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: WaPo
Nov 21, 2011
Gregg Schwarz frowned as he positioned himself, just so, in front of the wrought iron fence surrounding John Edgar Hoover’s grave, a place he has visited countless times but never before in anger.A retired FBI agent who joined the agency in 1972, the year Hoover died, Schwarz had hired a videographer to film him for YouTube expressing his displeasure with a movie that depicted Hoover as a repressed homosexual. In a dig at Clint Eastwood, the director of “J. Edgar,” Schwarz titled his video response, “Dirty Harry to Filthy Harry.”“Mr. Hoover was portrayed as an individual who had homosexual tendencies and was a tyrannical monster,” Schwarz said into the camera, as the sun glinted off his FBI cuff links and FBI lapel pin. “That is simply not true.”
Source: WSJ
Nov 21, 2011
MOSCOW — The leader of Russia’s Communist Party defended his party’s use of Josef Stalin on election posters.“Under Stalin, we lived 30 years without corruption. This is our history,” Gennady Zyuganov said in an interview on Friday.As December parliamentary elections approach, billboards in Russia’s Far East displayed the Soviet hammer-and-sickle emblem and the slogan “time to change the power,” along with a portrait of of Stalin, the Soviet leader who ruled with terror from 1922 to his death in 1953....
Source: Discovery News
Nov 21, 2011
Autumn festivals, including American Thanksgiving, East Asian Mid-Autumn Festival and Jewish Sukkot, celebrate family and the Earth's bounty in similar ways despite cultural differences.Of those three, Thanksgiving is the newcomer.The Pilgrims celebrated a harvest festival with the Native Americans in 1621. And their ancient Anglo-Saxon ancestors also celebrated autumn harvest festivals."Our word 'harvest' is a direct reflex of the Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, word 'hærfest,' which ... only meant 'autumn.' By extension, the word came to refer to the fruits of the field, brought home for processing," John Niles, emeritus professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison told Discovery News.But Thanksgiving wasn't an official annual event until 1863 when president Abraham Lincoln proclaimed, "...set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens."...
Source: Discovery News
Nov 21, 2011
Astronomer Edwin Hubble's landmark paper on the rate of expansion of the universe was published in 1929, overturning the long-held belief among scientists that the universe was static and unchanging.That's why the Hubble Constant (the number that describes the rate of expansion) is named after him, not to mention the Hubble Space Telescope.Less well known is that Hubble might not have been the first the person to make this momentous discovery.A Belgian priest and cosmologist named Georges Lemaitre published a paper reaching very similar conclusions two years earlier. It's a contentious issue among cosmologists, needless to say.The problem was, Lemaitre's paper was in French, and appeared in a rather obscure journal: Annals of the Brussels Scientific Society. This limited its distribution throughout the scientific community (at least initially).
Source: LiveScience
Nov 21, 2011
The Dead Sea Scrolls may have been written, at least in part, by a sectarian group called the Essenes, according to nearly 200 textiles discovered in caves at Qumran, in the West Bank, where the religious texts had been stored.Scholars are divided about who authored the Dead Sea Scrolls and how the texts got to Qumran, and so the new finding could help clear up this long-standing mystery.
Source: BBC
Nov 21, 2011
A healed fracture discovered on an ancient skull from China may be the oldest documented evidence of violence between humans, a study has shown.The individual, who lived 150,000-200,000 years ago, suffered blunt force trauma to the right temple - possibly from being hit with a projectile.But the ancient hunter-gatherer - whose sex is unclear - survived to tell the tale: the injury was completely healed by the time of the person's death.Details are published in PNAS journal."There are older cases of bumps and bruises - and cases of trauma," said co-author Erik Trinkaus from Washington University in St Louis, US....
Source: Science Magazine
Nov 21, 2011
When humans turned from hunting and gathering to farming some 10,000 years ago, they set our species on the road to civilization. Agricultural surpluses led to division of labor, the rise of cities, and technological innovation. But civilization has had both its blessings and its curses. One downside of farming, a new study demonstrates, was a shortening of the human jaw that has left precious little room for our teeth and sends many of us to an orthodontist's chair.Although all living humans belong to one species, Homo sapiens, there are recognizable differences in the shapes of our skulls and faces across the world. In recent years, anthropologists have concluded that most of this geographic variation in skull shape is due to chance, so-called genetic drift, rather than natural selection. But some features of our faces, including the shape of our lower jaws, don't seem to follow this random pattern....
