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: Spiegel Online
Nov 30, 2011
Preparations have already been made for Ernst Uhrlau's retirement party next Wednesday when he steps down from his post as the head of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence agency, on his 65th birthday. The office of the chancellor has selected a posh location in Berlin for his farewell party and Angela Merkel herself is expected to attend. Uhrlau, a member of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), will be turning over his post to Gerhard Schindler, a member of the business-friendly Free Democratic Party.At events like this, the successes of the person retiring are usually celebrated. In Uhrlau's case, topping the list are his efforts to review the problematic history of the BND's creation after World War II. It has long been known that around 10 percent of the employees at the BND and its predecessor organization once served under SS chief Heinrich Himmler in Nazi Germany. In 2011, Uhrlau appointed an independent commission of historians to research the agency's Nazi roots.
Source: BBC News
Nov 30, 2011
Investigators have found that in 2007 the German Intelligence Service (BND) destroyed files of 250 BND employees who had been in the Nazi SS or Gestapo.The BND confirmed the loss, calling it "regrettable and annoying".Four independent historians are investigating the BND's old links with the Nazis. They say some of the missing papers concern suspected war criminals.The historians did not allege a deliberate cover-up, but they urged the BND not to destroy any more files.They said the BND should consult them before shredding any more documents, and called for a full investigation into the 2007 incident....
Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch
Nov 30, 2011
Because of incomplete records or categorization errors, those searching for black or Native American ancestors may hit a wall.Slave records often were incomplete, and American Indians often were described as negro or black.The Virginia Historical Society recently launched Unknown No Longer, a database of Virginia slave names. The database builds on work of the Historical Society's "Guide to African American Manuscripts," said Lauranett Lee, curator of African American history at the Virginia Historical Society....
Source: The Press Association
Nov 29, 2011
Four million newspaper pages have been put online as part of a massive history project.The British Newspaper Archive website includes pages from more than 200 different papers from across the UK and Ireland with first hand accounts of events including the wedding of Victoria and Albert and the Charge of the Light Brigade.Ed King, the British Library's Head of Newspapers, said it opened up the collection "as never before".He said: "Rather than having to view the items on site at the Library, turning each page, people across the UK and around the world will be able to explore for themselves the goldmine of stories and information contained in these pages - and the ability to search across millions of articles will yield results for each user, that might previously have been the work of weeks or months, in a matter of seconds and the click of a mouse."...
Source: WSJ
Nov 29, 2011
ALBANY, N.Y. — They ranged in age from 20 to 45, stood between just over 5 feet 3 inches to 5 feet 9 inches tall, and most of them were male and intact, except for the one missing its skull.Five years after human skeletons were uncovered on a historic island in the upper Hudson River by a husband-and-wife team of amateur archaeologists, New York state officials are revealing what professional archaeologists learned from the remains.Evidence found in seven unmarked graves unearthed on Rogers Island in 2006 suggests the site was a military cemetery during the French and Indian War, according to archaeologists at the New York State Museum, which was contracted by the property's owner to examine the remains. The state Department of Education, which operates the museum, recently released the archaeologists' findings to The Associated Press.Christina Rieth, the state's chief archaeologist, believes the site in the village of Fort Edward likely contains a large cemetery dating back to the 1750s, when Britain established its largest fortification in North America on the east bank of the upper Hudson, 45 miles north of Albany. Lisa Anderson, one of the state archaeologists who examined the remains, agreed....
Source: Discovery News
Nov 29, 2011
American politics has long been rocked with scandal, but none are more potent than the presidential sex scandal.Since the dawn of the United States, there have been rumors and conjecture about everyone from President Thomas Jefferson to presidential candidates like Herman Cain or John Edwards. The campaign for the office of the president is a difficult road, even more so with media scrutiny, but when the public discover a sexual mishap, those involved feel the fallout.Presidential candidates' sexual indiscretions, once known, are widely publicized, and often politicized, but how many have there been? Suffice it to say a lot. Here are five presidential, or presidential candidate, sex scandals that we at Discovery News find most interesting.#5 Presidential Candidate Wilbur MillsRepresentative Wilbur Mills (D-Ark.) was a powerful Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee for 18 years (1957-1975). His position made him very a powerful figure in the U.S. House of Representatives, which made him well known in the District of Columbia.
