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: Huffington Post
May 28, 2012
JISH, Israel -- Two villages in the Holy Land's tiny Christian community are teaching Aramaic in an ambitious effort to revive the language that Jesus spoke, centuries after it all but disappeared from the Middle East.The new focus on the region's dominant language 2,000 years ago comes with a little help from modern technology: an Aramaic-speaking television channel from Sweden, of all places, where a vibrant immigrant community has kept the ancient tongue alive.In the Palestinian village of Beit Jala, an older generation of Aramaic speakers is trying to share the language with their grandchildren. Beit Jala lies next to Bethlehem, where the New Testament says Jesus was born....
Source: Fox News
May 27, 2012
DRESDEN, Germany – A German 16-year-old has become the first person to solve a mathematical problem posed by Sir Isaac Newton more than 300 years ago.Shouryya Ray worked out how to calculate exactly the path of a projectile under gravity and subject to air resistance, The (London) Sunday Times reported.The Indian-born teen said he solved the problem that had stumped mathematicians for centuries while working on a school project....
Source: NYT
May 26, 2012
The custom of strewing flowers on the graves of fallen soldiers has innumerable founders, going back perhaps beyond the horizon of recorded history, perhaps as far as war itself. But there is the ancient practice and there is Memorial Day, the specific holiday, arising from an order for the annual decoration of graves that was delivered in 1868 by Maj. Gen. John A. Logan, the commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, a group made up of Union veterans of the Civil War.
According to the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, roughly two dozen places claim to be the primary source of the holiday, an assertion found on plaques, on Web sites and in the dogged avowals of local historians across the country.
Yet each town seems to have different criteria: whether its ceremony was in fact the earliest to honor Civil War dead, or the first one that General Logan heard about, or the first one that conceived of a national, recurring day.
Source: Medievalists.net
May 25, 2012
Anyone who has admired centuries-old sculptures and portraits displayed in museums and galleries around the world at some point has asked one question: Who is that?Three University of California, Riverside scholars have launched a research project to test — for the first time — the use of facial recognition software to help identify these unknown subjects of portrait art, a project that ultimately may enrich the understanding of European political, social and religious history.Funded by an initial grant of $25,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the research project — “FACES: Faces, Art, and Computerized Evaluation Systems” — will apply state-of-the-art facial recognition technology used in the fight against terrorism to solve old and vexing art historical problems, said Conrad Rudolph, professor of art history and project director....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
May 25, 2012
Jesus died on Friday, April 3, 33AD, according to an investigation which matches his death to an earthquake.The investigation, from the International Geology Review, looked at earthquake activity around the Dead Sea, which is around 13 miles from Jerusalem.The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 27, says that as Jesus lay dying on the cross, an earthquake shook the area, scattering graves and making the sky go dark....
Source: CNN.com
May 25, 2012
Belfast, Northern Ireland (CNN) -- Audio recordings locked inside a college library in the United States might help solve a decades-old murder mystery, but the release of those tapes could damage the fragile peace in Northern Ireland.In December 1972, the widow Jean McConville was taken from her home in Belfast and her 10 children."They came about tea time and they dragged her out of the bathroom and dragged her out," remembers McConville's daughter, Helen McKendry, who was then a teenager....
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
May 25, 2012
The University of Missouri will soon be without a university press. The university announced last week that it would phase out its press, beginning in July. The news was made public in a larger statement about the university's shifting strategic priorities.Such announcements about other university presses have often spurred protests and attempts to save them, but so far at least, the news about the Missouri press has been greeted quietly.One close observer of scholarly publishing, Peter Brantley of the Internet Archive, noted in a blog post for Publishers Weekly that "the impact of such closures is mediated by how the academic community handles the larger transformations in publishing." He wrote that while closing university presses might lead to "a diminution of the number of outlets for scholarly work, it could just as easily be a more positive bellwether for a healthy shift in emphasis from one model of scholarly publishing to another."...
Source: Fox News
May 24, 2012
Nothing James Browne learned in flight school prepared him for “The Hump,” a perilous, Himalayan no-man’s land that became a graveyard for hundreds of fearless WWII-era fliers who battled Japanese fighters, impossible weather and a supply route from hell. Somewhere high above the Himalayas, the aircraft’s wings iced over. The best guess is that it stalled out and dropped like a rock, landing in the rugged mountain jungle, its location a mystery that would endure for more than 70 years. Browne, who grew up in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, Capt. John Dean, the pilot and a veteran of the legendary Flying Tigers, and a Chinese crewman were listed as missing in action.The plane was one of hundreds to go down in the rugged and remote mountain region fliers dubbed “The Hump” by American fliers who dodged Japanese fighter planes, steering their unarmed and rickety aircraft for 20-hour stretches with unreliable instruments in winds that could reach 200 mph. Experts believe more than 700 planes crashed trying to surmount the Hump, making the Himalayan region an inaccessible tomb of legendary fliers and rusted fuselages....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
May 24, 2012
A leather-bound religious text, thought to date from the fifth century but discovered only 12 years ago, will cause the collapse of Christianity worldwide, claims Iran.The book, written on animal hide, apparently states that Jesus was never crucified and that he himself predicted the coming of the Prophet Muhammad, according to the the Iranian press.Written in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, the gospel even predicts the coming of the last Islamic messiah, the report adds....
