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: Discovery News
Nov 16, 2011
Jane Austen, the author of classics such as Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, may have died of arsenic poisoning, according to a crime writer who has reviewed the last letters of the British novelist.The crucial clue lies in a line written by Austen a few months before her mysterious death in 1817.Describing weeks of illness she had recently experienced, Austen wrote: "I am considerably better now and recovering my looks a little, which have been bad enough, black and white and every wrong colour."According to Lindsay Ashford, a British crime writer, the description matches the symptoms of arsenic poisoning, "which causes skin spotting if taken in small doses over a long time."...
Source: BBC
Nov 16, 2011
The Archbishop of Canterbury has paid tribute to the King James Bible at a service to mark its 400th anniversary.Dr Rowan Williams said the text was "extraordinary" and of "abiding importance".The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales also attended the service at Westminster Abbey.The translation was ordered by James I in 1604 to help forge unity between religious factions.The final editing of the "Authorised Version" of the King James Bible was completed in the Jerusalem Chamber of the Abbey in 1611.Dr Williams told the congregation that the seventeenth century translators would have been "baffled and embarrassed" by the idea of a perfect translation of the Bible....
Source: AP
Nov 15, 2011
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A long-lost version of the Air Force One recordings made in the immediate aftermath of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, with more than 30 minutes of additional material not in the official version in the government's archives, has been found and is for sale.There are incidents and code names described on the newly discovered two-plus hour recording, which predates the shorter and newer recording currently housed in the National Archives outside Washington and the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Texas. The shorter recording was thought to be the only surviving version of the tape.The asking price is $500,000 for the reel-to-reel tape, which is inside its original box with a typewritten label showing it was made by the White House Communications Agency for Army Gen. Chester "Ted" Clifton Jr....
Source: ABC News
Nov 15, 2011
Nearly 48 years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, fresh audio evidence from that fateful day has surfaced. The evidence comes in the form of the original reel-to-reel Air Force One radio recording, containing conversations between officials on the plane, the White House situation room, and others. The original tape was long thought to be lost or destroyed.The tape contains never-before-heard conversations between the presidential aircraft and the White House and immediately after the assassination of President Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963.
Source: NYT
Nov 15, 2011
MIAMI (AP) — Aging Holocaust survivors in the U.S. are looking to Congress to clear a path for them to sue European insurance companies they contend illegally confiscated Jewish life-insurance policies during the Nazi era.The survivors say companies owe as much as $20 billion....
Source: AP
Nov 14, 2011
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — A research team is attempting to discover the origin of a cast bronze artifact excavated from an Inupiat Eskimo home site believed to be about 1,000 years old.The artifact resembles a small buckle, researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder said in an announcement. How it got to Alaska remains a mystery."The object appears to be older than the house we were excavating by at least a few hundred years," research assistant John Hoffecker said in the release. Hoffecker led excavating at Cape Espenberg on Alaska's Seward Peninsula....
Source: BBC
Nov 14, 2011
An early Bronze Age burial cist containing cremated bones and material dating back 4,000 years has been excavated on Dartmoor.Archaeologists uncovered items from the site on Whitehorse Hill including a woven bag or basket and amber beads.Cists are stone-built chests which are used for the burial of ashes.Dartmoor National Park Authority (DNPA) said the discovery could be one of the most important archaeological finds in 100 years....
Source: Science Daily
Nov 14, 2011
The Greeks were not always in such dire financial straits as today. German archeologists have discovered a very large commercial area from the ancient Greek era during excavations on Sicily.Led by Professor Dr. Martin Bentz, archeologists at the University of Bonn began unearthing one of Greek antiquity's largest craftsmen's quarters in the Greek colonial city of Selinunte (7th-3rd century B.C.) on the island of Sicily during two excavation campaigns in September 2010 and in the fall of 2011.The project is conducted in collaboration with the Italian authorities and the German Archaeological Institute. Its goal is to study an area of daily life in ancient cities that has hitherto received little attention....
