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: Pew
Aug 1, 2012
Residential segregation by income has increased during the past three decades across the United States and in 27 of the nation’s 30 largest major metropolitan areas, according to a new analysis of census tract and household income data by the Pew Research Center.
The analysis finds that 28% of lower-income households in 2010 were located in a majority lower-income census tract, up from 23% in 1980, and that 18% of upper- income households were located in a majority upper-income census tract, up from 9% in 1980.
These increases are related to the long-term rise in income inequality, which has led to a shrinkage in the share of neighborhoods across the United States that are predominantly middle class or mixed income—to 76% in 2010, down from 85% in 1980—and a rise in the shares that are majority lower income (18% in 2010, up from 12% in 1980) and majority upper income (6% in 2010, up from 3% in 1980).
Source: Medievalists.net
Aug 1, 2012
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Injured British soldiers have helped uncover the remains of a sixth Century Anglo-Saxon female in an excavation project to preserve the remains of a burial site on Salisbury Plain in southern England.‘Davina’, as they have named the woman is believed to have died in her late teens to early 20s. She appears to have been a person of note, as she was buried in what would have been a prestigious burial site. They have also found the remains of an Anglo-Saxon male, who was buried with a bronze shield.
Source: Daily Mail
Aug 1, 2012
Secret Cabinet papers on the decision to invade Iraq could be kept from the public for three decades.
The crucial minutes of ministerial meetings in 2003 were approved for release under Freedom of Information laws but blocked at the last minute by the Attorney General.
Dominic Grieve’s ruling yesterday is a repeat of the decision made by Jack Straw in 2009 over the same papers.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 31, 2012
All Saints, Waterden, stands in splendid isolation in the middle of a field in a hidden valley 10 miles from the north Norfolk coast. It is a 1,000-year-old Anglo-Saxon village church without a village – but even if it has lost its original purpose, it remains picture postcard perfect, a Grade I-listed gem in a landscape that carries those who happen upon it back through the centuries....The building belongs to the parish of South Creake, where the 40 or so regular worshippers have already had to find £100,000 to repair the roof of their own Saint Mary’s. They use All Saints only once every four weeks for Evensong. It is quite a bill to foot in return for 12 services a year.Their dilemma neatly encapsulates the crisis facing the custodians of the 12,000 listed Anglican parish churches around the country, two thirds of which are in rural areas with tiny and dwindling congregations struggling to pay maintenance bills. The desperation caused by this funding shortfall has been brought into sharp relief this week by the news that thousands of homeowners living near ancient churches potentially face large bills for the upkeep of their fabric, even if they never set foot inside them....
Source: Yahoo
Jul 31, 2012
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It was 100 years ago this month that Jim Thorpe put America on the world’s sports map and made the Olympics a global phenomenon. But the fight over Thorpe’s body still lingers in a federal court.Two weeks ago, two of Thorpe’s sons were testifying in court-ordered mediation in a federal lawsuit over the final resting place of the late Olympian’s body, according to a northeast Pennsylvania newspaper.
Source: USA Today
Jul 31, 2012
Gore Vidal, the author, playwright, politician and commentator whose novels, essays, plays and opinions were stamped by his immodest wit and unconventional wisdom, died Tuesday, his nephew said Tuesday.
Vidal died at his home in the Hollywood Hills at about 6:45 p.m. of complications from pneumonia, Burr Steers said. Vidal had been living alone in the home and had been sick for "quite a while," he said.
Along with such contemporaries as Norman Mailer andTruman Capote, Vidal was among the last generation of literary writers who were also genuine celebrities — fixtures on talk shows and in gossip columns, personalities of such size and appeal that even those who hadn't read their books knew who they were.
Source: BBC
Jul 31, 2012
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The earliest unambiguous evidence for modern human behaviour has been discovered by an international team of researchers in a South African cave.The finds provide early evidence for the origin of modern human behaviour 44,000 years ago, over 20,000 years before other findings.The artefacts are near identical to modern-day tools of the indigenous African San bush people.
Source: NPR
Jul 30, 2012
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In college, study of American history is often broken down into two chunks. Professors pick a date to divide time in two: 1865, after the Civil War, say, or 1900, because it looks good. So for those who teach courses on the first half, their purview is fairly well defined.But those who teach the second half, such as Jonathan Rees, face a persistent problem: The past keeps growing. Rees teaches U.S. history and, like many teachers, every few years responds to major events by adding them to his lectures. But that means other important events get left behind. He wrote about this conundrum in a piece for The Historical Society blog, "When Is It Time To Stop Teaching Something?"
Source: Guardian
Jul 30, 2012
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The ancient Colosseum in Rome is slanting about 40cm lower on the south side than on the north, and authorities are investigating whether it needs urgent repairs.Experts first noticed the incline about a year ago and have been monitoring it for the past few months, Rossella Rea, director at the 2,000-year-old monument, said in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera.
Source: CBS News
Jul 30, 2012
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There are museums dedicated to barbed wire and Spam, hobos and yo-yos -- even trash. Yet there is no major museum for the treasures of the American Revolution. But there are plans to right that wrong -- with a museum to be built with public and private funds in the city where America was born.In a secret location in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Scott Stephenson has been cataloging artifacts form the Revolutionary War.