Source: AP
May 24, 2012
NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- For years, varied and sometimes wild claims have been made about the origins of a group of dark-skinned Appalachian residents once known derisively as the Melungeons. Some speculated they were descended from Portuguese explorers, or perhaps from Turkish slaves or Gypsies.Now a new DNA study in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy attempts to separate truth from oral tradition and wishful thinking. The study found the truth to be somewhat less exotic: Genetic evidence shows that the families historically called Melungeons are the offspring of sub-Saharan African men and white women of northern or central European origin.And that report, which was published in April in the peer-reviewed journal, doesn't sit comfortably with some people who claim Melungeon ancestry."There were a whole lot of people upset by this study," lead researcher Roberta Estes said. "They just knew they were Portuguese, or Native American."...
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 24, 2012
A renowned French forensic scientist has launched an investigation into the death of Richard the Lionheart, examining a tiny sample of the 12th century monarch's heart to try to understand what germ killed him. Richard I died from an infection at the age of 42 after being poorly treated for a crossbow wound during a siege of a French castle.Philippe Charlier, who previously helped dispel claims that Napoleon was poisoned to death by his British captors, has been given exclusive access to a tiny sample of the heart of the crusading English kingKing Richard, famed for his bravery, brutality and bad temper, ruled England from 1189 to his death in 1199.
Source: Russia Today
May 24, 2012
A World War II-era Soviet submarine has been found on the bottom of the Tallinn Bay by an Estonian hydrographical ship.“The object was marked on the sea maps as an unidentified obstacle,” said the press service of the Water Transport Department. “The expedition discovered it was actually a submarine.”The scientists took beautiful photos of the sub that helped identify it as a Soviet Malyutka type submarine, said Estonian underwater archaeologist Vello Mäss....
Source: Boston Globe
May 24, 2012
NATICK — Frank Rines Jr. sat in a studio at the Morse Institute Library. Lights glared and the camera rolled. Questions flowed, and soon Rines, better known by his buddies as Bud, was in a time machine, transported across oceans and decades.Wearing a sweater and jacket, Rines, 92, a chief radio officer in the US Merchant Marine during World War II, looked quite comfortable, considering the task.He was being asked, as one of the recent contributors to the Natick Veterans Oral History Project, to recall the details of his service over some 22 voyages, including about 15 “lucky crossings’’ of the Atlantic Ocean when it was infested with German U-boats....
Source: Fox News
May 24, 2012
The final resting places for many of the men and women who fought America’s wars have fallen into shocking disrepair, with neglect, theft and vandalism prompting veterans groups to question the nation's commitment to honoring its dead soldiers.Advocates say smaller federal, state, county and private cemeteries that contain the graves of service members are often poorly kept, marked by crumbling headstones, overgrown with weeds and littered with debris. Perhaps even worse, many veterans' gravesites have been targets of vandalism and theft.“It’s a pattern that you’re seeing across the country right now," said Tim Tetz, national legislative director for the American Legion. "You have cemeteries being expanded or added to with less or the same number of people caring for the grounds.”...
Source: CNN
May 23, 2012
Washington (CNN) – After sitting in storage for nearly a decade, George Washington’s signature statement on religious liberty will go on display this summer in the city where freedom of religion was enshrined in the Constitution: Philadelphia.America’s first president wrote the letter to a Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790, assuring American Jews that their freedom of religion would be protected. The document will go on display this summer for the first time since 2002 in an exhibition at Philadelphia’s National Museum of American Jewish History.For nine years, the letter has been kept out of public view, in storage at a sterile Maryland office park a few hundred feet from FedEx Field, where the Washington Redskins play. CNN took an inside look at the document in September.
Source: PBS Newshour
May 23, 2012
Source: allAfrica
May 23, 2012
Robert Mugabe has reportedly blamed Zimbabwe's current problems on historical influences, in a meeting Wednesday with the visiting United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay.The UN Human Rights chief met with Mugabe at his state house offices and told reporters the ZANU PF leader had admitted the country currently faces problems. But he blamed historical influences for the ongoing political and economic crisis .Pillay was invited by government for a week-long mission to assess the human rights situation in the country. She had already met with civil society groups and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvngirai on Tuesday....
Source: History.com
May 23, 2012
Politician, printer, inventor, diplomat, author, scientist—Benjamin Franklin will forever be remembered as a man of many talents. But not everyone knows the founding father was also a volunteer firefighter who at age 30 established Philadelphia’s first fire department. Tom Lingenfelter, president of the Heritage Collectors’ Society in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, recently announced his discovery of a relic from this fascinating phase of Franklin’s career: a document listing his name and those of the Union Fire Company’s other members, thought to date to 1736.
Born in Boston in 1706, Franklin left home and moved to Philadelphia at age 17. His adoptive hometown still bears numerous traces of his extraordinary legacy, from the University of Pennsylvania to America’s first lending library, the Library Company of Philadelphia. One of the city’s most central and successful public figures from a very young age, Franklin cofounded the Union Fire Company, an all-volunteer brigade, in 1736....
Source: New Haven Register
May 23, 2012
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Harvard University’s alumni association says it regrets including the Unabomber’s references to his convictions in a directory for his 50th class reunion this week.Ted Kaczynski graduated in 1962 and is in prison for killing three people and injuring 23 others during a nationwide bombing spree between 1978 and 1995. He lists his occupation as “prisoner” and his awards as “eight life sentences.”...
Source: WaPo
May 23, 2012
More than 65 years after it was suppressed by the Army, a powerful and controversial John Huston documentary about soldiers suffering from the psychological wounds of war has been restored by the National Archives and debuts Thursday on the Web. “Let There Be Light” portrays GIs just back from the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific — trembling, stuttering, hollow-eyed and crying. Using a noir style, Huston filmed dozens of soldiers in unscripted scenes from their arrival at an Army psychiatric hospital on Long Island through weeks of often successful treatment, culminating in their release to go home.The restoration “reveals the film’s full force,” said Scott Simmon, a film historian and English department chairman at the University of California, Davis....
