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: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 6, 2012
Last month, a copy of Leonardo's most famous painting rocked the art world with revelations about its provenance.Two weeks after it went on show to the public at the Prado, the museum's conservation team believe they are closing in on a conclusion about the painting's authorship.The most likely candidate is Gian Giacomo Caprotti, the apprentice known as "Salaì" - which translates as "Little Devil" - who went to work in Leonardo's workshop when he was ten years old.Many historians believe, though it is not proven, that Salaì was Leonardo's lover. He is presumed to be the youthful model for Leonardo's paintings 'St. John the Baptist' and 'Bacchus', as well as numerous drawings....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 6, 2012
Jamaica's prime minister has hinted that Britain might want to pay her country compensation for the "wicked and brutal" years of slavery in the days of Empire as she prepares to host Prince Harry on the latest leg of his Caribbean tour.Portia Simpson Miller said that if Britain wanted to apologise for slavery it would be "fine with us" and repeated her view that the Queen should be removed as head of state of the Commonwealth realm.In an interview with the BBC recorded hours before Prince Harry touched down at Kingston's Normal Manley Airport, Mrs Simpson Miller chose the four-day Diamond Jubilee visit to highlight the way her forebears had been wronged by the British."No race should have been subjected to what out ancestors were subjected to," she said. "It was wicked and brutal."We gained our freedom through the sweat, blood and tears of our ancestors and we are now free."If Britain wishes to apologise, fine with us, no problem at all."...
Source: The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
Mar 6, 2012
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week cited the Roosevelt administration's failure to bomb Auschwitz as part of his explanation of Israeli policy regarding Iran's nuclear weapons program.In his remarks to the AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington, D.C. on March 5, 2012, Prime Minister Netanyahu noted that some critics of Israel have claimed military action against Iran "might provoke an even more vindictive response." The prime minister recalled that similar claims were advanced by Roosevelt administration officials in 1944, in rejecting requests to bomb Auschwitz. He then held up copies of correspondence between the World Jewish Congress and the War Department in 1944, and read excerpts from them. [SEE ATTACHED LETTERS]The World Jewish Congress asked the Roosevelt administration to undertake the "destruction of gas chambers and crematoria in Oswiecim [Auschwitz] by bombing" and "bombing of railway [lines leading to Auschwitz]." In response, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy gave several excuses as to why bombing should not be carried out, including the claim that attacking Auschwitz "might provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans." Prime Minister Netanyahu then commented: "What could possibly have been more vindictive than Auschwitz?"
Source: AP
Mar 6, 2012
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — President Cristina Fernandez says a new museum dedicated to the Falklands Islands will honor Argentine marines killed trying to reclaim them from Britain 30 years ago....
Source: Belfast Telegraph (UK)
Mar 6, 2012
Visitors to one of Northern Ireland's most popular beaches have been warned to be careful after an unexploded World War II bomb was washed up.Benone beach has reopened after the Army carried out a controlled explosion on a bomb discovered by a member of the public on Sunday.It was discovered lying near the water on the beach, which was evacuated along with part of the nearby Seacoast Road. The train line was also closed for a time as a precaution.This was the second time in recent months that an unexploded bomb had washed up in the area....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 6, 2012
Although a collision with a vast tower of ice ultimately brought the passenger liner to its sticky end, it was a freak lunar event three months earlier that put the obstacle in its path, a new study claims.An incredibly rare combination of astronomical factors including the closest approach of the moon to Earth in 1,400 years caused an unusually high tide in January 1912, researchers found.This once-in-a-lifetime swell would have swept a vast field of icebergs from their normal resting place off the coast of Canada and caused them to drift further south.It would have taken them almost exactly three months to reach the shipping lanes where the Titanic sank on April 14 at a cost of 1,500 lives, the scientists reported in Sky & Telescope magazine....
Source: CS Monitor
Mar 6, 2012
Fifty-five years ago today, Ghana became the first black African nation to gain independence from a colonial power. As the Ghana Broadcasting Corp. reported today, apparently without great enthusiasm, “The day will as usual be marked all over the country with parades of security agencies, school children, workers, and other groups.”When independence day becomes a ho-hum affair, it's a good sign. It means freedom is the accepted norm. The path of independence has not been easy. Kwame Nkrumah – the pan-Africanist leader who galvanized various different tribes into a single nation, and then was overthrown in a 1966 coup for overstaying his welcome – told his countrymen that their success depended on common effort for the greater good....
