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: UPI
Oct 22, 2012
DEBNO, Poland, Oct. 22 (UPI) -- Antoni Dobrowolski, the oldest former prisoner of Auschwitz, has died in Debno, Poland, a historian said.Dobrowolski was 108....
Source: McGill Daily
Oct 22, 2012
The Harper government renamed a federal building in Old Montreal on Wednesday, October 10 as part of a $28 million campaign to commemorate the bicentennial of the War of 1812. Located at 400 Place d’Youville, the Édifice des douanes is now officially the Dominique Ducharme Building.“Mr. Ducharme fought both at the Battle of Beaver Dams in Upper Canada and at the Battle of the Chateauguay, and played an important role in Canada’s development,” Minister of Public Works and Government Services Rona Ambrose stated in a press release.“The building’s proximity to the Battle of the Chateauguay site gives it special historic significance for the region,” Jacques Gourde, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Public Works and Government Services, said at the October 10 naming ceremony....
Source: MinnPost
Oct 22, 2012
...In a Politico story, Mondale recalls:“I remember when, after I lost my race for president, I went to see George. I said, ‘Tell me how long it takes to get over a defeat of this kind.’ He said, ‘I’ll call you when it happens.’ That’s the kind of guy he was, he was funny.”Added Mondale:“We were old friends. He was a very nice, warm, smart, positive, funny man and we kidded each other for all those years. I’m sorry he’s gone.”...
Source: BBC News
Oct 22, 2012
The world's oldest undeciphered writing system, which has so far defied attempts to uncover its 5,000-year-old secrets, could be about to be decoded by Oxford University academics.This international research project is already casting light on a lost bronze age middle eastern society where enslaved workers lived on rations close to the starvation level."I think we are finally on the point of making a breakthrough," says Jacob Dahl, fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford and director of the Ancient World Research Cluster.Dr Dahl's secret weapon is being able to see this writing more clearly than ever before....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 21, 2012
He was one of the greatest big game hunters, who saved Theodore Roosevelt, the former US president, from a rampaging hippopotamus and ended one expedition with a haul of 11,400 animals killed or captured.But in the decades since he died, the name of Richard John “RJ” Cuninghame has slipped into obscurity, as his writings remained hidden in his family archives.Now, almost 90 years after his death, the astonishing story of his life can be told after his previously unseen journals emerged as part of an auction of the contents of his former home.Over several expeditions the British hunter and explorer travelled thousands of miles through eastern and central Africa during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, crossing terrain where Europeans had never before set foot....
Source: NYT
Oct 21, 2012
PHOENIX — An excavator clawed away at a squat, battered building on the edge of downtown one morning, tearing the structure down in chunks that sounded like firecrackers as they crashed to the ground — heaps of discarded history in a city that prizes what is new.From the other side of a chain-link fence, a cadre of preservationists watched with lament. The Madison Hotel — a boardinghouse for traders, travelers and tramps dating back to Arizona’s territorial days — was coming down unceremoniously to make way for a parking lot.Its younger neighbor, the Hotel St. James, is to be next for the wrecking crew.The hotels’ demolition permits were issued midsummer, though no one seemed to have heard about it until Michael Levine stumbled upon a lead-cleanup crew stepping out of the buildings sometime in August and thought to make a call to City Hall. Mr. Levine, 44, is an artist who has made it his business to buy and renovate some of the surviving buildings in Phoenix’s vanishing warehouse district, where, he said, “it’s been all about buying low, building cheap and selling out.”...
Source: NYT
Oct 21, 2012
Mention “the Victor at Saratoga” and people may think that you are talking about a horse. Yet that so-called victor, Gen. Horatio Gates, the commander of the American forces at the Battle of Saratoga, played a crucial role in the triumph there over the British forces of Gen. John Burgoyne in October 1777.Though other figures of the War of Independence are still widely revered and studied, Gates faded from the national memory. He died in New York in 1806 and was buried at Trinity Churchyard in Lower Manhattan. Precisely where is not known.On Sunday afternoon, more than 150 people gathered at the cemetery just off Wall Street to celebrate the installation of a marker that will serve as his gravestone and to highlight his long-neglected role in American history.“This is a great day in my point of view in the history of the city of New York,” James S. Kaplan said in an address to the gathering, made up mostly of members of the Daughters of the American Revolution....
