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: AP
Dec 6, 2012
WASHINGTON — Protection of sites held sacred by American Indians and Alaska Natives will be bolstered under a memorandum of understanding signed Thursday by four federal agencies and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation.The memo signed by the departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy and Interior also calls for improving tribal access to sites that are on federal land.“We have a special, shared responsibility to respect and foster American Indian and Alaska Native cultural and religious heritage, and today’s agreement recognizes that important role,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement.The agencies plan to work during the next five years to raise awareness about sacred sites. That includes developing a website, a training program for federal employees and guidance for managing sacred sites....
Source: Elizabeth P. McIntosh for WaPo
Dec 6, 2012
After her journalism career, Elizabeth P. McIntosh served in the Office of Strategic Services and the Central Intelligence Agency before retiring to Prince William County. She is the author of four books.On Dec. 7, 1941, when Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor, I was working as a reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. After a week of war, I wrote a story directed at Hawaii’s women; I thought it would be useful for them to know what I had seen. It might help prepare them for what lay ahead. But my editors thought the graphic content would be too upsetting for readers and decided not to run my article. It appears here for the first time.For seven ghastly, confused days, we have been at war. To the women of Hawaii, it has meant a total disruption of home life, a sudden acclimation to blackout nights, terrifying rumors, fear of the unknown as planes drone overhead and lorries shriek through the streets.
Source: WaPo
Dec 6, 2012
WASHINGTON — Final campaign finance tallies trickled out Thursday for a presidential race expected to be the most expensive in U.S. political history, showing a last-minute $10 million contribution to a political action committee backing Republican candidate Mitt Romney from a billionaire Las Vegas casino magnate who has been the election’s biggest moneyman.The $10 million donation by Sheldon Adelson to the Restore Our Future “super” PAC raised the casino owner’s total contributions for the 2012 campaign to at least $72 million, all for Republicans....
Source: AP
Dec 5, 2012
President John F. Kennedy spelled out the mission clearly in his 1961 speech committing the United States to send humans to the moon and back by the end of the decade. He left no doubt about the definition of success and laid out a clear vision.Now, five decades after his challenge, a panel of space, science and engineering experts said in a stinging report that NASA does not have a goal....
Source: LiveScience
Dec 4, 2012
SAN FRANCISCO — A 200-year-long drought 4,200 years ago may have killed off the ancient Sumerian language, one geologist says.Because no written accounts explicitly mention drought as the reason for the Sumerian demise, the conclusions rely on indirect clues. But several pieces of archaeological and geological evidence tie the gradual decline of the Sumerian civilization to a drought.The findings, which were presented Monday (Dec. 3) here at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, show how vulnerable human society may be to climate change, including human-caused change....
Source: Washington Times
Dec 4, 2012
A long-delayed proposal to establish a national memorial in Washington to honor the 5,000 free blacks and slaves who fought as soldiers and sailors during the Revolutionary War got a congressional boost Tuesday when it was passed as part of a massive Senate defense spending bill.The legislation authorizes the nonprofit National Mall Liberty Fund DC to establish a memorial on federal land in the District to honor the black soldiers, sailors and civilians who provided assistance during the Revolution. It was attached as an amendment Monday to the defense bill, which authorizes $631 billion in Pentagon spending for the next year."This is a critical step," said Maurice Barboza, who has been trying for 30 years to get a memorial built for the blacks who fought in the Revolution. "Without this amendment, the project would be dead. We are now in the ballgame."...
Source: AP
Dec 4, 2012
AMSTERDAM (AP) — Foreigners visiting the Netherlands in winter are often surprised to see that the Dutch version of St. Nicholas' helpers have their faces painted black, wear Afro wigs and have thick red lips — in short, a racist caricature of a black person.The overwhelming majority of Dutch are fiercely devoted to the holiday tradition of "Zwarte Piet" — whose name means "Black Pete" — and insist he's a harmless fictional figure who doesn't represent any race. But a growing number are questioning whether "Zwarte Piet" should be given a makeover or banished from the holiday scene, seeing him as a blight on the nation's image as a bulwark of tolerance."There is more opposition to Zwarte Piet than you might think," says Jessica Silversmith, director of the regional Anti-Discrimination Bureau for Amsterdam. She said that historically her office received only one or two complaints per year, but the number jumped to more than 100 last year, and will escalate much further this year....