Source: WaPo
Mar 6, 2012
Perhaps they were friends — the older sailor who walked with a limp and always had a pipe clenched in his teeth, and the younger salt with the busted nose and the beat-up, mismatched shoes.If not comrades in life, they became so in death, drowning together in the iron tomb of the USS Monitor as it capsized off Cape Hatteras in 1862 and sank upside down in 40 fathoms of water.Over a century later, their skeletons would be found, one atop the other — the younger man still with his shoes on — amid the guns, equipment and debris inside the famous ship’s turret.And Tuesday, a few months shy of 150 years since their faces were last seen in the midst of the Civil War, likenesses of the noble Yankee seamen were unveiled at the Navy Memorial in downtown Washington....
Source: NYT
Mar 6, 2012
FUSHUN, China — Some national heroes are born in the crucible of war. Others have far less dramatic origins.So it was in the summer of 1962, when a soldier at this army base in northeast China reversed his truck into a telephone pole, sending it crashing onto the head of a 22-year-old comrade. The young man died, but his short life provided Communist Party propagandists with a perfect icon: Lei Feng, industrious, generous and irresistibly impish, China’s most endearing soldier, the sort of fellow who would darn his comrades’ socks and skip a meal so others might eat.In urging people to “Learn from Lei Feng” a year after his death, Mao Zedong sought to imbue China’s youth with a passion for self-sacrifice and patriotism — and perhaps distract them from the hunger pangs of famine that followed his disastrous effort to rapidly industrialize in the Great Leap Forward.But the party’s efforts to resuscitate the spirit of Lei Feng on the 50th anniversary of his death have exposed the limits of old school propaganda in the age of the Internet. The campaign, which culminated Monday with the annual “Learn From Lei Feng Day,” has provoked a fresh round of public cynicism about a ruling party that is struggling to cultivate a sense of legitimacy....
Source: Guardian (UK)
Mar 5, 2012
A whole new world of magic animals, brave young princes and evil witches has come to light with the discovery of 500 new fairytales, which were locked away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany for over 150 years. The tales are part of a collection of myths, legends and fairytales, gathered by the local historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810–1886) in the Bavarian region of Oberpfalz at about the same time as the Grimm brothers were collecting the fairytales that have since charmed adults and children around the world.
Source: NBC 10 Philadelphia
Mar 5, 2012
More than 200 years later, there's another tussle brewing at Princeton Battlefield State Park.Instead of the American and British Armies, this time the combatants are historical preservationists and the Institute for Advanced Study, which owns 21 acres next to the battlefield site and wants to use part of it for faculty housing....
Source: Boston Globe
Mar 5, 2012
The bustle of lunchtime foot traffic today flooded narrow streets in downtown Boston. But pedestrians took care to step over a single red flower lying at the corner of Congress and State streets.The flower had been left on the brick monument marking the site of the Boston Massacre, which left five dead exactly 242 years ago today. On March 5, 1770, British soldiers opened fire on a crowd of colonists, killing Crispus Attucks and four others....
Source: Yahoo News
Mar 5, 2012
KANSAS CITY, Missouri (Reuters) - Back in 1926, nobody balked when President Calvin Coolidge dedicated Kansas City's towering Liberty Memorial as the national memorial to the First World War.But as the 100th anniversary of the beginning of "the Great War" approaches in 2014, a tussle has broken out between Kansas City and Washington, D.C. over which city should be the site of the nation's "official" World War One memorial.In 2004, Congress voted to designate the Kansas City memorial as the official museum, but late last year support emerged for having the memorial on the National Mall in the nation's capital.A bill designating both locations as national memorials has also stalled, delaying fundraising for the U.S. observation of the approaching centennial....
Source: NYT
Mar 5, 2012
At 82, the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Dr. Eric R. Kandel is still constantly coming up with new ideas for research.This winter, he has been working on a project that he hopes will lead to a new class of drugs for treating schizophrenia. Last year he collaborated, for the first time, with Denise B. Kandel — his fellow Columbia University research scientist and wife of 55 years — investigating the biological links between cigarette and cocaine addiction. And this month his newest book, “The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain, From Vienna 1900 to the Present,” is to be released by Random House.A condensed and edited version of our two interviews follows. As in his new book, the conversation begins with memories of Vienna, his birthplace.How old were you when the Nazis marched into Vienna?
