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
Sep 9, 2012
Mitt Romney: “It’s disgraceful that the Obama Administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”..[B]ecause Republicans have frequently likened President Obama to Jimmy Carter, we were curious to learn how candidate Ronald Reagan responded to the worst foreign policy disaster on Carter’s watch — the failed mission to rescue U.S. diplomats in Iran, resulting in the deaths of eight servicemen. In April 1980, Reagan was still battling George H.W. Bush for the GOP nomination, while Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was challenging Carter for the Democratic nomination. This is excerpted from The Washington Post reporting on the political fallout:Carter's presidential rivals were charitable. Republican George Bush supported the president's actions without reservation. Ronald Reagan and Edward Kennedy offered sympathy to the families of the dead troopers and called for national "unity."...
Source: Takepart.com
Sep 9, 2012
Earlier this week, TakePart reported on the record lows recorded in the Earth’s dwindling Arctic ice cap coverage. The dire implications of reaching that kind of planetary milestone are obvious, but there is one consequence that could actually prove helpful to us.BBC reports that a 500-year old Alaskan Eskimo settlement was recently discovered eroding from under the permafrost, and it’s giving researchers the ability to study a culture that went through its own dramatic climate change centuries ago.
Source: Washington Times
Sep 9, 2012
A Texas congressman who abandoned efforts this summer to “nationalize” the District of Columbia World War I Memorial on the Mall has crafted a revamped bill that would honor Americans who fought and died in the Great War on a site north of the Reflecting Pool.The House Natural Resources subcommittee on national parks, forests and public lands on Tuesday will hear testimony on the proposal by Rep. Ted Poe, Texas Republican, whose draft legislation now proposes a National World War I Memorial in Constitution Gardens, a shaded section of the federal parkland marked by a large pond just south of Constitution Avenue.While there is broad consensus that heroes of the conflict from 1914 to 1918 deserve a fitting memorial, the location has been a sticking point for local officials and advocates in the District. City lawmakers and other advocates have pushed for a memorial in Pershing Park, located on Pennsylvania Avenue about a block from the White House....
Source: NYT
Sep 8, 2012
THE September day when the brutal hurricane of 1938 hit the East End started out warm and sunny, but it ended up leaving behind a wasteland of uprooted trees, ruined houses and smashed cars. All that destruction, and more, is chronicled in an exhibition in East Hampton, “The Long Island Express: Rare Photographs of East Hampton Town After the 1938 Hurricane.” The Long Island Express is one of several names by which the hurricane came to be remembered.The story behind the exhibition, which is on display in the East Hampton Historical Society’s Clinton Academy, began about a year ago, said Richard Barons, the society’s director, when Camilla Jewett, who lives down the street from the museum and who recently turned 101, invited him to tea, as she often does....
Source: NYT
Sep 8, 2012
A dispute between Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo over the $1 billion museum at ground zero has dragged on for so long that the museum will not open in time for the 11th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks — or even for the next one.Aides to Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Cuomo have so far been unable to resolve their differences over which government agencies will pay the operating costs of the museum, which is intended to document the terrorist attacks of 2001 and honor the nearly 3,000 victims. The two sides also remain at odds over who will have oversight of the museum and the surrounding memorial.
Source: LiveScience
Sep 7, 2012
The search for the grave of English King Richard III has uncovered a garden said to hold a memorial to the medieval monarch.University of Leicester archaeologists announced today (Sept. 7) that they have found paving stones that may belong to the garden of Robert Herrick, a mayor of Leicester who built a mansion and garden over the church where Richard III was buried. In 1612, a man named Christopher Wren visited Herrick and reported that the garden contained a 3-foot (1-meter) tall stone pillar inscribed, "Here lies the body of Richard III sometime King of England."