Source: Discovery News
Oct 20, 2012
The "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" papyrus, which may or may not be a forgery, seems to be in limbo, as the Harvard Theological Review has pulled the scientific article describing the discovery from their January 2013 issue.This withdrawal, however, doesn't mean the journal will never publish the scientific paper by Harvard historian Karen King on the supposed lost Gospel. "Harvard Theological Review is planning to publish Professor King's paper after testing is concluded so that the results may be incorporated," Kit Dodgson, director of communications at Harvard Divinity School, wrote in an email to LiveScience.Even so, the announcement has garnered both anger and elation....
Source: AP
Oct 20, 2012
...About 70 protesters traveled from around France for Saturday morning's demonstration in the city of Poitiers, which has symbolic meaning as the place where a French medieval ruler once drove away Arab invaders, regional prefect Yves Dassonville said by phone. After police arrived, the protesters dispersed without resistance - and three were detained to face accusations of "incitement of racial hatred" and damage to property, he said.French TV broadcast images of dozens of rowdy, waving and chanting protesters on the mosque roof next to its minaret. They unfurled a banner that read "Generation Identitaire" and demanded a referendum on immigration and mosques. The banner also bore the number 732, which Dassonville said was a reference to the year when the army of medieval French leader Charles Martel stopped an Arab invasion in Poitiers...
Source: SF Chronicle
Oct 19, 2012
The federal government has quietly ended a 433-year-old historical controversy by officially recognizing a cove on the Point Reyes Peninsula as the site where Sir Francis Drake landed in 1579 and claimed California for England.The mystery of where England's most famous and feared sea captain landed has long intrigued maritime scholars. Many of them claimed Drake landed in a cove near Point Reyes in what is now Marin County, but others cited what they said was evidence that Drake put ashore in spots ranging from San Francisco Bay to Alaska, Oregon, British Columbia or several other sites on the California coast....
Source: AP
Oct 18, 2012
DALLAS (AP) - A federal judge in Texas has blocked an attempt by the Los Angeles Police Department to use a search warrant to obtain decades-old tapes of conversations between a Manson family disciple and his attorney that police believe could help clear up more than a dozen unsolved murders.U.S. District Judge Richard A. Schell's ruling stopped authorities from executing a search warrant earlier this month for the office of the bankruptcy trustee who has eight cassette tapes containing hours of conversations between Charles "Tex" Watson and attorney Bill Boyd.Schell criticized the LAPD for what the judge called an apparent attempt to circumvent a court order making the tapes off limits until Watson's appeal of a previous ruling in bankruptcy court can be heard."This court understands and respects the desire of the LAPD to seek access to the 42-year-old tapes," Schell wrote in an Oct. 5 ruling. "However, the LAPD has provided no explanation as to why this court should shortcut the usual procedure for determining a bankruptcy appeal given that the investigation the LAPD wishes to reopen involves murders that occurred 42 years ago."...
Source: TCU360
Oct 18, 2012
Assistant professor of history Max Krochmal created the Texas Communities Oral History Project (TX-COHP), a program that aims to preserve the history of the civil rights movement in Fort Worth. Krochmal said he ran into problems doing research in the field because many subjects did not leave behind written records. TX-COHP was born out of his interest in the civil rights movement and the fact that many people from that era are dying. The Institute for Urban Living and Innovation at Addran College and the Center for Community Involvement & Service-Learning support the project alongside students and community partners....
Source: NYT
Oct 18, 2012
BERLIN — Twitter waded into potentially perilous territory on Thursday when it blocked users in Germany from access to the account of a neo-Nazi group that is banned by the government here.The move was the first time that Twitter acted on a policy known as “country-withheld content,” announced in January, in which it will block an account at the request of a government. But the company cracked open the gates to a complex new era in which it will increasingly have to referee legal challenges to the deluge of posts that has made the site so popular.The company said the goal was to balance freedom of expression with compliance with local laws. “Never want to withhold content; good to have tools to do it narrowly & transparently,” Alexander Macgillivray, the company’s chief lawyer, wrote on Twitter....
