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: WSAV (GA)
Sep 13, 2012
Official statement from the state:"The Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget has instructed the Office of the Secretary of State to further reduce its budget for AFY13 and FY14 by 3% ($732,626). As it has been for the past two years, these cuts do not eliminate excess in the agency, but require the agency to further reduce services to the citizens of Georgia. As an agency that returns over three times what is appropriated back to the general fund, budget cuts present very challenging decisions. We have tried to protect the services that the agency provides in support of putting people to work, starting small businesses, and providing public safety.
Source: BBC News
Sep 13, 2012
A memorial for the first man on the Moon, astronaut Neil Armstrong, has been held in Washington, DC.The public memorial was held at the National Cathedral, with fellow Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins among the hundreds attending.Armstrong died in August, aged 82, from complications after heart surgery.Nasa administrator Charles Bolden, a former astronaut, said Armstrong's humility and courage "lifted him above the stars"A private funeral for family and friends was held earlier in Ohio, Armstrong's home state....
Source: NY Curbed
Sep 13, 2012
New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman really likes Louis Kahn's FDR Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island. He praises the 4-acre memorial, calling it "a belated and monumental triumph for New York and for everyone who cares about architecture and public space." He says the boxy "room" at the tip of the park is a "stroke of genius" because the 36-ton granite blocks are spaced one inch apart to let light shine through and create a heightened awareness in the viewer. He really doesn't hold back:It gives New York nothing less than a new spiritual heart. That's to say it creates an exalted, austere public space, at once like the prow of a ship and a retreat for meditation. It's a memorial, perhaps naïvely optimistic but uplifting and confident, unlike the one at ground zero. It is as solemn as the Roosevelt wartime speech it honors, a call to safeguard the freedoms of speech and worship and the freedoms from want and fear....
Source: WaPo
Sep 12, 2012
When Lin Biao, China’s then heir apparent, died in an air crash more than 40 years ago, it took the Communist Party two months to inform the public.This week’s unexplained disappearance of Xi Jinping, China’s leader-in-waiting, who has not been seen in public for 11 days, shows that, despite the country’s economic transformation, when it comes to its leaders, Beijing is as secretive now as it was in 1971, when Lin Biao died and Mao Zedong was still in power.According to Beijing’s official version, Lin had been plotting a coup against Mao and decided to flee to the Soviet Union with his family after learning that he had been found out. His flight crashed in Mongolia, killing everyone on board. While Russian forensic evidence confirmed that he died in the crash, foreign historians continue to doubt Beijing’s explanation of a coup....
Source: AP
Sep 12, 2012
The earliest movies known to be shot in color have been revived by film archivists, who on Wednesday gave an audience at London's Science Museum a glimpse at cinema's first attempts to show us the world as we see it.The obscure film segments were long considered failed prototypes, blurry flickers of color seen by no more than a handful of people before being consigned to an archive. But the National Media Museum in the northern England city of Bradford said digitization had effectively rescued the footage, unlocking remarkably modern-looking images created more than a century ago...Experts have dated the movie segments back to 1901 or 1902, when cinema was still in its infancy and inventors on both sides of the Atlantic were racing to produce ever-more realistic films. American inventor Thomas Edison led the way with peep-show-like Kinetoscope; the Lumiere brothers had wowed French audiences with moving images projected onto screens in 1895. The next challenge was to shoot a film in color...
Source: NYT
Sep 12, 2012
...The cultural divide that opened that school year on California campuses forever changed some young men. The new Stanford student president, David Harris, was later imprisoned for refusing military service. Some freshmen in Mr. Romney’s dormitory, Rinconada Hall, joined an antiwar commune or fought the draft as conscientious objectors.Mr. Romney, though, stayed true to his chinos and the Vietnam War, even joining a counterprotest against the occupation of the office of the university president, Wallace Sterling. Forty-six years later, some classmates remember his pro-war stand as principled and heartfelt; others say he merely championed the worldview of his father, George Romney, then Michigan’s governor, a war supporter and a future contender for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination. Still others say he sailed through the most schismatic moral and political issue of that time — and perhaps of any period since in the United States — with neither much angst nor introspection.
