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
Jul 16, 2012
“John McCain ran for president and released two years of tax returns. John Kerry ran for president; you know, his wife, who has hundreds of millions of dollars, she never released her tax returns. Somehow this wasn’t an issue.”— Mitt Romney, on Fox News, July 16, 2012 “It's standard for the last Republican nominee, the last Democratic nominee.”— Romney senior adviser Ed Gillespie, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” July 15, 2012, answering a question on why Romney will release only two years of tax returns. In trying to fend off demands — from both Democrats and even some Republicans — that presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney release more than two years of tax returns, his campaign has sought to claim that releasing two years of tax returns is normal. (Romney so far has released his 2010 return and an estimate for his 2011 return.) Is that really the case? Let’s check out Gillespie’s claim, presumably about McCain and President Obama, and Romney’s claim that the tax returns of Teresa Heinz Kerry were “not an issue.”...
Source: New Kerala
Jul 16, 2012
Washington : Tracking the impact of climate change today has been made possible by tools developed by nuclear scientists to detect radioactivity in the wake of testing of atomic bombs during the Cold War era, says a leading historian.Their insights and research have contributed enormously to enhancing knowledge about both carbon dioxide, which warms the earth and aerosols, which cool it. Otherwise, scientists today would have been in the dark about atmospheric changes, says historian Paul Edwards from University of Michigan, US....
Source: The Telegraph
Jul 16, 2012
The French foreign ministry has joined Nazi hunters and Jewish community groups to call on prosecutors in Hungary to arrest Laszlo Csatary, 97, for his role in organising the deportation of 15,700 Jews to their deaths in Auschwitz.
"We believe that Nazi criminals, wherever they are, must answer for their acts before justice," said a spokesman for the French foreign ministry.
Csatary, who tops the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's most-wanted list of the Nazi war criminals, was last weekend discovered living peacefully in Budapest under his own name.
He had left Canada when he was unmasked by war crimes investigators in 1995.
Source: BBC
Jul 15, 2012
The African Union has chosen South African Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma as its leader, making her the first woman to hold the post.Dlamini-Zuma beat incumbent Jean Ping of Gabon after a closely fought contest for the chairmanship of the organisation.In January, neither got the required two-thirds majority, leaving Mr Ping in office for another six months.The dispute has overshadowed other issues, especially security and trade.Voting had been broadly split along linguistic lines, with English-speaking countries tending to support Ms Dlamini-Zuma and French-speaking countries lining up behind Mr Ping.Senior officials had warned that failure to resolve the leadership deadlock would divide the AU and undermine its credibility....
Source: AFP
Jul 15, 2012
TOKYO — For six years US General Douglas MacArthur was lord of all he surveyed as supreme commander of the Allied forces in occupied Japan, gazing over Tokyo from a building requisitioned from an insurance company.Now, more than 60 years after Japan began governing itself again, his office is being opened to the public, just as he left it.The sixth-floor room has the original seats, desk and even an armchair where MacArthur would have sat as he presided over Japan's rise from the ashes of World War II.From the office, MacArthur oversaw the transformation of a country that waged a brutal war of acquisition across Asia into a peaceable nation that would become the economic powerhouse of the late 20th century....
Source: AP
Jul 15, 2012
Syria's 16-month bloodbath crossed an important symbolic threshold Sunday as the international Red Cross formally declared the conflict a civil war, a status with implications for potential war crimes prosecutions.The Red Cross statement came as United Nations observers gathered new details on what happened in a village where dozens were reported killed in a regime assault. After a second visit to Tremseh on Sunday, the team said Syrian troops went door-to-door in the small farming community, checking residents' IDs and then killing some and taking others away.According to the U.N., the attack appeared to target army defectors and activists."Pools of blood and brain matter were observed in a number of homes," a U.N. statement said.... The bloodshed appeared to be escalating. On Sunday, the International Committee of the Red Cross said it now considers the Syrian conflict a civil war, meaning international humanitarian law applies throughout the country.
