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)
Feb 28, 2012
Here's the proof that photo fakery is nothing new.These days magazine 'artists' can indulge every whim of the vainest covergirls, but pictures involving celebrities have been modified for many a long year.Take this 150-year-old portrait of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, in which he looks every bit the all-American hero. All is not as it appears - as although it is undoubtedly the 16th Commander in Chief's face staring at the camera, the body in fact belongs to a prominent southern politician.It has led to claims the 1860 portrait, stitched together from two pictures as 'no sufficiently heroic portrait of Lincoln had yet been taken', could be the first ever Photoshopped image....
Source: Public Radio International
Feb 27, 2012
There are thousands of national landmarks in the United States. But less than 3 percent of them are dedicated to members of minority groups, such as Latinos and women.Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior and a former U.S. Senator from Colorado, believes more monuments should be created to honor the nation's diversity of heroes. He said the Interior Department is and can be instrumental in being the custodian of America's history.Surprisingly, Congress agrees with him.The Interior Department oversees all of the National Parks, the wildlife refuges and even monitors and regulates oil and natural gas drilling on public lands — both onshore and off."Our mission, in essence, is to be the custodian of America's natural resources and also to be the custodian of America's history," Salazar said. "It's in being the custodian of America's history that we do things like the celebration of the Civil War and the maintenance of forts in many places that are significant."...
Source: AP
Feb 27, 2012
CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. — Mike Ritz is trying to help save Central Falls — one chocolate bar at a time.While Central Falls is often called a “failed city” that was taken over by the state and later filed for bankruptcy, a new project is highlighting a very different story: its history as a chocolate manufacturer during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.Ritz says the “Save Chocolateville” bar — honoring Central Falls’ nickname — recalls the tale of an American city that once thrived as a manufacturer, sank into decline and is trying to turn itself around. Proceeds will go to a yet-undecided program benefiting city children.“Chocolateville to me represents the spirit of ingenuity, entrepreneurship, productivity, and — when that first mill building was created there — it was the heart of the community,” said Ritz, who heads the organization Leadership Rhode Island. The old Wheat chocolate factory that operated along the Blackstone River is pictured on the chocolate bar’s label....
Source: Irish Times
Feb 27, 2012
AN INTERNATIONAL expedition led by British researcher William Lindesay believes that a 1,900-year-old wall in the heart of the Gobi Desert, which the Mongolians call the “Wall of Genghis Khan” is actually part of the Great Wall of China and was built by the Western Han dynasty.The Great Wall of China is made up of many different pieces, constructed at different times and spread over large parts of the country but this section in Mongolia was not previously thought to be part of the Great Wall.It is found 40km north of the China-Mongolian border in Ömnögovi Province, and is preserved to a height of 2.5m, giving defenders a bird’s eye view over the flat desert in order to observe the approach of enemies.“Overall, the Wall of Genghis Khan in Ömnögovi appears to be a missing piece of the Han Dynasty Great Wall which was routed through the heart of the Gobi around 115BC,” said Mr Lindesay, who has lived in China for 25 years and is one of the experts on the Great Wall, having published numerous books on aspects of its history....
Source: NYT
Feb 27, 2012
ON March 6, 1912 — before the Titanic sailed or sank, before the first Opening Day at Fenway Park — the National Biscuit Company made its first sale of Oreo sandwich cookies, to a grocer in Hoboken named S. C. Thuesen.A century later, the brand’s present owner, Kraft Foods, is readying a centennial celebration that looks ahead as well as back.The commemoration takes the form of what Kraft Foods is calling the first worldwide campaign for Oreo that is fully integrated, including traditional and new media, stores, events, promotions and public relations. There is even a tangible, edible way for consumers to take part: a limited-edition variety called Birthday Cake Oreos.The campaign is indicative of two trends reshaping consumer marketing. One, referred to on Madison Avenue as authenticity, involves responding to a growing interest among consumers seeking value in the provenance of brands as they search for products whose quality has been tested over time....