Source: National Park Service
Jul 30, 2012
Today, the National Park Service officially launched the Star-Spangled Banner National Historic Trail with a ceremony in the Fell's Point neighborhood of Baltimore, MD. Partners from all nine regions along the trail were recognized for their hard work to develop the trail in their local areas.
"The launch of the Star Spangled Banner Trail is a key part of our nation's bicentennial celebration of the War of 1812," said U.S. Senator Ben Cardin. "It will provide Marylanders and visitors with a way to access and appreciate the sites engaged in our nation's Second War of Independence. Highlighted by kiosks, wayside signs, and highway markers, the trail will offer a unique combination of land and water-based sites and give visitors a unique understanding of Maryland's role in the war that helped shaped our nation."
With help from regional partners, important sites along the trail are now ready for visitors in southern Maryland, the Upper Bay, Maryland's Eastern Shore, Prince George's County, Anne Arundel County, Baltimore City and Baltimore County, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the District of Columbia.
Source: NYT
Jul 30, 2012
President Obama’s biography — son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas — has long suggested that unlike most African-Americans, his roots did not include slavery.
Now a team of genealogists is upending that thinking, saying that Mr. Obama’s mother had, in addition to her European ancestors, at least one African forebear and that the president is most likely descended from one of the first documented African slaves in the United States.
The findings are scheduled to be announced on Monday by Ancestry.com, a genealogy company based in Provo, Utah. Its team, while lacking definitive proof, said it had evidence that “strongly suggests” Mr. Obama’s family tree — on his mother’s side — stretches back nearly four centuries to a slave in colonial Virginia named John Punch.
In 1640, Mr. Punch, then an indentured servant, escaped from Virginia and went to Maryland. He was captured there and, along with two white servants who had also escaped, was put on trial. His punishment — servitude for life — was harsher than what the white servants received, and it has led some historians to regard him as the first African to be legally sanctioned as a slave, years before Virginia adopted laws allowing slavery.
Source: Daily Mail
Jul 29, 2012
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A feud has broken out between members of the Wagner opera family in Germany as the leader of the clan threatens legal action unless they co-operate with a 'moral house cleaning' aimed at de-Nazifying the world's leading opera festival. Katharina Wagner, who now directs the annual Bayreuth Festival of Richard Wagner's operas, wants family members to turn over every document they have in a bid to exorcise the ghosts of the Third Reich - including 'potentially explosive' letters penned by Hitler to Winifred Wagner, the Englishwoman who became head of the family in wartime.
Source: AP
Jul 29, 2012
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Gray's Store in Adamsville village brought in customers for years with its old-fashioned marble soda fountain, cigar and tobacco cases, and Rhode Island johnny cakes.The 224-year-old business may be the oldest operating general store in America, although others have staked similar claims. The Rhode Island store near the Massachusetts line opened in 1788. Now owners say this year is its last.
Source: NYT
Jul 28, 2012
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PARIS — Early on a Thursday morning in July 1942, more than 4,000 police officers set out in pairs through the streets of occupied Paris, carrying arrest orders for scores of Jewish men, women and children. Within days, 13,152 people had been rounded up for deportation to death camps. No more than 100 would survive.
Source: CBS News
Jul 28, 2012
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The White House's case arguing President Obama never returned a bust of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill turned out to be somewhat of a bust itself.
Source: ABC News Radio
Jul 28, 2012
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London's Olympic Stadium became a vast meadow in an opening ceremony that evoked the history of the United Kingdom to kick off the 2012 Olympics.In the ceremony, choreographed by director Danny Boyle, London took the drama in the opposite direction from that taken by Beijing's Olympic organizers in 2008.
Source: Fox News
Jul 27, 2012
Two sculptures of life-size lions, each weighing about 5 tons in antiquity, have been discovered in what is now Turkey, with archaeologists perplexed over what the granite cats were used for.One idea is that the statues, created between 1400 and 1200 B.C., were meant to be part of a monument for a sacred water spring, the researchers said.The lifelike lions were created by the Hittites who controlled a vast empire in the region at a time when the Asiatic lion roamed the foothills of Turkey."The lions are prowling forward, their heads slightly lowered; the tops of their heads are barely higher than the napes," write Geoffrey Summers, of the Middle East Technical University, and researcher Erol Özen in an article published in the most recent edition of the American Journal of Archaeology....
Source: Boston Globe
Jul 27, 2012
In April 1944, a German submarine prowling the waters off Nantucket torpedoed an American tanker caught straggling behind its convoy. The U-boat took cover beneath the sinking ship to avoid detection, but the flagship USS Joyce closed in and delivered a punishing depth charge attack that forced the damaged vessel to the surface.Under fierce attack, U-550 sank stern first. There it lay, its final resting place an enduring mystery for nearly 70 years.But earlier this week, after years of research and days of painstaking searches of the ocean floor, a crew discovered the elusive craft about 70 miles south of Nantucket. Crew members said the submarine was among the last undiscovered German warships along the eastern seaboard, where it once attacked merchant ships and forced blackouts in coastal cities.
Source: CNN
Jul 27, 2012
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It's the white whale of American elections: elusive, mythical and never realized. But could it finally happen this year? The likelihood that President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney will each net 269 electoral votes in November, instead of the 270 needed to win, is actually not so farfetched -- and for close observers of the Electoral College system, a tie would set off a wave of constitutional and political mayhem that would make the 2000 Florida recount seem like a tidy affair.
