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: AP
Jul 27, 2012
Elderly North Korean veterans pledged loyalty to their 20-something leader in Pyongyang during Korean War armistice commemorations Friday that were being closely watched after Kim Jong Un reshuffled the military and revealed he's married.Over the last two weeks, Kim has taken on the title of marshal and replaced his army chief - once a key mentor. Both moves were seen as an effort to build loyalty among the million-man armed forces and solidify his credentials as commander.North Korea also revealed Wednesday that the stylish woman at Kim's side in some public appearances this month is his wife. Images of her walking with Kim were choreographed to show the leader as modern, mature and down-to-earth, analysts said, and contrast sharply to his intensely private father, Kim Jong Il, who ruled for 17 years before his death in December.Kim Jong Un and his wife weren't at Friday's event. Hundreds of aging veterans were shown on state television in a huge auditorium as Choe Ryong Hae, the military's top political officer, stood beneath giant portraits of Kim Jong Il and North Korea founder Kim Il Sung and urged the crowd to "follow the leadership of Marshal Kim Jong Un and win 100 out of 100 battles."...
Source: National Library of Medicine
Jul 27, 2012
The National Library of Medicine (NLM), the world's largest medical library and a component of the National Institutes of Health, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) are forming a new partnership. They will collaborate to develop initiatives that bring together scholars, scientists, librarians, doctors and cultural heritage professionals from the humanities and biomedical communities in order to share expertise and develop new research agendas.Representatives from the NLM and the NEH signed a memorandum of understanding that outlines their partnership and recognizes their shared interest in advancing health and medical education, training and information dissemination for research, teaching and learning by the humanities and biomedical communities.As initial efforts, the partners will work together to:Explore areas of mutual interest for research, particularly in the fields of digital humanities and the history of medicine;Develop and participate in curricula and courses, training and internship opportunities, and other educational initiatives; and
Source: National Library of Medicine
Jul 27, 2012
The National Library of Medicine, the world's largest medical library and a component of the National Institutes of Health, has acquired a collection of over 200 books and periodical issues related to the literary achievements of the prominent American Civil War surgeon S. Weir Mitchell (1829-1914). Mitchell obtained his medical degree in 1850 from Jefferson Medical College and spent the following year in Paris, where he studied with noted physiologist Claude Bernard, who invented the concept of blind experiments to ensure objectivity in scientific observations. During the American Civil War, Mitchell was a surgeon at Turner's Lane Hospital in Philadelphia, where he treated many patients with nerve injuries. This work eventually led to his interest in neurology and neuropsychiatry. After the war, Mitchell returned to private practice. In 1870, he was appointed physician-in-charge of the Department for Nervous Diseases of the Philadelphia Orthopedic Hospital, where he would treat patients for over 40 years.
Source: Yahoo News
Jul 24, 2012
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A British beach has been closed as Army bomb disposal experts deal with nearly 1000 bombs and rockets littering the sand after storms uncovered the remnants of a World War II bombing range. The deadly arsenal cascaded on to Mappleton beach near Hornsea after being dislodged from cliffs by the bad weather.Army experts have already blown up at least 15 of the old bombs.
Source: NYT
Jul 24, 2012
Madonna defended her decision to use a swastika in a video during her current tour, saying it is a fit image for her message about “the intolerance that we human beings have for one another.”The Nazi symbol is superimposed on the forehead of the French National Front leader Marine Le Pen during a video that Madonna has been playing while she sings “Nobody Knows Me” at her concerts during a world tour. Last week, the far-right party said it would sue Madonna after a concert in Paris and accused her of cynically insulting Ms. Le Pen to gain publicity....
Source: AP
Jul 24, 2012
The towering, white mausoleum in downtown Caracas is for many Venezuelans a lot like Hugo Chavez, only in architectural terms: disproportionately larger-than-life, flamboyant and self-important.And no, the grand tomb was not built for Venezuela's socialist president, who has grappled with his own mortality in his recent battle with cancer and is running for re-election.It will cradle the remains of South American independence leader Simon Bolivar, who Chavez daily, rapturously and exhaustively exalts as the spiritual father of his own self-styled revolution....
