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: NYT
Aug 7, 2012
The other day, Richard Teahan was strolling down Fifth Avenue with Michael Collins under his arm when a woman covered fully by a burqa approached him near 65th Street and asked for directions to the Port Authority Bus Terminal.Mr. Teahan, 23, has been in New York City only since late May, when he came over from Ireland to land a summer job. But he was able to adequately direct the woman, Rani Niazi, a Pakistani immigrant living in Newark. She then asked about Michael Collins – actually a cardboard cutout of a life-size photograph of Michael Collins, the Irish revolutionary leader killed in 1922.“His name is Michael Collins and he is one of the leading protagonists in the Irish battle for independence,” said Mr. Teahan, who was with Mike Coleman, a real-life friend....
Source: AP
Aug 7, 2012
Mexican archaeologists say they have found an unprecedented human burial in which the skeleton of a young woman is surrounded by piles of 1,789 human bones in Mexico City's Templo Mayor.Researchers found the burial about five meters (15 feet) below the surface, next to the remains of what may have been a "sacred tree" at one edge of the plaza, the most sacred site of the Aztec capital.The National Institute of Anthropology and History said the find was the first of its kind, noting the Aztecs were not known to use mass sacrifice or the reburial of bones as the customary ways to accompany the interment of a member of the ruling class....
Source: NYT
Aug 7, 2012
The Woolworth Building is about to have another defining moment. The uppermost floors of the neo-Gothic tower that once stood as the world’s tallest skyscraper will be turned into about 40 luxury apartments as part of a $68 million deal made final last week. Only if the Chrysler Building or Empire State Building were to be remade into condominiums could buyers hope to live in a more iconic New York tower.An investment group led by Alchemy Properties, a New York developer, bought the top 30 floors of the landmark on July 31 from the Witkoff Group and Cammeby’s International, which will continue to own the lower 28 floors and lease them as office space.The agreement promises to reinvent the tower — telescoping up at 233 Broadway between Park Place and Barclay Street — as one of Manhattan’s most sought-after addresses, adding yet another chapter to the history of this Cass Gilbert-designed monument to Frank W. Woolworth and his five-and-dime empire. The building, which cost Woolworth $13.5 million in cash, was completed in 1913 and remains a signature element of the city skyline....
Source: Yahoo News
Aug 7, 2012
Fiona McLaren, 59, had kept an old painting in her Scottish farmhouse for decades. She reportedly didn't think much of the painting, which had been given to her as a gift by her father. But after she finally decided to have the painting appraised, some experts are speculating that it may in fact be a 500-year-old painting by Leonardo da Vinci and potentially worth more than $150 million."I showed it to him [auctioneer Harry Robertson] and he was staggered, speechless save for a sigh of exclamation," said Ms. McLaren, according to The People.The Daily Mail says the painting may be of Mary Magdalene holding a young child. The painting is now undergoing further analysis by experts at the Cambridge University and the Hamilton Kerr Institute, who will attempt to uncover its exact age and origins....
Source: AP
Aug 6, 2012
DELTA, Utah - A groundbreaking ceremony has been held for a museum that will tell the story of a Utah internment camp where Japanese Americans were detained during World War II.Seven former internees were among a crowd that attended the ceremony Saturday for the $2.3 million Topaz Museum and Education Center in Delta....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 5, 2012
It eluded Franklin Roosevelt, Sir Malcolm Campbell and Errol Flynn, but now an explorer from Melton Mowbray could be on the trail of a multi-million-pound hoard of gold, silver and jewellery stolen by pirates and buried on a treasure island.Shaun Whitehead is leading an archaeological expedition to Cocos Island, the supposed hiding place of the “Treasure of Lima” – one of the world’s most fabled missing treasures.The haul – said to be worth £160 million – was stolen by a British trader, Captain William Thompson, in 1820 after he was entrusted to transport it from Peru to Mexico.He is said to have been stashed his plunder on the Pacific island, from where it has never been recovered....
