This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream
media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously
biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in
each source note. Quotation marks are not used.
Source: WaPo
Dec 10, 2012
DORDRECHT, Netherlands — Just as the first storms of winter roll in, Dutchman Johan Huibers has finished his 20-year quest to build a full-scale, functioning model of Noah’s Ark — an undertaking of, well, biblical proportions.Huibers, a Christian, used books 6-9 of Genesis as his inspiration, following the instructions God gives Noah down to the last cubit.Translating to modern measurements, Huibers came up with a vessel that works out to a whopping 427 feet (130 meters) long, 95 feet (29 meters) across and 75 feet (23 meters) high. Perhaps not big enough to fit every species on Earth, two by two, as described in the Bible, but plenty of space, for instance, for a pair elephants to dance a tango....
Source: NYT
Dec 10, 2012
MIAMI — Rick Scott, businessman turned politician, campaigned for governor in 2010 with promises to run Florida like a successful business — more efficiency, lower costs, less hand-wringing and measurable results.He meant higher education, too, but until recently that meant mostly shrinking budgets.Now, looking for more value on the remaining dollars, Governor Scott and Republican lawmakers are prodding Florida’s 12 state universities to find ways to steer students toward majors that are in demand in the job market.The message from Tallahassee could not be blunter: Give us engineers, scientists, health care specialists and technology experts. Do not worry so much about historians, philosophers, anthropologists and English majors....
Source: Glenn Greenwald for the Guardian (UK)
Dec 10, 2012
Glenn Greenwald is a Guardian columnist.Earlier this year, the film "Zero Dark Thirty", which purports to dramatize the hunt for and killing of Osama bin Laden, generated substantial political controversy. It was discovered that CIA and White House officials had met with its filmmakers and passed non-public information to them - at exactly the same time that DOJ officials were in federal court resisting transparency requests from media outlets and activist groups on the ground that it was all classified.With its release imminent, the film is now garnering a pile of top awards and virtually uniform rave reviews. What makes this so remarkable is that, by most accounts, the film glorifies torture by claiming - falsely - that waterboarding and other forms of coercive interrogation tactics were crucial, even indispensable in finding bin Laden.
Source: NJ.com
Dec 9, 2012
COMMERCIAL TWP. — Aug. 15, 1781, Capt. James Riggins and his troops of the New Jersey militia took action against 15 British sympathizers boarding a boat on the Maurice River in Port Norris attempting to flee to New York.The skirmish became known as the Battle of Dallas Landing and was Cumberland County’s only officially-recorded battle where blood was shed during the Revolutionary War....
Source: AP
Dec 9, 2012
WASHINGTON — Just six blocks from the White House, the FBI’s hulking headquarters overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue has long been the government building everyone loves to hate. The verdict: It’s an ugly, crumbling concrete behemoth, an architectural mishap — all 2.4 million square feet of it.But in this time of tight budgets, massive deficits and the “fiscal cliff,” the 38-year-old FBI headquarters building has one big thing in its favor.It sits atop very valuable real estate, an entire city block on America’s Main Street, midway between the U.S. Capitol and the White House. Just how valuable? The General Services Administration intends to find out.This past week, the agency that oversees all federal buildings issued an invitation to developers: How would you like to build a new headquarters for the FBI in a different location? In exchange, we’ll consider throwing in the J. Edgar Hoover building and the underlying land as part of the transaction....
Source: NYT
Dec 9, 2012
...In the civil rights era, the Supreme Court waited decades to weigh in on interracial marriage. On Friday, by contrast, the court did not hesitate to jump into the middle of one of the most important social controversies of the day, agreeing to hear two cases on same-sex marriage....In private correspondence in 1957, Justice Felix Frankfurter said the court was doing all it could to avoid hearing cases that would require giving the nation an answer about whether bans on interracial marriage — anti-miscegenation laws, in the parlance of the day — were constitutional....
