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: CBS News
Jan 17, 2012
In 1945, Carl Clark saved the Navy destroyer ship Aaron Ward from Japanese Kamikaze pilots. But he was not recognized for his heroism because of his race. Now, 66 years later, Clark was awarded his Medal for Distinguished Service in Combat. John Blackstone reports.
Source: Guardian (UK)
Jan 17, 2012
He was one of the men who laid the foundations for God's own country, but Thomas Jefferson had his own revolutionary ideas about the Bible.The third US president's unwillingness to swallow miracles such as the virgin birth led him to cut out parts of the Gospels he did not agree with and compile his own version.The result, known informally as The Jefferson Bible, has been published in a new edition by Tarcher, part of Penguin USA, this month.The original, which has been painstakingly restored by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, where it is on display, was created by Jefferson in 1820 by cutting out passages from six other volumes with razors. He then pasted them into a book of his own, which he had bound.
Source: Guardian (UK)
Jan 17, 2012
The eldest son of North Korea's late leader Kim Jong-il has predicted the regime would soon fail, with or without reforms, according to a new book that the author says is based on emails and interviews with Kim Jong-nam.The book says that Kim Jong-nam – who has never met the new leader, his half-brother Kim Jong-un – described the dynastic succession as "a joke to the outside world", and said even his father had originally opposed the hereditary transfer of power."The Kim Jong-un regime will not last long," Kim Jong-nam is said to have written, forecasting a power struggle. "Without reforms, North Korea will collapse, and when such changes take place, the regime will collapse."...
Source: AFP
Jan 17, 2012
Gazing down a frozen New York field, the statue of a Mohawk girl about to become the first Native American saint exudes calm. Yet the real Kateri Tekakwitha had a brutal existence -- and ghosts from her dramatic life still haunt these hills.The 17th-century figure will make history when the Vatican canonizes her later this year, although the joy among America's indigenous tribes will be mixed with some painful historical memories.No other "Indian", as the original inhabitants of the United States and Canada are widely, but wrongly, called, has made sainthood. Following centuries of being dispossessed, caricatured, or ignored, Native Americans will soon have the unusual experience of appearing in a positive light.
Source: Fox News
Jan 17, 2012
LONDON – British scientists have found scores of fossils the great evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin and his peers collected but that had been lost for more than 150 years.Dr. Howard Falcon-Lang, a paleontologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, said Tuesday that he stumbled upon the glass slides containing the fossils in an old wooden cabinet that had been shoved in a "gloomy corner" of the massive, drafty British Geological Survey.Using a flashlight to peer into the drawers and hold up a slide, Falcon-Lang saw one of the first specimens he had picked up was labeled 'C. Darwin Esq.""It took me a while just to convince myself that it was Darwin's signature on the slide," the paleontologist said, adding he soon realized it was a "quite important and overlooked" specimen....
Source: NYT
Jan 16, 2012
The British explorer Robert Falcon Scott finally reached his destination a century ago, Jan. 17, 1912, more than a month too late to claim victory in the race to be first to the South Pole. But the triumphant Norwegian Roald Amundsen could not deny him at least one distinction: Scott was the founder of The South Polar Times, the first magazine to be produced on the Antarctic continent.Just about anything done in Antarctica on Scott’s first expedition, beginning in 1902, had a good chance of being a first. When his ship Discovery entered McMurdo Sound, among the gear in its hold was a typewriter, lots of typing paper and art supplies. Scott had decided, in the tradition of other Royal Navy long voyages, that there should be a monthly periodical to entertain and help the explorers keep their chins up.Keepers of journalism’s flame should take note. The illustrious publication saturated its market. The single handmade copy of each issue, neatly typed and illustrated with photographs, watercolors and playful sketches, was passed around and read aloud to one and all, icebound during the darkness of the austral winter, April to August....
Source: NYT
Jan 16, 2012
A City Room post recently about a town house on the Upper East Side that blew up in 2006 brought to mind another town house, another era and another explosion — the town house in Greenwich Village that became a bomb factory for the radical group the Weathermen.Unlike with the physician on the Upper East Side who apparently intended to destroy his town house, the explosion on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village, in 1970, was an accident.Charles Lockwood remembers how loud it was. He was down the street, taking pictures.He was a senior at Princeton. He and a classmate with a new camera had driven to Manhattan to take photographs for Mr. Lockwood’s senior thesis. It served as the basis for his book “Bricks and Brownstone: The New York Row House,” published in 1972 and reissued by Rizzoli in 2003....