Source: The Daily Caller
Dec 4, 2012
Judge Andrew Napolitano really doesn’t like Woodrow Wilson.Napolitano, a former Superior Court judge and the senior judicial analyst for Fox News, is out with a new book, “Theodore and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedom.”Asked whether there was anything about Wilson that he admired, Napolitano compared Wilson to the 20th century’s most notorious killer.“He was awesome the way Hitler was,” Napolitano said...
Source: NYT
Dec 3, 2012
Sicilian cuisine is famous for the bounty of the Mediterranean: fish, clams, mussels, shrimp. But 20,000 years ago, around the time of the last ice age, the first modern humans who arrived in the region ate very little seafood, researchers report after studying the remains of human skeletons.“The source of the dietary protein consumed mainly originated from the meat of medium to large terrestrial herbivores,” said the report’s first author, Marcello Mannino, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.The remains were found in a cave on the small island of Favignana, which thousands of years ago was part of Sicily. Sicily itself was connected to the mainland by a land bridge, allowing humans to cross over....
Source: NYT
Dec 3, 2012
A plan now before Congress would create a national park spread over three states to protect the aging remnants of the atomic bomb project from World War II, including an isolated cabin where grim findings threw the secretive effort into a panic.Scientists used the remote cabin in the seclusion of Los Alamos, N.M., as the administrative base for a critical experiment to see if plutonium could be used to fuel the bomb. Early in 1944, sensitive measurements unexpectedly showed that the silvery metal underwent a high rate of spontaneous fission — a natural process of atoms splitting in two.That meant the project’s design for a plutonium bomb would fail. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the project’s scientific head, was so dismayed that he considered resigning.But he and his colleagues pressed ahead with a new design. On July 16, 1945, the world’s first atom bomb — a lump of plutonium at its core — illuminated the darkness of the central New Mexican desert with a flash of light brighter than the sun....
Source: NYT
Dec 3, 2012
Anthony W. Robins did not set out to amass one of the most important surviving archives of the original World Trade Center. Though he is an architectural historian devoted to the buildings of New York City, Mr. Robins didn’t even set out to study the twin towers.Rather, Gale Research, which was planning a series of books in the 1980s under the rubric “Classics of American Architecture,” asked Mr. Robins if he would turn his attention first to the trade center before tackling a monograph on the Chrysler Building, which was his preference.Mr. Robins, now 62, is a well-known figure in landmarks circles, having served on the staff of the Landmarks Preservation Commission for 19 years. He is an adjunct professor at Columbia University and New York University. And if you happen to see a walking tour coming your way under the confident leadership of a man in a Bailey Dalton safari hat — well, that’s Mr. Robins....
Source: NYT
Dec 3, 2012
NEW HAVEN — In the summer of 1968, John Shepherd Jr. enlisted in the Army, figuring that the draft would get him anyway. By January 1969, he was in the Mekong Delta, fighting with the Ninth Infantry Division.Within a month, his patrol was ambushed, and Mr. Shepherd responded by tossing a hand grenade into a bunker that killed several enemy soldiers. The Army awarded him a Bronze Star with a valor device, one of its highest decorations.Yet the medal did little to assuage Mr. Shepherd’s sense of anxiousness and futility about the war. A few weeks after his act of heroism, he said, his platoon leader was killed by a sniper as he tried to help Mr. Shepherd out of a canal. It was a breaking point: his behavior became erratic, and at some point he simply refused to go on patrol....
Source: WaPo
Dec 3, 2012
People who think standardized tests are wreaking havoc in education today may be interested to take a look back at a different kind of trouble they sparked many years ago.The first standardized tests, any world history student can tell you, were created in ancient China, during the Han Dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD), when officials designed civil service exams to choose people to work in the government based on merit rather than on family status. The goal was to create an intellectual meritocracy based on Confucian learning. The system of exams was consolidated during later dynasties; through the centuries until the late 18th century, the core material was hardly altered.......The civil service exams actually played a part in the Taiping Rebellion, which left about 20 million people dead in the 19th century. How? In the mid-1800s, a lower middle class man named Hong Houxiu, who was only partly educated, wanted to join the Qing bureaucracy. Here’s how the society’s website explains what happened...
Source: Fox News
Dec 3, 2012
Congregants of one of the nation's oldest churches have voted to auction off a 372-year-old hymn book that's expect to fetch $10 million to $20 million at auction.Members of the Old South Church in Boston authorized the sale of one of its two copies of the Bay Psalm Book, which was published in 1640. It is among the first books ever published in North America, and only 11 copies remain.Board of Trustees Chairman Phil Stern says the church wants to continue growing its endowment and take care of some "critical capital needs."...
