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: LiveScience
Dec 20, 2011
Genetic hints of extinct human lineages — and the benefits we might have received from having sex with them — were among the discoveries this year regarding the evolution of our species.Other key findings include evidence strengthening the case that fossils in South Africa might be those of the ancestor of the human lineage. Research also suggests humans crossed what is now the desolate Arabian Desert to expand out of Africa across the world.Sex with extinct human lineages
Source: Discovery News
Dec 20, 2011
In movies, medieval knights are portrayed as courageous and loyal heroes who will fight to the death without fear or regret.In reality, the lives of knights were filled with a litany of stresses much like those that modern soldiers deal with.They were often sleep-deprived, exhausted and malnourished. They slept outside on hard ground, fully exposed to whatever weather befell them. And their lives were full of horror and carnage as they regularly killed other men and watched their friends die.Faced with the trauma inherent in a life of combat, according to a new look at ancient texts, medieval knights sometimes struggled with despair, fear, powerlessness and delusions. Some may have even suffered from post-traumatic stress or related disorders, argues a Danish researcher, just as their modern-day counterparts do...."As a medievalist, it's a bit irritating to hear people say that the Middle Ages were just populated by brutal and mindless thugs who just wallowed in warfare," said Thomas Heebøll-Holm, a medieval historian at the University of Copenhagen. "I'm going for a nuanced picture of humans that lived in the past. They were people just like you and me, as far as we can tell."...
Source: National Geographic
Dec 20, 2011
It's remotely possible the world will end in December 2012. But don't credit the ancient Maya calendar for predicting it, say experts on the Mesoamerican culture.It's true that the so-called long-count calendar—which spans roughly 5,125 years starting in 3114 B.C.—reaches the end of a cycle on December 21, 2012.That day brings to a close the 13th Bak'tun, an almost 400-year period in the Maya long-count calendar.But rather than moving to the next Bak'tun, the calendar will reset at the end of the 13th cycle, akin to the way a 1960s automobile would click over at mile 99,999.9 and reset to zero....
Source: NYT
Dec 20, 2011
The whimsical secret of Audrey Hepburn’s royal status may be the heart of William Wyler‘s “Roman Holiday,” but for years the romantic comedy concealed another more troubling truth: the film was missing the screenwriting credit of Dalton Trumbo, the blacklisted writer and its original author, and instead attributed his work to Ian McLellan Hunter. Now, nearly 60 years after the 1953 release of “Roman Holiday,” the Writers Guild of America, West said it had restored Trumbo’s credit following the efforts of Trumbo’s and Hunter’s sons.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Dec 20, 2011
An invaluable historical archive has been destroyed in clashes between protesters and the Egyptian army, reports the Associated Press. The Institute of Egypt, a research center established by Napoleon Bonaparte during France’s invasion of Egypt in the 18th century, went up in flames over the weekend. The building was on the front line of a street battle in downtown Cairo that left 14 dead and hundreds wounded....
Source: Al Arabiya
Dec 20, 2011
Turkish President Abdullah Gul made an appeal to France on Tuesday to drop an Armenian genocide bill as soon as possible, saying that the planned legislation was unacceptable. “It is not possible for us to accept this bill which denies us the freedom to reject unfair and groundless accusations targeting our country and our nation,” Gul said in a statement. His remarks came as the French parliament prepares to vote Thursday on a law making it illegal to deny the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Gul urged France to abort this initiative as soon as possible as it will block any objective research of the 1915 events....
Source: Beaver County Times
Dec 20, 2011
Sweden will commemorate the centenary of the birth of Raoul Wallenberg in 2012 with a series of postage stamps and a touring exhibition about the World War II hero credited with rescuing tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews.Organizers launched a photo exhibition about Wallenberg in Stockholm on Tuesday, and two new stamps that will go on sale in May. The exhibition will tour Hungary, Germany, Russia, Israel, the United States and Canada next year.As Sweden's envoy in the Hungarian capital of Budapest from July 1944, Wallenberg saved 20,000 Jews by giving them Swedish travel documents, or moving them to safe houses. He also dissuaded German officers from massacring the 70,000 inhabitants of the city's ghetto.However, he disappeared after being arrested by the Soviet army in Budapest in January 1945 and his fate has since remained one of the great mysteries of WWII.The Russians have claimed Wallenberg was executed on July 17, 1947, but have never produced a reliable death certificate or his remains. Unverified witness accounts and new evidence from Russian archives suggest he was still alive years later....