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Source: AP
Jul 24, 2012
The 1912 Boston Red Sox World Series trophy presented to team manager Jake Stahl is going on the auction block.The sterling silver trophy will be auctioned Aug. 2 at Camden Yards in Baltimore during a national sports collectors convention.The trophy's current owner is Red Sox fan Robert Fraser. He says several companies wanted to auction it off for the 100th anniversaries of the team's World Series win against the New York Giants and the opening of Fenway Park...
Source: LA Times
Jul 24, 2012
Up the street from the old MGM lot, a tale of miracles is playing out at what was once the Culver City courthouse.Decommissioned in 2005, the low-slung, single-story building is the home of the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum, a monument to one woman's quest to preserve African American history — from slavery to modern times.Clayton once said: "If we're not careful, the record of our history in this country can be permanently lost. Right now it's just misplaced."She spent years tracking it down.The first miracle is its 2 million items — second only to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. Those items include 25,000 magazines, 20,000 books, 17,000 photographs, 1,000 pieces of sheet music, 700 films and 300 movie posters....
Source: Q13Fox.com
Jul 24, 2012
The Washington State History Museum will be opening a special exhibit in August on famous skyjacker D.B. Cooper, who parachuted out of a commercial airliner somewhere between Portland and Seattle with $200,000 in extorted cash in 1971 and was never caught.The case remains the only unsolved air piracy in American aviation history.Museum spokesman Margo Helgen said the museum in Tacoma wanted to emphasize the exhibit is not being held to promote a criminal, but to show “the nature of personal safety” and how “hijacking has changed over time and the response to it.”...
Source: NYT
Jul 24, 2012
A $2.2 million expedition that hoped to find wreckage from Amelia Earhart’s final flight is on its way back to Hawaii without the conclusive plane images searchers were hoping to attain. But the president of the group leading the search, the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, said it still believes Earhart and her navigator crashed onto a reef off a remote island in the Pacific 75 years ago this month. The president, Pat Thrasher, said Monday that the group has a significant amount of video and sonar data that searchers will pore over on the return voyage to Hawaii this week and afterward to look for things that may be tough to see at first glance....
Source: NYT
Jul 23, 2012
WASHINGTON — Scott Lilly was a young member of Senator George McGovern’s presidential campaign staff in the summer of 1972, and he remembers the satisfaction he felt when Mr. McGovern chose Mr. Lilly’s home-state senator to be the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential candidate.But a few days after the convention that nominated Mr. McGovern and his running mate, Senator Thomas F. Eagleton of Missouri, Mr. Lilly said, he came to a realization. “It suddenly struck me out of the blue that they didn’t know,” he said, that the decision to pick Mr. Eagleton had been made without some crucial facts.
Source: NYT
Jul 23, 2012
The Bayreuth Festival has a new Dutchman, this one presumably minus a swastika tattooed on his chest. The bass-baritone Samuel Youn will take over the title role in Wagner’s “Flying Dutchman,” which opens on Wednesday, news reports said. Mr. Youn is replacing Evgeny Nikitin, who withdrew from the performances over the weekend after German news media reported that he had acquired a swastika tattoo in his youth, when he played in a Russian heavy metal band. Images show another tattoo partially covering the swastika....
Source: USA Today
Jul 23, 2012
Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, has died of cancer at age 61, her organization has announced.On June 18, 1983, Ride was 32 when she launched aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger.Ride, a physicist, helped develop the shuttle's robotic arm....
Source: Huffington Post
Jul 23, 2012
BUDAPEST, Hungary -- The evidence against a 97-year-old Hungarian man accused of abusing Jews and helping deport thousands during the Holocaust is much stronger than a similar case last year that ended in a high-profile acquittal, experts say.Laszlo Csatary's role as a police officer and chief of an internment camp from where 12,000 Jews were deported to their deaths in Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps is amply documented and there are strong witness statements about his brutality, they said.Authorities charged Csatary last week with "unlawful torture of human beings," accusing him of being present in 1944 when trains bound for death camps were loaded and sent on their way, regularly using a dog whip to strike detainees and in one case refusing to cut holes in a train car to allow people to breathe. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison....
