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: Slate
Jan 14, 2012
For most people in their eighties, life is a gradual winding down. For Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the key architects of America’s cold war strategy – “Jimmy Carter’s Kissinger”, as he was once called – being 83 isn’t much different from 43. Brzezinski plays singles tennis every day – “one of my partners is older than me,” he tells me with some amusement. At the crack of dawn he is often found opining trenchantly on Morning Joe, the MSNBC daily news show co-hosted by his daughter Mika. And he remains a much sought-after adviser to secretaries of state and presidential candidates, including Barack Obama, though nowadays Brzezinski finds it hard to conceal his disappointment with his former mentee. “I’m all in favour of grand important speeches but the president then has to link his sermons to a strategy,” Brzezinski says. “Obama still has some way to go.”...
Source: AP
Jan 14, 2012
BROOKLYN, Ohio (AP) — A personal check that Abraham Lincoln wrote the day before he was assassinated is among those that were rediscovered by an Ohio bank.The Plain Dealer in Cleveland reports that 70 checks were found in a vault at Huntington Bank's Columbus headquarters....
Source: NYT
Jan 14, 2012
...The deforestation that has stripped the Amazon since the 1970s has also exposed a long-hidden secret lurking underneath thick rain forest: flawlessly designed geometric shapes spanning hundreds of yards in diameter.Alceu Ranzi, a Brazilian scholar who helped discover the squares, octagons, circles, rectangles and ovals that make up the land carvings, said these geoglyphs found on deforested land were as significant as the famous Nazca lines, the enigmatic animal symbols visible from the air in southern Peru.“What impressed me the most about these geoglyphs was their geometric precision, and how they emerged from forest we had all been taught was untouched except by a few nomadic tribes,” said Mr. Ranzi, a paleontologist who first saw the geoglyphs in the 1970s and, years later, surveyed them by plane.For some scholars of human history in Amazonia, the geoglyphs in the Brazilian state of Acre and other archaeological sites suggest that the forests of the western Amazon, previously considered uninhabitable for sophisticated societies partly because of the quality of their soils, may not have been as “Edenic” as some environmentalists contend....
Source: Guardian (UK)
Jan 14, 2012
A quote carved in stone on the new Martin Luther King Jr memorial in Washington will be changed after the inscription was criticised for not accurately reflecting the civil rights leader's words.The inscription currently reads: "I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness." The phrase is chiselled into one side of a massive block of granite that includes King's likeness emerging from the stone. It became a point of controversy after the memorial opened in August.Ken Salazar, secretary of the US department of the interior, has decided to have the quote changed, said a department spokesman on Friday.The phrase is modified from a sermon known as the Drum Major Instinct, in which the 39-year-old King explained to his Atlanta congregation how he would like to be remembered at his funeral. He made the February 1968 speech just two months before he was assassinated in Memphis.In the speech, King's words seem more modest than the paraphrased inscription: "Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter."...
Source: The Star (UK)
Jan 13, 2012
This much is known: rare, medieval Jewish manuscripts have been discovered along the fabled Silk Road in Afghanistan and are for sale.Are they authentic? Scholars who have examined them say they are.The rest — who found them, where they came from, whether there are more to unearth — remains a mystery.But the discovery of the 200 or more documents, some in good condition and others crumpled or in fragments, has excited academic interest around the world....
Source: WaPo
Jan 13, 2012
Washington and Lee University will hold classes Monday over the objections of David Knoespel and some of his law school classmates, who unsuccessfully petitioned their institution to shut down for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.They are concerned, in part, that the day commemorating King will be overshadowed by events three days later to mark the birthday of Robert E. Lee.The proximity of the two occasions poses a particular challenge for Virginia and for the university in Lexington named in equal parts for the founding father and the Confederate commander. Lee served as the school’s president after the Civil War and set it on a course toward national prestige in the liberal arts.For more than a decade after the 1986 advent of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Virginians celebrated the births of the civil rights icon and Confederate generals Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson on the same day. (Jackson, too, was born in mid-January.) In 2000, Lee-Jackson-King Day was split into two holidays, one for the generals on a Friday, the other for the civil rights leader on the following Monday....