Source: Live Science
Dec 19, 2011
The death by natural causes of Kim Jong-Il highlights a possibly unpleasant truth about repressive dictators: Many, if not most, end up living long lives and dying peacefully.Those who live by the sword don't necessarily die by it, according to "The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities" (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011). In it, Matthew White tracked the fates of the leaders most responsible for the 100-deadliest human events. A majority, he found, lived out their natural life spans in peace."About 60 percent of the individual oppressors and warmongers who were most responsible for each of these multicides lived happily ever after," White wrote....
Source: WaPo
Dec 19, 2011
RICHMOND, Va. — A year after Virginia overhauled its review process to improve the quality of textbooks used in public schools, the publisher whose error-plagued history books helped spur the change now plans to bypass state Department of Education scrutiny.The Washington Post (http://wapo.st/sn7tBU) says Connecticut-based Five Ponds Press plans to introduce a series of elementary-level science books that it will market directly to school systems, and is refusing to submit them for state review.The publisher says on its website that its new “All Around Us” science series is “the first textbook series created to meet the needs of Virginia students using Virginia’s 2010 science standards.”“Five Ponds Press has indicated to the department that it does not intend to submit science books for review,” Department of Education spokesman Charles Pyle said. The publisher’s marketing campaign “should not be interpreted to mean it has the imprimatur of the state,” Pyle said....
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Dec 19, 2011
A federal court has denied Boston College's motion to thwart a government request for sensitive oral-history records. But the court will review those records confidentially on Wednesday before it decides what, if anything, must be handed over to federal authorities.A spokesman for the college said it was happy with the decision because the court acknowledged the need to protect confidential research.Friday's ruling, by the U.S. District Court in Boston, rejected the college's request to quash the subpoenas for material from what's known as the Belfast Project. In the project, from 2001 to 2006, researchers and journalists conducted interviews with paramilitary fighters and others who lived through the decades-long sectarian conflict Northern Ireland, always with the promise that the talks would be confidential until they died.
Source: Huffington Post
Dec 19, 2011
A controversial effort to honor the life of fairy tale author Hans Christian Andersen with a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) festival in his native Denmark has sparked a row between local politicians and advocates.As The Telegraph is reporting, the gay-themed, week-long Andersen celebration was the brainchild of Trine Bramsen, a member of the country's parliament, who believes the LGBT literary gala would attract more visitors to the town of Odense on the island of Funen, where the author was born in 1805. "There is so much palaver about Hans Christian Andersen's sexuality, and I think we should use it," she said, noting that she believed the event could also capitalize on the country's marriage equality law. "It should be a week where gays from all over the world can come to the island of Funen."...
Source: NYT
Dec 19, 2011
Greek, Aramaic, Latin, Parthian, Middle Persian and Hebrew — all of these languages were used concurrently throughout the society, according to inscriptions and graffiti uncovered by archaeologists. A temple altar epitomizes the multiculturalism: The inscription is in Greek, and a man with a Latin name and a Greek-titled office in the Roman army is shown presenting an offering to Iarhibol, a god of the migrants from the old Syrian caravan city of Palmyra.New Yorkers would have felt at home in the grid pattern of streets, where merchants lived, scribes wrote and Jews worshiped in the same block, not far from a Christian house-church as well as shrines to Greek and Palmyrene deities. Scholars said the different religious groups seemed to maintain their distinct identities.An exhibition of prized and quotidian artifacts from Dura-Europos, “Edge of Empires: Pagans, Jews, and Christians at Roman Dura-Europos,” is on view through Jan. 8 at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. The objects — notably art from antiquity’s best-preserved synagogue, and evocative photographs of the buried city’s excavations — are on loan from the Yale University Art Gallery....
Source: New Zealand Herald
Dec 19, 2011
For centuries, scientists and historians have argued over why Stonehenge was built and, even more puzzlingly, how.They are now closer to cracking one aspect of the mystery after working out the exact spot where some of the rocks came from.The 5000-year-old circle of stones - thought at various times to have been a temple of healing, a calendar, or even a royal cemetery - have been traced to an outcrop 150 miles (241km) away in north Pembrokeshire.Dr Richard Bevins of the National Museum of Wales and Dr Robert Ixer at Leicester University narrowed down the source of the rocks - called rhyolites - to the 70m-long area called Craig Rhos-y-Felin after testing thousands of samples and finding a match.
