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: Daily Mail (UK)
Mar 20, 2012
A letter Charlie Chaplin kept hidden in a locked draw for decades could finally solve the mystery of where the iconic film pioneer was born.The letter, written to Chaplin in the Seventies, claims he was born on the 'Black Patch' near Birmingham rather than in London as he had publicly claimed.Up until now, the true birth place of Chaplin has remained a mystery even the CIA and MI5 have been unable to crack.The faded document was sent by Jack Hill, who lived in Tamworth, Staffordshire, and was only discovered in 1991 after the star's daughter inherited the desk it was concealed in....
Source: Fox News
Mar 20, 2012
JONESBORO, Ga. – Just months after children at a Georgia school were given a math homework assignment that referenced slavery, a similar incident has occurred at another school in the state.Christopher Jackson said his nine-year-old son's homework assignment from a class at James A. Jackson Elementary School in Jonesboro, Ga., 12 miles south of Atlanta, contained an extra-credit question that read, "A plantation owner had 100 slaves. If three-fifths of them are counted for representation, how many slaves will be counted?"In January, some parents became upset over a third-grade math assignment at Beaver Ridge Elementary School, in Norcross, Ga., just north of Atlanta, that contained multiple references to slavery. A teacher later resigned over the controversy and the story received nationwide attention....
Source: Fox News
Mar 20, 2012
A body found naked in 1974 at a California condominium complex is a U.S. Marine from Iowa who had been listed as a deserter from Camp Pendleton, authorities said yesterday.The man known for more than 37 years as 'John Doe No. 155' is Oral Stuart Jr of Des Moines, Iowa, Long Beach police said in a statement.His cause of death, previously listed as undetermined, has been reclassified as a homicide.The body of Stuart, who was 18 when he disappeared, was found on November 10, 1974, in the carport area of an apartment complex near Interstate 605, police said....
Source: NYT
Mar 20, 2012
It was a van Gogh, then it wasn’t a van Gogh and now it’s a van Gogh again, maybe this time for good.New research has shown that a still life painting of a vase brimming with flowers, bought in 1974 by the Kröller-Müller Museum in the central Netherlands, was executed directly over a painting of two wrestlers that matches a description of an image that a young van Gogh once mentioned in a letter to his brother, Theo, as a work in progress....
Source: NYT
Mar 20, 2012
If the Obama administration persuades the Supreme Court to uphold its health care overhaul law, it will be in large part thanks to a 70-year-old precedent involving an Ohio farmer named Roscoe C. Filburn. Mr. Filburn sued to overturn a 1938 federal law that told him how much wheat he could grow on his family farm and made him pay a penalty for every extra bushel. The 1942 decision against him, Wickard v. Filburn, is the basis for the Supreme Court’s modern understanding of the scope of federal power. It is the contested ground on which the health care case has been fought in the lower courts and in the parties’ briefs. And it is likely to be crucial to the votes of Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Antonin Scalia, who are widely seen as open to persuasion by either side.
Source: AP
Mar 20, 2012
WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is wading into one of the 20th century's most enduring mysteries: the fate of American aviator Amelia Earhart, who went missing without a trace over the South Pacific 75 years ago.Clinton will meet Tuesday with historians and scientists from The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, which is launching a new search in June for the wreckage of Earhart's Lockheed Electra plane off the remote island of Nikumaroro, in what is now the Pacific nation of Kiribati. Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared July 2, 1937, while flying from New Guinea to Howland Island. Searches at the time uncovered nothing.The group believes Earhart and Noonan may have managed to land on the island, then known as Gardner Island, and survived for a short time. Other historians believe they crashed into the ocean. But conspiracy theories, including claims that they were U.S. government agents captured by the Japanese before the Second World War, abound despite having been largely debunked....
Source: LiveScience
Mar 19, 2012
A small handful of bones found in an ancient church in Bulgaria may belong to John the Baptist, the biblical figure said to have baptized Jesus.There's no way to be sure, of course, as there are no confirmed pieces of John the Baptist to compare to the fragments of bone. But the sarcophagus holding the bones was found near a second box bearing the name of St. John and his feast date (also called a holy day) of June 24. Now, new radiocarbon dating of the collagen in one of the bones pegs its age to the early first century, consistent with the New Testament and Jewish histories of John the Baptist's life.