Source: WaPo
Sep 11, 2012
The Virginia woman eyed the box of kitsch at the West Virginia flea market and figured she’d discovered a true steal. Surely, she calculated, she could resell that brown leather Paul Bunyan doll to folk art enthusiasts for a tiny profit. As for the rest of the box’s items, she loved the plastic cow. The cow would get displayed in her living room.But the third item, a painting — with swirls of green and pink, carrying a plaque emblazoned with the word RENOIR — did not excite her so much. She liked only its golden frame and assumed the thing was a fake.So the woman forked over $7. She drove home. She stuck the box in a shed.Now, about two years after her random trip to a flea market on Route 340, the woman is selling the painting through the Alexandria-based Potomack Co. auction house, which determined that the piece is a bona fide work by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the renowned French impressionist. Potomack thinks the painting could fetch as much as $100,000, if not more, when it goes on the auction block Sept. 29....
Source: NYT
Sep 11, 2012
This time, there were no presidents reading psalms, no sounds of Yo-Yo Ma’s cello echoing across the plaza, no national outpouring of decade-later reflections.This time, the faces on the stage were almost all those of the 200 readers listing the dead, one by one, the names of cousins, brothers, mothers and husbands sounding for almost four hours over the twin reflecting pools that stand where the towers fell 11 years ago.Other elements of the annual Sept. 11 ceremony at ground zero remained the same: a chorus of children’s voices, an honor guard carrying a battered flag salvaged from the World Trade Center, six moments of silence to mark the impact of planes crashing and buildings hitting the ground, three trumpeters closing the day’s commemoration with the haunting sound of taps. Outside the site, however, many places across the country had shrunk their anniversary ceremonies or chosen not to hold them at all....
Source: Fox News
Sep 11, 2012
Bob Dylan says the stigma of slavery ruined America and he doubts the country can get rid of the shame because it was "founded on the backs of slaves."The veteran musician tells Rolling Stone that in America "people (are) at each other's throats just because they are of a different color," adding that "it will hold any nation back." He also says blacks know that some whites "didn't want to give up slavery."...
Source: NYT
Sep 11, 2012
The Greek government has appointed a panel to determine whether Germany might still owe Greece money in reparations for Nazi war crimes, a move that indicates the extent to which the shaky coalition government in Athens is trying to appease lawmakers from the extreme right and left.Christos Staikouras, a deputy finance minister, on Monday signed a decision appointing four members of the State Audit Council to scour historical archives “in relation to German reparations” and to issue a verdict by year-end.The move comes as the so-called troika of Greece’s foreign creditors are scrutinizing the government’s books to determine whether the country will receive the next installment of rescue loans it needs to stay solvent.
Source: AP
Sep 11, 2012
The world will soon get its first good look at the wreckage of the only U.S. Navy ship sunk in combat in the Gulf of Mexico during the Civil War, thanks to sophisticated 3-D sonar images that divers have been collecting this week in the Gulf's murky depths.The USS Hatteras, an iron-hulled 210-foot ship that sank about 20 miles off the coast of Galveston, Texas, in January 1863, has sat mostly undisturbed and unnoticed since its wreckage was found in the early 1970s. But recent storm-caused shifts in the seabed where the Hatteras rests 57 feet below the surface have exposed more of it to inspection, and researchers are rushing to get as complete an image of the ship as possible before the sand and silt shifts back....
Source: Lower Hudson Journel News
Sep 11, 2012
The leaders of Rye made historic preservation a top priority back in 1927, when they commemorated a set of milestones as relics from 1763.The engraved stones measured each mile from New York to Boston, and legend has it that Ben Franklin himself set them to determine the postal rates. Rye officials fought to reclaim one of the stones from publisher George Palmer Putnam, who had built it into his front porch.But the Boston Post Road milestones, such as they are today, demonstrate how difficult that task can be....
Source: CNN
Sep 11, 2012
The budgetary dispute that has delayed the opening of the National September 11 Memorial Museum has been resolved, according to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.The museum was scheduled to open on the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, but disagreements over funding, financing and oversight of the museum between the 9/11 Memorial and Museum Foundation and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey have halted construction. The foundation controls the memorial and museum; the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey owns the World Trade Center site.Late Monday, all parties entered into a "memorandum of understanding," an agreement that allows them to restart construction on the stalled museum project....