Source: WSJ
Feb 27, 2012
The late Sen. Edward Kennedy’s son, Patrick Kennedy, is asking Sen. Scott Brown to stop invoking his father’s name in the midst of a hard-fought battle over health care in a tough campaign.Mr. Brown, a Massachusetts Republican fighting to hold onto his seat, has been citing Mr. Kennedy, who had held the Senate seat for almost a half-century, in opposing President Barack Obama’s new rules on contraception. Under those rules, church-related institutions like Catholic universities must provide employees with insurance that covers contraception, but the insurance company, rather than the employer itself, can pay for it if the employer has religious objections.Mr. Brown has attacked that policy as a violation of religious freedom. He supports a “conscience” law saying employers don’t have to provide coverage for services they find religiously or morally objectionable. Critics say that’s so broad that it would let employers omit any coverage they dislike for any reason, from drug treatment to mental health services....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Feb 27, 2012
From York’s Gothic cathedral to pinnacles of Victorian engineering such as the SS Great Britain, scores of landmarks across England tell the story of the nation’s history.But there are fears children are growing up ignorant of the role of major historical sites in ‘our island story’, despite having so many on their doorstep.The concerns have prompted ministers to ask English Heritage to draw up a list of local sites for schoolchildren to visit which would ‘bring history alive’.It is expected to include York Minster – northern Europe’s largest Gothic cathedral – as well as the SS Great Britain, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and the Dover Boat, the world’s oldest known seafaring vessel....
Source: NYT
Feb 27, 2012
TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. — With two days left before the high-stakes Republican primaries in Arizona and Michigan, Rick Santorum delivered a full-throated defense of religion in public life on Sunday, appealing to the social conservatives who have revived his presidential campaign.In an escalation of the sometimes fiery language that he has used throughout the race, Mr. Santorum declared that colleges were no longer a “neutral setting” for people of faith and described how he had become sickened after reading John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech calling for the rigid separation of religion and politics.“What kind of country do we live in that says only people of nonfaith can come into the public square and make their case?” Mr. Santorum said on the ABC News program “This Week.”“That makes me throw up,” he said, adding later, “I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.”...Related LinksJoan Walsh: Santorum’s JFK Story Makes Me Want to Throw Up
Source: CNN Go
Feb 27, 2012
Cartoon pandas, Teletubbies, Ronald McDonald. At first glance they don’t seem to have much in common beyond a certain childlike quality. But during a visit to Bangkok you may discover another trait these popular cultural icons now share: their resemblance to Adolf Hitler.In the Thai capital’s latest outbreak of Nazi chic, pandas, Teletubbies and Ronald have metamorphosed into cutesy alter egos of the Führer, who seems to exert a childlike fascination over some young Thais....“Some foreigners get upset [when they see my T-shirts on sale] -- they come to my shop and complain,” acknowledges the owner of Seven Star, a small clothing shop at Terminal 21, a new designer mall in central Bangkok on Sukhumvit Road which is a popular tourist haunt.He’s a 30-something fellow who identifies himself by his nickname “Hut”, and is a graduate of a local university’s arts program. Hut does brisk business selling his T-shirts. Seven Star's most popular items, Hut notes, are his McHitler designs, which he sells alongside his caricatures of Michael Jackson, Che Guevara and Kim Jong-Il....“It’s not that I like Hitler,” Hut insists. “But he looks funny and the shirts are very popular with young people.”...
Source: Haaretz
Feb 26, 2012
UNITED NATIONS - Locked inside UN headquarters is a huge but largely unknown archive documenting 10,000 cases against accused World War II criminals. Leading British and American researchers are campaigning to make the files - hundreds of thousands of pages in 400 boxes - public for the first time in 60 years, arguing that they are not only historically valuable but also might unearth legal precedents that could help bring some of today's war criminals to justice.The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington is also seeking to have the archive opened."It's outrageous that material which could help bring today's war criminals to justice and improve our understanding of the Holocaust is still secret," said British academic Dr. Dan Plesch, who is leading the push for access. "The whole archive should be online for scholars and historians."The archive belonged to the United Nations War Crimes Commission, a body established in October 1943 by 17 allied nations to issue lists of alleged war criminals - ultimately involving approximately 37,000 individuals - examine the charges against them and try to assure their arrest and trial....