Source: Fox News
Nov 29, 2011
Serving a life sentence for his role in the Oklahoma City Bombing, Terry Nichols has a lot of time to think and write about the decisions he made."It was just so wrong as to what happened," Nichols wrote in April 2010. "There was actually no justification for it. And my heart breaks and grieves daily knowing that I had a part in such a devastating tragedy."Nichols, 56, is locked up in a small prison cell in Florence, Colo. He has no chance of parole. Several of his letters, published Monday in The Oklahoman newspaper, were written to Jannie Coverdale, who lost two young grandsons in the bombing....
Source: NYT
Nov 29, 2011
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. — To step into the Tin & Lint bar here is to be surrounded by stories. Carved into the wooden walls, booths and benches are 30 years of names, dates and declared loves: Mike was here; Don loves Joanna 4EVER; Amy and Jennifer, 1989.But the biggest story, nearly as much a part of this upstate city’s lore as its racetrack and mineral waters, is revealed on a small, worn plaque above the third booth from the door: “American Pie written by Don McLean, Summer 1970.”With its low tin ceilings and stained-glass lamps, the bar seems like the type of place where Mr. McLean would have written his generational anthem of rock’s lost innocence.Or, maybe not.Mr. McLean put the legend to rest last weekend in an article in The Post-Star of Glens Falls, N.Y. He also debunked a parallel tale that claimed he first performed the song at Caffè Lena around the corner from the Tin & Lint....
Source: AtlanticWire
Nov 29, 2011
Forty-one years after he was convicted for the murder of Robert Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan's lawyers have filed a new appeal claiming that he's the victim of a setup and that he didn't fire the shots that killed the Senator. The filing includes a new report that claims to show through "sophisticated" audio tests that there were 13 shots (more than could be held in Sirhan's pistol) fired from multiple guns that night, as well as a further claim that one of the bullets taken from Kennedy's body was switched out before the trial, because it did not match his gun....
Source: BBC News
Nov 28, 2011
Two previously undiscovered pits have been found at Stonehenge which point to it once being used as a place of sun worship before the stones were erected.The pits are positioned on celestial alignment at the site and may have contained stones, posts or fires to mark the rising and setting of the sun.An international archaeological survey team found the pits as part of the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project.The team is using geophysical imaging techniques to investigate the site.The archaeologists from the University of Birmingham and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection in Vienna have been surveying the subsurface at the landmark since summer 2010....
Source: LiveScience
Nov 28, 2011
Artificial-intelligence networks could help pinpoint new fossil sites across thousands of square miles of desert, scientists have found.
Source: Yahoo News
Nov 28, 2011
Archeologists have discovered two new pits at the mysterious Stonehenge site that shed potential light on its ritual use. The pits are aligned in a celestial pattern, suggesting that they could have been used for sunrise and sunset rituals; the pits pre-date the construction of the famous rock formations more than 5,000 years ago....
Source: AP
Nov 28, 2011
SALT LAKE CITY — Museum-goers are taking in the sounds, smell and feel of ancient life and landscapes at a new $100 million building in Salt Lake City.The Natural History Museum of Utah engages the senses, allowing visitors to mingle inside exhibits, touch artifacts, get a whiff of desert plants or rotting flesh and hear the soft warbling of birds.People are even walking on top of exhibits, with glass-panel floors covering fossil dig sites. Over the years, they’ll also be able to watch paleontologists separate fossils from rock in a glass-walled working laboratory.The museum, which opened Nov. 18, is located in the Rio Tinto Center on the University of Utah campus. The center’s copper and stone exterior is designed to blend into the high foothills of the Wasatch Range, and it’s named for the mining company that donated the copper — 100,000 pounds of it — for the outside panels. The center was also designed to meet specifications for top ratings from the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building systems, with features like a planted roof and parking tiers that percolate rainwater. Rooftop solar panels will satisfy a quarter of the building’s energy demands....
Source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Nov 28, 2011
Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., went out needling in announcing his retirement on Monday, taking delight in digs at Republican presidential candidate ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich.“I will be neither a lobbyist nor a historian,” Frank, former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, told reporters.It was a dig at Gingrich, who took $1.8 million from Freddie Mac — the troubled federal mortgage giant — for what Gingrich described as his services “as a historian.”Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae have served as favorite Republican targets. During one debate — before his gig as a “historian” came to light — Gingrich said that Frank should go to jail because of his ties to Freddie Mac....