Source: WaPo
Nov 14, 2011
Washington — President Barack Obama’s “we can’t wait” refrain is all about projecting a sense of urgency and bold action heading into his fourth year in office. It turns out other presidents haven’t had much luck with that.The fourth year is often a disappointment, particularly when a president facing re-election is trying to coax action out of a Congress in the hands of the other party. The heady optimism of earlier years gets bogged down in partisan bickering, and big initiatives give way to less ambitious steps.Bill Clinton, chastened by huge GOP gains in the 1994 congressional elections, ended up tacking to the center in his fourth year, a remarkable transformation captured in his 1996 acknowledgment that “the era of big government is over.” Clinton, helped by a solid economy, did enough to get re-elected, but it was a year largely characterized by small-bore initiatives like school uniforms and neighborhood curfews.George H.W. Bush, frustrated that he couldn’t get action out of a Democratic Congress on his economic proposals, opened his fourth year in 1992 with words akin to Obama’s:“My friends: The people cannot wait,” he said in his State of the Union address that January. “They need help now.”
Source: LiveScience
Nov 14, 2011
A rare Arabic inscription from the Crusades has been deciphered, with scientists finding the marble slab bears the name of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, a colorful Christian ruler known for his tolerance of the Muslim world.Part of the inscription reads: "1229 of the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus the Messiah."The 800-year-old inscription was fixed years ago in the wall of a building in Tel Aviv, though the researchers think it originally sat in Jaffa's city wall. To date, no other Crusader inscription in the Arabic language has been found in the Middle East....
Source: Salon
Nov 14, 2011
On his Fox show Monday evening, Bill O’Reilly dismissed as “gutter sniping” reviews of his new Lincoln assassination history that pointed out multiple factual errors in the bestselling book.“We well understand our enemies are full of rage of [the book's] success,” O’Reilly said. “We also know the media lies at will with no accountability. ‘Killing Lincoln’ in an honest book that you will enjoy and learn from, and that every American student should read.”...The controversy started after Salon reported that the official National Park Service bookstore at Ford’s Theatre had rejected O’Reilly’s book because of “the lack of documentation and the factual errors within the publication.” A second review in a leading Civil War magazine identified another 10 or so alleged errors.A separate gift shop at Ford’s, which is not subject to the same rigorous review standards as the National Park Service bookstore, has decided to sell “Killing Lincoln.”...
Source: The Daily Beast
Nov 14, 2011
Philip Eade writes in the foreword to his new book, Prince Philip: The Turbulent Early Life of the Man Who Married Queen Elizabeth II, that he first became interested in authoring a bio about Prince Philip when he “briefly toyed with writing a book about prominent ufologists in the period just after the Second World War.” During the course of that research, Eade discovered not only that Prince Philip was a subscriber to the magazine Flying Saucer Review, but that he once sent his equerry, Sir Peter Horsley, “to meet an extraterrestrial humanoid at a house in Ealing.” Eade writes, “A number of witnesses were invited to Buckingham Palace to discuss their experiences, as Horsley later explained, to ‘put them on the spot’ and to test their honesty in the presence of royalty, a method as effective as any truth serum.” Horsley was on the prince’s staff from 1952 to 1955 before climbing to great heights in the Royal Air Force.
Source: The Atlantic
Nov 14, 2011
Many ethnic Armenians who read ex-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recently published memoirs ("No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington") are spitting fire over her descriptions of her battles with the US-based Diaspora Armenian lobby. Both in 1991 as a presidential aide (to then US President George Bush) and in 2007 as secretary of state (under then President George W. Bush), Rice worked to defeat the congressional push for recognizing the World-War I-era slaughter of ethnic Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide.While acknowledging the brutality and the scale of the bloodshed, Rice writes that US recognition of the act as genocide would have antagonized Turkey, a key strategic ally for the US. She argues that she was guided by the raison d'état that labels are best left to historians....
Source: Guardian (UK)
Nov 14, 2011
Ian Paisley has retired from ministry in the fundamentalist Protestant church he founded 60 years ago.The 85-year-old has stepped down from his role as a minister in the Free Presbyterian Church.Paisley told the Martyrs Memorial Church he helped build in East Belfast of his decision on Sunday. He intends to devote his time to writing his autobiography.The former first minister of Northern Ireland founded his breakaway church in 1951 after a split with the main Presbyterian church over its embrace of ecumenism and greater links with the Roman Catholic church....
