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: CBS News
Sep 26, 2012
(LiveScience) It sounds like a mash-up of Indiana Jones' plots, but German researchers say a heavy Buddha statue brought to Europe by the Nazis was carved from a meteorite that likely fell 10,000 years ago along the Siberia-Mongolia border.This space Buddha, also known as "iron man" to the researchers, is of unknown age, though the best estimates date the statue to sometime between the eighth and 10th centuries. The carving depicts a man, probably a Buddhist god, perched with his legs tucked in, holding something in his left hand. On his chest is a Buddhist swastika, a symbol of luck that was later co-opted by the Nazi party of Germany....
Source: ABC News
Sep 26, 2012
The story of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the love-struck bandits who rose to fame during America's public enemy era before suffering a violent death at the hands of police, has resonated across generations, spawning films, music, even an annual festival. Starting Sept. 30, some of the most crucial pieces of that iconic American story will be for sale to the public.The center piece of the auction, which is being held at RR Auction at the Crowne Plaza Nashua, in New Hampshire, is a Colt .38 detective special revolver. The revolver, nicknamed "the squat gun" because Bonnie was squatting on it at the time of her death, was found taped to Bonnie's thigh after she was shot and killed by Texas Ranger Captain Frank Hamer and his posse. Hamer later speculated that it was hidden there because it is one of the few locations "no gentleman officer would search."...
Source: AP
Sep 26, 2012
Forensic experts have found 10 bodies as they began to excavate a mass grave where Muslim Bosniaks killed during the 1995 massacre in the eastern town of Srebrenica are believed to have been hidden.Srebrenica was the worst massacre in Europe since World War II and took place in an area that was officially under U.N. protection during the 1992-95 Bosnian war...
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 25, 2012
The English-language book, published in 1942, paints Adolf Hitler as a man of peace and dwells at length on Britain’s class inequalities and “atrocities” committed in Ireland and India.However, it also celebrates British landscape and culture, in particular the works of Shakespeare.A rare copy of the work, entitled “Hirt’s Englandkundliches Lesebuch fur die Oberstufe an Oberschulen” (“Hirt’s English textbook theory for colleges and high schools”), will go on sale at auction this week.The book’s front cover is illustrated with an idyllic picture of the River Avon and Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-Upon-Avon, Warwick, where Shakespeare was baptised and buried....
Source: WaPo
Sep 25, 2012
DAKAR, Senegal — Ten years after one of the worst maritime disasters in history, the few survivors and dozens of families of the dead gathered in Senegal to pay homage to victims of the Joola, a Senegalese ferry that sank off the coast of Gambia, killing 1,863 people.That’s 361 more than died when the Titanic went down, taking with it 1,502 people.The Joola was overloaded with passengers and survivors say it was already listing from the excess weight on the night of Sept. 26, 2002, when it ran into a storm.Survivors wept at the graves Wednesday. Among the 64 who made it out alive was Victor Djiba. He says he has been taking sleeping pills since 2002, because although he managed to get out, his friend traveling with him perished....
Source: NJ.com
Sep 25, 2012
PRINCETON TOWNSHIP – The Princeton Battlefield Society has filed another lawsuit aimed at stopping a faculty housing development proposed by the Institute for Advanced Study on land that the group argues was a key Revolutionary War battlefield.The preservation group filed suit Friday asking the courts to reverse an approval the project was given by the Delaware and Raritan Canal Commission last month.The IAS sought waivers from the DRCC to build the development in stream corridors, according to the battlefield society’s appeal filing. The commission gave default approval because of a rule that a project is automatically approved if the commission is unable to act on an application in 45 days....
Source: NYT
Sep 25, 2012
SAPELO ISLAND, Ga. — Once the huge property tax bills started coming, telephones started ringing. It did not take long for the 50 or so people who live on this largely undeveloped barrier island to realize that life was about to get worse.Sapelo Island, a tangle of salt marsh and sand reachable only by boat, holds the largest community of people who identify themselves as saltwater Geechees. Sometimes called the Gullahs, they have inhabited the nation’s southeast coast for more than two centuries. Theirs is one of the most fragile cultures in America.These Creole-speaking descendants of slaves have long held their land as a touchstone, fighting the kind of development that turned Hilton Head and St. Simons Islands into vacation destinations. Now, stiff county tax increases driven by a shifting economy, bureaucratic bumbling and the unyielding desire for a house on the water have them wondering if their community will finally succumb to cultural erosion....
