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: Press Europ
Feb 9, 2012
In a shadowy area of recent French history, the ideological battle over a wound that has yet to heal remains ongoing. Ranged against each other, two camps of intellectuals, politicians and activists are at war over a question that is as simple as it is terrible: is France in part to blame for the Rwandan genocide which claimed 800,000 lives in one month?Close to 18 years after the massacre, the question remains the subject of virulent controversy, which says as much about internal political divides in France as it does about the 1994 genocide itself.No other recent event has resulted in such entrenched positions, personal hatreds, and such a level of verbal fury: not even Bosnia or Kosovo. You have to go back to the Algerian war – or refer, to a lesser degree, to the Palestinian question – to find such serious allegations, and such a rift between two camps, which in this case can be roughly designated as “anti-France” against “eternal France.
Source: AP
Feb 9, 2012
WESTERLY, R.I. (AP) — For two centuries it rested a mile from shore, shrouded by a treacherous reef from the pleasure boaters and beachgoers who haunt New England's southern coast.Now, researchers from the U.S. Navy are hoping to confirm what the men who discovered the wreck believe: that the sunken ship off the coast of Rhode Island is the USS Revenge, commanded by Oliver Hazard Perry and lost on a stormy January day in 1811."The Revenge was forgotten, it became a footnote," said Charlie Buffum, a brewery owner from Stonington, Conn., who found the shipwreck while diving with friend Craig Harger. "We are very confident this is it."...
Source: The Star Online
Feb 9, 2012
MADRID (Reuters) - Sitting at a wooden table before the judges of Spain's Supreme Court, Maria Martin Lopez recalls the day a lifetime ago when fascists loyal to General Francisco Franco shot her mother.White-haired and dressed in black, Martin, 81, described how her mother's killers had punished her afterwards by forcing her to drink castor oil and eat hot chillies in an act of cruelty designed to humiliate a six-year-old child."They asked for a thousand pesetas and since she didn't have them they threw her into the street. They were taking her to Arenas de San Pedro, but they killed her on the way," Martin said of that day in 1936.Her testimony, and that of other Franco victims, was broadcast during the trial of crusading human rights judge Baltasar Garzon, a case that has split the nation and rekindled debate over whether Spain should do more to face a painful chapter from its past....
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Feb 8, 2012
HARRISBURG -- The House Gaming Oversight Committee held a hearing today on a bill that would impose 10-mile no-casino "buffer zone" around the Gettysburg National Military Park and the Flight 93 Memorial Park.House Bill 2082 is needed, said Rep. Paul Clymer, R-Bucks, to protect the "sacred memory" of the soldiers who died in battle at Gettysburg July 1-3, 1863, which he said was the "turning point of the Civil War," and of the heroic passengers on Flight 93 that stopped terrorists from crashing the plane into a building in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11, 2001.The National Civil War Trust, the Gettysburg Battlefield Association and Preservation Pennsylvania supported the bill, which the committee will vote on at a later date. Some business advocates in Gettysburg favor a casino, saying it would bring additional jobs and visitors to an area already popular with tourists....
Source: NYT
Feb 8, 2012
As my colleague David M. Herszenhorn reports, scientists are poised to take some highly anticipated samples from a deep subglacial lake in Antarctica, saying on Wednesday that they had succeeded in boring through more than two miles of ice....What evolutionary secrets Lake Vostok — named after the Russian research station above it — may hold after being sealed under ice for millions of years has tantalized scientists who hope to find evidence of previously unknown forms of life.Probing the mysterious depths of earth has also fascinated casual observers, some of whom gravitated toward more outlandish theories about what may be discovered in the ancient lake, including alien life forms or Hitler’s remains.That last theory, based on sketchy rumors of a Nazi base on the frozen continent, received an unlikely boost this week from Russia’s state-run news service, Ria Novosti, which said that the scientific mission had revived an “old theory saying that German Nazis may have built a secret base” at Lake Vostok “as early as the 1930s.”...Editor's Note: The article goes on to discuss the impossibility of the rumors.