Source: NYT
Nov 14, 2011
LONDON — Before he died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2010, the historian Tony Judt recalled childhood days just after World War II in a debilitated Britain that was slowly ceding its empire and its pre-eminence.“Clothes were rationed until 1949, cheap and simple ‘utility furniture’ until 1952, food until 1954,” he wrote in a memoir, concluding that austerity in “that bare-bones age” was “not just an economic condition: it aspired to a public ethic.”It was not just in Britain.A continent was reeling, its cities and industries ruined. As Soviet Communism threatened to encroach and the cold war loomed, Western Europe awaited the salvation of America’s Marshall Plan. Cars were few and small, vacations modest, belts tight.As it confronts its massive debt problem, though, and a new austerity threatens to become its default setting, Europe seems to have lost sight of the fact that it has been there before; that the baby boom generation found its roots in postwar hardship; that, as Mr. Judt suggested, the huge affluence of more recent years could barely have been imagined as people struggled to shake off the gloom of war....
Source: Fox News
Nov 13, 2011
SALT LAKE CITY – More than six decades after being freed from a Japanese prisoner of war camp, a Utah veteran was compelled to relive the horrors and triumphs of his World War II experience this month when he received a mysterious package containing seven military medals, including the Distinguished Service Cross and Silver Star.The medals have become a source of pride for retired Army Capt. Tom Harrison, 93, since they arrived in a box with nothing more than a packing slip from a logistics center in Philadelphia on Nov. 4, which happened to be his 65th wedding anniversary. But they have also refreshed painful memories of the Bataan Death March, POW camps and the comrades he lost during the war or in the years since....
Source: Fox News
Nov 13, 2011
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. – A statue on top of Abraham Lincoln's tomb in Illinois is missing its sword for the second time in over a hundred years after thieves apparently made off with part of the copper sculpture, the State Journal-Register reported.An employee at the Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Ill., noticed last week that the copper sword held by a replica of a Civil War artillery officer was missing.According to the report, the sword was broken off at the handle, with no damage done to the rest of the artillery officer statue or the other statues in the group of four -- representing the Civil War cavalry, infantry and navy -- atop the tomb....
Source: The Australian
Nov 13, 2011
A MEDIEVAL market town has discovered it owns an original version of Magna Carta, potentially worth about 20 million pounds, rather than a copy worth only 10,000 pounds.It was identified in the collection of Faversham town council in Kent by academic experts prompted by the auction of a version from 1297 owned by Ross Perot, who ran for the US presidency against Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. In 2007 that version had fetched $US21.3m (about $A20.8 million at today's rates)....
Source: Medievalists.net
Nov 12, 2011
In one otherwise unremarkable storage box in Connecticut College’s Shain Library, Ben Panciera made a remarkable discovery.Wedged between a set of magazines containing stories for Australian children and a biography of an Episcopalian priest was a book Panciera never thought he’d see with his own eyes – a medieval manuscript presumed stolen more than 50 years earlier.Panciera, the Director of Special Collections in the Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives, said the find was exhilarating. “You could see right away that it wasn’t paper,” Panciera said. “I thought, ‘Ahhhh, this has got to be at least 400 years old.’”...
Source: WaPo
Nov 12, 2011
Of all the places you’d expect to find Bill O’Reilly’s “Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever,” Ford’s Theatre, the site of the dreadful act, should rank at the top. But you’d do better to search for the history bestseller on Amazon.com, because you won’t find it at the theater’s store.For a history of the assassination — an “unsanitized and uncompromising . . . no spin American story,” as O’Reilly and coauthor Martin Dugard put it, “Killing Lincoln” suffers from factual errors and a lack of documentation, according to a study conducted by Rae Emerson, the deputy superintendent of Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site, which is a unit of the National Park Service. Emerson’s review recommended that the book not be sold at Ford Theatre’s store.
