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: Florida Independent Alligator
Jan 31, 2012
The president of the Gainesville Tea Party said she "would probably disagree" with the Tennessee Tea Party's push to remove slavery from textbook references that make the Founding Fathers look bad."If they're asking for an accurate rendition of what happened, then yes, I'll support what they have to do, but I do not support a whitewash," said Laurie Newsom, president of the Gainesville Tea Party.According to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, the Tennessee Tea Party wants to remove material from textbooks so "no portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers."Steven Noll, a UF American history professor, said he believes calling for the removal of slavery from textbooks is disparaging, dismissing and disrespectful....
Source: CBS News
Jan 31, 2012
It's been nearly a half-century since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.But new information from that day in Dallas has just been released -- audiotape of conversations between Air Force One and Washington.For the first time, the complete audio record of the flight back from Dallas to Washington is available to the public online, from the National Archives, for free.It helps to fill in the record of that day of sorrow, confusion and fear."Gonna put Mrs. Rose Kennedy on the line now," one voice can be heard saying....
Source: ESPN
Jan 31, 2012
The persuasive power of President Lyndon B. Johnson is the stuff of Washington legend. Selling ice to Eskimos is nothing. As the Senate majority leader and again as president, LBJ sold civil rights legislation to a Senate controlled by Southern segregationists.But 40 years ago, in the winter of Johnson's life, when he had returned to his beloved Texas, he couldn't sell the Longhorns to one of the top recruits in the state. The running back went to Texas' archrival and fulfilled the potential that had prompted Longhorns coach Darrell K. Royal to enlist LBJ in the first place.Recorded in the files of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin is the story of how the recruit, Joe Washington of Port Arthur, and his family refused an invitation from Johnson to go to the famed LBJ Ranch and meet the former president. Washington, a 5-foot-9 scatback, went to Oklahoma, where he became an All-American and, as a junior, finished third in the 1974 Heisman Trophy vote. After 10 years in the NFL, he was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame....
Source: WaPo
Jan 31, 2012
Obama has spoken nostalgically of his grandparents’ generation and said he hopes to “restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.”Economists have come to call that period, following World War II, the “Great Compression,” because inequality dramatically declined as middle-class wages surged. It lasted until the 1970s.Some economists today are skeptical about whether that could happen again.The economy often achieved growth of nearly 4 percent per year in the decades after World War II, and much of the gains accrued to middle-class workers. Over the past 30 years, it has grown at an annual pace of less than 3 percent.
Source: Discovery News
Jan 30, 2012
In a recent debate Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said that he would like to beat the Chinese back to the moon. He has even been so bold as to propose setting up a manned base by 2020, driven by empowering private industry to take the initiative.It's ironic to hear moon travel still being debated 40 years after the last Apollo landing in 1972. Between then and now, NASA's small space shuttle fleet filled in for space travel, but astronauts could only venture as far a low earth orbit -- at an altitude much shorter than the distance the early pioneers covered in settling the West.If there were no Apollo crash program to beat the Soviets to the moon, would we have planned to go to the moon eventually? But this time with a commitment of staying? Or would we never go?...In the 1960s the X-15 experimental rocket planes were already flying to the edge of space. This would have evolved into a fleet of orbital planes and lifting bodies and the next logical step in aerospace history.
Source: Yahoo News
Jan 30, 2012
George Washington wasn't only America's first president, he was also almost its first zombie. After Washington died from an illness in December 1799, his family nearly accepted an offer from a physician who believed he could bring America's first commander in chief back to life.The website io9 writes that physician William Thornton is best remembered as the first designer of the U.S. Capitol. But he also proposed reviving George Washington's deceased body using a combination of blankets, an air pump and lamb's blood....
Source: CS Monitor
Jan 30, 2012
Sequences of explosive volcanic eruptions in the tropics were the likely trigger for the Little Ice Age, according to a new study.The research attempts to answer two longstanding questions swirling around the roughly 400-year span of slightly cooler-than normal temperatures: Exactly when did it begin? And what was its initial trigger?Previous estimates for the onset of the Little Ice Age range from as early as the late 1200s to as late as the 1500s, the research team notes. Globally, temperatures averaged a modest 0.6 degrees Celsius, or about 1 degree Fahrenheit cooler than usual.