Source: LiveScience
Dec 8, 2012
The largest ancient Egyptian sarcophagus has been identified in a tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, say archaeologists who are re-assembling the giant box that was reduced to fragments more than 3,000 years ago.Made of red granite, the royal sarcophagus was built for Merneptah, an Egyptian pharaoh who lived more than 3,200 years ago. A warrior king, he defeated the Libyans and a group called the "Sea Peoples" in a great battle.He also waged a campaign in the Levant attacking, among others, a group he called "Israel" (the first mention of the people). When he died, his mummy was enclosed in a series of four stone sarcophagi, one nestled within the other....
Source: WaPo
Dec 8, 2012
FREDERICKSBURG — On the second floor of the old brick building on Sophia Street, the three Confederate snipers waited for the Yankees.They had their muskets at the ready, and paper ammunition cartridges were lined up on the window sills.Outside, their comrades were retreating. There were shouts, crashes of gunfire and the sound of approaching drums. “Get ready!” rebel Andrew Prasse said as he leaned out a window. “All right, let ’em have it, boys!”They refought the Civil War’s Battle of Fredericksburg on Saturday, a few days shy of its 150th anniversary....
Source: NYT
Dec 8, 2012
Back when leaders led, followers followed and the news media made less noise, the commanding figures of American government retreated to Andrews Air Force Base to forge a bipartisan budget compromise.That 11-day summit meeting failed — despite the threat of deep automatic spending cuts, and despite the top Republican’s acknowledgment that taxes had to go up.A smaller group of negotiators later struck a deal inside the Capitol. That failed, too — defeated on the House floor by a coalition of liberal and conservative rebels.History now recalls those events in the fall of 1990, and the agreement Congress eventually enacted, as the opening chapter of Washington’s long, successful climb out of the deficit hole of the 1980s. And they offer a perspective on the current stalemate between a White House and a Congress struggling to repeat that achievement....
Source: NYT
Dec 8, 2012
...Five hundred and twenty years after the start of the Inquisition, Spain opened the door to descendants of Sephardic Jews whose ancestors had fled the Iberian Peninsula, forced, in order to live in Spain or its colonies, to choose between exile or conversion to Christianity. Or worse.Top government officials pledged to speed up the existing naturalization process for Sephardic Jews who through the centuries spread in a diaspora — to the Ottoman Empire and the south of Italy; to Spain’s colonies in Central and South America; and to outposts in what are now New Mexico, Texas and Mexico.
Source: WaPo
Dec 7, 2012
Nobel Peace Prize winner and New York Times best-selling author Elie Wiesel will appear on the “Super Soul Sunday” series on OWN.The interview, which falls on the first day of Hanukkah, features the 82-year-old Holocaust survivor talking about his open heart surgery, being a witness to history as well as the impact of being among the victims of the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. Wiesel received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.The interview precedes a 2006 “The Oprah Winfrey Show” episode during which Wiesel and Oprah Winfrey travel to Poland where they visit the grounds of the Auschwitz death camp....
Source: WaPo
Dec 7, 2012
PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii — As crew members lined the edge of the Navy guided-missile destroyer, the ship’s whistle sounded. It was 7:55 a.m., the exact time the Japanese began bombing Pearl Harbor 71 years earlier.Friday’s moment of silence was part of the commemoration that drew some 2,000 people to Pearl Harbor — and many more to events around the country — to mark the anniversary of the surprise attack that killed thousands of people and launched the United States into World War II....
Source: AP
Dec 7, 2012
HONOLULU – Ray Emory could not accept that more than one quarter of the 2,400 Americans who died at Pearl Harbor were buried, unidentified, in a volcanic crater.And so he set out to restore names to the dead.Emory, a survivor of the attack, doggedly scoured decades-old documents to piece together who was who. He pushed, and sometimes badgered, the government into relabeling more than 300 gravestones with the ship names of the deceased. And he lobbied for forensic scientists to exhume the skeletons of those who might be identified.On Friday, the 71-year anniversary of the Japanese attack, the Navy and National Park Service will honor the 91-year-old former sailor for his determination to have Pearl Harbor remembered, and remembered accurately....