Source: AP
Jul 15, 2012
For decades, nobody really talked about them: the thousands of Poles, mostly Roman Catholics, who risked their lives during World War II to save Jewish friends, neighbors and even strangers.Those discovered by the Germans were executed quickly, often with their entire families. And then, under communism, there was silence. The Jewish survivors would send letters and gifts in gratitude. But the Polish state ignored the rescuers. And they themselves kept quiet, out of modesty, or shame or fear of anti-Semitism. Sometimes they worried gift packages from the West would arouse the jealousy of neighbors in a period of economic deprivation."It wasn't considered anything to be proud of," said Ewa Ligia Zdanowicz , an 81-year-old whose parents hid a Jewish teenage girl in their home during the war.That era is over.
Source: WaPo
Jul 14, 2012
The photograph, scratched and undated, is captioned “Brother Jordan Anderson.” He is a middle-aged black man with a long beard and a righteous stare, as if he were a preacher locking eyes with a sinner, or a judge about to dispatch a thief to the gallows.Anderson was a former slave who was freed from a Tennessee plantation by Union troops in 1864 and spent his remaining 40 years in Ohio. He lived quietly and likely would have been forgotten, if not for a remarkable letter to his former master published in a Cincinnati newspaper shortly after the Civil War.Treasured as a social document, praised as a masterpiece of satire, Anderson’s letter has been anthologized and published all over the world. Historians teach it, and the letter turns up occasionally on a blog or on Facebook. Humorist Andy Borowitz read the letter recently and called it, in an email to The Associated Press, “something Twain would have been proud to have written.”
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 14, 2012
It is a time capsule of Bomber Command, the unit that has seen its role overlooked since the end of the conflict.Now following the success of the memorial to the unit which was unveiled by the Queen in central London last month, the Second World War airbase at RAF Bicester could become a permanent museum to honour the courage of the bomber crews.The 348 acre airfield, which contains 19 Grade II listed buildings and 12 scheduled ancient monuments, has been put up for sale by the Ministry of Defence.Among those looking to take on the airfield is Bomber Command Heritage (BCH), a group of volunteers, who are planning to convert it into one of the country's foremost aviation museums....
Source: AP
Jul 14, 2012
Polish officials unveiled a statue of former President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II on Saturday, honoring two men widely credited in this Eastern European country with helping to topple communism 23 years ago.The statue was unveiled in Gdansk, the birthplace of Lech Walesa's Solidarity movement, in the presence of about 120 former Solidarity activists, many of whom were imprisoned in the 1980s for their roles in organizing or taking part in strikes against the communist regime.The bronze statue, erected in the lush seaside President Ronald Reagan Park, is a slightly larger-than-life rendering of the two late leaders. It was inspired by an Associated Press photograph taken in 1987 on John Paul's second pontifical visit to the U.S.The photographer who took the picture, Scott Stewart, expressed satisfaction that one of his pictures has helped immortalize "a wonderful moment in time between the two men."...
Source: AP
Jul 13, 2012
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Archaeologists in Mexico City have unearthed the skulls and other bones of 15 people, most of them the children of traveling merchants during Aztec times.Researcher Alejandra Jasso Pena says they also found ceramic flutes, bowls, incense burners, the remains of a dog that was sacrificed to accompany a child in the afterlife and other artifacts of a pre-Columbian civilization.Jasso Pena said Friday that construction was about to start on five buildings in a Mexico City neighborhood when the National Institute of Anthropology and History asked to carry out an excavation of the site first....
Source: AP
Jul 13, 2012
Folk singer and native Oklahoman Woody Guthrie was "probably not one of the favorite sons" when he was alive, a state senator said. But Guthrie's legacy has inspired a celebration in honor of his 100th birthday this Sunday at the annual festival in his hometown of Okemah.Guthrie, perhaps best known for his song "This Land is Your Land," was hotly political, speaking out against fascism and aligning himself with working class, influenced by his time in the Dust Bowl. Guthrie had a silly side, too, in ditties such as "Car Song." And his seemingly simple songwriting inspired countless musicians, among them Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger.Guthrie's son, singer Arlo Guthrie, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Friday that he believes his father would find humor in the fact that his life and music are being celebrated as part of the 15th annual Woody Guthrie Folk Festival, referred to by fans as WoodyFest...
