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: Daily Mail (UK)
Sep 15, 2011
Peru’s Nazca Lines, the mysterious geoglyphs etched into the desert centuries ago by indigenous groups, are world famous – and now thousands of similar patterns have been found in the Middle East.Satellite and aerial photography has revealed mysterious stone ‘wheels’ that are more numerous and older than the Nazca Lines in countries such as Syria, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.The structures are thought to date back 2,000 years, but why they were built is baffling archaeologists and historians.In Jordan alone we've got stone-built structures that are far more numerous than the Nazca Lines, far more extensive in the area that they cover, and far older,’ David Kennedy, a professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Western Australia, told Live Science....
Source: CBS
Sep 15, 2011
They stretch from Syria to Saudi Arabia, can be seen from the air but not the ground, and are virtually unknown to the public.
They are the Middle East's own version of the Nazca Lines -- ancient "geolyphs," or drawings, that span deserts in southern Peru -- and now, thanks to new satellite-mapping technologies, and an aerial photography program in Jordan, researchers are discovering more of them than ever before. They number well into the thousands.
Referred to by archaeologists as "wheels," these stone structures have a wide variety of designs, with a common one being a circle with spokes radiating inside. Researchers believe that they date back to antiquity, at least 2,000 years ago. They are often found on lava fields and range from 82 feet to 230 feet (25 meters to 70 meters) across.
Kennedy's new research, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, reveals that these wheels form part of a variety of stone landscapes.
Source: BBC
Sep 15, 2011
They were young idealistic high school students who were unaware of what horrors they were about to face: imprisonment, torture and, in some cases, death.
Thirty-five years ago, one of most notorious episodes of abuse committed during military rule in Argentina took place - the abduction of 10 students by security forces in the city of La Plata near Buenos Aires.
On 16 and 17 September 1976, masked men raided their homes under cover of darkness, taking them away to clandestine detention centres in what became known as the "Night of the Pencils".
Six were never seen again.
The murdered victims, aged 16 to 18, were Francisco Lopez, Horacio Ungaro, Maria Clara Ciocchini, Claudio de Acha, Daniel Racero and Maria Claudia Falconer, whose face became one of the best known images to keep the students' memory alive.
The abuse the students suffered became one of the emblematic events of the dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 to 1983.
Their story was told in a 1986 film directed by Hector Olivera, called The Night of the Pencils, regarded as a powerful depiction of events....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 15, 2011
Egypt's prime minister triggered angry consternation in Israel on Thursday after declaring that the historic Camp David accords underpinning peace between the two countries were "not a sacred thing". Dramatically heightening tensions during an increasingly volatile time in Israel's relations with the Arab world, Essam Sharaf's suggestions that the 32-year treaty could be revised prompted disbelief in the Jewish state. Coming just days after an angry mob stormed the Israeli embassy in Cairo, Israeli officials said they were staggered more by the timing of Mr Sharaf's comments than their actual content. "Less than a week ago, we had the problem with the embassy," an Israeli official said. "I don't think a responsible prime minister should say things like that."Reeling from a noxious diplomatic row with Turkey and fearing that an expected Palestinian bid for statehood at the UN next week will heighten its growing sense of isolation.
Source: Newser
Sep 15, 2011
(Newser) – Dinosaurs just got a little more colorful. A batch of prehistoric feathers found in western Canada from about 70 million years ago suggests that feathers on dinosaurs and early birds were more diverse and complex than thought, reports the Los Angeles Times. "Instead of scaly animals portrayed as usually drab creatures, we have solid evidence for a fluffy colored past," Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History in New York tells the AP....
Source: Cornwall Free News
Sep 14, 2011
CFN - Seventy years after its destruction by Nazi troops, a memorial statue honoring President Woodrow Wilson will be rededicated on Oct. 5 in Prague, Czech Republic, the American Friends of the Czech Republic (AFoCR) announced today.The Wilson Monument commemorates the role that the former U.S. president played in helping the Czech people achieve independence in 1918, and it will stand as an enduring symbol of the historic friendship between the United States and the Czech Republic.“Many Americans, including the millions who are of Czech descent, are unaware of the aid and support President Wilson gave to the Czech people in their struggle for freedom,” said AFoCR Director Robert Doubek, who is Project Director for the Wilson Monument. “But the Czech people never forgot which country and which president did so much so secure their independence as a free nation. The rededicated Woodrow Wilson Monument honors a historic friendship that has stood the test of time.”...
