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
Nov 29, 2012
Thursday marks 80 years for the Federal Diary, our regular column on and for the Federal workforce. It launched Nov. 29, 1932. A small box at the bottom of that day’s front page announced its arrival.Federal Diary columnist Joe Davidson described The Diary’s origins in a column in Thursday’s paper: When the Diary began covering issues involving federal employees — a core segment of The Washington Post audience — president-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt and congressional leaders were discussing legislation to legalize beer....
Source: WaPo
Nov 29, 2012
It’s sometimes best to fade into history.That’s especially true if your claim to fame has been an affair with a famous politician who later became president. Case in point: Gennifer Flowers, who sold her sex stories about Bill Clinton to the tabloid “Star” and nearly derailed Clinton’s presidential bid in 1992. She appeared in Penthouse, landed a book deal and wrote the steamy “Gennifer Flowers: Passion & Betrayal” in 1995.And now she’s back....
Source: WaPo
Nov 29, 2012
Since 2000, the Japanese government has surveyed public opinion toward a handful of foreign countries, and this year’s results found something surprising and potentially quite significant. The number of respondents who reported they feel “friendly” toward Japan’s two most important neighbors, China and South Korea, have hit record lows. Those holding negative views of South Korea exceed those with positive views for the first time in the survey’s history, a dramatic and rapid reversal of previous scores. The number of Japanese who lack “affinity” for China now exceed those with positive feelings for the country by a proportion of over four-to-one. Here are the official results (the blue represents “friendly” feelings, the black line negative), and below that some thoughts on why this matters:...
Source: Religion News Service
Nov 29, 2012
...“Today’s secessionist movements are just the latest example of a long parade of breakaway groups (in American history) seeking to restore some lost ideal,” said Peter J. Thuesen, professor of religious studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. “The problem is that the ideal is invariably a mirage.”Seeking purity through separation has marked American religious history since the Puritans sailed from Holland to establish a holy beacon in the New World. It helps explain why Baptists, Presbyterians and others have splintered into countless subgroups over the years, and why the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina disaffiliated from the Episcopal Church this fall....Secessionists, such as Russell Longcore of Marietta, Ga., take inspiration from history. He sees secession as pursuit of God-given liberty, such as when American colonies seceded from Britain in 1776, when Southern states left the Union in the 1860s and when the Soviet Union dissolved into 15 separate states two decades ago....
Source: WaPo
Nov 28, 2012
NEW YORK — An upcoming auction of over 300 historical documents includes rare letters written by Vincent van Gogh, George Washington, John Lennon and other iconic figures.The property of an anonymous American collector is being offered by Profiles in History in an online and phone auction on Dec. 18.Among the highlights is a two-page letter from Washington to an Anglican clergyman.Another top item is a signed van Gogh letter, written in 1890, to Joseph and Marie Ginoux, who were proprietors of the Cafe de la Gare in Arles, France, where the Dutch post-impressionist artist lived for a time....
Source: WaPo
Nov 28, 2012
WASHINGTON — Jill Biden and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta joined an effort Wednesday to build an education center at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to tell the stories of generations of veterans killed in combat, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.They gathered with military families for a ceremonial groundbreaking on a site next to the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall for the $85 million museum. Organizers still must raise $38 million before construction can begin.The veterans group that built the Vietnam memorial wants to open the center in 2014, in time to welcome the last troops home from Afghanistan....
Source: Fox News
Nov 28, 2012
Is this [CLICK LINK] a photograph of the iceberg that did the unthinkable: sinking the RMS Titanic?
On April 12, 1912, Captain W. F. Wood aboard the steamer S. S. Etonian photographed a massive iceberg with a distinctive elliptical shape. Wood found the picture remarkable enough to print it out and annotate it with the current latitude and longitude.
Two days later, on April 14, the “unsinkable” Titanic struck an iceberg and sank to bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. That iceberg had the same elliptical shape, according to sketches made on the ship. Wood had captured the remarkable piece of ice, said Craig Sophin, a Titanic expert and consultant to the auctioneers.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 28, 2012
A lost squadron of Spitfires buried in Burma after the Second World War could be flying again within three years, experts said today.Archaeologists will begin digging for the historic hoard of at least 36 British fighter planes in January.A proportion of the aircraft will then be carefully packaged and brought back to the UK next spring, where they will be restored.David Cundall, a farmer and aviation enthusiast from Scunthorpe, Lincs, has spent 16 years researching the project after being told about the burial by a group of US veterans....
Source: Archaeo News
Nov 27, 2012
It has long been believed that the analysis of charcoal from fires and pollen from cultivated plants was the most accurate way of tracking ancient human life and development. But scientists from the University of Massachusetts (USA) are using a much more unusual method, the analysis of ancient human faeces, more specifically, the levels of coprostanol found in the faeces. Coprostanol is formed when cholesterol is digested and can be found not only in 'solid' deposits but also washed through sediment....
Source: NYT
Nov 27, 2012
The Cyrus Cylinder — one of the most famous objects in the British Museum — will travel from its home in London to five museums in the United States next year.Often referred to as “the first bill of human rights” because its inscription encourages freedom of worship throughout the Persian Empire, it is a small clay object — not quite nine inches long — bearing an account, in Babylonian cuneiform, by Cyrus, the King of Persia of his conquest of Babylon in 539 B.C. The cylinder was found in what was once Babylon, now Iraq, in 1879 during a British Museum excavation and has been on display at the museum ever since. It is one of the most famous objects to have survived from the ancient world....
