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: LiveScience
Feb 19, 2012
New evidence has emerged to support the controversial claim that Hitler had a son with a French teenager, the French magazine LePoint reported on Friday.The man, Jean-Marie Loret, claimed to be the Fuhrer's son in 1981, when he published an autobiography called "Your Father's Name Was Hitler." He died four years later aged 67, not being able to prove his family line.But Loret's Paris lawyer, François Gibault, told the French magazine that a number of photographs and documents can now support the claim.He also revealed how Loret got to know about his parentage....
Source: WaPo
Feb 19, 2012
CARROLLTON, Ga. — In an unnoticed 1992 speech, Newt Gingrich in a single utterance took aim not only at a beloved conservative icon but also at a core tenet of the conservative movement: that government must be limited.Ronald Reagan’s “weakness,” Gingrich told the National Academy of Public Administration in Atlanta, was that “he didn’t think government mattered. . . . The Reagan failure was to grossly undervalue the centrality of government as the organizing mechanism for reinforcing societal behavior.”
Source: NYT
Feb 19, 2012
ATLANTA — Drive through any state in the Deep South and you will find a monument or a museum dedicated to civil rights.A visitor can peer into the motel room in Memphis where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was staying when he was shot or stand near the lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., where four young men began a sit-in that helped end segregation.Other institutions are less dramatic, like the Tubman African American Museum in Macon, Ga., where Jim Crow-era toilet fixtures are on display alongside folk art.But now, a second generation of bigger, bolder museums is about to emerge.Atlanta; Jackson, Miss.; and Charleston, S.C., all have projects in the works. Coupled with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which breaks ground in Washington this week, they represent nearly $750 million worth of plans....
Source: BBC News
Feb 18, 2012
Facebook, YouTube and even texting will be the salvation of many of the world's endangered languages, scientists believe.Of the 7,000 or so languages spoken on Earth today, about half are expected to be extinct by the century's end.Globalisation is usually blamed, but some elements of the "modern world", especially digital technology, are pushing back against the tide.North American tribes use social media to re-engage their young, for example.Tuvan, an indigenous tongue spoken by nomadic peoples in Siberia and Mongolia, even has an iPhone app to teach the pronunciation of words to new students....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Feb 18, 2012
Its iconic stones are said to mark an ancient burial site, form an astronomical calendar or even be a monument to the fertility gods. But no one has claimed Stonehenge to be the result a trick of the mind - until now.A major science conference heard yesterday that the blueprint for the mystical stone circle came other-worldly visions triggered by music.While the theory may seem outlandish, legend has it that some stone circles were formed when maidens who danced in a circle to magical pipers were turned to stone....
Source: NYT
Feb 17, 2012
Bill O'Reilly made the best-seller lists for "Killing Lincoln," his historical exploration of the death of Abraham Lincoln. Now he has moved on to John F. Kennedy.Henry Holt and Company said on Thursday that it would publish "Killing Kennedy" this fall, as the second book in Mr. O'Reilly's presidential history series. The book will be written with Martin Dugard, the co-author of "Killing Lincoln."
Source: Guardian (UK)
Feb 17, 2012
MI5 opened a file on Charlie Chaplin while he was being hounded by J Edgar Hoover's FBI for alleged communist sympathies.The FBI, which described the star of Modern Times and The Great Dictator as one of "Hollywood's parlour Bolsheviks", asked MI5 for information to help get him banned from the US. The results, including information gathered through eavesdropping, are contained in an extensive personal MI5 file released on Friday at the National Archives."Chaplin has given funds to communist front organisations … He has been involved in paternity and abortion cases," an MI5 liaison officer in Washington warned in October 1952.MI5 noted that a decade earlier Chaplin had told the Los Angeles branch of the National Council of American Soviet Friendship: "There is a great deal of good in communism. We can use the good and segregate the bad."...
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Feb 17, 2012
When his comic genius became an international phenomenon, it was a source of great pride back home in England.But it seems Charlie Chaplin may not have been English at all – but a Frenchman with the alias Israel Thornstein.The startling claims are made in MI5 papers released for the first time today.Classified files reveal how the Security Service was baffled to find there were no records of Chaplin’s supposed birth in South London....