Source: CBS News
Sep 25, 2012
Photographer Lewis Hine is well known for his iconic pictures of workers high atop the Empire State Building. But before becoming famous for snapping pictures above the streets of New York, Hine worked as an anti-child labor investigator. Between 1908 and 1924, Hine worked for a private advocacy organization, The National Child Labor Committee. Over the course of 16 years, he took more than 5,000 pictures of children working, often illegally, in mills and mines across the United States. The photos were meant to shock Americans into reforming child labor laws. Almost 75 years after labor reform was enacted though, one man is still haunted by the photos.
Source: NYT
Sep 25, 2012
Ancient dentistry has been discovered in a 6,500-year-old human jawbone: a lump of beeswax that appears to be the earliest evidence of a dental filling.The beeswax was probably applied to ease pain from a crack in the enamel and dentin layers of the tooth, said Claudio Tuniz, a nuclear paleoanthropologist at the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics in Italy.He and his colleagues report their findings in the journal PLoS One.The details, based on this single finding, are fuzzy, said the study’s first author, Federico Bernardini, an archaeologist at the center....
Source: NYT
Sep 24, 2012
A giant Roman mosaic, made up of thousands of marble cubes just half a cubic inch in size, is being unearthed in southern Turkey.The 1,600-square-foot mosaic, which consists of colorful geometric patterns, probably dates from the third or fourth century A.D., said Michael Hoff, a professor of art history at the University of Nebraska, whose team has been working since 2005 to excavate ruins in Antiochia ad Cragum, which was once a city on the southern coast of what is now Turkey.First spotted in 2002 but uncovered just this summer, the mosaic is so large that Dr. Hoff and his team have exposed only about 40 percent of it. The rest will be unearthed next summer....
Source: CBS News
Sep 24, 2012
The war between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland ended more than a decade ago. But, a new battle has broken out over an oral history that contains some of the Irish Republican Army's (IRA) deepest secrets."As they always say, the victors write the history," Delours Price said.The history she is talking about is when Catholics and Protestants were at war in Northern Ireland and when Delours and her sister Marian were IRA fighters trying to force the British out....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 23, 2012
One of Britain’s greatest spies of the Second World War, a secret agent who went by the code name White Rabbit, has been identified as the inspiration behind Ian Fleming’s James Bond.He’s the dashing secret agent who surrounded himself with women, ruthlessly despatched his enemies and had a series of swashbuckling adventures.It is not James Bond but a real Second World War hero who has now been identified as the inspiration behind Ian Fleming’s fictional creation.A new biography of Wing Commander Forest “Tommy” Yeo-Thomas, one of Britain’s greatest secret agents of the war, claims the writer based the character of 007 on the spy and recreated many of his real life experiences in his novels....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 23, 2012
It is one of Britain’s most intriguing archeological mysteries.When two almost perfectly preserved 3,000-year-old human skeletons were dug up on a remote Scottish island, they were the first evidence that ancient Britons preserved their dead using mummification.The scientists who uncovered the bodies also found clues that one of them – a man buried in a crouching position – was not a single individual, but had in fact been assembled from the body parts of several different people.The discovery began a 10-year investigation into what had led the bronze-age islanders to this strange fate....