Source: Discovery News
Nov 27, 2012
An 11th-century book by a revered Baghdad Muslim scholar turns out to be a tongue-in-cheek guide for party crashers, according to the researcher who translated the book into English.The tome was originally authored by al-Khatib al-Baghdadi, a well known scholar of the Prophet Mohammed's teachings.According to Emily Selove of the University of Manchester, who did the translation, he wrote the book to remind readers "that every serious minded person needs to take a break."...
Source: WaPo
Nov 27, 2012
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is adding an asterisk to his name in the history books.His inauguration will be only the seventh time that the constitutionally mandated date for a president’s swearing-in — Jan. 20 — has fallen on a Sunday. So, following tradition, the inauguration will be on Monday, Jan. 21.The adjustment puts Obama in league with President Ronald Reagan, whose second inauguration in 1985 also was changed from Sunday to Monday....
Source: Noisecreep
Nov 27, 2012
Steven Roby is arguably the world's most knowledgeable Hendrix historian. Throughout his career, Roby has been credited for his research in six Hendrix biographies and two Hendrix album reissue packages, plus he also worked for Experience Hendrix, LLC, a Hendrix family-owned company founded by James "Al" Hendrix, the legendary guitarist's father. Roby recently released Hendrix on Hendrix: Interviews and Encounters with Jimi Hendrix, a collection of some of the best Hendrix interviews, including his final interview given the week before he died. Noisecreep spoke with Roby to get more insight on the influential guitarist. First off, how did you gain access to all of these interviews? You must have the world's most extensive Hendrix archive.
Source: WaPo
Nov 26, 2012
The 7,000 soldiers buried with Qin Shi Huang in 210 B.C. were made of clay. But the bronze weapons the terra cotta army carried into the enormous tomb complex near Xi’an in western China were the real things: tens of thousands of swords, axes, spears, lances and crossbows, all as capable of spilling blood as anything Qin’s real army wielded when they triumphed, ending centuries of war and uniting China under a single rule for the first time.What has been a puzzle for scientists is how so many weapons could have been made so skillfully, so uniformly and so quickly. (Qin reigned for only 11 years; construction of his mausoleum complex is thought to have started long before his death.) They now have a likely answer. A new study of 40,000 bronze arrowheads suggests they were produced in self-sufficient, autonomous workshops that produced finished items rather than parts that fed into an assembly line of sorts....
Source: WaPo's Fact Checker
Nov 26, 2012
This assertion by creator of the anti-tax pledge caught our attention. Did the 41st president fail to be reelected mainly because he reversed his famous pledge of “Read my lips: No new taxes”? Bush, of course, had famously promised not to raise taxes in his acceptance speech at the 1988 Republican convention, no matter how much pressure he faced from Congress. But then a soaring budget deficit — and a refusal by the Democratic-led Congress to accept only spending cuts — led him accept a tax hike in late 1990. The 1992 race was not just between Bill Clinton and Bush, but also businessman Ross Perot, who took 19 percent of the popular vote (but won no electoral votes.) The three-person race was a key reason why Bush won only 38 percent of the vote — and Clinton 43 percent. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane....
Source: AP
Nov 26, 2012
MRAUK-U, Myanmar — It was dusk in a corner of Myanmar recently shaken by some of the bloodiest sectarian violence in a generation, and a dozen Canadian tourists climbed to the top of a grassy hill, cameras ready to capture the sweeping view.Moss-covered pagodas rose from foggy hilltops all along the horizon, their bell-shaped silhouettes dark against the blue sky. Birds flitted through lush treetops. A small throng of children played on a dirt road nearby.From here, it was hard to tell anything was wrong....
Source: WaPo
Nov 26, 2012
Albert Einstein is widely regarded as a genius, but how did he get that way? Many researchers have assumed that it took a very special brain to come up with the theory of relativity and other insights that form the foundation of modern physics.A study of 14 newly discovered photographs of Einstein’s brain, which was preserved for study after his death, concludes that the brain was indeed highly unusual in many ways. But researchers still don’t know exactly how the brain’s extra folds and convolutions translated into Einstein’s amazing abilities....
Source: AP
Nov 26, 2012
President John F. Kennedy was supposed to just stop by and wave hello.Instead a group of eager Latinos persuaded him to come inside and speak to a packed room of Mexican-American civil rights activists. And then he persuaded his wife, first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, to address the crowd in Spanish.It was Nov. 21, 1963. Hours later, the president was dead, his assassination overshadowing the significance of a speech that can be seen as the birth of the Latino vote, so instrumental in 2012 in helping re-elect the first black president, Barack Obama.To historians, Kennedy's appearance at the Rice Ballroom in Houston was likely the first time that a president officially acknowledged Latinos as an important voting bloc....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Nov 25, 2012
It may sound like a plot straight out of a science fiction novel, but a U.S. mission to blow up the moon with a nuke was very real in the 1950s.At the height of the space race, the U.S. considered detonating an atom bomb on the moon as a display of America's Cold War muscle.The secret project, innocuously titled 'A Study of Lunar Research Flights' and nicknamed 'Project A119,' was never carried out.
Source: WaPo
Nov 25, 2012
WILLEMSTAD, Curacao — Headstones are pockmarked, their inscriptions faded. Stone slabs that have covered tombs for centuries are crumbling. White marble has turned grey, likely from the acrid smoke that spews from a nearby oil refinery.One of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in the Western Hemisphere, Beth Haim on the island of Curacao, is slowly fading in the Caribbean sun....