Source: Medievalists.net
Aug 5, 2012
A report to be released tomorrow by the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) will reveal that a mass burial on the site of the Augustinian priory and hospital of St Mary Spital had thousands of victims from a famine that occurred in 1258. The famine was caused by a volcanic blast from the other side of the world, which sent vast amount of ash into the atmosphere and dropped world temperatures.The report, A bioarchaeological study of medieval burials on the site of St Mary Spital: excavations at Spitalfields Market, London E1, 1991–2007, was written by a team lead by Don Walker, a human osteologist at Museum of London Archaeology. It is based on excavations that took place between 1991 and 2007 by the Museum of London Archaeology, which uncovered over 10,500 human skeletons. The skeletons date from the 12th to the early 16th centuries, and includes a large number who were buried in a mass grave. It was previously believed that the remains came from a tragedy like the Black Death in 1348, but radiocarbon dating revealed they were buried in the 13th century....
Source: AP
Aug 5, 2012
Hiroshima marked the 67th anniversary of the world's first atomic bomb attack on Monday with a call for the elimination of nuclear arsenals.About 50,000 people gathered in Hiroshima's peace park near the epicenter of the 1945 blast that destroyed most of the city and killed as many as 140,000 people. A second atomic bombing Aug. 9 that year in Nagasaki killed tens of thousands more and prompted Japan to surrender to the World War II Allies.The ceremony, attended by representatives of about 70 countries, began with the ringing of a temple bell and a moment of silence. Flowers were placed before Hiroshima's eternal flame, which is the park's centerpiece...Related LinksHNN Hot Topics: Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Source: AP
Aug 5, 2012
A hundred meters (yards) or so from taxiing airliners, Iraqi archaeologist Ali al-Fatli is showing a visitor around the delicately carved remains of a church that may date back some 1,700 years to early Christianity.The church, a monastery and other surrounding ruins have emerged from the sand over the past five years with the expansion of the airport serving the city of Najaf, and have excited scholars who think this may be Hira, a legendary Arab Christian center."This is the oldest sign of Christianity in Iraq," said al-Fatli, pointing to the ancient tablets with designs of grapes that litter the sand next to intricately carved monastery walls.The site's discovery in 2007 and its subsequent neglect are symbolic of a Christianity that has long enriched this country, and is now in decline as hundreds of thousands have fled the violence that followed the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
Source: AP
Aug 4, 2012
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Senator Robert C. Byrd obtained secret F.B.I. documents about the civil rights movement that were leaked by the C.I.A. and set off an angry confrontation between the two agencies in the 1960s, according to newly released F.B.I. records.
Source: NYT
Aug 4, 2012
RIO DE JANEIRO — Her nom de guerre was Estela. Part of a shadowy urban guerrilla group at the time of her capture in 1970, she spent three years behind bars, where interrogators repeatedly tortured her with electric shocks to her feet and ears, and forced her into the pau de arara, or parrot’s perch, in which victims are suspended upside down naked, from a stick, with bound wrists and ankles.
Source: NPR
Aug 4, 2012
Sometime before the end of the month, when Republicans hold their convention in Tampa, Fla., Mitt Romney will announce his vice presidential running mate.There's a good chance the finalists for that spot are wading through mountains of paperwork, and answering deeply personal questions about finances, past statements, friendships — and medical history.A lot of that tedious process stems from something that happened 40 years ago this summer, when presidential candidate George McGovern decided to place Thomas Eagleton on the Democratic ticket. Joshua Glasser tells the story of that fateful decision in his new book, The Eighteen-Day Running Mate....
Source: The Week
Aug 3, 2012
Two centuries ago, the U.S. declared war on Britain, and invaded its closest colony. Why did we fight the War of 1812, and who really won?Who started the war?The United States was the first to declare war, though after repeated British provocations. At the time, the Napoleonic wars were raging across Europe, and the Royal Navy had taken to seizing American sailors at sea and press-ganging them into their undermanned fleet. Already infuriated by British attempts to prevent the U.S. from trading with France, President James Madison and the so-called War Hawks in Congress urged the country to go to war and defend its recently won independence. But the June 1812 vote to go to war only narrowly passed the House and the Senate, and critics condemned "Mr. Madison's War" as a foolhardy adventure, motivated less by crimes at sea than by a lust for land. Indeed, the American offensive began with a land invasion of Canada....