Source: NYT
Sep 10, 2012
The moments of silence. The musical interludes. The honor guards of policemen and firefighters, colleagues of those who died rescuing others on Sept. 11, 2001. And the reading of names, whether to honor the three victims from Nutley, N.J., or the nearly 3,000 others from around the world who died in the attacks.Across the country, the elements of a Sept. 11 anniversary commemoration have become familiar, from the World Trade Center site in Manhattan to the Pennsylvania field where United Flight 93 crashed to the dozens of New Jersey towns with neighbors to mourn. After the commemorations reached a peak of sorts for last year’s 10th anniversary, a sprinkling of communities have decided to scale back — prompted, they say, by a growing feeling that it may be time to move on.Nearly every ceremony will be smaller this year, even at the epicenter of the attacks. In a move that has drawn some controversy, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has stripped the New York ceremony of its presidents, governors and other politicians, who have in the past read literary or religious passages. Instead of Yo-Yo Ma, James Taylor and Paul Simon, bagpipers and a youth chorus will provide the music....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Sep 10, 2012
A rare medieval book gives an insight into the bizarre medical practices used 500 years ago.It has gone on display for the first time at the University of Aberdeen.The De Hortus Sanitatis, which translates as the Garden of Health, shows some of the medical methods practiced in Scotland five centuries ago and is one of the earliest European medical texts.The book, first printed in Mainz, Germany, in 1491, is a fusion of late medieval science and folklore....Meanwhile, detailed illustrations reveal how physicians used to study the colour of urine to make diagnoses....
Source: AP
Sep 10, 2012
DENVER - A former University of Colorado professor who compared some Sept. 11 victims with a Nazi has lost his appeal to get his job back.The Colorado Supreme Court on Monday upheld a lower court decision against Ward Churchill....
Source: AP
Sep 10, 2012
WARSAW, Poland – The American POWs sent secret coded messages to Washington with news of a Soviet atrocity: In 1943 they saw rows of corpses in an advanced state of decay in the Katyn forest, on the western edge of Russia, proof that the killers could not have been the Nazis who had only recently occupied the area.The testimony about the infamous massacre of Polish officers might have lessened the tragic fate that befell Poland under the Soviets, some scholars believe. Instead, it mysteriously vanished into the heart of American power. The long-held suspicion is that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn't want to anger Josef Stalin, an ally whom the Americans were counting on to defeat Germany and Japan during World War II.Documents released Monday and seen in advance by The Associated Press lend weight to the belief that suppression within the highest levels of the U.S. government helped cover up Soviet guilt in the killing of some 22,000 Polish officers and other prisoners in the Katyn forest and other locations in 1940.
Source: NC Department of Cultural Resources
Sep 10, 2012
WARRENTON- The illegal nighttime dumping of liquid contaminated with PCB (polychlorinated biphenyls) in 14 rural North Carolina counties led to the creation of a landfill 30 years ago. The choice of the site in rural Warren County sparked protests that gave birth to the environmental justice movement in America. A N.C. Highway Historical Marker will be dedicated to that protest movement on Saturday, Sept. 15, at 8 a.m. at Coley Springs Missionary Baptist Church at 224 Parktown Rd in Warrenton.
Source: AP
Sep 10, 2012
The Obama administration is opposing a Jewish group's bid to have civil fines levied against Russia for failing to obey a court order to return its historic books and documents - a dispute that has halted the loan of Russian art works for exhibit in the United States.In a recent court filing, the Justice Department argued that judicial sanctions against Russia in this case would be contrary to U.S. foreign policy interests and inconsistent with U.S. law.The Jewish group, Chabad-Lubavitch, based in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, has already convinced Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court here that it has a valid claim to the tens of thousands of religious books and manuscripts, some up to 500 years old, which record the group's core teachings and traditions....
Source: AP
Sep 10, 2012
A group of survivors from the Hiroshima atomic bomb attack have held a protest in Jerusalem calling for the end of nuclear weapons.The group visited Jerusalem holy sites on Monday and held signs reading "Nuclear Abolition" in Japanese.The visit comes amid growing tensions between Israel and Iran over the Islamic Republic's nuclear program. Israel and much of the West believe Iran is seeking nuclear weapons, a charge that Tehran denies....