Source: Guardian (UK)
Feb 8, 2012
In 1975, the US army corps of engineers opened a Louisiana spillway and discovered the remains of at least five pre-civil war slaves.On Wednesday night – 36 years later – army officials will meet members of the local community to discuss how they might finally lay their ancestors to rest.Fifty-two bones, along with a number of artefacts, including a bible and headstone, washed into a drainage ditch that the army had been building. It turns out that the spillway they were working on, built in the aftermath of the devastating 1927 Mississippi river flood, had been built on the grounds of two forgotten cemeteries for slaves and black union soldiers....
Source: NBC
Feb 8, 2012
In her first television interview [Wednesday night], former White House intern, Mimi Alford tells Rock Center special correspondent Meredith Vieira specific details about her alleged affair with President John F. Kennedy in 1962. In her book, Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath, Alford calls their encounters "sexual and fun." She also calls the President a "sensualist," who also enjoyed being completely silly, especially in the bathtub.
"He had a collection of little yellow rubber ducks and they were in the bathtub and rubber ducks sort of became part of the game," Alford told Vieira.
Source: NYT
Feb 8, 2012
HAVANA (AP) — The world is much changed since the early days of 1962, but one thing has remained constant: The United States’ economic embargo on Cuba, a near-total trade ban that turned 50 on Tuesday.Supporters say it is a justified measure against a repressive Communist government that has never stopped being a thorn in Washington’s side. Critics call it a failed policy that has hurt ordinary Cubans instead of the government.All acknowledge that it has not accomplished its core mission of toppling Fidel Castro or his brother and successor, Raúl.“All this time has gone by, and yet we keep it in place,” said Wayne Smith, who was a young American diplomat in Havana in 1961 when relations were severed and who returned as the chief American diplomat after they were partially re-established under President Jimmy Carter. “We talk to the Russians, we talk to the Chinese, we have normal relations even with Vietnam,” Mr. Smith said. “We trade with all of them. So why not with Cuba?”...
Source: AP
Feb 7, 2012
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (AP) — Groups trying to protect Logan County's Blair Mountain from mining have no legal standing to sue because they don't own any of the property involved in the long-running dispute, the West Virginia Coal Association argues in a new court filing.The association's friend-of-the-court brief asks U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton to grant summary judgment to the U.S. Department of Interior. It argues the Sierra Club and other several other groups have no legal standing to sue Interior, the National Park Service or the Keeper of the National Register of Historic Places.Walton has scheduled a status conference for March 1....
Source: AP
Feb 7, 2012
WASHINGTON – Descendants of Harriet Tubman have gathered at The President's Gallery by Madame Tussauds and unveiled a wax statue of the woman who led hundreds of slaves to freedom.Tubman's great-great-great-grand-nephew, Charles E.T. Ross, and Tubman's great-great-grand-niece, Valery Ross Manokey, were present at the Washington wax museum Tuesday to see the statue join a collection of historical figures....
Source: Discovery News
Feb 7, 2012
Costa Concordia captain Francesco Schettino wasn't the only seaman who drove his ship into the rocks off the Tuscan island of Giglio, ripping a huge gash in the hull that sent the 114,500-ton vessel tumbling onto its side.Before him, other ship commanders had a close encounter with the cursed reefs that jut out off the island's coast.In fact, more than a dozen ancient ships rest in Giglio's treacherous waters.One of them, a third-century Roman cargo vessel, lies about 1,000 feet south of the Concordia's bow at a depth of 130 feet.Loaded with fish sauce-filled jars, the late Roman imperial ship was on the same route followed by Schettino on Jan. 13, when it struck the infamous stretch of rock known as Le Scole....