Source: NYT
Oct 18, 2012
Before the Knoedler Gallery closed its doors last year, and before it and its former president Ann Freedman were mired in lawsuits and accusations of selling fakes, the gallery on East 70th Street in Manhattan was considered among the most distinguished in the world.Formed 165 years ago, the gallery helped shape many of this country’s greatest collections, including those of Paul Mellon, Henry Clay Frick and Robert Sterling Clark. Over the years Knoedler also bought and sold works by a roster that reads like a Who’s Who of 19th- and 20th-century art, including van Gogh, Manet, Winslow Homer, Frederic E. Church and John Singer Sargent, as well as more contemporary figures like Louise Bourgeois, Willem de Kooning and Barnett Newman.This week the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles announced that it had bought the Knoedler Gallery archive, a vast trove dating from around 1850 to 1971 that incorporates stock books, sales books, a photo archive and files of correspondence, including illustrated letters from artists and collectors....
Source: NYT
Oct 18, 2012
DELANO, Calif. — It is the obscurity of his father’s grave, not far from the once-tumultuous grape fields where farmworker history was made, that most troubles Johnny Itliong, a chef from Los Angeles.“Larry deserves better,” Mr. Itliong said of his father, Larry Itliong, the fiercely determined, polyglot Filipino labor leader whose pivotal role in the farm labor movement continues to reside in history’s shadows.Mr. Itliong, 47, looks much like his father did, though taller and ponytailed. Losing his father when he was 11, he grew up with a persistent longing, which has led him on a journey to bring his father’s accomplishments to light....
Source: AP
Oct 18, 2012
MORROW, Ga. — When Georgia officials announced plans to severely restrict public access to its state archives, it set off a firestorm not only among scholars and people tracing their family roots, but national historical groups.Archives supporters expressed outrage at plans to limit access to appointments-only on six days a month to view some of the state's most valuable papers, from the fading parchment of the 1798 Georgia state constitution to Jimmy Carter's 1976 statement of candidacy. They collected more than 17,000 signatures on an online petition, rallied at the State Capitol and hired a lobbyist.On Thursday, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal and Secretary of State Brian Kemp backed off of the plan – sort of. Deal announced that he was restoring $125,000 of a $733,000 budget cut so that the archives could remain open two days a week and visitors could view records without making an appointment."Georgia's Archives are a showcase of our state's rich history and a source of great pride," Deal said in a statement, which did not address the fate of seven workers who recently received pink slips effective Nov. 1. Three other employees – new archives director Chris Davidson, an archivist and a building manager – will definitely stay....
Source: Media Matters
Oct 18, 2012
Source: Discovery News
Oct 17, 2012
The remains of a 5,500-year-old tomb near Ale's Stones, a megalithic monument where, according to myth, the legendary King Ale lies buried, has been discovered by Swedish archaeologists. The discovery is the product of a geophysical investigation of the area carried out in 2006.Intrigued by a circular structure measuring about 165 feet in diameter with a rectangular feature in its center, archaeologists of the Swedish National Heritage Board decided to dig a trial trench."The outer circle was difficult to prove, but we did find vague traces at the spot, possibly imprints of smaller stones," archaeologist Bengt Söderberg told Discovery News....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Oct 15, 2012
Fidel Castro recruited former members of the Nazi SS to train Cuban troops during the Cold War, newly released German secret service files have revealed.The then Communist President of Cuba also bought Belgian-fabricated arms from two middle-men who had strong links to the extreme German right.It sheds light on the extent Castro, who in public was stringently committed to socialism, was willing to go in order to further his grip on the island nation and prevent an invasion from the U.S.Bodo Hechelhammer, historical investigations director at German foreign intelligence agency Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) said: 'Evidently, the Cuban revolutionary army did not fear contagion from personal links to Nazism, so long as it served its objectives.'...
Source: Fox News
Oct 15, 2012
BEIJING – China's beloved national symbol -- the panda -- may have been seen quite differently by ancient humans: as food.Scientist Wei Guangbiao says prehistoric man ate pandas in an area that is now part of the city of Chongqing in southwest China.Wei, head of the Institute of Three Gorges Paleoanthropology at a Chongqing museum, says many excavated panda fossils "showed that pandas were once slashed to death by man."The Chongqing Morning Post quoted him Friday as saying: "In primitive times, people wouldn't kill animals that were useless to them" and therefore the pandas must have been used as food....