Source: BBC News
Jan 13, 2012
Martin McGuinness has said he was 'disturbed' to learn that documents detailing paramilitary decommissioning are held in a Boston College archive.The deputy first minister made his remarks at the British Irish Summit in Dublin Castle on Friday.Boston College has said that documents in its archive will remain confidential for 30 years.The body which oversaw paramilitary decommissioning in Northern Ireland presented its final report in 2011.The entire process was monitored by the International Independent Commission on Decommissioning (IICD)....
Source: Mother Jones
Jan 13, 2012
Last February, activists pitched a fit when it was announced that, for the second consecutive year, the gay Republican group GOProud would be a cosponsor of Washington's biggest right-wing confab, the Conservative Political Action Conference....CPAC isn't so discerning about the rest of its cosponsors, though. As Right Wing Watch notes, one of the sponsors at February's conference will be Youth For Western Civilization, a group dedicated to, as the name suggests, preventing the "extinction" of Western Civilization at the hands of multiculturalism. Per its mission statement, the group boasts that, "in spite of the continual assault and hatred it endures from the radical left, we wish to revive the West, rather than see our civilization be sent to the graveyard of history."How does that manifest itself? Among other things, the group is a passionate defender of South Africa's white heritage. A recent blog post featured at the site accuses the African National Congress, the nation's ruling party, of waging a "genocide" against Afrikaners, and pins much of the blame on revered former president Nelson Mandela....
Source: BBC History Magazine
Jan 12, 2012
Newly-released documents have revealed that novelist JRR Tolkien was passed over for the Nobel literature prize in 1961, after his storytelling in the Lord of the Rings trilogy was described as second rate. Declassified after 50 years, the papers show that Tolkien was nominated for the award by fellow author CS Lewis but that the Nobel prize jury had said of his work: “The result has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality”. The documents also reveal that British writer Graham Greene – who never won the Nobel prize – was the jury's runner-up, followed by Karen Blixen, the Danish writer of Out of Africa. Other prominent authors put forward for the Nobel prize in 1961 were EM Forster and Lawrence Durrell.
Source: Examiner
Jan 12, 2012
About 3,500 years ago, when the Bronze Age was ending in Europe and the Olmec civilization was thriving in Mexico, natives in San Antonio were living off the land using primitive tools, as they had been for thousands of years.Signs of ancient human settlements have been found elsewhere in Texas, some more than 10,000 years old. And now there's evidence that about 1500 B.C. — three millennia before the Spanish Conquest — natives were building structures along the San Antonio River.Last month, workers preparing Mission County Park for construction found evidence of one such building while searching for a previous location of nearby Mission San Jose, which they never located.What they did uncover — and then reburied after preliminary investigation — were remains of a prehistoric hut that burned down but left significant clues....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Jan 12, 2012
A medieval fishing village is believed to have been found in the Outer Hebrides after a tip-off from an islander.The site is among potential new historic finds made along the islands’ coasts following information from members of the public.Archaeologists said they were told about the village after bumping into local man JJ MacDonald. The possible fishing station was discovered near Loch Euport, on North Uist.The project team said on Ordnance Survey maps the area is called Havn, the Norse word for harbour.Last year, fishermen, beachcombers, divers and islanders in the Hebrides were asked for information on where archaeologists might find ancient sites along shorelines.The project involves the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), WA Coastal and Marine, Historic Scotland and Comhairle nan Eilean Siar (Western Isles Council)....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Jan 12, 2012
The newly-discovered diaries of a wealthy country squire show he spent the majority of his time painting scenes of Victorian life rather than working.Solicitor George Cooper's journals are full of incredibly detailed sketches and paintings and give a fascinating insight into Victorian life.But the diaries have also provided a new enlightening picture of the wealthy Somerset landowner - and show he very rarely went to work.Typical entries include descriptions of his favourite pastimes of shooting, fishing, hunting, cycling and cricket, around the town of Wincanton, with regular mentions of dinners with friends....