Source: NYT
Aug 3, 2012
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SILETZ, Ore. — Local native languages teeter on the brink of oblivion all over the world as the big linguistic sweepstakes winners like English, Spanish or Mandarin ride a surging wave of global communications.But the forces that are helping to flatten the landscape are also creating new ways to save its hidden, cloistered corners, as in the unlikely survival of Siletz Dee-ni. An American Indian language with only about five speakers left — once dominant in this part of the West, then relegated to near extinction — has, since earlier this year, been shouting back to the world: Hey, we’re talking. (In Siletz that would be naa-ch’aa-ghit-’a.)“We don’t know where it’s going to go,” said Bud Lane, a tribe member who has been working on the online Siletz Dee-ni Talking Dictionary for nearly seven years, and recorded almost all of its 10,000-odd audio entries himself. In its first years the dictionary was password protected, intended for tribe members.
Source: NYT
Aug 3, 2012
The governor of Russia’s Krasnodar region, which will host the Winter Olympics in 2014, has enlisted the area’s Cossacks as an auxiliary police force, urging them to prevent darker-skinned Muslims from the North Caucasus from moving there.The governor, Aleksandr Tkachev, in a speech to law enforcement officers on Thursday, announced that as of September, 1,000 Cossacks would be paid from the budget to maintain public order. In the speech, he said the Cossacks — whose paramilitary forces served the czars — could take measures beyond what the police were allowed.“What you can’t do, the Cossacks can,” he told the officers in the speech, which was widely circulated on the Internet on Friday. “We have no other way — we shall stamp it out, instill order; we shall demand paperwork and enforce migration policies.”He said that a neighboring region had stopped performing its traditional function as “a filter” between central Russia and the North Caucasus. Internal migrants from the North Caucasus are often not welcomed by ethnic Russians, who consider them outsiders.
Source: NYT
Aug 3, 2012
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Gerald Gold, an editor for The New York Times who helped supervise the herculean task of combing through a secret 2.5-million-word Defense Department history of the Vietnam War, later known as the Pentagon Papers, to produce articles showing that officials had lied about the war, died on Wednesday at a hospice in Melville, N.Y. He was 85.The cause was heart failure, his daughter Madeleine Gold said.
Source: Secrecy News
Aug 3, 2012
In a floor statement yesterday, Sen. John McCain reiterated his criticism of the Obama White House for allegedly leaking classified information that endangered national security, and he repeated his call for appointment of a special counsel to independently investigate the claims.Sen.
Source: Ynet News
Aug 2, 2012
Adolf Hitler's nephew pleaded to enlist in the US army and fight against his uncle's Nazi regime, a letter written in 1942 reveals.The New York Daily News on Thursday reported that William Patrick Hitler, who fled from Germany to the US in 1939, wrote US President Franklin D. Roosevelt after being rejected from the US Army, begging him to fight alongside the Allied Forces....
Source: NYT
Aug 2, 2012
DJENNE-DJENNO, one of the best-known archaeological sites in sub-Saharan Africa, spreads over several acres of rutted fields near the present city of Djenne in central Mali. The ruts are partly caused by erosion, but they’re also scars from decades of digging, by archaeologists in search of history and looters looking for art to sell.When I was there last fall, a few archaeology students were in evidence. These days, with Mali in the throes of political chaos, it’s unlikely that anyone is doing much work at all at the site, though history and art are visible everywhere. Ancient pottery shards litter the ground. Here and there the mouths of large clay urns, of a kind once used for food storage or human burial, emerge from the earth’s surface, the vessels themselves still submerged.
Source: AP
Aug 2, 2012
The skeleton of Australia's most notorious criminal will finally be returned to his descendants 132 years after he was executed, the government said Thursday, ending the family's long quest to find and properly bury the remains of a man many Australians now consider a folk hero.Ned Kelly led a gang of bank robbers in Australia's southern Victoria state before he was hanged in 1880. The whereabouts of his corpse was long unknown, but forensic scientists identified Kelly's nearly headless skeleton last year after it was found in a mass grave outside a now-closed prison. Most of Kelly's skull, which was stolen long ago, is still missing, but the identification of the skeleton was followed by a battle over what to do with his bones.The property developer of the former Pentridge Prison site where Kelly's skeleton was buried had hoped to keep the remains on the grounds. Kelly's descendants wanted the skeleton so they could have a private burial....