Source: Greenfield Reporter
Feb 25, 2012
LAFAYETTE, Ind. — John M. Harris spends each Tuesday and Wednesday quietly working in a small office surrounded by shelves stacked from floor to ceiling with boxes containing ... well, that's what Harris is finding out.Outside his office, a much larger room is filled with stacks of boxes, filing cabinets and a conference table for sorting. Throughout the Frank Arganbright Genealogy and Research Center, items are in storage -- items someone at some point considered historically significant.Nestled in his small office on the second floor of the center on 10th Street across from the Moses Fowler House, Harris' task is to computerize the Tippecanoe County Historical Association's hard-copy card catalogs and computerize years of donated items that escaped being enumerated or completely slipped through the cracks....
Source: Billings Gazette
Feb 25, 2012
While the National Park Service in Montana struggles to find a way to build a new museum and visitor center at Little Bighorn Battlefield, an ambitious group in Monroe, Mich., is working toward establishing Lt. Col. George Custer's hometown as the center for all things Custer.William H. Braunlich, president of the Monroe County Historical Society, said in a telephone interview that the project involves establishing a unit of the National Park Service in downtown Monroe called Custer National Monument and Museum.It wouldn't involve large capital expenditure by the cash-strapped federal agency, he said. Instead it would transfer ownership of existing resources from the city of Monroe and Monroe County to the Park Service. Those resources would include a county museum, a world-renowned Custer collection and an annual payment of $200,000 for the first 10 years of operation.One of the Park Service's newest units, the War of 1812 River Raisin National Battlefield Park and River Raisin Heritage Trail, was established in Monroe two years ago. The Historical Society envisions the Custer monument as a second unit of River Raisin....
Source: USA Today
Feb 25, 2012
Hades wasn't the happiest place, the Department of Motor Vehicles of the ancient Greek afterlife.There, in a gloomy underworld, departed heroes such as Achilles gathered mostly to grouse about their boredom, and await the verdict of the judges of the dead."I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man's house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead," said Achilles, the greatest of Greek heroes, commenting on the scenery, according to the ancient poem, The Odyssey. (Tough break for Achilles, but perhaps he was later cheered to learn that Brad Pitt would play him in the 2004 film Troy.)
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Feb 25, 2012
As the Queen advances indefatigably into the year-long festivities for her Diamond Jubilee, thoughts inevitably turn to the last British sovereign who survived to celebrate 60 years on the throne.Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 marked the refulgent patriotic zenith of the British Empire. Standing less than 5ft tall, but nevertheless a towering colossus throughout the world, the iconic Queen Empress gave her name to an age that produced an empire measuring some 40 million square kilometres, with 387 million subjects.It was an age characterised by extreme sexual repression, strait-laced morality and invincible ignorance. Victoria flatly refused to allow her government to legislate against lesbianism, not because she approved of it, but because she regarded it as a physical impossibility.But now an astonishing article, published this month in The Oldie magazine, seeks to explode this greatest of all royal myths....It claims that after the untimely death of her husband, Albert, the Prince Consort, Victoria sought sexual solace with her uncouth, arrogant and heavy-drinking Highland ghillie, John Brown. It further alleges that the Queen secretly married Brown in a clandestine ceremony and then bore him a child.