Source: BBC News
Jul 13, 2012
Scientists studying how North America was first settled have found stone spearheads and darts in Oregon, US, that date back more than 13,000 years.The hunting implements, which are of the "Western Stemmed" tradition, are at least as old as the famous Clovis tools thought for a long time to belong to the continent's earliest inhabitants.Precise carbon dating of dried human faeces discovered alongside the stone specimens tied down their antiquity.It has published the scholarly findings of an international team investigating the Paisley Cave complex in south-central Oregon....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 13, 2012
The surgical records detail the groundbreaking work of Dr Harold Gillies, the pioneering plastic surgeon who developed some of the world’s first successful skin grafts during the Great War.Dr Gillies developed early plastic surgery techniques to treat seriously wounded and disfigured soldiers, allowing them to go on to live a full life as civilians.Records relating to more than 3,000 soldiers treated at The Queen’s Hospital in Sidcup, Kent during the First World War have now been placed online for the first time.The index of 11,000 operations reflect procedures between 1917 and 1925, including details of soldiers, their names, regiments and ranks....
Source: Fox News
Jul 12, 2012
Maybe the 1992 movie Brendan Fraser film Encino Man wasn’t too far from the mark?Fossilized human feces and other evidence from a West Coast cave demonstrates the existence of a long-lost, 13,500-year-old American culture, scientists said Thursday. The fossilized feces, known to researchers as a coprolite, from the Paisley Caves in Oregon has turned assumptions about the history of the Americas on its ear.“Coprolites are as good as a human skeleton,” Dr. Thomas Stafford, Jr. of Stafford Research Laboratories said during a briefing for science journalists. This particular one left him stunned....
Source: Irish Times
Jul 12, 2012
A 1,000-year- old hoard of gold coins has been unearthed at a famous Crusader battleground where Christian and Muslim forces once fought for control of the Holy Land, Israeli archaeologists said yesterday.The treasure was dug up from the ruins of a castle in Arsuf, a strategic stronghold during the religious conflict waged in the 12th and 13th centuries.The 108 coins – one of the biggest collections of ancient coins discovered in Israel – were found hidden in a ceramic jug beneath a tile floor at the clifftop coastal ruins, 15km from Tel Aviv.“It is a rare find,” said Oren Tal, a professor at Tel Aviv University who leads the dig. “We don’t have a lot of gold that had been circulated by the Crusaders.”...
Source: AFP
Jul 11, 2012
RAMALLAH, Palestinian Territories — Israel poisoned the late Yasser Arafat with the lethal radioactive substance polonium, a nephew of the veteran Palestinian leader alleged on Thursday, prompting an Israeli denial."We accuse Israel of killing Yasser Arafat by poisoning him with that lethal substance," Nasser al-Qidwa told AFP, referring to polonium, traces of which were recently found on clothing worn by Arafat when he was ailing."Those responsible for that assassination should be held accountable and judged," said Qidwa, who is also president of the Yasser Arafat Foundation.Allegations that the long-time Palestinian leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate was poisoned were resurrected earlier this month after Al-Jazeera news channel broadcast an investigation in which experts said they had found high levels of polonium on his personal effects....
Source: AP
Jul 11, 2012
The pain that seared Srebrenica 17 years ago burned fresh Wednesday as tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims came to bury their dead in the town whose name is now synonymous with genocide.In a ceremony broadcast live on television across the country, 520 coffins were placed in the ground as tears flowed like water from family and friendsOn the anniversary of Europe's worst massacre since World War II, 30,000 Muslims traveled to a memorial center in Srebrenica to honor the thousands of Muslim men and boys slaughtered in July 1995 by Serb forces...Tired of listening to political speeches every year, the families of the victims allowed only Holocaust survivor Rabbi Arthur Schneier of the Park East Synagogue in New York to address them during Wednesday's ceremony...
Source: NYT
Jul 11, 2012
North and South America were first populated by three waves of migrants from Siberia rather than just a single migration, say researchers who have studied the whole genomes of Native Americans in South America and Canada.Some scientists assert that the Americas were peopled in one large migration from Siberia that happened about 15,000 years ago, but the new genetic research shows that this central episode was followed by at least two smaller migrations from Siberia, one by people who became the ancestors of today’s Eskimos and Aleutians and another by people speaking Na-Dene, whose descendants are confined to North America. The research was published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Source: Chattanooga Times Free-Press
Jul 10, 2012
Organizers have canceled the 25th annual 2012 Scopes Festival, citing "unforeseen circumstances.""We appreciate the efforts by those who have been working hard to prepare for a festival that would be both entertaining and educational and regret that we will not be able to produce the festival this year," Scopes Festival Chairman Tom Davis said in an email....
