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: NYT
Nov 1, 2012
It kept its secret for decades. It perished in the process. It died, experts say, a valiant death, most likely on a hush-hush mission over wartime France, and was then, like so many others, forgotten.But now, decades after the final flight of military carrier pigeon 40TW194, the bird’s secret message has become a matter of state and the grist of headlines. After a concerted campaign by pigeon fanciers, the encrypted message, which had been folded into a scarlet capsule on the pigeon’s leg, has now been sent to Britain’s top-secret GCHQ listening post and decoding department outside Gloucester to the west of London.There, 40TW194’s World War II secret might finally be revealed. Or maybe not. “We cannot comment until the code is broken,” said a spokesman for GCHQ, which stands for Government Communications Headquarters. “And then we can determine whether it’s secret or not.”...
Source: CNN.com
Nov 1, 2012
(CNN) -- George Smith, one of the Navajo code talkers who helped the U.S. military outfox the Japanese during World War II by sending messages in their obscure language, has died, the president of the Navajo Nation said."This news has saddened me," Ben Shelly, the Navajo president, said in a post Wednesday on his Facebook page. "Our Navajo code talkers have been real life heroes to generations of Navajo people."Smith died Tuesday, Shelly said, and the Navajo Nation's flag is flying at half-staff until Sunday night to commemorate his life....
Source: LA Times
Nov 1, 2012
JERUSALEM -- More than 24 years after Palestinian military leader Khalil Ibrahim Wazir was assassinated in Tunisia, Israel acknowledged for the first time that its spy agency Mossad carried out the killing.Wazir, one of the founders of the Fatah Party and a top aide to the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, was viewed by Israel as a terrorist and by Palestinians as a freedom fighter.After refusing for years to publicly confirm Israel's role in the April 16, 1988, assassination, the nation's military censors on Thursday permitted the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot to publish an interview with the commander who led the secret mission. The article had reportedly been suppressed by censors for more than a decade....
Source: Reuters
Nov 1, 2012
BERLIN (Reuters) - Erwin Rommel, the World War Two German field marshal celebrated as the brilliant and humane "Desert Fox", is portrayed in a new film as a weak man torn by his loyalty to Adolf Hitler and the dawning realization that he was serving a devil.The drama, due to be broadcast on the public ARD television on Thursday, has angered Rommel's son and granddaughter who believe it underplays his role in the resistance against Hitler.Rommel was forced to commit suicide in 1944 after Hitler suspected the general of being linked to the July 1944 plot to kill him, though historians disagree about how close he was to the failed assassination attempt.
Source: NYT
Oct 31, 2012
A small piece of Truman Capote’s famously unfinished novel “Answered Prayers” has come to light. The six-page story, “Yachts and Things,” found among Capote’s papers in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library, is published in the December issue of Vanity Fair, out now in New York and nationally next week. The story will be available online in mid-November.Issued three years after Capote’s death, “Answered Prayers” was composed of three excerpts that had been separately published in Esquire in 1975 and 1976. Full of the thinly veiled (and unveiled) rich and famous, including Peggy Guggenheim, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Gloria Vanderbilt, the book lost Capote many friends. Before his death at 59 in 1984, he spoke of several other fragments that have never been found or published....
Source: WaPo
Oct 31, 2012
JUNEAU, Alaska — A smog-like haze that hung over part of Alaska’s Kodiak Island this week was courtesy of a volcanic eruption — 100 years ago.The National Weather Service said strong winds and a lack of snow Tuesday helped stir up ash from the 1912 eruption of Novarupta, the largest volcanic blast of the 20th century.The ash drifted up to about 4,000 feet and traveled over the Shelikof Strait and across Kodiak Island, prompting an aviation alert. The news was first reported by KMXT radio....
Source: AP
Oct 31, 2012
NICOSIA, Cyprus — Cypriots who fought against British colonial rule in the 1950s plan to sue the U.K. government for torture they allegedly suffered at the hands of British authorities while in custody, an official said Wednesday.Thassos Sophocleous, president of an organization representing former Cypriot fighters, said the British law firm K.J. Conroy & Co. is now gathering information from them to build a case following this month’s landmark ruling from Britain’s High Court, which found that three Kenyans tortured during a rebellion against British colonial rule can seek compensation....