Source: NYT
Feb 7, 2012
In the centenary year of his birth, Alan Turing, the British mathematician and cryptanalyst regarded as one of the central figures in the development of the computer and artificial intelligence, has been denied a formal pardon by the government of Prime Minister David Cameron for his conviction in 1952 on charges of homosexuality, then a criminal offense in Britain....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Feb 7, 2012
The world's oldest works of art have been found in a cave on Spain's Costa del Sol, scientists believe.Six paintings of seals are at least 42,000 years old and are the only known artistic images created by Neanderthal man, experts claim.Professor Jose Luis Sanchidrian, from the University of Cordoba, described the discovery as 'an academic bombshell', as all previous art work has been attributed to Homo sapiens.The paintings were found in the Nerja Caves, 35 miles east of Malaga in the southern region of Andalusia....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 7, 2012
Mrs Green passed away in her sleep at a care home in Norfolk just two weeks before her 111th birthday.The great-grandmother signed up to the Women's Royal Air Force (WRAF) 93 years ago in September 1918, when she was aged just 17.She was the last surviving person to have served in WWI following the death of British-born sailor Claude Choules in Australia last year.During the First World War she worked at Narborough Airfield and RAF Marham, Norfolk, as an Officer's Mess steward.Mrs Green, who was born in London, lived with her daughter May, 90, in King's Lynn, Norfolk, but had moved into Briar House care home shortly before Christmas where she died on Saturday....
Source: CBS News
Feb 7, 2012
The bells rang out over London where a congregation gathered to commemorate the birth 200 years ago not just of a man, but of the language he created.Charles Dickens works have been turned into more movies and stage plays than any other novelist. His themes of poverty and social injustice made more real perhaps because of his own rags to riches story. Dickens himself was sent out to work in a child labor sweatshop because he father was sent to debtors prison, or so says his great, great grandson.
Source: AP
Feb 7, 2012
Florence Green never saw the front line. Her war was spent serving food, not dodging bullets.But Green, who has died aged 110, was the last known surviving veteran of World War I. She was serving with the Women's Royal Air Force as a waitress at an air base in eastern England when the guns fell silent on November 11, 1918.It was not until 2010 that she was officially recognized as a veteran after a researcher found her service record in Britain's National Archives.
Source: AP
Feb 7, 2012
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Lifting a half-century veil of secrecy, Israel's Mossad spy agency is opening its archive this week to reveal the story behind the legendary 1960 capture of Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann.The "Operation Finale" exhibit, curated by a Mossad officer who can't be fully identified, displays never before seen items, names and documents that led to Eichmann's nabbing in Argentina. It also discloses new details, such as how forensic experts identified Eichmann by his ears.Eichmann was in charge of implementing Adolf Hitler's "final solution," the plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Six million Jews were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II.
Source: Huffington Post
Feb 7, 2012
Argentina has decided to rename its top flight football league after a warship sunk by the British Royal Navy during the Falklands conflict.When the season begins on Friday the Primera Division will be known as the Crucero General Belgrano Primera Division, according to regional press sources.The General Belgrano was controversially torpedoed, with the loss 323 men, by the submarine HMS Conqueror on 2 May 1982.Margaret Thatcher's decision to sink the Argentinian ship provoked outrage in some quarters as it was outside the exclusion zone Britain had imposed around the island....
Source: CNN
Feb 6, 2012
Richmond, Virginia (CNN) -- A historical society in Virginia, where slavery began in the American colonies in 1619, has discovered the identities of 3,200 slaves from unpublished private documents, providing new information for today's descendants in a first-of-its-kind online database, society officials say.Many of the slaves had been forgotten to the world until the Virginia Historical Society received a $100,000 grant to pore over some of its 8 million unpublished manuscripts -- letters, diaries, ledgers, books and farm documents from Virginians dating to the 1600s -- and began discovering the long-lost identities of the slaves, said society president and CEO Paul Levengood.The private, nonprofit historical society, the fourth-oldest in the nation, is assembling a growing roster of slaves' names and other information, such as the slaves' occupations, locations and plantation owners' names, said Levengood.The free, public website also provides a high-resolution copy of the antique documents that identify the slave....
Source: Physorg.com
Feb 6, 2012
Scientists digging in a Namibian national park have uncovered sponge-like fossils they say are the first animals, a discovery that would push the emergence of animal life back millions of years.The tiny vase-shaped creatures' fossils were found in Namibia's Etosha National Park and other sites around the country in rocks between 760 and 550 million years old, a 10-member team of international researchers said in a paper published in the South African Journal of Science.That means animals, previously thought to have emerged 600 million to 650 million years ago, actually appeared 100 million to 150 million years before that, the authors said.It also means the hollow globs -- about the size of a dust speck and covered in holes that allowed fluid to pass in and out of their bodies -- were our ancestors, said co-author Tony Prave, a geologist at the University of St Andrews in Scotland....