Source: WaPo
Jan 30, 2012
MISURATA, Libya — Eight months after revolutionaries took control of Misurata, a strategic and bloody battlefield in Libya’s uprising against former leader Moammar Gaddafi, people are going about their lives once more.Shops and schools have reopened, and a few valiant souls are beginning to patch up the sooty skeletons of buildings shattered by months of fighting.But Misurata, 131 miles east of Tripoli, has not quite gone back to being a sleepy coastal city. Some former rebel fighters like to block the main street with trucks loaded with missiles so they can have races, executing screeching hand brake turns while irritated motorists are forced onto back streets. And the thousands who died here will not soon be forgotten, as ubiquitous memorials to fallen sons, fathers and colleagues testify....
Source: NYT
Jan 30, 2012
The folklorist and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax was a prodigious collector of traditional music from all over the world and a tireless missionary for that cause. Long before the Internet existed, he envisioned a “global jukebox” to disseminate and analyze the material he had gathered during decades of fieldwork.A decade after his death technology has finally caught up to Lomax’s imagination. Just as he dreamed, his vast archive — some 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, 5,000 photographs and piles of manuscripts, much of it tucked away in forgotten or inaccessible corners — is being digitized so that the collection can be accessed online. About 17,000 music tracks will be available for free streaming by the end of February, and later some of that music may be for sale as CDs or digital downloads.On Tuesday, to commemorate what would have been Lomax’s 97th birthday, the Global Jukebox label is releasing “The Alan Lomax Collection From the American Folklife Center,” a digital download sampler of 16 field recordings from different locales and stages of Lomax’s career....
Source: NYT
Jan 30, 2012
Tucked away for decades in a cabinet in Thomas Edison’s laboratory, just behind the cot in which the great inventor napped, a trove of wax cylinder phonograph records has been brought back to life after more than a century of silence.The cylinders, from 1889 and 1890, include the only known recording of the voice of the powerful chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Two preserve the voice of Helmuth von Moltke, a venerable German military strategist, reciting lines from Shakespeare and from Goethe’s “Faust” into a phonograph horn. (Moltke was 89 when he made the recordings — the only ones known to survive from someone born as early as 1800.) Other records found in the collection hold musical treasures — lieder and rhapsodies performed by German and Hungarian singers and pianists at the apex of the Romantic era, including what is thought to be the first recording of a work by Chopin.Officials at Edison’s old laboratory in West Orange, N.J., now the Thomas Edison National Historical Park, unveiled the newly identified recordings on Monday....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 30, 2012
A former US Marine claims to have had threesomes with the abdicated King Edward VIII and his wife Wallis Simpson in a new book.Scotty Bowers, a former Marine, claims to have run a gay and bisexual prostitution ring for some of Hollywood's biggest names in the 1940s and beyond.Cary Grant, Rock Hudson, George Cukor, Katherine Hepburn and Vivien Leigh are among those named by Bowers, now 88....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Jan 30, 2012
Discovery of prostate cancer in a 2,200-year-old mummy suggests the disease is caused by genetics – not the environment.Professor Salima Ikram, of the American University in Cairo, Egypt, said: ‘Living conditions in ancient times were very different; there were no pollutants or modified foods, which leads us to believe that the disease is not necessarily only linked to industrial factors.’Whether environment or genetics triggers cancer is key to understanding it.The unnamed Ptolemaic mummy, which is kept at the National Archaeology Museum of Lisbon, had a pattern of round and dense tumours between its pelvis and lumbar spine - giveaway signs of man's modern-day killer....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Jan 30, 2012
A medieval barn described by the poet John Betjeman as the ‘cathedral of Middlesex’ has been rescued from decay and neglect for the nation, English Heritage said today.Grade I-listed Harmondsworth Barn in west London joins the likes of Stonehenge, Osborne House and parts of Hadrian's Wall in the national collection of historic sites and monuments under the guardianship of English Heritage.Built by Winchester College in 1426, the barn would have been used to store grain from the surrounding manor, owned by the Bishop of Winchester, with profits from the produce used to pay for the school....
Source: NYT
Jan 30, 2012
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. — “I’ll take you to see Mulberry Street,” said Guy McLain, the director of the Museum of Springfield History.He meant the real Mulberry Street, the one that inspired the first of Dr. Seuss’ 44 children’s books.I started to think what I might see on Mulberry Street. Truffula trees? Gerald McGrew? Gertrude McFuzz? A Once-ler or two?That’s the thing about Dr. Seuss. He gets in your head and stays there.I was listening to the radio last week when I heard an announcer say that this year is the 75th anniversary of the publication of “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.”...