Source: AP
Oct 31, 2012
SKOPJE, Macedonia — Winston Churchill is flashing his trademark victory sign from the rooftop of Macedonia’s shining white new foreign ministry building.Alexander the Great is pointing his mighty sword from the top of a mega water fountain that airs classical music on the hour, as sprinkling water dances to the sound of its tunes....All those grandiose buildings, monuments, fountains and bridges — some completed, others under construction — are dotting the city center as part of a government project called Skopje 2014, officially intended to rebuild a city that lost many of its landmarks in a 1963 earthquake.One of Europe’s biggest urban endeavors has been criticized by many Macedonians who describe it as kitsch....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 31, 2012
Civil servant Maurice Clarke inspected the liner for lifeboats and safety equipment five hours before she left on her doomed maiden voyage 100 years ago.He made handwritten notes at the time in which he clearly stated the vessel did not have enough lifeboats.But he wrote that if he made the recommendation official his job would be threatened as Titanic's owners had pressured his superiors into giving the fated ship the all clear.The revelation of a cover-up have come to light for the first time in a century after Mr Clarke's 'smoking gun' documents were made available for sale at auction....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 30, 2012
The foundations of a huge Anglo-Saxon feasting hall, the first to be discovered in more than 30 years, has been found below a village green in Kent.The hall, where a king and his warriors would have enjoyed epic days-long feasts, has laid just inches underground for 1,300 years.A team from the University of Reading working with villagers and local archaeologists made the exceptional discovery in Lyminge, Kent.At 69 feet by 28 feet, the hall would have been an impressive structure with room for at least 60 people....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 30, 2012
Archaeologists from Leicester University announced in September that two sets of human remains had been found amid the foundations of a historic church, located underneath a council car park in the city.The find captured the nation's attention after it was revealed that one of the skeletons was that of a man with battle wounds and a curved spine, a description fitting accounts of the Plantagenet king.Now researchers believe the second set of bones could be the remains of the female founder of the Franciscan friary in which the church was located.Experts said that historical records only name one woman buried within the Church of Grey Friars – Ellen Luenor, who is thought to have helped found or support the friary....
Source: CS Monitor
Oct 30, 2012
...To better understand the road ahead, a look back at the Soviet experience here may prove instructive."[The Soviets] were pretty active, and to a large degree effective, in urban-based development schemes, the paving of roads, the construction of buildings for government, and things of that nature," says Thomas Gouttierre, director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.Mr. Gouttierre first began working in Afghanistan in 1964. Unable to visit during the nine-year Russian war, he says he remembers returning shortly after it was over to find that many of the large cities such as Kabul, Jalalabad, and Herat had been noticeably changed by Soviet development projects. The power grid had improved, new roads were paved, and housing developments had been expanded.
Source: Huffington Post
Oct 29, 2012
NEW ORLEANS — A marathon project is under way in New Orleans to digitize thousands of time-worn 18th-century French and Spanish legal papers that historians say give the first historical accounts of slaves and free blacks in North America.Yellowed page by yellowed page, archivists are scanning the 220,000 manuscript pages from the French Superior Council and Spanish Judiciary between 1714 and 1803 in an effort to digitize, preserve, translate and index Louisiana's colonial past and in the process help re-write American history."No single historian could ever live long enough to write all the books that are to be written from all these documents," said Emily Clark, a Tulane University historian who has worked in the papers.The few historians who've pored over the unique archive say it's pivotal because it connects early America to the broader history of the Atlantic slave trade. It's at the heart of a wave of research tracing American roots beyond the English colonies and into Spain, France and Africa....