Source: Yahoo News
Feb 17, 2012
Greek Culture Minister Pavlos Geroulanos resigned on Friday after masked armed robbers stole more than 60 objects of "incalculable" value, including a gold ring, from a museum in ancient Olympia.Sixty-eight objects were whisked from a museum dedicated to the ancient Olympic Games after two masked men immobilised the museum's sole female guard as she arrived for her early morning shift, officials said.The police said "bronze and clay objects and a gold ring" had been removed from display cases at the museum, which is built on a forested hilltop on the outskirts of the small town of Olympia."There were two of them, and they had a gun," Olympia Mayor Thymios Kotzias told Flash Radio....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Feb 17, 2012
Nazi forgers ‘destroyed’ confidence in British currency by flooding Europe with forged Bank of England notes, the MI5 files reveal.There were so many counterfeits in circulation that officials even considered recalling all British bank notes and starting afresh.The papers describe how the Germans first began forging the notes in 1940 in preparation for Hitler’s planned invasion of Britain.According to a captured German agent, the plan was to scatter the notes, £5 denominations and above, over the country from the air ‘in order to create loss of confidence and general confusion’....
Source: Guardian (UK)
Feb 17, 2012
The treachery of the first German agent to penetrate MI5, a Dutchman who hoodwinked Britain's security and intelligence throughout the second world war, is spelt out in the files released on Friday.Folkert van Koutrik was taken on by MI6 before the war. He was subsequently recruited by Germany's military intelligence service, the Abwehr, which gave him the codename Walbach.On 9 November 1939, two MI6 officers, Richard Stevens and Sigismund Best, were called to a clandestine meeting at Venlo, on the Dutch-German border. They were expecting to meet German army officers plotting to get rid of Hitler. Instead, they were seized by the Gestapo....
Source: Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans
Feb 16, 2012
Last week, the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans (PAAIA) contacted Senator Robert Menendez regarding his amendment to the Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Human Rights Act of 2012, and its potential impact on the University of Chicago’s collection of Persian Artifacts.
Source: Irish Times
Feb 16, 2012
FIRST CENTURY AD. The Roman General Agricola reportedly says he can take and hold Ireland with a single legion. Some archaeologists have claimed the Romans did campaign in Ireland, but most see no evidence for an invasion. Imperial Rome and this island on its far western perimeter did share interesting links, however.The Discovery Programme, a Dublin-based public institution for advanced research in archaeology, is to investigate Ireland’s interactions with the empire and with Roman Britain, aiming to fill gaps in the story of the Irish iron age, the first 500 years after the birth of Christ.The project, Late Iron Age and Roman Ireland (Liari) could uncover a surprising role for Roman culture, predicts Dr Jacqueline Cahill Wilson, project leader. It offers “a new narrative for this formative period of early Irish history”....
Source: New Zealand Herald
Feb 16, 2012
It seemed appropriate that just as we approached the grim 3000-year-old fortress of Mycenae, dark clouds should suddenly gather overhead and send down a few warning drops of rain.Even though this was the setting for one of the greatest love affairs in history - the romance between Helen and Paris that launched the Greek invasion of Troy and inspired Homer's epic poems - it is a dark place with an even darker history.Legend has it that Mycenae was founded by the hero Perseus and that he hired the Cyclops, the awful one-eyed giants, to build it.Other legends tell of successive blood feuds, wars and assassinations, with grandsons killing grandfathers, nephews killing uncles, fathers sacrificing daughters, wives killing husbands and sons killing mothers, until the ruling dynasty wiped itself out....
Source: KSL
Feb 16, 2012
PROVO — As The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints finalizes plans to build a temple within the walls of the fire-ravaged Provo Tabernacle, history from an even earlier building at the site is being studied. Little by little, archaeologists and students from BYU are working in cooperation with the Church History and Temple departments of the LDS Church to unearth Provo's first Tabernacle — a building known as "the old meetinghouse." Through their efforts, the students have discovered some of Provo's early history and find some of it surprising....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 16, 2012
Flying Officer Derek Allen crammed more aviation heroics into eight days than many RAF comrades did in six years of World War II.The 22-year-old flyer saw frenetic fighting almost every day in his short career and was credited with four outright and three shared enemy kills.He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for bringing down a German bomber wreaking havoc on British armour during the Battle of France in May 1940....He was listed as missing in action presumed dead and his status remained that way for seven decades until historian Andy Saunders began researching the case.He discovered FO Allen's body had been removed from his wrecked plane on May 18 by locals and buried in an unmarked grave in the village of Poix-de-Nord, near Cambrai....