Source: West Cork Times
Sep 7, 2012
THE controversial killing of 13 protestants in and around Dunmanway in 1922 were not, as has been portrayed, an act of sectarian violence but an act of self-defence.That’s according to Cork history teacher Barry Keane and he says he has the evidence to prove it.Thirteen Protestants were killed, was it retaliation for the killing of Commandant Michael O’Neill and the pogroms in Belfast?Did British agents attempt to provoke a re-occupation of West Cork by the Essex regiment?Was it an attempt ‘to exterminate and drive out all Protestants from the area’ as historian Peter Hart claimed?...
Source: NYT
Sep 7, 2012
The instructions from the Israeli government were clear in the hours after Palestinian terrorists killed two Israeli athletes at the Munich Summer Olympics in 1972, took nine others hostage and demanded the release of more than 200 Arab prisoners.“The Israeli government does not negotiate with terrorists,” read the urgent cable, marked classified and sent to the Israeli ambassador in Bonn, the capital of what was then West Germany, on Sept. 5, 1972. “The government expects the German authorities to do everything in their power to rescue the hostages.”…Now for the first time, these and dozens more classified documents relating to the killing of the athletes have been made public after four decades left sitting in cardboard boxes in the Israel State Archives, the repository of the country’s collective memory and many of its secrets. Their publication last week was timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the Munich massacre.
Source: Nowsourcing
Sep 7, 2012
Source: Io9.com
Sep 6, 2012
Antiquity was the pits. For every advancement in philosophy or mathematics, you had half a dozen crazed aristocrats high on mercury potions trying to remove your limbs in bold new ways. Here are five particularly egregious ways to kick it centuries ago — they involve (among many things) honey, wine, eels, and inappropriate touching.1. Death by eels Ah Rome, a cultured place where the entire animal kingdom was itching to tear you to bits. According to historical accounts of 1st century BC Rome, the aristocrat Vedius Pollio would chuck unlucky victims into — as the historian Dio recalls:[...] reservoirs [of] huge [morays] that had been trained to eat men, and he was accustomed to throw to them such of his slaves as he desired to put to death.It's worth mentioning that some descriptions of Pollio's prized pool toss lampreys instead into the hungry depths, but such a death by jawless sea sausages comes across as improbable.
Source: CS Monitor
Sep 6, 2012
Almost nine decades ago, the Democrats got together in New York City and tore themselves apart.They fought over civil rights and the Ku Klux Klan. They fought over religion. They fought over legalizing liquor. And they did it for more than two whole weeks while botching everything from the music to the celebratory fire sirens.The Democratic National Convention of 1924 remains the most destructive of all time. "During its 16 days and 103 ballots, the party virtually committed suicide," writes historian Robert K. Murray.The players included a future president who'd lose that November, a Catholic governor, a KKK sympathizer and the ultimate nominee, a man who described the chaos, in a bit of understatement, as "a three-ring circus with two stages and a few trapeze acts."...
Source: NPR
Sep 6, 2012
1) Bill Clinton. After all, it takes a cool guy to know a cool guy. "Obviously Bill Clinton," says Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University. During the 1992 election, Clinton explored new ways to reach voters, like appearing on MTV and playing the saxophone on a late night talk show. Clinton's popularity, Zelizer says, "even in the middle of impeachment, demonstrated a kind of admiration many had for his personal style."2) John F. Kennedy. The smoothie from Massachusetts "was certainly cool in terms of charisma and demeanor," Zelizer says. The stark contrast between Kennedy and Richard Nixon in the 1960 debates "might have set the standard for what it meant to be cool."...
Source: WSJ
Sep 6, 2012
Being out in the world took on new meaning at the 39th Telluride Film Festival. All of the natural attractions were in place—the perfumed breeze, the azure sky, the scudding clouds, the Rocky Mountains as backdrop to a whirl of urban sophisticates done up as alpine rustics. Still, watching many of this year's films meant being out in the larger world of political strife, seething violence and history's tumult.In some cases, the chosen mode was entertainment. "Argo," a terrific Hollywood thriller directed by and starring Ben Affleck, takes place during the Iran hostage crisis that began in the fall of 1979; it's just the kind of smart, accomplished film the studios should be making, and seldom do. In "No," Pablo Larraín's sensational fact-based political drama from Chile, Gael García Bernal plays an outwardly callow ad executive who's determined to drive the Pinochet dictatorship from office. (His genial insight, which the movie explores with a playful sense of paradox, is that democracy can be packaged like any other consumer product.) "Hyde Park on Hudson" has Bill Murray as a buoyant FDR on the eve of World War II, and Laura Linney as one of the women who loves him....