Source: The Register
Mar 19, 2012
As a commemoration of the 133rd birthday of Albert Einstein, the online archives of his work are being expanded to contain more than 80,000 documents.According to Caltech, which conducts the Einstein Papers Project, the site will ultimately hold all the documents held jointly by Caltech and the Einstein Archives at Hebrew University. There are more than 40,000 of Einstein’s personal papers, and more than 30,000 additional Einstein-related documents discovered since the 1980s.The long work of digitizing the hoard is funded by the UK’s Polonsky Foundation, whose patron, Dr Leonard Polonsky, also drove the digitization of Isaac Newton’s papers at the University of Cambridge....
Source: National Geographic
Mar 19, 2012
A forgotten section of the Great Wall of China has been discovered deep in the Gobi Desert—and outside of China—researchers say. With the help of Google Earth, an international expedition documented the ancient wall for roughly 100 kilometers (62 miles) in a restricted border zone in southern Mongolia in August 2011.The defensive barrier formed part of the Great Wall system built by successive Chinese dynasties to repel Mongol invaders from the north, according to findings published in the March issue of the Chinese edition of National Geographic magazine. (The National Geographic Society is responsible for both the magazine and National Geographic News.)...
Source: Science Now
Mar 19, 2012
In museums around the world, reproductions of Neandertals sport striking blue or green eyes, pale skin, and gingery hair. Now new DNA analysis suggests that two of the most closely studied Neandertals—a pair of females from Croatia—were actually brown-eyed girls, with brunette tresses and tawny skin to match. The results could help shed new light on the evolution of the family that includes both modern humans and Neandertals, who died out some 30,000 years ago.The study has provoked deep skepticism among several outside researchers, however, who criticize numerous aspects of its methodology. The results also run contrary to other genetic evidence and to a long-held hypothesis that Neandertals, who lived mostly in northern latitudes, must've had light skin to get enough vitamin D....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Mar 19, 2012
Nine thousand Nazi war criminals fled to South America after the Second World War, it has been revealed for the first time.After receiving tip-offs, German prosecutors were recently granted access to secret files in Brazil and Chile that confirmed the true number of Third Reich immigrants.According to the documents, an estimated 9,000 war criminals escaped to South America, including Croatians, Ukrainians, Russians and other western Europeans who aided the Nazi murder machine.Most, perhaps as many as 5,000, went to Argentina; between 1,500 and 2,000 are thought to have made it to Brazil; around 500 to 1,000 to Chile; and the rest to Paraguay and Uruguay....
Source: Huffington Post
Mar 19, 2012
Forget the Hollywood sign and the walk of fame -- the next time you're in Los Angeles, Calif., go off the beaten path and head to an abandoned Nazi compound.There you'll catch a glimpse of an alternate reality in which the Nazis won World War II and set up their headquarters in sunny Los Angeles. That was the hope of landowners Winona and Norman Stephens, who built the the 50-acre "Murphy Ranch" in 1933 to be a self-sustaining Nazi community ruled by Adolf Hitler. Under the thrall of a mystical "Herr Schmidt," who may have been a German spy, the couple and a band of Nazi-sympathizers known as the "Silver Shirts" worked in the compound, doing military exercises and preparing for war....
Source: NYT
Mar 19, 2012
In 1952, a young Supreme Court clerk wrote a memorandum that would come to haunt him. The court was considering Brown v. Board of Education, the great school desegregation case. The question for the justices was whether to overrulePlessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 decision that said “separate but equal” facilities were constitutional.The memo, prepared for Justice Robert H. Jackson, was written in the first person and bore the clerk’s initials — “WHR,” forWilliam H. Rehnquist. “I realize it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by ‘liberal’ colleagues,” Mr. Rehnquist wrote, “but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed.”The memo was disclosed by Newsweek in 1971, on the eve of the Senate floor debate on Mr. Rehnquist’s nomination to the Supreme Court. It caused a firestorm, one that was rekindled when President Ronald Reagan nominated Justice Rehnquist to be chief justice in 1986.Opposition to the Brown decision is a good way to doom a Supreme Court nomination. But Mr. Rehnquist had an explanation, which he sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee in a letter in 1971 and repeated under oath in 1986.