Source: My Fox Phoenix
Jan 16, 2012
BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) - On a bluff overlooking a sweep of Southern California beach, scientists in 1976 unearthed what were among the oldest skeletal remains ever found in the Western Hemisphere.Researchers would come to herald the bones - dating back nearly 10,000 years - as a potential treasure trove for understanding the earliest human history of the continental United States. But a local tribal group called the Kumeyaay Nation claimed that the bones, representing at least two people, were their ancestors and demanded them back several years ago.For decades, fights like this over the provenance and treatment of human bones have played out across the nation. Yet new federal protections could mean that the vast majority of the remains of an estimated 160,000 Native Americans held by universities, museums and federal government agencies, including those sought by the Kumeyaay, may soon be transferred to tribes.A recent federal regulation addresses what should happen to any remains that cannot be positively traced to the ancestors of modern-day tribes. Museums and agencies are required to notify tribes whose current or ancestral lands harbored the remains, then the tribe is entitled to have them back....
Source: LiveScience
Jan 16, 2012
A research team has discovered what may be the oldest astrologer's board, engraved with zodiac signs and used to determine a person's horoscope.Dating back more than 2,000 years, the board was discovered in Croatia, in a cave overlooking the Adriatic Sea. The surviving portion of the board consists of 30 ivory fragments engraved with signs of the zodiac. Researchers spent years digging them up and putting them back together. Inscribed in a Greco-Roman style, they include images of Cancer, Gemini and Pisces. The board fragments were discovered next to a phallic-shaped stalagmite amid thousands of pieces of ancient Hellenistic (Greek style) drinking vessels.An ancient astrologer, trying to determine a person's horoscope, could have used the board to show the position of the planets, sun and moon at the time the person was born....
Source: Yahoo News
Jan 16, 2012
ISLA NEGRA, Chile (AP) — The suspicions have lingered for decades.Pablo Neruda, Chile's Nobel Prize-winning poet, would have been a powerful voice in exile against the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. But that all changed just 24 hours before Neruda was to flee the country in the chaos following the 1973 military coup.He was 69 years old and suffering from prostate cancer when he died, exactly 12 days after the brutal coup that ended the life of his close friend, socialist President Salvador Allende.The official version was that he died of natural causes brought on by the trauma of witnessing the coup and the lethal persecution of many of his friends.
Source: Irish Independent
Jan 16, 2012
A FORENSIC archaeologist has unearthed fresh evidence to prove the existence of mass graves at the Nazi death camp Treblinka.Some 800,000 Jews were killed at the site, in north east Poland, during the Second World War but a lack of physical evidence at the site has been exploited by Holocaust deniers.British forensic archaeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls has now undertaken the first co-ordinated scientific attempt to locate the graves, according to an interview in the Radio Times.As Jewish religious law forbids disturbing burial sites, she and her team from the University of Birmingham have used "ground-penetrating radar"....
Source: National Post
Jan 16, 2012
BERLIN – Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”, banned from German bookstores, will soon be available from newspaper kiosks after a British publisher said he would print excerpts from the text in Germany.But the state of Bavaria, which owns the copyrights to the Nazi vision of Aryan racial supremacy, said it was considering legal steps to block publication.Reprinting the Nazi dictator’s autobiography, which outlines his ambitions to seize vast areas of land in eastern Europe to provide living space for the so-called master race, is outlawed in Germany except for academic study.The first of three 16-page extracts from the book, accompanied by a critical commentary, will be published later this month with a print run of 100,000 each, Peter McGee, head of London-based publishing firm Albertas Ltd told Reuters....
Source: CBS News
Jan 16, 2012
Over 50 years ago, a group of students from the local NAACP chapter sat down at the counter at Dockum's Drug Store in Wichita, Kansas. Jim Axelrod spoke with a few members of the group on how that day changed history in the civil rights movement.
Source: NPR
Jan 16, 2012
Legal challenges and demonstrations were cracking the foundations of segregation, but a black person still couldn't sit down and eat a hamburger or a piece of pie in a store that was all too willing to take his money for a tube of toothpaste.Those four freshmen at North Carolina A&T College — Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr. and David Richmond — sat until the store closed, but they still didn't get their coffee.But that day helped spark other sit-in protests — led by young people like themselves — that spread throughout the South in 1960, energizing the civil rights movement. And the Greensboro Woolworth desegregated its lunch counter later that year.It wasn't the first time that food, or the lack thereof, figured large in the movement....