Source: WaPo
Oct 29, 2012
The New York Stock Exchange planned a rare shutdown Monday because of Hurricane Sandy. The last time the NYSE closed down for a weather-related event was on Sept. 27, 1985, for Hurricane Gloria. Here’s a look at other unusual NYSE closings throughout history.Aug. 8 1885: Funeral of former President Ulysses S. GrantMar. 12-13, 1888: Blizzard of 1888Nov. 25, 1899: Funeral of Vice-President Garret A. Hobart....
Source: NYT
Oct 29, 2012
Two European media companies, Bertelsmann and Pearson, confirmed Monday that they had agreed to combine their book publishing divisions, Random House and Penguin, creating the largest consumer book publisher in the world.The deal would give the combined companies, already two of the biggest English-language publishers, an even greater scale to deal with the challenges arising from the growth of e-books and the power of Internet retailers like Amazon.com.Together, the combined publishers would have a global market share of slightly more than 25 percent, and a book list that includes contemporary best-sellers like Random House’s “Fifty Shades of Grey” trilogy and Penguin’s back list of classics from authors like George Orwell....
Oct 28, 2012
Scholars have traced the history of housing segregation in several notable books and articles. ProPublica has obtained new documents and interviewed key figures in the four-decade battle over the Fair Housing Act.
Source: AP
Oct 28, 2012
IRVINE, Calif. — The knock came at night more than 30 years ago. Hugo Van, then a young man, had a chance to flee newly communist Vietnam and walk to freedom.There were no guarantees, but Van didn’t hesitate to take the risk. With a few hundred dollars, he and his younger sister got a car ride to a Vietnamese village, then a boat to Cambodia and began the trek across barren land until they were caught by Cambodian soldiers. For nearly two weeks, they were held in a camp where they were given wormy rice to eat and Van found himself staring down the barrels of six guns as guards attempted to attack his younger sister.“Everybody knew: boat or walk,” Van, now 57, told his American-born daughter in words she was hearing for the first time. “When you escape ... you use your life to bet.”...
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Oct 26, 2012
The German SS officer was fighting to save himself from the gallows for a terrible war crime and might say anything to escape the noose. But Fritz Knöchlein was not lying in 1946 when he claimed that, in captivity in London, he had been tortured by British soldiers to force a confession out of him.Tortured by British soldiers? In captivity? In London? The idea seems incredible.Britain has a reputation as a nation that prides itself on its love of fair play and respect for the rule of law. We claim the moral high ground when it comes to human rights. We were among the first to sign the 1929 Geneva Convention on the humane treatment of prisoners of war.Surely, you would think, the British avoid torture? But you would be wrong, as my research into what has gone on behind closed doors for decades shows....
Source: Guardian (UK)
Oct 26, 2012
The British government opposed the establishment of the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals at the end of the second world war because it wanted selected Nazi leaders to be summarily executed and others to be imprisoned without trial, according to a contemporary account that is declassified on Friday.Winston Churchill made the proposal at the "Big Three" conference at Yalta in February 1945, according to the account, but was overruled by Franklin D Roosevelt, who believed the US public would demand proper trials, and Joseph Stalin, who argued that public trials possessed excellent propaganda value.The British eventually agreed to the war crimes trials despite the misgivings of some senior government officials who believed the decision to prosecute the surviving Nazi leadership for waging a war of aggression would set a dangerous precedent. They also feared the prosecutions would be on a par with the high-profile show trials in Stalin's Russia....
Source: AP
Oct 26, 2012
More than 4,000 archaeological artifacts looted from Mexico and seized in the U.S. have been returned to Mexican authorities in what experts say is one of the largest such repatriations between the countries.The items returned Thursday mostly date from before European explorers landed in North America and include items from hunter-gatherers in pre-Columbian northern Mexico, such as stones used to grind corn, statues, figurines and copper hatchets, said Pedro Sanchez, president of the National Archaeological Council of Mexico.U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents seized the relics in El Paso, Phoenix, Chicago, Denver, San Diego and San Antonio, though most of the artifacts - including items traced to a 2008 theft from a museum in Mexico - turned up in Fort Stockton, a Texas town about 230 miles southeast of El Paso...
