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
Aug 28, 2012
MANASSAS, Va. — The Civil War Trust is rolling out a new “battle app” to mark the 150th anniversary of the Second Battle of Manassas.The battle application making its debut Tuesday includes video featuring top historians and topographical maps, among other features. The free smartphone application is the latest in a series developed by the trust on key Civil War battles....
Source: Global Toronto
Aug 28, 2012
OTTAWA - There was a war in 1812? Really?The Harper government has been highlighting a war with our American neighbours 200 years ago, but the relevance of commemorating the event seemed lost on almost all of those who participated in a comprehensive survey for National Defence.The poll, conducted annually, measures impressions of the Canadian military, its missions, equipment and important events.Few people who took part in the survey, and in related focus groups, were aware of the anniversary "and even fewer could identify the War of 1812 by name," said the research conducted by Phoenix Strategic Perspectives Inc....
Source: NYT
Aug 28, 2012
One party platform stated that Hispanics and others should not “be barred from education or employment opportunities because English is not their first language.” It highlighted the need for “dependable and affordable” mass transit in cities, noting that “mass transportation offers the prospect for significant energy conservation.” And it prefaced its plank on abortion by saying that “we recognize differing views on this question among Americans in general — and in our own party.”The other party platform said that “we support English as the nation’s official language.” It chided the Democratic administration for “replacing civil engineering with social engineering as it pursues an exclusively urban vision of dense housing and government transit.” And its abortion plank recognized no dissent, taking the position that “the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed.”
Source: AP
Aug 28, 2012
WASHINGTON (AP) - "2016: Obama's America," a new conservative film exploring the roots of President Barack Obama's political views, took in $6.2 million to make it one of the highest-grossing movies of last weekend. The film, written and narrated by conservative scholar Dinesh D'Souza, argues that Obama was heavily influenced by what D'Souza calls the "anti-colonial" beliefs of his father, Barack Obama Sr., a Kenyan academic who was largely absent from the president's life.To document that claim, D'Souza travels to Kenya to interview members of Obama's extended family as well as to Hawaii and Indonesia, where Obama grew up. He also cites several actions and policy positions Obama has taken to support the thesis that Obama is ideologically rooted in the Third World and harbors contempt for the country that elected him its first black president.The assertion that Obama's presidency is an expression of his father's political beliefs, which D'Souza first made in 2010 in his book "The Roots of Obama's Rage," is almost entirely subjective and a logical stretch at best....
Source: Yahoo News
Aug 28, 2012
PARIS (AP) — French prosecutors opened a murder inquiry into the death of Yasser Arafat on Tuesday, his widow's lawyer said, after she and a TV investigation raised new questions about whether the Palestinian leader was poisoned.Many in the Arab world have long suspected that Arafat was poisoned, and a Swiss lab's recent finding of elevated levels of polonium-210 — a rare and highly lethal radioactive substance — on Arafat's clothing has fed those claims.However, the Institute of Radiation Physics said its findings were inconclusive and that only exhuming Arafat's remains could bring possible clarity. Palestinian officials have waffled on that matter — initially approving the exhumation and then saying the matter needed more study — only further fueling suspicions....
Source: NorthJersey.com
Aug 28, 2012
METTAWA, Ill. (AP) — The home of former Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson could be named a National Historic Landmark.Historian Robie Lange says despite Stevenson failed bids for the presidency in 1952 and 1956, he meets the criteria as a nationally significant individual of the mid-20th century....
Source: AP
Aug 27, 2012
NEW YORK — The Sept. 11 museum at ground zero is offering a hand on planning commemorations elsewhere as the anniversary of the terror attacks approaches.The National September 11 Memorial & Museum released a remembrance guide online Monday. The guide includes a list of the nearly 3,000 victims of the attacks, interactive timelines, lesson plans about memorialization and ideas for sharing reflections through social media....
Source: Chicago Tribune
Aug 27, 2012
In 1997, Darlene Clark Hine came across an essay in which Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps argued that black Chicago had its own, little-known renaissance that began in the 1930s and rivaled the famous one that occurred in 1920s New York."I read this and said, 'What in the world?'" said Hine, a professor of history and African-American studies at Northwestern University. "Bontemps was saying that Chicago had a major black arts movement without finger bowls and highfalutin intellectuals. Most of Chicago's artists were hardworking, working-class people creating the people's art."...