Source: New Yorker
Dec 3, 2012
For one party to win a majority of House seats with a minority of votes is a relatively rare occurrence. It has now happened five times in the past hundred years. In 1914 and 1942, the Democrats were the beneficiaries. In 1952, 1996, and this year, it was the Republicans’ turn to get lucky, and their luck is likely to hold for many election cycles to come. Gerrymandering routinely gets blamed for such mismatches, but that’s only part of the story. Far more important than redistricting is just plain districting: because so many Democrats are city folk, large numbers of Democratic votes pile up redundantly in overwhelmingly one-sided districts. Even having district lines drawn by neutral commissions instead of by self-serving politicians wouldn’t do much to alter this built-in structural bias. Of course, the perversities of our peculiar electoral machinery can cut both ways. Before November 6th, there was much speculation that Obama, like Bush in 2000, might lose the popular vote while winning in the electoral college. It didn’t happen, but the speculation was far from idle. If Romney had run more strongly throughout the country, he might have beaten Obama by as many as two million votes and still have lost the Presidency.
Source: The Daily Beast
Dec 2, 2012
In the eight hundred years since his death, people have sought in vain for the grave of Genhis Khan, the 13th-century conqueror and imperial ruler who, at the time of his death, occupied the largest contiguous empire, stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Pacific. In capturing most of central Asia and China, his armies killed and pillaged but also forged new links between East and West. One of history’s most brilliant and ruthless leaders, Khan remade the world.But while the life of the conqueror is the stuff of legend, his death is shrouded in the mist of myths. Some historians believe he died from wounds sustained in battle; others that he fell off his horse or died from illness. And his final burial place has never been found. At the time great steps were taken to hide the grave to protect it from potential grave robbers. Tomb hunters have little to go on, given the dearth of primary historical sources. Legend has it that Khan’s funeral escort killed anyone who crossed their path to conceal where the conqueror was buried. Those who constructed the funeral tomb were also killed—as were the soldiers who killed them. One historical source holds that 10,000 horsemen “trampled the ground so as to make it even”; another that a forest was planted over the site, a river diverted.
Source: NYT
Dec 2, 2012
MOSCOW — There are scattered reports of unusual behavior from across Russia’s nine time zones.Inmates in a women’s prison near the Chinese border are said to have experienced a “collective mass psychosis” so intense that their wardens summoned a priest to calm them. In a factory town east of Moscow, panicked citizens stripped shelves of matches, kerosene, sugar and candles. A huge Mayan-style archway is being built — out of ice — on Karl Marx Street in Chelyabinsk in the south.For those not schooled in New Age prophecy, there are rumors the world will end on Dec. 21, 2012, when a 5,125-year cycle known as the Long Count in the Mayan calendar supposedly comes to a close. Russia, a nation with a penchant for mystical thinking, has taken notice....Related Links
Source: Fox News
Dec 2, 2012
HANOI, Vietnam – A mortar shell left from the Vietnam War has exploded in a southern village, killing four children and seriously injuring five other people.Hieu Nghia village official Le Van Giang says three children aged 4 to 11 died at the scene Sunday afternoon and a 6-year-old boy died at the hospital. The blast seriously injured two other children and three men....
Source: WaPo
Dec 2, 2012
WASHINGTON — David Letterman’s “stupid human tricks” and Top 10 lists vaulted into the ranks of cultural acclaim Sunday night as the late-night comedian received this year’s Kennedy Center Honors with rock band Led Zeppelin, an actor, a ballerina and a bluesman.Stars from New York, Hollywood and the music world joined President Barack Obama at the White House on Sunday night to salute the honorees, whose ranks also include actor Dustin Hoffman, Chicago bluesman Buddy Guy and ballerina Natalia Makarova.The honors are the nation’s highest award for those who influenced American culture through the arts. The recipients were later saluted by fellow performers at the Kennedy Center Opera House in a show to be broadcast Dec. 26 on CBS....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 2, 2012
From July to October 1940, the Spitfire was hailed by the British public as the RAF fighter that saved the nation from invasion by Hitler's Nazis, inflicting heavy losses on wave after wave of Luftwaffe bombers.Now models of the classic fighter plane, made in Germany for toy firm Revell, are on sale in Marks & Spencer for £10 each.Justin Reeves, who spotted the model in the flagship M&S store on Oxford Street in central London, said: "I picked it up as a present and couldn't believe it when I saw the 'Made in Germany' tag on the back."The Spitfire is one of the most iconic images of the Second World War and one of the reasons we kept the Nazis at bay."At least they came up with this 60 years too late to make a difference in the Battle of Britain."...