Source: CS Monitor
Jan 16, 2012
It’s that time of year again, and we don’t mean the NFL postseason. Yes, Martin Luther King Day is upon us.As many Americans know, the King commemoration is an unusual holiday in a number of respects. It’s one of only three federally authorized celebrations of individuals, the others being Washington’s Birthday and Columbus Day. It’s the newest US holiday, created in 1983. It’s been bolstered for 2012 by the opening of the new King memorial on the National Mall in Washington.But here’s something many citizens may not know: It is really two holidays in one.
Source: Free Malaysia Today
Jan 16, 2012
PETALING JAYA: According to history, Chinese Princess Hang Li Po was the fifth wife of Malaccan Sultan Mansur Shah who reigned from 1456-1477.During this period, there was also the legend of the Sultan’s five famous warriors, Hang Tuah, Hang Jebat, Hang Kasturi, Hang Lekir and Hang Lekiu. It is a tale of friendship and loyalty, which every Malaysian had heard.However, renowned historian Prof Khoo Kay Kim told radio station BFM this morning that Hang Li Po and the five warriors never existed.Speaking to FMT later, he explained: “The Chinese Ming dynasty of the 16th century does not have records on them. These are very well preserved records.”
Source: Huffington Post
Jan 16, 2012
STOCKHOLM — A newly found Swedish document shows how the KGB intervened in the early 1990s to stop an investigation into World War II hero Raoul Wallenberg's fate, two U.S.-based researchers said Monday.The Swedish diplomat, who would have turned 100 this year, is credited with rescuing tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis. He disappeared after being arrested in Hungary by the Soviet Red Army in 1945.The Russians have said he was executed on July 17, 1947, but unverified witness accounts and newly uncovered evidence suggest he may have lived beyond that date.Wallenberg researchers were hoping that key pieces of the puzzle would emerge when an international commission was granted access to Soviet prison records as the communist rule was heading toward its end....
Source: AP
Jan 16, 2012
HILTON HEAD ISLAND, S.C. -- Rick Santorum is running for president but his campaign speeches sometimes sound like he's working toward tenure.The Republican quotes Irish statesmen and French historians, traces word origins and explains Islam to the Christian conservatives who have great sway in South Carolina's Saturday GOP primary. He recommends books, cites academic studies and doesn't shy from footnoting his own unscripted remarks.At times, Santorum's events more closely resemble a somber college lecture than a raucous political rally -- informative, if not always inspirational....Often, Santorum commends one of his recent reads, David Hackett Fischer's "Washington Crossing," to his audiences. He mentions Edmund Burke, the 18th Century historian. He quotes Alexis de Tocqueville's study of American democracy....
Source: Huffington Post
Jan 15, 2012
There's been a lot of interest in Machu Picchu lately. Huffington Post travel readers recently ranked it Number One on the "1,000 Places To See Before You Die" bracket.Last July 25 marked the 100th anniversary of the discovery of the "Lost City" by Hiram Bingham.I visited Machu Picchu in March 1986 as a W.K. Kellogg National Leadership Fellow. It was a memorable experience because I felt I touched the hand of God there and understood my smallness in the immensity of Creation. Here is an excerpt from my journal.We rode the train from Cuzco to Machu Picchu trekking through the Andes Mountains, which are full of terraced agricultural land. Sometimes we'd see Indian farmers working, sometimes a village of adobe-brick houses. The colors were greens of many hues from very different looking plants....
Source: AP
Jan 14, 2012
Crews of scientists with wooden spoons and small metal picks dig carefully around bones embedded in a dry lake bed, excavating what is believed to be the remains of freed slaves and their children buried in a long-forgotten cemetery.More than two dozen graves were exposed this summer in a section of a reservoir that dried up in the severe Texas drought. Officials later organized a thorough excavation effort and were recently embroiled in a brief legal battle over where to rebury the bones.With the legal issues resolved and the excavation effort two weeks from completion, the unidentified skeletal remains then will be moved to a cemetery in Navarro County where other black families have been laid to rest."I'm pleased that we're able to finally move them to a place of dignity and honor," said Bruce McManus, chairman of the county's historical commission....