Source: LA Times
Jul 22, 2012
French President François Hollande on Sunday made an emotional mea culpa on behalf of his country for its part in the World War II roundup and deportation of more than 13,000 Jews from Paris.At the 70th anniversary of what is known as the Vel d'Hiv Raids, Hollande admitted the operation carried out by Paris police in 1942 was a "crime committed in France, by France."Hollande also praised former president and political rival Jacques Chirac who in 1995 became the first French leader to admit the roundup had been "France's fault."Until then, French presidents including Hollande's Socialist mentor François Mitterrand had contended that the wartime collaborationist Vichy government led by Marshall Philippe Petain did not represent the French Republic....
Source: Winona Daily News (MN)
Jul 22, 2012
It was one of the largest gifts of art ever made to a teachers college.Now much of the collection has been lost.The Paul Watkins family donated about 600 pieces of artwork collected from around Europe to the Winona Teachers College over the course of a decade or so beginning in the 1920s. That kind of gift was unheard of in its time, and is still the largest art donation in Winona State University history.More than 80 years later, only about 250 of the items can still be accounted for, according to inventory and appraisal records collected and provided by WSU....
Source: NYT
Jul 22, 2012
Some of the thousands of people who gathered in Cooperstown, N.Y., on Sunday for the annual induction ceremony into the National Baseball Hall of Fame no doubt visited the attached museum to gaze at items connected to memorable moments or the greats of the game.But one display, near the center of an exhibit called “Today’s Game,” may have surprised some visitors because of its ties to the Occupy Wall Street movement.Inside a glass case was a white jersey with flowing blue lettering and a blue hat that might seem vaguely familiar to Brooklynites of a certain vintage. The team name, however, was the Tax Dodgers; the hat displayed a 1 percent logo.
Source: NYT
Jul 22, 2012
MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan — The atrocities of the Afghan civil war in the 1990s are still recounted in whispers here — tales of horror born out of a scorched-earth ethnic and factional conflict in which civilians and captured combatants were frequently slaughtered en masse.Stark evidence of such killings are held in the mass graves that still litter the Afghan countryside. One such site is outside Mazar-i-Sharif, in the north. It lies only half-excavated, with bones and the remains of clothing partially obscured by water and mud from recent flooding. Experts say at least 16 victims are here, and each skull that lies exposed is uniformly punctured by a single bullet-entry hole at the back.The powerful men accused of responsibility for these deaths and tens of thousands of others — some said to be directly at their orders, others carried out by men in their chain of command — are named in the pages of a monumental 800-page report on human rights abuses in Afghanistan from the Soviet era in the ’80s to the fall of the Taliban in 2001, according to researchers and officials who helped compile the study over the past six years....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 22, 2012
The East Riding beach of Mappleton, near Hornsea, was used as a practice bombing range during the Second World War - but the bad weather has led to ground movement which exposed one of the biggest arsenals ever uncovered yesterday.The fins of many of the bombs have been left sticking out of the mud and rock which has fallen onto the beach.With holiday crowds flooding to the coast, coastguards are warning visitors thinking of grabbing a souvenir that the bombs may be "highly volatile" and capable of causing tragedy.Coastguards say the odd item of explosives often turn up in dribs and drabs after being embedded in the cliffs for decades in the area....
Source: NYT
Jul 22, 2012
SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library sits on top of the world here, a majestic tribute to a former president filled with testimonials to his life: the Air Force One that flew him around the globe, the gowns that Nancy Reagan wore to inaugural balls, a video re-enactment of his near assassination, movie clips from his Hollywood days and memorabilia from his campaigns for California governor.But the other afternoon, hundreds of people lined up outside the door waiting to view a most unlikely addition to this presidential library: Mickey Mouse.In an unusual collaboration of presidential scholarship and mass-market entertainment — featuring two men who, truth be told, were never particularly close — the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and the Walt Disney Company have joined together to open a sprawling, nine-month exhibition drawn from the Disney archives....