Source: NYT
Mar 5, 2012
Since it was discovered in 1991, preserved in 5,300 years’ worth of ice and snow in the Italian Alps, the body of the so-called Tyrolean Iceman has yielded a great deal of information. Scientists have learned his age (about 46), that he had knee problems, and how he died (by the shot of an arrow).Now, researchers have sequenced the complete genome of the iceman, nicknamed Ötzi, and discovered even more intriguing details. They report in the journal Nature Communications that he had brown eyes and brown hair, was lactose intolerant and had Type O blood.The lactose intolerance makes sense, said Albert Zink, an anthropologist at the European Academy of Research in Bolzano, Italy, who was one of the study’s authors.
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Mar 5, 2012
A 'secret' book recording the precise details about the D-Day landings has been discovered locked in a safe.General Sir Miles Dempsey GBE, KCB, DSO, MC commanded the 2nd Army and ordered the account to be written shortly after the events that would change the course of the war.Only 48 copies of the three-volume book, An Account Of The Operations Of Second Army In Europe 1944-45, were ever published, soon after the war - and are all held in museums or military institutions.Much of the material provided the world with information about the army's actions from before D-Day to Berlin....
Source: Pittsburgh Review-Tribune
Mar 5, 2012
Preservationists are drawing lines of defense around more of America's hallowed ground.U.S. senators hoping to control development near Civil War sites have introduced legislation to protect two parcels at Gettysburg and preserve thousands of acres of battlefields at Vicksburg, Miss., and Petersburg, Va."That kind of historic land can never be replaced," said Michael Kraus, curator of Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall & Museum in Oakland and a member of the National Civil War Museum Advisory Council. "These are places where people fought and gave their lives."Preservation groups recently fought off a developer's proposal to build a casino a half-mile from Gettysburg National Military Park, drawing attention to the preservation issue.A planned Gettysburg expansion would add 46 acres, including two parcels known as Plum Run and the Gettysburg Train Station. Supporters hope that will happen before next summer's 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg....
Source: Vancouver Sun
Mar 5, 2012
During the 1968 federal election, a campaign team working for an underdog Conservative candidate in New Brunswick decided to deface a bunch of their candidate's lawn signs.The reasoning was that Char-lie Thomas might get some sympathy votes if people saw "Vote Liberal" scrawled across his signs, indicating he likely was the victim of dirty tricks by his opponents.Their scheme - as told in Leaders and Lesser Mortals, a 1992 book about backroom politics - ultimately was found out by the police. No charges were laid because it was their own property the campaign workers had damaged. Thomas ended up winning his seat, despite the Tories losing that general election to the Liberals under Pierre Elliott Trudeau.The past 10 days have seen a public outcry over revelations that misleading phone calls were made to voters during last year's federal election campaign in an alleged attempt to suppress the vote in some ridings....
Source: China Daily
Mar 5, 2012
For tourists to Fuzhou, capital city of southeast China's Fujian province, there is the oft dismissed area of the Three Workshops and Seven Lanes, an area that has been invaded by commercial development but one still rich in ancient beauty.Located in the heart of Fuzhou's commercial center, the site consists of historical buildings dating back to the Ming dynasty, and it is said to be one of the best preserved architectural wonders in China. The ancient housing in this area was entirely authentic until the restoration project that began six years ago.Now with a mix of original and imitation, the site has become a haven for tourists. On both sides of the overlapping pedestrian lanes, there are shops selling traditional Fujian lacquer handicrafts and Chinese paintings....
Source: NYT
Mar 5, 2012
From the street, the brick tenement on Avenue C looked like any other building. But inside on Saturday afternoon, about 30 people gathered to look at a storefront space covered with graffiti and murals. “This is C-Squat,” Laurie Mittelmann explained to one of the spectators, “soon to be home to the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space.”That museum, Ms. Mittelmann said, was being established to, among other things, tell the story of how activists in the East Village took over abandoned properties and over the years transformed them into permanent housing or community gardens.She said that she came up with the idea for the museum with Bill DiPaola, the executive director of an environmental group, Time’s Up, whose members participated in demonstrations to preserve community gardens and squats....