Source: Archaeo News
Dec 7, 2012
An entire hill, famed for its archeological heritage and geological significance, is to be removed from the Scottish skyline to make way for a quarry under plans being considered by West Dunbartonshire Council.Sheep Hill, in the Kilpatrick Hills on the Clyde, is the site of ancient Bronze and Iron Age forts which local residents and experts say will be destroyed by the expansion of a stone quarry. Allowing the hill to be wiped off the map would be "an act of wanton destruction of our environment and inheritance", according to Clydebelt, a local environmental group, which is calling for Scottish ministers to intervene to save the hill.A proposal to revise mineral permission for an existing quarry run by a local firm near Sheep Hill is due to be discussed by West Dunbartonshire Council and has provoked fierce opposition from local groups. Silverton and Overtoun community council says digging away the hill would be irrevocable. "When Sheep Hill is gone, it is gone," said the council's Rose Harvie. "Future generations will look back and wonder how such destruction could have been permitted."...
Source: AP
Dec 6, 2012
FALLS CHURCH, Va. – A former Nazi concentration camp guard who has lived quietly in western Pennsylvania for more than 50 years took his fight against deportation to the nation's highest immigration court Thursday, arguing that he shouldn't be punished because he served in Hitler's army against his will.The Board of Immigration Appeals in Falls Church heard the appeal from 88-year-old Anton Geiser of Sharon, Pa., who acknowledges serving in the Nazi SS as a guard in the Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald concentration camps. A federal judge ordered him deported in 2010.But his lawyer argued that the court should have considered that Geiser was forced to join the SS against his will as a 17-year-old.Government lawyers argued to uphold the deportation. They said federal law places former Nazis in a harsher immigration category, and no exceptions should be made because of compulsory service....
Source: MSNBC
Dec 6, 2012
Europe's largest minority group, the Romani, migrated from northwest India 1,500 years ago, new genetic study finds.The Romani, also known as the Roma, were originally dubbed " gypsies " in the 16th century, because this widely dispersed group of people were first thought to have come from Egypt. Today, many consider "gypsy" to be a derogatory term.Since the advent of better and better genetic technology, researchers have analyzed the genetic history of much of Europe, finding, for example, the history of the Jewish Diaspora written in DNA. But though there are 11 million Romani in Europe, their history has been neglected, said study researcher David Comas of the Institut de Biologia Evolutiva at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain....
Source: eLocal
Dec 6, 2012
Source: eLocal.com
Source: AP
Dec 6, 2012
SEATTLE — The grass is no greener. But, finally, it’s legal — at least somewhere in America. It’s been a long, strange trip for marijuana.Washington state and Colorado voted to legalize and regulate its recreational use last month. But before that, the plant, renowned since ancient times for its strong fibers, medical use and mind-altering properties, was a staple crop of the colonies, an “assassin of youth,” a counterculture emblem and a widely accepted — if often abused — medicine.On the occasion of Thursday’s “Legalization Day,” when Washington’s new law takes effect, here’s a look back at the cultural and legal status of the “evil weed” in American history....
Source: AP
Dec 6, 2012
NEW YORK — The uniform Don Larsen was wearing when he pitched the only perfect game in World Series history has sold for $756,000.The former New York Yankees’ right-hander achieved perfection in Game 5 of the 1956 Series against the Brooklyn Dodgers.The pinstriped uniform with No. 18 on the back received 22 bids in an online auction on Steinersports.com. The winning bidder was Pete Siegel, CEO of GottaHaveIt.com. His company has been building a collection of Yankees memorabilia that it plans to put on display.The price includes a 20 percent buyer’s fee above the final bid of $630,000....
Source: AP
Dec 6, 2012
SAVANNAH, Ga. — Their dinner had just arrived as the two college professors watched their guests, a group of singers from the Georgia coast, unexpectedly turn saying grace into an outburst of song, rhythm and shouted praises that soon had other diners in the restaurant joining in with the impromptu performance.“Before you know it, they’re out of their chairs and the beat is getting played on a table and you had all the children in the restaurant shouting praises with them,” said Mary Ellen Junda, a music professor at the University of Connecticut.The dinner at a restaurant in Richmond, Va., last year with the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters of Darien, Ga., turned into another lesson for Junda and fellow music professor Robert Stephens, who have spent years studying the art and traditions of the Gullah, descendants of slaves who live in coastal communities from North Carolina to northern Florida. Scholars say their culture, long isolated from the mainland, has clung to its African roots and traditions more than any in America....