Source: NYT
Jan 12, 2012
I’m not throwin’ away my shot.Hey yo, I’m just like my country.I’m young, scrappy and hungry.That verbal fusillade delivered by Lin-Manuel Miranda, playing Alexander Hamilton, began the sensational performance of Mr. Miranda’s project, “The Hamilton Mixtape,” on Wednesday evening at the Allen Room, where it opened the new season of Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series....Who would have thought of comparing America’s founding fathers to contemporary rappers? But “The Hamilton Mixtape,” inspired by Ron Chernow’s biography of Hamilton, finds him furiously quarreling with Thomas Jefferson (Jon Rua), James Madison (James Monroe Iglehart), and Aaron Burr (Utkarsh Ambudkar), in cabinet debates moderated by George Washington (Christopher Jackson)....
Source: BBC News
Jan 12, 2012
It was a decade of drama - miner's strikes, the Falklands war, IRA terrorism and the discovery of Aids.But life on a more domestic level in the 1980s will be opened up for further study this summer.First hand accounts, written by volunteers, of their daily lives and views were collected throughout the decade as part of the Mass Observation Archive.The ambitious project, which ran from the 1930s to 1950s and then from the 1980s onwards, recorded personal details about life in Britain, through diaries and observations....
Source: NYT
Jan 12, 2012
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea said on Thursday that it would place the body of Kim Jong-il on permanent display in a Pyongyang mausoleum and install his statues, portraits and memorial towers across the country.Mr. Kim, who died on Dec. 17 at age 69, is the second North Korean leader whose embalmed body will be on public display. His father, the North’s founding president, Kim Il-sung, who died in 1994, was embalmed with the help of Russian experts and is in the Kumsusan Memorial Palace in Pyongyang.Mr. Kim’s body will be on display there too, the Politburo of the ruling Workers’ Party said on Thursday in a report carried by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency. There was no indication of how much the impoverished North Korean government planned to spend on the memorials.
Source: LA Times
Jan 12, 2012
REPORTING FROM MEXICO CITY -- Two years have passed since a ferocious earthquake leveled much of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, and killed about a quarter-million people. It was, as The Times put it, "one of modern times' worst natural disasters," striking "one of modern times' poorest nations."Today there is progress, including the election and seating of a new government, the clearing of much rubble, the rebuilding of some housing and other infrastructure, the expansion of access to healthcare.
Source: WaPo
Jan 12, 2012
NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. — The Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley will be in clear view for the first time in nearly 150 years once a truss weighing more than eight tons surrounding it is removed in South Carolina.The work is scheduled for Thursday at a conservation lab in North Charleston....
Source: AP
Jan 12, 2012
The Czech government agreed Wednesday to pay billions of dollars in compensation to churches for property seized by the former Communist government. The deal threatened to topple the coalition government earlier this week after a junior partner voiced anger at the thought of huge sums being paid to churches in the middle of the European debt crisis....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 12, 2012
A POW wiling away the war in a German prison camp delivered a defiant message insulting Hitler through the apparently innocuous skill of embroidery.Major Alexis Casdagli, who was taken prisoner in 1941, had turned to embroidery as a way of protecting his sanity against the tedium of POW life but he also found it provided a means of covert resistance.An innocent looking tapestry stitched by the officer in December 1941 bears the rather bland text stating the name and location of its creator and the date. But in a border surrounding the text Major Casdagli also stitched a series of dots and dashes, which in Morse code spelt out "God Save the King" and "---- Hitler"....
Source: AP
Jan 11, 2012
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is convinced that a lone gunman wasn't solely responsible for the assassination of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, and said his father believed the Warren Commission report was a "shoddy piece of craftsmanship."Kennedy and his sister, Rory, spoke about their family Friday night while being interviewed in front of an audience by Charlie Rose at the Winspear Opera House in Dallas. The event comes as a year of observances begins for the 50th anniversary of the president's death.