Source: WaPo
Sep 6, 2012
Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), the third-ranking Democrat in the House, greeted the delegation from his neighboring home state before likening President Obama invoked of one of the great icons in his party’s history, President John F. Kennedy.Riffing throughout his speech on JFK’s famous paraphrase of a Chinese proverb, “we are not here to curse the darkness; we are here to light a candle,” Clyburn said that the “fundamental” difference between the two major-party tickets is that “President Obama has lit candle after candle, bringing our country out from the darkness of recession, only to see Republicans douse the flames and amuse themselves cursing the darkness.”...
Source: NYT
Sep 6, 2012
Sept. 11 is approaching, and American television is maintaining a polite distance. Since last year, when more than two dozen new documentaries and memorials were presented for the 10th anniversary of the 2001 attacks, our attention has receded again. Apparently the most appropriate gift for an 11th anniversary is reruns.A close but not exhaustive survey of prime-time schedules through Tuesday turned up five new specials on the attacks, all on cable. New to America, that is — two are leftover inventory, having been shown in Britain last year. Why in Britain? Because all these TV documentaries about the most significant event in our recent history were made there, four by the same company, Testimony Films....
Source: WaPo
Sep 6, 2012
When President Obama addresses the Democratic National Convention on Thursday night, he will try to make the case for a second term. How have other recent presidents approached this task? Below we take a look back at the past four acceptance speeches that incumbents delivered at their nominating conventions:George W. Bush, 2004: Past vs. futureDifferent as they are politically, there is some resemblance between Bush’s 2004 speech and the message Democrats have been trying to underscore in Charlotte this week. Bush argued in his speech that a vote for Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) represented a step backward.“His policies of tax and spend, of expanding government rather than expanding opportunity, are the politics of the past. We are on the path to the future, and we’re not turning back,” Bush said in a speech in which he was not shy about going after his opponent....
Source: WaPo
Sep 6, 2012
Bill Clinton’s face doesn’t appear on Mount Rushmore, and he doesn’t have a monument bearing his name in Washington, D.C. That much we know.But judging by the reaction to the former president these days, it seems some are ready to mention him in the same breath as some of those bronze and stone statues.Clinton served up the best-reviewed speech of the 2012 convention season on Wednesday, cementing his status as perhaps the preeminent force in American politics nearly 12 years after his presidency ended....
Source: Yahoo News
Sep 6, 2012
One hundred and 30 years after her death, Mary Todd Lincoln will be retried for insanity.The former first lady was declared insane 10 years after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, when her son Robert Todd Lincoln had her committed."Even today, historians disagree whether the evidence against the First Lady was 'trumped up,' whether the procedures used constituted due process, and what would occur if today's modernized health laws were applied to the same facts," reads a statement from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum....
Source: WaPo
Sep 6, 2012
WASHINGTON — Lady Gaga’s famous meat dress has made its way to Washington, along with Loretta Lynn’s song about “The Pill” and other relics from music history.Lady Gaga’s dress from the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards is now dried and painted to restore its raw meat color. Beyond its shock value, though, it’s being displayed at the National Museum of Women in the Arts with an explanation of her political message....
Source: Smithsonian Magazine
Sep 5, 2012
The earliest known instance of cannibalism among hominids occurred roughly 800,000 years ago. The victims, mainly children, may have been eaten as part of a strategy to defend territories against neighbors, researchers report online in the Journal of Human Evolution. The new study shows how anthropologists use the behavior of modern humans and primates to make inferences about what hominids did in the past—and demonstrates the limitations of such comparisons....