Source: Star Tribune
Jan 29, 2012
A 150-year-old loop of rope, knotted into a hangman's noose, sits in a climate-controlled case in the underground archives of the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul.Some say it should be burned, buried or returned to the hands of the Dakota people.Others argue it should be displayed, like piles of shoes at Holocaust museums, as a powerful artifact to help people confront the grim story of the U.S.-Dakota War, which erupted in Minnesota in 1862 and ended with the largest mass execution in U.S. history.The noose, and just what to make of it, is one sign of the historical reckoning looming this year as Minnesotans wrestle with how to mark the 150th anniversary of one its ugliest, yet often overlooked, episodes."This will be a very challenging year -- the wounds are still deep," said Republican state Rep. Dean Urdahl, a longtime history teacher whose Grove City home is three miles from where the war broke out. His great-great-grandfather buried some of its first victims. "It was our state's greatest tragedy."...
Source: CS Monitor
Jan 28, 2012
Wherever Newt Gingrich goes these days – stumping in Florida, arguing on televised debates with fellow Republican presidential hopefuls, jotting down notes for his umpteenth book – he carries with him a scary but useful ghost: Saul Alinsky.The radical community organizer (gone now these 40 years) is the specter on which Barack Obama has modeled his life, Mr. Gingrich warns. It’s no coincidence, he says, that both Alinsky and Mr. Obama were from Chicago or that the president passed up far more lucrative possibilities to become … a community organizer....
Source: Examiner
Jan 28, 2012
A monument in Washington, DC to honor slaves and free blacks who fought in the American Revolution came once step closer to getting built. Legislation (S. 883) to authorize such a project was reported by the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar.Similar legislation failed in the last Congress, however.The bill would allow the National Mall Liberty Fund DC to raise private money for the memorial, which would go on an unspecified piece of public real estate in the District of Columbia to honor the 5,000 individuals in question who served in the U.S. military or otherwise helped in the War of Independence.Since the monument would be built with non-federal funds, the Congressional Budget Office estimated federal costs as “insignificant.”...
Source: Discovery News
Jan 27, 2012
NASA marked a trio of space tragedies with ceremonies at the Kennedy Space Center on Friday and at Arlington National Cemetery on Thursday, commemorating the astronauts who lost their lives in accidents.Forty-five years ago, Apollo 1 astronauts Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee climbed aboard their capsule for a routine pre-launch test. A fire broke out in the cabin, dooming the astronauts. The accident, traced to a design flaw, delayed America's foray to the moon for almost two years.Saturday marks the 26th anniversary of the Challenger disaster. Astronauts Dick Scobee, Michael Smith, Judy Resnik, Ellison Onizuka, Ronald McNair, Greg Jarvis and schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe died following the breakup of the space shuttle 73 seconds after liftoff on the cold winter morning of Jan. 28, 1986....Tragedy struck again on Feb. 1, 2003, when the shuttle Columbia was destroyed 16 minutes before its scheduled touchdown in Florida following a 16-day research mission. The shuttle had been damaged by a piece of insulation that fell off the fuel tank during liftoff and damaged the ship's left wing....
Source: WaPo
Jan 27, 2012
Richard Nixon was many things — crafty, criminal, self-pitying, vengeful, paranoid. But gay?According to a book to be released Tuesday, “Nixon’s Darkest Secrets,” the former president and his best friend, Charles “Bebe” Rebozo, had a relationship of a “possibly homosexual nature.” But author Don Fulsom, a former radio reporter who covered the White House from Lyndon Johnson’s presidency to Bill Clinton’s, provides scant evidence for this claim. No new White House tapes. No love letters, incriminating pictures or diary entries. No recently declassified government documents. Just a recollection from retired journalist Bonnie Angelo, who, in an interview with me, confirmed the story she told Fulsom: In 1972, she saw a tipsy Nixon pull Rebozo into a group photo at a Florida restaurant and hold his hand for “upwards of a minute.”
Source: Politico
Jan 27, 2012
President John Tyler’s grandson Harrison Tyler, 84, says he’s not impressed with the state of politics today and particularly thinks Newt Gingrich is a “big jerk” for his three marriages.Incredibly, President Tyler, who was born in 1790 and became the 10th president in 1841, has two grandchildren still alive today. His grandson, Harrison Ruffin Tyler, currently maintains the Tyler presidential home, Sherwood Forest Plantation Foundation in Charles City, Va.Harrison said he doesn’t spend much time focusing on the 2012 presidential race — “I can’t stand watching television” — but considers himself a conservative. His big problem this election, he said, is with the candidates.“I don’t really like any of them,” he said in an interview.,,,