Source: Salon
Sep 23, 2012
[CLICK HERE FOR VIDEO]...To fully appreciate the journey that produced today’s polarized electoral map and the trends that will shape the future, Salon’s art director, Benjamin Wheelock, pored over a century’s worth of presidential, congressional and gubernatorial election results from every state, assigning each a shade of blue or red for each election year. Watch as the map travels backward from the divide we know today, through the long, slow post-civil rights evolution, through a sea of red when Dwight Eisenhower takes power, to coast-to-coast blue during the FDR years, and finally all the way to 1912, just a few decades after the end of Reconstruction, when “Republican” was still a curse-word in the South and the GOP reigned in states we now think of as Democratic bastions....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Sep 23, 2012
Art experts will this week claim that Leonardo da Vinci completed a version of the Mona Lisa some ten years before the famous painting which now hangs in the Louvre in Paris.Known as the Isleworth Mona Lisa, the painting is a slightly larger size than the famous portrait and has long been the subject of debate over its authenticity.However, the not-for-profit Mona Lisa Foundation, which was set up to conduct research into the work, is planning to put forward 'historical, comparative and scientific evidence' that will prove once and for all that the painting is by the Italian renaissance artist....
Source: NYT
Sep 23, 2012
LEICESTER, England — For more than 500 years, King Richard III has been the most widely reviled of English monarchs. But a stunning archaeological find this month here in the English Midlands — a skeleton that medieval scholars believe is very likely to be Richard’s — could lead to a reassessment of his brief but violent reign.If 12 weeks of DNA and isotope testing confirm that the remains found amid the ruins of an ancient priory are the 15th century king’s, those who believe that Richard has been the victim of a campaign of denigration — begun by the Tudor monarchs who succeeded him and deeply entrenched over the centuries in British popular consciousness — hope the renewed attention will spur scholarship that will correct the injustice they say has been done to his reputation.It is a debate that has raged with varying intensity since at least the late 18th century. And at its heart is this: Was Richard the villain his detractors expediently made him out to be, or was he, as supporters contend, a goodly king, harsh in ways that were a function of an unforgiving time, but the author of groundbreaking measures to help the poor, extend protections to suspected felons and ease bans on the printing and selling of books?...
Source: BBC magazine
Sep 23, 2012
Though his American critics often accuse the US President of being a socialist or Marxist, some observers have recently come to another conclusion: Barack Obama is a Tory.Though President Obama is a Democrat, and thus more likely to embrace left-leaning political positions than the American Right, he's drawn repeated comparisons to members of England's Conservative party.For some expatriates, the president's centrist response to an increasingly activist Republican opposition makes him a conservative in the mould of the Tory party."The fit isn't always going to be perfect, but it's more of a guide to a certain aspect of a politician's temperament and character," says Alex Massie, who writes for the Spectator in London....
Source: Chicago Tribune
Sep 23, 2012
In the wake of the bloodiest day of the Civil War or any American war, President Abraham Lincoln issued on Sept. 22, 1862, a preliminary proclamation freeing all slaves in the Confederate states. In the wake of the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day of the Civil War or any American war, President Abraham Lincoln issued on Sept. 22, 1862, a preliminary proclamation freeing all slaves in the Confederate states.
Source: NYT
Sep 22, 2012
EARLIER this month, we asked you to tell us which objects represented New York City to you. We had made our own list, “A History of New York in 50 Objects,” and wanted to hear what we had missed. Well, you told us. More than 600 of you responded on NYTimes.com, offering everything from a bright red apple to Bella Abzug’s hat.No subject engaged you more than food. We included a hearty helping in our list, but you wanted seconds. You lobbied passionately for pizza slices (triangular and square); egg creams (made with Fox’s U-bet chocolate syrup); pastrami sandwiches; Mello-Rolls and other ice cream treats, especially from Mister Softee and Bungalow Bar; seltzer bottles; Ebinger’s blackout cake; the cream-cheese sandwiches at Chock full o’Nuts; bialys; plantains; cheesecake from Junior’s and Lindy’s; Charlotte russes; a pickle barrel; and hot dogs from Nathan’s and from carts under the ubiquitous blue-and-yellow Sabrett umbrellas.
Source: NYT
Sep 22, 2012
BERLIN — The hunt for Aribert Ferdinand Heim, a Nazi fugitive and concentration camp doctor, has officially come to a close, the German authorities said Friday, after they determined that the man known as Dr. Death for his unnecessary operations had died in Egypt in 1992.A regional court in Baden-Baden, Dr. Heim’s last known residence in Germany, said it had suspended the criminal investigation because “no doubts remained” that the fugitive who eluded the authorities for decades had died of cancer in Cairo in 1992.