Source: Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star
Nov 21, 2011
There’s nothing like seeing hallowed ground in the company of a good historian.But for those times when an in-person interpreter is unavailable, or time is short, a second-best alternative has just hit the Web: the latest “battle app” created by the Civil War Trust and its Colorado technology partner, Neotreks....
Source: Daily Record (UK)
Nov 21, 2011
TWO World War II veterans – who took part in the most famous break-out by British prisoners of war – have gone back to the tunnel they helped construct.Stanley “Gordie” King, 91, and Frank Stone, 89, returned to the remains of Harry and the tunnel built after The Great Escape, nicknamed George, which has been reopened for the first time in 66 years.Standing at the entrance to the 111-yard shaft, on the site of the notorious Stalag Luft III camp in Poland, widower Gordie’s eyes filled with tears.The former radio operator said: “It has been such an emotional time for me.“This brings back such bittersweet memories. I’m amazed by what they found.”...
Source: Reuters
Nov 21, 2011
ATLANTA (Reuters) - An historic church building in the city of Savannah belongs to the national Episcopal Church, not a breakaway congregation that left the national church following the naming of an openly gay bishop in New Hampshire, the Georgia Supreme Court said on Monday.Christ Church, the oldest Episcopal church in Georgia, was founded in 1733, when James Oglethorpe, an English general, designated the property on Bull Street as a place of worship, the state Supreme Court said.When the national Episcopal Church named the Rev. Gene Robinson as its first openly gay bishop in 2007, the Savannah congregation voted to leave the national church and move under the leadership of an Anglican diocese in Uganda.The breakaway congregation refused to give up the Savannah church building and property, valued at $3 million, prompting a lawsuit by the national church and the Georgia diocese....
Source: National Parks Traveler
Nov 20, 2011
The National Park Service has recognized the historic significance of gay rights activist Dr. Franklin E. Kameny by listing his home in the National Register of Historic Places. “Dr. Kameny led a newly militant activism in the fledgling gay civil rights of the 1960s,” said NPS Director Jonathan B. Jarvis. “He was a landmark figure in articulating and achieving gay civil rights in federal employment and security clearance cases, and in reversing the medical community’s view on homosexuality as a mental disorder.” Dr. Kameny’s efforts in the civil rights movement, modeled in part on African American civil rights strategies and tactics, significantly altered the rights, perceptions, and role of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people in American society, a Park Service release said.
Source: Chicago Sun-Times
Nov 20, 2011
ROMEOVILLE — Lewis University’s History Center and the Heritage Corridor Convention and Visitors Bureau held a ribbon cutting Nov. 16 at the historic Fitzpatrick House, located across from the university’s main campus on Route 53.The event celebrated the Fitzpatrick House as the new site for the Lewis University History Center and the Heritage Corridor CVB.Dennis Cremin, Director of the center and associate professor of history, welcomed guests to view the new display of historic photographs and panel exhibit which tells a story of the development of the I & M Canal and its historical significance to the development of the region....
Source: NYT
Nov 20, 2011
CHOEUNG EK, Cambodia — With opening statements about to begin in the most important phase of the Khmer Rouge trials, survivors of the regime’s violence kneeled before a huge pyramid of skulls at a killing field here on Sunday as monks chanted a prayer for the souls of the dead.Chickens pecked in the damp grass above the pits where nearly 9,000 people were bludgeoned to death and where teeth and bits of bone still work their way to the surface during monsoon floods. Signs warn tourists, “Please don’t walk through the mass grave.”In the trial that got under way on Monday, three senior members of the Khmer Rouge leadership faced charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and other charges....
Source: NYT
Nov 20, 2011
PARIS — When the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, home to the Dead Sea Scrolls, reopened last year after an extensive renovation, it attracted a million visitors in the first 12 months. When the museum opened an enhanced Web site with newly digitized versions of the scrolls in September, it drew a million virtual visitors in three and a half days.The scrolls, scanned with ultrahigh-resolution imaging technology, have been viewed on the Web from 210 countries — including some, like Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Syria, that provide few real-world visitors to the Israel Museum.“This is taking the material to an amazing range of audiences,” said James S. Snyder, the museum’s director. “There’s no way we would have had the technical capability to do this on our own.”...