Source: Press Release
Sep 14, 2011
New York City, September 14, 2011—The American Historical Association (AHA) announced today it has reached an agreement with Oxford University Press, Inc. (OUP USA) for the publication, promotion, and dissemination of its flagship journal, the American Historical Review (AHR). OUP USA will begin servicing subscriptions starting with the October 2012 issue of the Review. The AHR is the official publication of the AHA and has been the journal of record for the historical profession in the United States since 1895, bringing together scholarship from every major field of historical study. The journal also publishes approximately one thousand book reviews per year, surveying and reporting on the most important contemporary historical scholarship in the discipline.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 14, 2011
Long before his rise to power Adolf Hitler was an artist who attempted to earn a living selling sketches of Vienna to tourists and was rejected twice for a place at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.He was also a film buff particularly enjoying Hollywood movies which he viewed in his private cinema. One of his favourites was said to be Walt Disney's Snow White, the classic animated adaptation of a German fairy tale.In 2008 it emerged he may have combined the two passion when sketches believed to be drawn by Hitler were discovered in a folio by a Norwegian art gallery owner. The sketches were of Disney cartoon characters, including some of the Seven Dwarfs and one of Pinocchio.Italian dictator Benito Mussolini considered himself an intellectual and a patron of the arts. He was said to be an accomplished violinist and let it be known that he started each day reading a canto of Dante. When he wasn't enforcing his own brand of fascism on Italy he penned romantic novels and translated Italian classics into German....
Source: Hollywood Reporter
Sep 13, 2011
For weeks, ABC News has been teasing an exclusive attached to the tome Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, which features previously unreleased audio recordings from early 1964 of Onassis talking frankly about her time in the White House.The two-hour special anchored by Diane Sawyer and airing Tuesday at 9 p.m. will include extensive audio and an interview with Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of Onassis and John F. Kennedy....The Kennedy book also was something of a bargaining chip in the Kennedy family’s efforts to quash the History channel miniseries The Kennedys. History channel is part of AETN, which is owned by a consortium including Disney, NBC Universal and Hearst. Disney/ABC Television Group chief Anne Sweeney sits on the AETN board. And last January, sources told The Hollywood Reporter that Caroline Kennedy personally lobbied Sweeney to kill the miniseries and that Kennedy's cooperation with the book, including writing the introduction and promoting it on ABC, was part of those conversations.
Source: BBC
Sep 13, 2011
US researchers who exposed hundreds of Guatemalans to sexually transmitted diseases committed "unconscionable basic violations of ethics", a US health commission has found.Some 1,300 were infected with syphilis, gonorrhoea and other STDs without their knowledge in the 1940s.Many of the same researchers had earlier sought consent from prisoners in a US study. Of these, some 1,300 prisoners, psychiatric patients and sex workers were deliberately infected with syphilis, gonorrhoea or another sexually transmitted disease, chancroid.Only about 700 received some sort of treatment.In previous tests by many of the same researchers on prisoners in Terra Haute, Indiana, those participants were asked for their consent....
Source: ArtDaily.org
Sep 13, 2011
ANCHORAGE (REUTERS).- Four decorated clay disks have been discovered at a prehistoric site in alaska, apparently the first artifacts of their type discovered in the state, the University of alaska Museum of the North said.The disks were found during a summer expedition in Noatak National Preserve, at a site where archeologists have for decades been studying lakefront pit dwellings that date back 1,000 years, officials at the Fairbanks museum said.The disks are etched, and two of them have holes in the center.They were discovered when a team from the museum and the National Park Service traveled to the site in northwestern alaska to make records of previously discovered prehistoric petroglyphs on boulders....
Source: NYT
Sep 13, 2011
Brooklyn’s latest historic district – a cluster of 21 skyscrapers and office buildings surrounding Borough Hall downtown – was created on Tuesday over the objections of some of its landowners and inhabitants.The city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission approved the Borough Hall Skyscraper Historic District despite opposition from business groups that said the designation would burden owners with new costs and regulations, and from the co-op board of the district’s only residential building, 75 Livingston Street.Before the commission unanimously approved the designation, members acknowledged the controversy surrounding the proposed district, but said it was unwarranted. The neighborhood can flourish financially, several commissioners said, while still preserving the area’s “iconic” and “visually stunning” stone skyscrapers....
Source: NYT
Sep 13, 2011
The highest medical and legal officials of the American government and experts at Harvard and other top medical schools approved venereal disease experiments on people in the 1940s, which led to the deliberate infection of Guatemalan prisoners and mental patients with syphilis to test penicillin, a White House bioethics panel reported Tuesday.