Source: LA Times
Nov 28, 2011
Director D.W. Griffith once said of French filmmaker Georges Méliès, "I owe him everything." Charlie Chaplin described him as "the alchemist of light." Méliès built the first movie studio in Europe and was the first filmmaker to use production sketches and storyboards. Film historians consider him the "father of special effects" — he created the first double exposure on screen, the split screen and the dissolve. Not to mention that he was one of the first filmmakers to have nudity in his films — he was French, after all.
Source: Reuters
Nov 28, 2011
(Reuters) - Forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi stole ancient Roman artefacts when they fled Tripoli, bundled them into sacks and planned to sell them abroad, Libya's new rulers said on Saturday as they displayed the haul for the first time since its recovery.The artefacts -- a collection of 17 stone heads, most the size of tennis balls, and terracotta fragments dating from the second or third centuries A.D. -- were recovered on August 23 when anti-Gaddafi fighters intercepted a convoy of loyalists heading south from Tripoli."All of them (the artefacts) date back to Roman times but with very strong local influence," said Saleh Algabe, director of the Antiquities Department in the new Libyan government....
Source: CBS News
Nov 28, 2011
(AP) BOSTON — Step into the sanctuary of the African Meeting House and you will walk on the same ancient floorboards where Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison and other prominent abolitionists railed against slavery in the 19th century, and where free black men gathered to shape the famed 54th Massachusetts Civil War regiment.Following a painstaking, $9 million restoration, the nation's oldest black church building is set to reopen to the public early next month. Beverly Morgan-Welch, who has spent more than a decade spearheading the project, calls the three-story brick building the nation's most important African American historic landmark."This space has the echo of so many of the greats of their time ... who were trying to figure out a way to end slavery," said Morgan-Welch, executive director of the Museum of African American History....
Source: Hudson Heritage
Nov 28, 2011
Doodles on the wall of a London flat where the Sex Pistols used to live has been unearthed by historians. The graffiti, drawn by frontman John Lydon, was discovered in the upper room of a two-storey 19th century property at 6 Denmark Street, which was known as Tin Pan Alley in the 60s, and consists of eight cartoons depicting members of the band and their manager, the late Malcolm McLaren (pictured).The building is now used as offices, and while historians have know of its previous residents, the drawings were only unearthed following a chance remark on a BBC 6 Music programme, which led to the discovery by Dr John Schofield, from the Department of Archaeology at the University of York, and Paul Graves-Brown, an archaeologist specialising in the contemporary past.In the spirit of the punk frontrunners, Dr Schofield has courted his own controversy by claiming that the markings discovered on the walls of the flat the group rented in the mid-1970s lend themselves to archaeological investigation as much as drawings made by early humans in the caves of Lascaux in southern France....
Source: NYT
Nov 28, 2011
Hidden in the coral terraces that line the eastern shores of East Timor are troves of artifacts and skeletal remains that tell a story of coastal activity going back tens of thousands of years — to the time when humans first settled nearby Australia.Recently, in a terrace cave called Jerimalai, a team of archaeologists discovered pieces of what are now the oldest known fishhooks in the world — dating from 16,000 to 23,000 years ago and made of shell. While these old samples are too incomplete to reveal exactly how they were used, the team also found fishhooks that are more intact from 11,000 years ago. These newer ones are classic baited jabbing fishhooks: They were most likely tied to a line, loaded with bait and thrown into the water.The archaeologists, whose findings appear in Science, also uncovered 42,000-year-old fish remains, including bones from tuna, which live only in deep water....
Source: WSJ
Nov 28, 2011
Lana Peters's life was a battle with history.Ms. Peters was born Svetlana Alliluyeva Stalina and she was the only daughter of Joseph Stalin. Her life was spent in the shadow of the man who helped to forge Soviet communism, led the nation to victory in World War II, and was held responsible for killing more people than Hitler.Much-married, restless, quarrelsome and elusive, she wrote best-selling memoirs, defected to the U.S., returned to the U.S.S.R., and finally settled in rural Wisconsin. She died there Nov. 22 of colon cancer, Richland County Coroner Mary Turner announced....