Source: Reuters
Dec 18, 2011
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il died of a heart attack while on a train trip, state media reported on Monday, sparking immediate concern over who is in control of the reclusive state and its nuclear program.A tearful television announcer dressed in black said the 69-year old had died on Saturday of physical and mental over-work on his way to give "field guidance."Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-il's youngest son, is seen as the leader-in-waiting after he was appointed to senior political and military posts in 2010.
Source: Historic City
Dec 17, 2011
Raphael Cosme reported to Historic City News that Archaeologist Kathleen Deagan and her team are excavating a section of grounds at the Mission of Nombre De Dios that could be the exact location where the oldest church in the nation once stood.“This is an important find,” Deagan said. “Last summer, some of the church’s stones showed up near the surface, and then we rescued a 17th century kaolin pipe fragment at the site.”Throughout the last four decades, in collaboration with the Florida Museum of Natural History, Deagan has followed her instincts. If she is right this time, she has found the first stone church in the United States; certainly, the largest church in Florida during the 17th century.“We went deep, with a pit three by three meters, and found a section of the church foundation,” Degan said. “The team is opening it up, where the dividing interior walls meet the outer foundation, to try and better understand how it was constructed and when it was built.”...
Source: Yahoo News
Dec 16, 2011
CLEVELAND (AP) — Convicted Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk's bid to regain his U.S. citizenship was denied Tuesday by a judge who said he had lied about where he was during World War II.U.S. District Judge Dan Aaron Polster rejected the retired autoworker's citizenship claim, which was based on newly discovered documents, including one suggesting an incriminating document was a Soviet fraud."John Demjanjuk has admitted that he willfully lied about his whereabouts during the war on his visa and immigration applications to gain entry to the United States," the judge wrote. "Despite numerous opportunities, Demjanjuk has never provided a single, consistent accounting of his whereabouts during the war years 1942 to 1945."...
Source: WTVR
Dec 16, 2011
Overnight several Richmond monuments had street art posted on them. No one seems to know yet who did it, and no one was quite sure earlier who would remove it, either.A political artist—identity unknown at this point—was trying to hammer home a message. Their canvas?The monuments of three prominent figures associated with the Civil War: J.E.B Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis.Sometime yesterday—at least that’s when anyone first noticed—three different plaques were installed at each monument. Each plaque details the story of individuals involved with the Civil Rights movement....
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
Dec 16, 2011
PARIS: It was one of the most shameful and shady chapters of French history: the collaboration of industrialists and business owners with the Nazis during the German occupation.A historical can of worms was reopened in a Paris court on Wednesday when the grandchildren of the inventor and car maker Louis Renault began a legal battle claiming his famous company was unfairly confiscated by the state as punishment for allegedly collaborating with the occupiers.Mr Renault, who founded the car maker in 1898 with his brothers, died in prison while awaiting trial for collaboration in 1944, two months after the liberation of France. In January 1945 Charles de Gaulle and the provisional government signed a decree confiscating the company and nationalising it, accusing Mr Renault of working for the Germans and providing their armies with vehicles and services to help the Nazi war effort....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 16, 2011
Meryl Streep is being trumpeted as a likely Oscar winner for her performance as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, but the film worries John Campbell, on whose biography it is based.“Like any film of that sort, it simplifies and it dramatises her as a great individual, fighting against all these things as if it was just her on her own,” says the author, who acted as a consultant and was even given a cameo role as the manager of an ice-cream company visited by Thatcher.“It does not credit her colleagues like Geoffrey Howe, or anybody else. The other politicians are made to look wet – she bashes them....
Source: WaPo
Dec 15, 2011
BERLIN — A 90-year-old man convicted last year of killing three Dutch civilians while he was part of a Nazi SS hit squad during World War II has been taken to prison to start serving his life sentence.Robert Deller, a spokesman for prosecutors in Aachen, said Heinrich Boere was taken by ambulance Wednesday from the old-age home where he lived to a detention facility. He declined to specify the prison’s location....