Source: WaPo
Aug 27, 2012
Charlie Crist and Artur Davis belong to the 2012 class of convention renegades — politicians who have spurned their former political parties to appear at rival nominating conventions....Crist and Davis each stand out this year. But this isn’t the first time a high-profile pol has disavowed his or her former affiliation on the national convention stage. Here’s a look back through history at a handful of memorable defectors:* Joesph Lieberman, 2008: Declaring “country matters more than party,” Lieberman, who eight years prior was the Democratic vice presidential nominee, delivered a defense of Arizona Sen. John McCain’s record at the GOP convention in St. Paul, Minn. Lieberman, a longtime friend of McCain’s and a senator from Connecticut lost in the Democratic Senate primary two years prior, but won reelection as an independent in the general election....
Source: Opposing Views
Aug 27, 2012
Speaking, last night, at the Prayer Rally for America’s Future in Tampa’s River Church, self-proclaimed historian David Barton claimed that the Seventh Amendment bans abortion, reports RightWingWatch.org....
Source: Atlantic Cities
Aug 27, 2012
With the peak month for global hurricanes nearly upon us, now is a good time to reflect upon all the thrashing tropical storms of yesteryear. Here's a way of looking at the atmosphere's tumultuous timeline that you've probably never seen before, courtesy of John Nelson at the "data viz" website IDV User Experience.Nelson has taken storm-path data from NOAA from 1851 to 2010 that includes all recorded tropical storms and hurricanes, and laid it on a "South Pole stereographic" map of the world. (If you're having trouble getting oriented, that's Antarctica in the middle, Asia on the left and the Americas on the right.) The color of the points represents a system's intensity, with the darkest, faded blue being a tropical storm and the iridescent green the equal of a most-potent Category 5 hurricane....
Source: Scientific American
Aug 27, 2012
Right now, one half of all Americans are on a diet. The other half just gave up on their diets and are on a binge. Collectively, we are overweight, sick and struggling. Our modern choices about what and how much to eat have gone terribly wrong. The time has come to return to a more sensible way of eating and living, but which way? An entire class of self-help books recommends a return to the diets of our ancestors. Paleolithic diets, caveman diets, primal diets and the like, urge us to eat like the ancients. Taken too literally, such diets are ridiculous. After all, sometimes our ancestors starved to death and the starving to death diet, well, it ends badly. The past was no panacea; each generation we made do with the bodies and foods available, imperfect bodies and imperfect foods. Yet, the idea that we might take our ancestral diet into consideration when evaluating the foods on which our organs, cells and existence thrive, makes sense. But what did our ancestors eat?...
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Aug 27, 2012
The Dark Lady who inspired some of Shakespeare’s romantic sonnets may have had a rather unladylike profession.An expert on the Bard suggests she may have been a notorious prostitute called ‘Lucy Negro’ or ‘Black Luce’ who ran a brothel in Clerkenwell, London.Shakespeare scholar Dr Duncan Salkeld said he had unearthed documents that indicate she is ‘the foremost candidate for the dubious role of the Dark Lady’.Many of the sonnets 127 to 152 are addressed to an unidentified woman with whom Shakespare imagines having an affair....
Source: NYT
Aug 27, 2012
Nikola Tesla electrified the world with alternating current, then slipped into obscurity, dying penniless in 1943 on the 33rd floor of the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan. But though his fame was eclipsed by other inventors, he was never forgotten: A hardy band of enthusiasts has long sought to give this eccentric genius his due.Now his devotees are making headway in their efforts to create a lasting memorial to Tesla by buying and restoring Wardenclyffe, the overgrown 16-acre estate on the North Shore of Long Island that features his only surviving workshop.Three fund-raising efforts are under way. All envision turning the rundown laboratory into a museum or educational center, but each has a distinct way of raising the money — online donations; foreign contributions; and simple philanthropy, in the form of a feature film that would memorialize Tesla, a bold visionary of Serbian birth....
