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: Discovery News
Feb 13, 2012
Forget roses, chocolate boxes, and candlelight dinners. On Valentine's Day, this is rather boring stuff - at least according to ancient Roman standards.Imagine half naked men running through the streets, whipping young women with bloodied thongs made from freshly cut goat skins. Although it might sound like some sort of perverted sado-masochist practice, this is what the Romans did until 496 A.D.Indeed, mid-February was Lupercalia (Wolf Festival) time. Celebrated on February 15 at the foot of the Palatine Hill beside the cave where according to tradition the she-wolf had suckled Romulus and Remus, the festival was essentially a purification and fertility rite.Directed by the Luperci, or "brothers of the wolf," the festival began with the sacrifice of two male goats and a dog, their blood smeared on the faces of Luperci initiates and then wiped off with wool dipped in milk.As thongs were cut from the sacrificed goats, the initiates would run around in the streets flagellating women to promote fertility....
Source: National Geographic
Feb 13, 2012
Where did Valentine's Day come from? (Think naked Romans, paganism, and whips.) What does it cost? And why do we fall for it, year after year?Valentine's Day History: Roman RootsMore than a Hallmark holiday, Valentine's Day, like Halloween, is rooted in pagan partying. (See "Halloween Facts: Costumes, History, Urban Legends, More.")The lovers' holiday traces its roots to raucous annual Roman festivals where men stripped naked, grabbed goat- or dog-skin whips, and spanked young maidens in hopes of increasing their fertility, said classics professor Noel Lenski of the University of Colorado at Boulder.The annual pagan celebration, called Lupercalia, was held every year on February 15 and remained wildly popular well into the fifth century A.D.—at least 150 years after Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire....
Source: The Root
Feb 13, 2012
In a blog entry at Atlantic magazine, Ta-Nehisi Coates condemns former Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder for apparently abandoning plans to open a highly touted slavery museum nearly two decades ago, leaving donors in the lurch.Famous first L. Douglas Wilder was supposed to be putting together a powerhouse slavery museum in Virginia. It looks like no such museum is in the offing:" 'Governor Wilder disappeared,' said Rev. Lawrence Davies, the former longtime mayor of Fredericksburg who was a member of the board. Davies stopped getting notices about board meetings, and when he tried to reach Wilder, he never heard back....
Source: AP
Feb 13, 2012
An Associated Press reported highlighted the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board reported that in 2011, gambling revenues in the Keystone State rose 22 percent to more than $3 billion. With numbers like that, it is hard to imagine a municipality or locality not wanting a gaming establish built to attract jobs and other ancillary business. But state Rep. Paul Clymer, R-Bucks, wants a 10-mile buffer zone around important historical locations, as reported by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.What sites in particular are trying to be protected?
Source: Sunday Gazette
Feb 13, 2012
SHEPHERDSTOWN, W.Va. -- The National Park Service will hold two public meetings featuring a historian as it considers whether to add the Shepherdstown Battlefield to the system.The meetings are set for Feb. 23 at the Stephen T. Mather Training Center in Harpers Ferry and Feb. 25 at the Clarion Hotel in Shepherdstown....
Source: Politico
Feb 13, 2012
Some of former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy's personal papers are now public for the first time, including notes from her televised White House tour 50 years ago.
Source: Haaretz
Feb 13, 2012
"A small fish" is one expression whose literal meaning is identical in German and Hebrew. As in the holy tongue, when someone uses the term in German, the reference is to something of little value. The expression refers to someone low on the totem pole - to a person like John Demjanjuk, the Ukrainian guard at the Sobibor concentration camp who was convicted last May of abetting the murder of tens of thousands of Jews."Yes he is a small fish - of course, that's right. He was at the lowest level of the hierarchy. But from the perspective of my clients, who lost their families in Sobibor, there's no doubt that everybody, big fish or small, who participated in murder of their families should be brought to justice," opines Prof. Cornelius Nestler of Cologne University, who represented the victims' families in the Demjanjuk trial in Germany.Nestler, who is married to a Jewish woman, visited Israel this week for the first time in his life, as a guest of the Hebrew University's Institute for Advanced Studies, where he delivered a lecture entitled "Demjanjuk Trial: the Voice of the Victims."The problem prosecutors faced in this Demjanjuk trial, Nestler states, "was not to put him on trial for what he did, but rather to put him on trial after they [the prosecutors] have not prosecuted all sorts of higher ranking Nazi culprits in past decades."...