Source: NYT
Feb 25, 2012
Joan Houston Hall, chief editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English, still remembers the day back in the late 1990s when she typed “scrid” into Google.The word, meaning scrap or bit, was to be listed in the dictionary as a purely New England piece of vocabulary traceable to 1860. But suddenly there it was on the Web site of a lathe maker in California.“I thought, ‘Oh no! This regionalism has jumped the country,’ ” Ms. Hall recalled recently in a telephone interview from her office at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.She e-mailed the lathe maker, who wrote back saying he had learned the word from his girlfriend, who was from Maine. A “nice, tight regionalism,” as Ms. Hall put it, was saved.Such was a particularly nerve-racking day in the life of one of America’s most ambitious lexicographical projects, which culminates with the publication by Harvard University Press of Volume V (Sl-Z) next month, a mere 50 years after the project was inaugurated by Frederic G. Cassidy, an exuberant Jamaican-born linguist given to signing off conversations with “On to Z!”...
Source: LiveScience
Feb 24, 2012
A newly discovered document, written by one of Europe's most famous philosophers, Thomas Hobbes, reveals a plan that, if successful, could have turned the tide of one of England's bloodiest wars.In the words of Hobbes, the plan would prevent the "ruine of the English nation." The document was written during the height of the English civil war, a series of conflicts between 1642 and 1651 that saw King Charles I (and later his son Charles II), pitted against his country's parliament.Hobbes, whose work encompassed politics, history, law, physics and mathematics, was a strong supporter of the king. And in the newfound document, discovered among papers of English writer John Evelyn in the British Library, Hobbes proposes a plan to win the war by getting the head of the parliamentary navy, Earl of Warwick Robert Rich, to defect....
Source: NJ.com
Feb 24, 2012
An historic, "Title Transfer Celebration" will be held at the Clinton Township Middle School, 34 Grayrock Road, 2 p.m. on Saturday, March 3. A reception will follow in the cafeteria.Descendant of a Revolutionary War loyalist accepts the deed to his ancestor's property from the Clinton Township School District for historic non-profit. This culminates a six-year struggle by The 1759 Vought House, Inc. to acquire and preserve this house as New Jersey's first loyalist museum. Congressman Leonard Lance, county historian Stephanie Stevens, township mayor, and others will speak.
Source: AP
Feb 24, 2012
ISTANBUL —As Turkey welcomes Syrians fleeing violence, the anniversary Friday of the deaths of more than 750 Jewish refugees who were denied shelter by Turkey in World War II was a reminder of perennial tension between pragmatic and humanitarian impulses.The SS Struma, whose passengers fled Romania and docked in Istanbul, was denied entry to Palestinian territory by colonial power Britain. On Feb. 23, 1942, Turkey towed the vessel to the Black Sea and set it adrift. A Soviet torpedo sank it the next morning, and only one person survived.The episode is a stain on an upbeat narrative of the Jewish experience in the mostly Muslim country, even if Jews are treated with far more tolerance than elsewhere in the region. Turkey dwells on the legacy of Ottoman rulers who welcomed Jews fleeing Christian persecution in Spain in the 15th century....
Source: Today's Zaman
Feb 24, 2012
A Bible that is currently being kept in a museum in Ankara and is thought to be 1,500 years old includes a drawing of the Last Supper, media reports said on Friday.On Thursday Culture and Tourism Minister Ertuğrul Günay confirmed reports that a 1,500-year-old Bible that was discovered by police during an anti-smuggling operation in 2000 is being kept in Ankara today.A smuggling gang was reportedly convicted of smuggling various items seized during the operation, including the Bible, and all the artifacts were kept in a safe at an Ankara courthouse. The Bible, which was reportedly kept at the courthouse for years, was only recently handed over to the care of the Ethnography Museum of Ankara....
Source: Discovery News
Feb 23, 2012
A colorful pebble bearing a sequence of linear incisions may be the world's oldest engraving.The object, which will be described in the April issue of the Journal of Archaeology, dates back approximately 100,000 years ago and could also be the world’s oldest known abstract art. It was recovered from Klasies River Cave in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa.“Associated human remains indicate that the engraved piece was certainly made by Homo sapiens,” co-author Riaan Rifkin of the University of Witwatersrand’s Institute for Human Evolution told Discovery News.