Source: AP
Sep 13, 2011
TULSA, Okla. — A federal order for one of the nation's largest American Indian tribes to restore voting rights and benefits to about 2,800 descendants of members' former slaves threw plans for a special election for a new chief into turmoil Tuesday.The federal government sent the sternly-worded letter to the Cherokee Nation after it sent letters last week kicking the descendants out of the tribe and stripping them of benefits including medical care, food stipends and assistance for low-income homeowners.The tribe also barred the descendants from voting in a Sept. 24 special election for principal chief. The Cherokee Supreme Court ordered the special election after it said it could not determine with certainty the outcome of a close and hotly contested June election between incumbent Chad Smith and longtime tribal councilman Bill John Baker. The results had flip-flopped between the two during weeks of counts and recounts. Baker had twice been declared winner, but so had Smith.The federal government said that unless the descendants, known as freedmen, were allowed to vote, the upcoming election wouldn't be valid....
Source: NYT
Sep 13, 2011
SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic — Melba Navarro froze at the image of the man with bulging eyes, his mouth flung open in terror. Or was it pain? He was strapped into an electric chair.“How horrible was the suffering,” she said, a replica of the chair — a simple wooden seat with straps, a little light bulb on the armrest, a wire snaking from the handle to the socket — behind her. It sits under a single light bulb in a bare, chilly subterranean room meant to evoke the feeling of a torture chamber.A shock to the conscience is the goal of the new Memorial Museum of Dominican Resistance, which brings into stark relief the years of repressive rule in this country, principally the 30 years of dictatorship under Rafael Trujillo from 1930 to 1961, considered among the bloodiest in Latin America....
Source: NYT
Sep 13, 2011
In a ruling that tugged at South Africa’s racial wounds, a judge said Monday that a firebrand youth leader was guilty of hate speech for singing an apartheid-era freedom song that includes lyrics calling on people to shoot white farmers.The ruling by Judge Colin Lamont added further censure to the contentious figure of Julius Malema, the 30-year-old leader of the Youth League of the governing African National Congress and a vocal adversary of President Jacob Zuma.
Source: BBC News
Sep 12, 2011
Along 800 miles (1,287km) of French coast lie some of the most substantial and evocative vestiges of war-time Europe.The so-called Atlantic Wall - Hitler's defensive system against an expected Allied attack - stretched all the way from the Spanish border to Scandinavia.Inevitably, it was in France that the most extensive building took place. Today there are still thousands of blockhouses, barracks and gun emplacements visible along the French shore.But in France there has been no effort up until now to preserve this extraordinary historical landmark.Elsewhere, World War II bunkers have been renovated as tourist attractions or for educational visits. The internet boasts Atlantic Wall fan sites in Germany and the Netherlands - and strong interest in the UK - but nothing in France.It is as though the nation was relieved to see the German defences slide inexorably into the sands - and oblivion....
Source: WaPo
Sep 12, 2011
For the past few days, “startling” comments by Jackie Kennedy about Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, and Charles DeGaulle — recorded 47 years ago — have leaked out.Hype alert: The remarks aren’t that shocking — catty, perhaps — and the leaks are part of a calculated rollout for the book, “Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy,” which will be released Wednesday.“If people are looking for revelations about her, they will not find them,” said Carl Anthony, one of the country’s leading experts on first ladies. “What I think they reveal is an unerring, all-observing eye.”...
Source: Mirror (UK)
Sep 12, 2011
THE Queen Mother was partial to a strong Martini followed by a nap after lunch, a historian has revealed.The cocktail contained large amounts of gin and had to be made to her liking.Historian Alistair Fraser said when she visited Dounreay nuclear site in Caithness staff tried to look after her.Alistair, a former worker at the site, said: “Clarence House advised that the Queen Mother liked a nap after lunch, and was partial to a Martini cocktail.”...
Source: NYT
Sep 12, 2011
Hours after 1,000 New York State troopers, sheriff’s deputies and correction officers stormed Attica prison to crush a four-day inmate revolt in 1971, Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller telephoned President Richard M. Nixon to claim victory unambiguously.At the time, it appeared that State Police sharpshooters who had fired on the prison yard had killed mostly inmates, not some of the prison guards who had been held hostage inside. And because the inmates were black and the guards white, the governor and the president seemed to suggest, the American public would undoubtedly endorse the state’s assault on Attica.“They did a fabulous job,” Rockefeller told Nixon. “It really was a beautiful operation.”