Source: Yahoo News
Nov 20, 2011
BLUFFTON, Texas (AP) — Johnny C. Parks died two days before his first birthday more than a century ago. His grave slipped from sight along with the rest of the tiny town of Bluffton when Lake Buchanan was filled 55 years later.Now, the cracked marble tombstone engraved with the date Oct. 15, 1882, which is normally covered by 20 to 30 feet of water, has been eerily exposed as a yearlong drought shrinks one of Texas' largest lakes.Across the state, receding lakes have revealed a prehistoric skull, ancient tools, fossils and a small cemetery that appears to contain the graves of freed slaves. Some of the discoveries have attracted interest from local historians, and looters also have scavenged for pieces of history. More than two dozen looters have been arrested at one site....
Source: AP
Nov 20, 2011
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) — Survivors of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime held a remembrance ceremony in an infamous "killing field" Sunday, a day before a U.N.-backed tribunal begins a trial for three of the accused architects of some of the 20th century's worst atrocities.Relatives of the victims wept as they chanted and burned incense near a glass case filled with skulls at the Choeung Ek Genocide Center on Sunday. The memorial stands in a field where the Khmer Rouge executed people during their 1975-79 rule that left nearly 2 million people dead.The emotional ceremony was held to allow Cambodians an opportunity to share their concerns and remember loved ones ahead of the trials of three of the Khmer Rouge's surviving inner circle — all now in their 80s — on charges including crimes against humanity, genocide and torture....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Nov 19, 2011
Belgians deported to Nazi Germany in World War II to work as slaves for the Third Reich have now received tax demands from Berlin.Belgium's finance minister Didier Reynders has vowed to confront Germany over the 'morally indefensible' tax demands which have been arriving in the mailboxes of elderly war survivors over the past few weeks.'It is shocking that people who during World War II were forced to work by the Nazis have now received tax demands from the authorities related to the compensation eventually paid for that work,' he said....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Nov 19, 2011
By the time he was 15, Pablo Picasso could paint brilliantly and was better than any of his teachers. A painting of a vase of flowers looked just like a vase of flowers, a chair looked just like a chair and a woman looked just like a woman. But making pictures that were realistic was boring to him. What’s the point of making a picture look like a photograph? A camera can do that. Paint should do something different. So he investigated, studied and tried again and again to develop new ways of painting the things that he saw around him. He was prolific – Picasso painted more than 2,000 works and each time he mastered one style he quickly moved on to the next. As he developed new techniques, his paintings became more honest and revealing. The same could be said of his affairs with women – and the relationship between the women in his life and his different styles is intimately interlinked. Picasso was brilliant and charismatic and he loved women. The attraction worked both ways and many strong, beautiful and passionate women fell for him. Their relationships were sensual, fraught, loving and confrontational, and one woman very often overlapped with another, but there are six that could be considered his main muses. Here we take a look at seven very different paintings of three of these women: Fernande, his first true love; Olga, his first wife, and Dora, his Weeping Woman.
Source: NYT
Nov 19, 2011
Jacqueline Piatigorsky, one of the most important figures in American chess in the 1960s, turned 100 this month.Piatigorsky, a member of the Rothschild banking family, was married to the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, and together they sponsored three significant chess events. The first was a 1961 match between Bobby Fischer and Samuel Reshevsky, the two best American players.It was a best-of-16 match, and after 11 games, each man had won twice and the other games were draws. And that is how it ended. Fischer quit after a fight with Mrs. Piatigorsky over the scheduling of the 12th game. (Fischer wanted an afternoon game so he could sleep in, and she wanted a morning game so she could attend a concert by her husband later in the day.)...
Source: NYT
Nov 19, 2011
DALLAS — Few figures in pop culture are more closely linked to the devil than Robert Johnson. Not only did the blues hero write “Me and the Devil Blues” and “Hellhound on My Trail,” but legend has it that he sold his soul in exchange for his guitar skills.In a twist, a Dallas church is now preserving the legacy of the bluesman who sang about walking alongside Satan.In June, the First Presbyterian Church of Dallas bought 508 Park Avenue, the downtown building where, in 1937, Johnson recorded almost half of the 29 songs that make up his entire discography. The church purchased the dilapidated three-story Art Deco building after its previous owner tried to have it demolished because it was unmarketable, due in part to its proximity to the Stewpot, a community center run by First Presbyterian that provides medical services and counseling for Dallas’s homeless.“Robert Johnson’s signature song is ‘Cross Road Blues,’ and a lot of people we serve are at the crossroads, too, brushing shoulders with the negative side of life,” said the Rev. Bruce Buchanan, executive director of the Stewpot and an associate pastor at First Presbyterian. “Johnson’s story isn’t foreign to us at all.”...