Source: NYT
Feb 13, 2012
In the winter of 1962, the nation needed a hero.Americans had yet to recover from the Soviet Union’s launching of the first spacecraft, Sputnik, in October 1957 — a rude jolt to our confidence as world leaders in all things technological. The space race was on.Soon after he took office in 1961, President John F. Kennedy had thrown down the challenge to send men to the Moon by the end of the decade. But the Russians still set the pace, boastfully. They launched a dog into orbit, then the first man, Yuri A. Gagarin, and another, Gherman S. Titov.The United States lagged, managing only two 15-minute suborbital astronaut flights — only five minutes of weightlessness each time.Then, on Feb. 20, 1962 — 50 years ago next Monday — a Marine Corps fighter pilot from small-town America stepped forward in response to the country’s need. The astronaut was John Glenn, whom the author Tom Wolfe has called “the last true national hero America has ever had.”...
Source: The Uptake
Feb 12, 2012
This year marks the 150th Anniversary of the War of 1862. Some call it the Sioux Uprising or the US-Dakota War. Hundreds of Dakota men and women as well as white settlers in Minnesota lost their lives during a short-lived war that resulted in the exile of many Dakota.To this day, the war remains a wound that has yet to heal. After the battles were fought, many Dakota, mostly women and children were marched from Morton, Minnesota to Fort Snelling in bitter cold temperatures. They spent the winter at an interment camp. Many did not survive.Descendants of those who were marched to Fort Snelling mark this time through a special ceremony at the exact spot. They consider that 1862 internment camp the first concentration camp in the United States. Mendota Dakota Tribal Chair Jim Anderson allowed our cameras to be there because, as he says, “Ignorance is racism. We need to educate others about what happened to our people.”Tales of atrocities, death and hopes for peaceA memorial plaque at Fort Snelling says at least 130 of the Dakota died during the cold winter months of captivity.
Source: NYT
Feb 11, 2012
For 32 years, a portrait of a serene Mary Todd Lincoln hung in the governor’s mansion in Springfield, Ill., signed by Francis Bicknell Carpenter, a celebrated painter who lived at the White House for six months in 1864.
The story behind the picture was compelling: Mrs. Lincoln had Mr. Carpenter secretly paint her portrait as a surprise for the president, but he was assassinated before she had a chance to present it to him.
Now it turns out that both the portrait and the touching tale accompanying it are false.
The canvas, which was purchased by Abraham Lincoln’s descendants before being donated to the state’s historical library in the 1970s, was discovered to be a hoax when it was sent to a conservator for cleaning, said James M. Cornelius, the curator of the Lincoln library and museum in Springfield. The museum is planning to present its findings at a lecture on April 26.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 10, 2012
Twenty-one German soldiers entombed in a perfectly preserved World War One shelter have been discovered 94 years after they were killed.The men were part of a larger group of 34 who were buried alive when an Allied shell exploded above the tunnel in 1918 causing it to cave in.Thirteen bodies were recovered from the underground shelter but the remaining men had to be left under a mountain of mud as it was too dangerous to retrieve them.Nearly a century later French archaeologists stumbled upon the mass grave on the former Western Front during excavation work for a road building project.Many of the skeletal remains were found in the same positions the men had been in at the time of the collapse, prompting experts to liken the scene to Pompeii....
Source: Science Now
Feb 9, 2012
About 3000 years ago, Central Africa was a landscape in transition. Lush evergreen forests were gradually giving way to savannas and grasslands as regional climate change pushed the formerly humid weather patterns toward drier, slightly warmer conditions. But climate was not the only factor at play. According to a new study, an influx of humans into the region at this time may have helped drive some of the original rainforests into oblivion.The paper's results, published online today in Science, came as a surprise to the researchers. "To be honest, at the beginning we were not at all aware of this human issue," says lead author Germain Bayon, a geochemist at the French Research Institute for Exploration of the Sea in Plouzané.