Source: Jamestown Press
Feb 16, 2012
The Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project (RIMAP) is currently engaged in a multi-year search to locate and identify 13 British transport ships that sunk in Newport Harbor in 1778. The British navy scuttled the ships in an effort to blockade the French fleet that was threatening the city.RIMAP is an organization that is interested in the state’s maritime history. Its goal is to locate, identify and study cultural resources in Rhode Island waters such as shipwrecks, debris fields, submerged man-made structures and inundated terrestrial sites. Such discoveries can include Native American watercraft and Colonial and Revolutionary war wreckage. It also studies local slaving, steamship and naval histories.Carolyn Frank is a Jamestown resident who teaches history at Brown University. At one time she participated in RIMAP wreck dives, including those in Newport Harbor, and she has followed the progress of the search since that time.
Source: Independent (UK)
Feb 16, 2012
Riots and protests by the disaffected poor, with the looming spectre of "mob rule", have often troubled MPs and lords at Westminster. No lawmaker, though, has ever raised his voice on behalf of the mutinous have-nots as boldly as one 24-year-old peer did during his maiden speech in the House of Lords on 27 February 1812. Over the previous nine months, the Luddite revolt against new technology in the weaving trades that boosted profits but eliminated jobs had spread through the villages of the young lord's native Nottinghamshire. Under cover of darkness, unemployed stocking-weavers moved from workshop to workshop, smashing the "wide frames" that had wrecked their livelihoods and starved their families.In panic, the Tory government had sent in the troops to put Nottingham and the surrounding districts under virtual martial law: 1,000 infantry and 900 cavalry in December 1811; two more regiments in January. Then it turned to the criminal statutes. On 21 February the Frame Work Bill, which made frame-breaking a capital crime, passed the House of Commons. When it came before the Lords, who better to speak on the subject than the noble possessor of Newstead Abbey, unexpectedly inherited in 1798? From his country seat, he could almost see the flames of the rioters.
Source: Science Daily
Feb 16, 2012
ScienceDaily (Feb. 16, 2012) — Researchers have long been fascinated by the secrets of Ramat Rahel, located on a hilltop above modern-day Jerusalem. The site of the only known palace dating back to the kingdom of Biblical Judah, digs have also revealed a luxurious ancient garden. Since excavators discovered the garden with its advanced irrigation system, they could only imagine what the original garden might have looked like in full bloom -- until now.Using a unique technique for separating fossilized pollen from the layers of plaster found in the garden's waterways, researchers from Tel Aviv University's Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology have now been able to identify what grew in the ancient royal gardens of Ramat Rahel. And based on the garden's archaeological clues, they have been able to reconstruct the lay-out of the garden.According to Prof. Oded Lipschits, Dr. Yuval Gadot, and Dr. Dafna Langgut, the garden featured the expected local vegetation such as common fig and grapevine, but also included a bevy of exotic plants such as citron and Persian walnut trees. The citron, which apparently emigrated from India via Persia, made its first appearance in the modern-day Middle East in Ramat Rahel's royal garden....
Source: WaPo
Feb 16, 2012
In the late 1980s, when organizers of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum were searching for Nazi-era artifacts, they sought to tell a story that was industrial in its magnitude and horrifying in its detail. The results, a widely acclaimed permanent exhibition that broke new ground in museum design, may be in jeopardy as the museum deals with demands to return one of its most powerful and haunting objects.Little known outside the Holocaust Museum is that many of the objects borrowed from Poland almost a quarter-century ago were on a 20-year loan, and over the past few years, those loans have expired. In some cases, the museum has returned objects, renegotiated loans or exchanged existing materials, such as shoes, suitcases and prayer shawls, for equivalent pieces....