Source: NYT
Mar 19, 2012
...“I realize it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by ‘liberal’ colleagues,” Mr. [William] Rehnquist wrote [in a 1952 memo], “but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed.”...In a new article in The Boston College Law Review, two scholars reconstruct and analyze another letter by Mr. Rehnquist, this one to Justice Felix Frankfurter in 1955, and they draw some stinging conclusions....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 19, 2012
The British military planned to secretly arm Vichy France during the Second World War behind Churchill’s back, despite the fact they were fighting for enemy forces, new documents have revealed.Confidential papers, unseen until now, show senior members of the Allied forces held a clandestine meeting with representatives of Vichy France - even as their opposing forces were fighting in Madagascar.Not only were Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle unaware of the meeting, they were specifically banned from being told under orders of the British Chief of Staff, who feared their reaction.The file, labelled “Most Secret”, decreed “knowledge of this plan should be greatly restricted” and added: “It would be unnecessary to inform the Prime Minister or Foreign Office until discussions were about to start.”...
Source: AP
Mar 18, 2012
NEW YORK – It was decades ago when tens of millions of people in the U.S. experienced mass unemployment and social upheaval as the nation clawed its way out of the Great Depression and rumblings of global war were heard from abroad.Now, intimate details of 132 million people who lived through the 1930s will be disclosed as the U.S. government releases the 1940 census on April 2 to the public for the first time after 72 years of privacy protection lapses.Access to the records will be free and open to anyone on the Internet — but they will not be immediately name searchable....
Source: NY Post
Mar 18, 2012
A survivor’s account of the sinking of the Titanic has been rediscovered after having been lost for decades and will be published next month ahead of the 100th anniversary of the disaster.John B. “Jack” Thayer, who boarded the ship at age 17 with his parents, printed his recollections of the catastrophe as a family record in 1940 and made just 500 copies.The tome was recently unearthed by Lorin Stein, editor of the Paris Review, who recalled a family tie he had to the Titanic after Luke Pontifell, who runs handmade-book publisher Thornwillow Press, said he wished he could track down documents from the ship.“Suddenly, I half-remembered that a distant cousin of mine had written an eyewitness account and had given my great-grandfather a copy,” Stein said. “My mother found the book in my grandfather’s library when he died.”...
Source: Irish Times
Mar 17, 2012
Hill of Tara What is it? The Hill of Tara, near Navan, Co Meath, is a limestone ridge that holds a wealth of historic detail in its mounds and earthworks.It was the seat of the high kings of Ireland, making it the most important centre of political and religious power in pre-Christian Ireland. Here the five roads of ancient Ireland converged; from the top you can understand its strategic position better, as you can see up to 12 counties.Why visit? If you don’t like the parades on St Patrick’s Day, it’s the perfect place to go for a sense of history, fresh air and open space. The most important thing to take with you (apart from warm and waterproof clothing) is an interest in how people lived thousands of years ago. Thirty monuments are visible on the hill itself, with more than 100 others underground. The most significant ones include the 5,000-year-old passage tomb called the Mound of the Hostages, which was a burial ground and pagan sanctuary for 1,500 years. The Fort of the Kings, or Royal Enclosure, is an Iron Age hill fort where enthronements and other ceremonies took place. The Hill of Tara was also the location for Daniel O’Connell’s last Monster Meeting, in 1843, at which he campaigned for home rule and repeal of the Act of Union....
Source: Irish Times
Mar 17, 2012
This incongruously elegant jewelled pendant was recovered from the wreck site of the Spanish galleass ‘Girona’, which sank off Lacada Point, on the north Antrim coast, in the autumn of 1588.‘Girona’ was part of the largest invasion fleet yet assembled, the great armada of 130 ships that set sail from Lisbon on May 30th, 1588. Its aim, as part of Philip II’s crusade against Protestant “heretics”, was to take control of England, depose Elizabeth I and re-establish a Catholic monarchy. (Philip had been married to Elizabeth’s sister and predecessor, Mary.) Spain and England were already fighting a proxy war in the Low Countries; Philip was now intent on a comprehensive victory.On board the ships was a vast store of ordnance, including the massive siege guns intended to batter down the walls of London....
Source: The Republic
Mar 17, 2012
AUSTIN, Texas — The memorials around the Texas Capitol grounds have long honored heroes and moments of Texas' storied past, from the Alamo to the Confederacy to fallen soldiers in foreign wars.Joining them this month is a tribute to Texas' earliest pioneers, Tejano settlers who trail-blazed what would become the Lone Star State. On March 29, a massive granite and bronze memorial to those early Spanish and Mexican explorers, settlers and their descendants will be formally dedicated on the South lawn of the state Capitol, the culmination of a decade-long effort to honor their history."We've been here for 500 years. For 500 years, we've ignored that chapter of Texas history," said Renato Ramirez, CEO of International Bank of Commerce in the border city of Zapata and one of the leaders of the nearly $2 million project. Ramirez' family gave $125,000 to the effort....