Source: AP
Feb 9, 2012
MEXICO CITY (AP) -- The ruins aren't particularly impressive, just some stone and clay footings for houses that probably supported walls of wood or clay wattle. And it's that very ordinariness that has experts excited.The remnants being uncovered in the hills east of Mexico City at a spot known as Amecameca are from an ancient neighborhood - a home to regular folks."What makes this important is that it is a residential area, not a ceremonial or religious site," said Felipe Echenique, a historian for the National Institute of Anthropology and History, or INAH, which is in charge of reviewing the site....
Source: LiveScience
Feb 9, 2012
With a weight that rivals a baby elephant, a meteorite that fell from space some 30,000 years ago is likely Britain's largest space rock. And after much sleuthing, researchers think they know where it came from and how it survived so long without weathering away.The giant rock, spanning about 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) across and weighing 205 pounds (93 kilograms), was likely discovered by an archaeologist about 200 years ago at a burial site created by the Druids (an ancient Celtic priesthood) near Stonehenge, according to said Colin Pillinger, a professor of planetary sciences at the Open University.Pillinger curated the exhibition "Objects in Space," which opens today (Feb. 9) and is the first time the public will get a chance to see the meteorite. The exhibition will explore not only the mystery that surrounds the origins of the giant meteorite, but also the history and our fascination with space rocks....
Source: Discovery News
Feb 9, 2012
Yesterday we celebrated the birth (in 1828) of legendary science fiction novelist Jules Verne, who penned such classic works as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and From the Earth to the Moon.The latter is one of the earliest depictions of space travel in popular fiction, featuring a capsule shot out of a cannon. It seems absurd by modern standards, but there's a hint of solid science underneath the fiction.Set a few years after the resolution of the American Civil War, the novel centers on the disaffected members of the Baltimore Gun Club. The men are bored and restless; there are no new artillery weapons to construct and test, nothing left to blow to smithereens.So their leader, Impey Barbicane (!), proposes they build a gigantic cannon to fire a projectile to the moon. Ultimately the plucky Gun Club succeeds in launching not just a projectile, but three men into space.Verne's notion of launching men to the moon with a cannon seems implausible at best, but some of the underlying principles are quite sound, given how little was known at the time.
Source: CBS News
Feb 9, 2012
It's almost like losing an old friend, News came Thursday is that bankrupt Eastman Kodak will stop making cameras.
Source: CBS News
Feb 9, 2012
Boston College is facing a crisis that's both moral and legal. The school collected an oral history of the vicious war between Irish Protestants and Catholics -- a history that includes many confessions of murder.
Source: Bloomberg News
Feb 9, 2012
The FBI released a decades-old file it kept on Apple co-founder Steve Jobs that noted his past drug use and cites interviews with people who say he had a penchant to "distort reality."The 191 pages of FBI records are part of a 1991 background check of Jobs, who died in October 2011, for an appointment by former President George H.W. Bush to the President's Export Council.The file includes the results of interviews with Jobs and those who knew him. The records reinforce the picture of Jobs that has been known to many followers of his career and Apple. Biographer Walter Isaacson's best-selling book about Jobs, released last year, outlines his use of drugs and mercurial personality. While many people interviewed by the FBI described Jobs favorably, some said he wasn't always truthful.
Source: NYT
Feb 9, 2012
CARMEL VALLEY, Calif. — Just in time for Valentine’s Day comes the ultimate gift for the Dr. Strangelove in your life: the 21,000-square-foot Jamesburg Earth Station, a satellite relay base from the Kennedy era that was built to survive a nuclear attack.Perched on a remote hillside overlooking the Ventana Wilderness here on California’s Central Coast, it is a white elephant that costs $3 million, a tech-lover’s paradise on 161 acres and equipped with a 97-foot satellite dish. (Though the signs reading “Danger: High Voltage” are perhaps not the best marketing tool.)
Source: NYT
Feb 9, 2012
TOKYO — Japan and the United States said Wednesday that they were renegotiating a 2006 agreement in order to expedite the removal of 8,000 Marines from Okinawa. Under the current terms, their departure has been stalled until progress is made on relocating an important Marine air station on the island, a chronic underlying irritant in relations between the two countries.Both sides have agreed to rework part of the agreement that makes relocation of the air station, the Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, a precondition for moving the Marines, who along with their dependents were supposed to be transferred to Guam by 2014.