Source: NYT
Aug 27, 2012
...Theaters once played a more unifying role. Lebanon lived under French control from 1920 to 1943, and the lingering influence of France, along with the magnetism of Hollywood, led Beirut to what many here still consider a golden age of moviegoing.In the mid-1950s downtown Beirut was filled with glorious movie palaces like the Empire and the Majestic and the Roxy. Lebanese presidents attended premieres, and many still recall the rush of stepping into an air-conditioned theater during Ramadan or its bookend holiday, Id al-Fitr....Even in the early years, though, movie theaters were entwined with politics. The Communist Party met in a Beirut cinema in the 1920s. In 1974, a new theater in the Holiday Inn aimed to open with “The Tamarind Seed,” featuring Omar Sharif as a Russian agent, but the Russian Embassy protested. “They held it for two months,” Mr. Soueid said....
Source: WaPo
Aug 26, 2012
WASHINGTON — When man first harnessed fire, no one recorded it. When the Wright Brothers showed man could fly, only a handful of people witnessed it. But when Neil Armstrong took that first small step on the moon in July 1969, an entire globe watched in grainy black-and-white from a quarter million miles awayWe saw it. We were part of it. He took that “giant leap for mankind” for us....“It’s a human achievement that will be remembered forever,” said John Logsdon, professor emeritus of space policy at George Washington University. Those first steps were beamed to nearly every country around the world, thanks to a recently launched satellite. It was truly the first global mass media event, Logsdon said. An estimated 600 million people — 1 out of every 5 on the planet — watched....
Source: WaPo
Aug 25, 2012
After dark had come, the cries of men fighting for their lives burst from the field hospitals, and the glow of distant lanterns floated over the battlefield.As men picked their way among the bodies, looking for wounded on that night nearly 150 years ago, it must have seemed that only the very fortunate had survived unscathed the carnage of the Second Battle of Bull Run.On Saturday, people again sought out the fields around Manassas, searching for insight into the bloody Civil War battle and marking its sesquicentennial.The battle from Aug. 28 to 30, 1862, was spread over the same ground as a major clash a year earlier. The second was much deadlier, although both were triumphs for the Confederacy....
Source: CNN.com
Aug 25, 2012
Washington (CNN) -- Some may not realize that the modern Republican Party owes its origin to the fight over slavery nearly two centuries ago.In the tumultuous mid-1800s, right before the Civil War, some political activists were concerned about keeping slavery from spreading into new western territories, and they saw no way to stop it through existing political powers: the Democrats and the Whigs (the pro-Congress party of the mid 1800s that largely destroyed itself in the 1852 elections in a battle over slavery).So they formed a new party, taking the name "Republicans" in a salute to earlier American politicians.By 1861, they had their first president: Abraham Lincoln. Soon after, slavery fell. The Whig party disappeared. And the Republicans began a long steady rise in power....
Source: NYT
Aug 25, 2012
In Selma, Ala., a battle over what to do with a bronze bust of a contradictory and controversial Civil War general has lasted far longer than the war itself.Since the monument honoring Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest was unveiled in a city park in 2000, critics have called it a symbol of hate. Vandals littered it with trash, pelted it with cinder blocks and tried to pull it down with ropes before it was moved to a private cemetery. Finally in March, the bust vanished. A historical society called Friends of Forrest has offered a $20,000 reward for its return, and vowed to replace it with a new bust on a taller pedestal, guarded by an iron fence and a surveillance camera.The fight continued this week as about 20 protesters tried to block construction of the new monument by lying in the path of a concrete truck as crews tried to pour a ramp. Late on Thursday night, the Selma mayor, George Patrick Evans, decided to halt the work until the city attorney could review the plans. Meanwhile, an online petition at Change.org asking the City Council to ban the monument has more than 69,000 signatures....
Source: NYT
Aug 25, 2012
WASHINGTON — To the myriad indignities suffered by Congress, including stagnant legislation, partisan warfare and popularity on a par with petty criminals, add this: the Capitol’s roof is leaking, and there is no money to fix it.The Capitol dome, the nation’s grandest symbol of federal authority, has been dinged by years of inclement weather, and its exterior is in need of repair.The dome has 1,300 known cracks and breaks. Water that has seeped in over the years has caused rusting on the ornamentation and staining on the interior of the Rotunda, just feet below the fresco “The Apotheosis of Washington,” which is painted on the Rotunda’s canopy.Like most of what the federal government is on the hook to fix — highways, bridges and airports — the dome is imperiled both by tough economic times and by a politically polarized Congress. While Senate appropriators have voted to repair the dome, which has not undergone major renovations for 50 years, their House counterparts say there is not money right now. In that way, the dome is a metaphor for the nation’s decaying infrastructure....
