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: PoliticalWire
Sep 8, 2011
Jacqueline Kennedy recalled in a series of oral-history interviews recorded in 1964, but just released, that President Kennedy felt strongly that Lyndon Johnson shouldn't become president, ABC News reports. In the months just before his death in 1963 he has even begun talking to his brother, Robert Kennedy, "about ways to maneuver around Johnson in 1968."...
Source: Live Science
Sep 8, 2011
The bones spent close to a century in 35 small boxes meant to hold loose cigarettes and shotgun cartridges, each box big enough to hold the complete skeleton of one infant. Then Jill Eyers found them in a museum archive."It was quite heart-rending, really, to open all these little cigarette boxes and find babies inside," said Eyers, an archaeologist and director of Chiltern Archaeology in England. "But they kept very well over 100 years."These remains were already ancient by the time they were excavated from the English countryside in 1912 and put into boxes. Eyers estimates they are now about 1,800 years old, dating back to the time when England was part of the Roman Empire....
Source: BBC
Sep 8, 2011
A sacred stone not supposed to be seen by Aboriginal women has been withdrawn from a British auction following a public outcry in Australia.
The stone had been listed for sale at Canterbury Auction Galleries in Kent for up to £6,000 on Wednesday.
However on Tuesday night the Australian High Commission called the gallery to explain its significance.
It was withdrawn and efforts are being made to repatriate it to the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.
The stone, known as tjuringa, is used in the most profound ceremonies within Aboriginal culture and then secreted away, with only senior elders knowing how to retrieve it....
Source: BBC
Sep 8, 2011
Canadian explorers have drawn a blank in the latest hunt for the remains of Captain Sir John Franklin's fatal expedition, 160 years after he took his crew of 129 men deep into the Arctic.
But the men vanished into the frozen Arctic, leaving a few clues but no explanation as to what went wrong.
The first search party set off in 1848 and searches involving teams from Canada, the UK, and the US have continued ever since. Last week, representatives from Parks Canada announced the results from their search this summer, which proved unsuccessful.
Explorers have found rock cairns with messages from sailors who abandoned ship. They've taken oral history from Inuit people whose ancestors saw the ships get stuck in giant ice floes. In several cases, they've dug up the bones and preserved bodies of the ship's crew. But they've found no ships, no logs, and no sign of Franklin himself.
In subsequent years, a rough sketch of the troubles emerged. During the first winter, the crew disembarked, travelled south to hunt. Franklin left a reassuring message in a rock cairn, signed "All well". A month later, he was dead....
Source: Reuters
Sep 8, 2011
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Ten years after al Qaeda's attack on the United States, the vast majority of the 9/11 Commission's investigative records remain sealed at the National Archives in Washington, even though the commission had directed the archives to make most of the material public in 2009, Reuters has learned.The National Archives' failure to release the material presents a hurdle for historians and others seeking to plumb one of the most dramatic events in modern American history.The 575 cubic feet of records were in large part the basis for the commission's public report, issued July 22, 2004. The commission, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, was established by Congress in late 2002 to investigate the events leading up to the 9/11 attacks, the pre-attack effectiveness of intelligence agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the government's emergency response.
Source: The Atlantic
Sep 8, 2011
Is the Australopithecus sediba our ancestor? New research in the journal Science suggests so, as high-resolution scans and uranium-dating tests reveal that this hominin exhibited primitive as well as human-like traits and existed around the same time early Homo species first walked the Earth."The many advanced features found in the brain and body, along with the earlier date, make it possibly the best candidate ancestor for our genus," says Lee Berger, the project leader from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, in a news release.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 8, 2011
Historians and literary experts have hailed the publication of Lena Mukhina's diary, published in Russian under the title 'Keep my Sad Story', as a sensation in both its vividness and the quality of the writing.Unlike Anne Frank who died in a Nazi concentration camp, Lena Mukhina lived through the Second World War surviving the entire almost 900-day Nazi blockade of Leningrad which started in September 1941.Aged 16 when she started recording her thoughts, she witnessed the death of her mother, suffered starvation, and survived countless bombing raids while cataloguing the normal growing pains of a teenage girl at the same time."In the beginning, the diary reads like a love story," said Marina Rymynskaya, who typed up the original manuscript. "But on June 22 1941 (When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union) the handwriting changed dramatically. At first I thought that somebody else was writing. It was psychologically and physically difficult to work on this project. After typing up two or three pages I often felt physically sick and had to get some air."...
Source: NYT
Sep 8, 2011
If history is a guide, the odds that the American economy is falling into a double-dip recession have risen sharply in recent weeks and may even have reached 50 percent....Over the last 50 years, every time that job growth has been as meager as it has been over the last four months, the economy has been headed toward recession, in a recession or in the immediate aftermath of one. From early 2010 through this spring, by contrast, employment was growing fast enough to make the economy look as if it were in a recovery, albeit a modest one....Perhaps the best sign of how difficult it is to know the economy’s direction is that, as a group, the nation’s professional forecasters have failed to predict all the recessions since the 1970s, according to data kept by the Philadelphia Fed. In the last 30 years, the average probability they put on the economy lapsing into recession has never risen above 50 percent — until the economy was already in a recession.
Source: Yahoo News
Sep 7, 2011
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A Goodwill worker who spotted a photograph of Confederate General Robert E. Lee has helped the charity make $23,000 in an online auction.The tintype photograph was in a bin, about to be shipped out, when a worker grabbed it and sent it to the charity's local online department. The item was then put up for auction, which closed Wednesday night....
Source: Discovery News
Sep 7, 2011
Unraveling the mystery surrounding the shipwreck found last year during excavations of the World Trade Center site has resulted in several facts as well as theories. The 18th century vessel, likely a single-masted sloop, measured approximately 50 feet long, and had a shallow, double-ended draft aided by a small, tapered keel built of squared-off hickory that that ran from stem-to-stern. The hull was built from Philadelphia oak trees -- one of which had lived for at least 111 years and was still growing in 1773, its youngest sapwood preserved in one of the boat's timbers.Maritime historian Norman Brouwer had suggested that the unusually crafted sailboat was from a small rural shipyard and the trees for its timber from the same forest. "The data we see suggest something very similar," says Neil Pederson of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory's Tree Ring Lab in Palisades, NY. "It's an interesting intersection in experts," he told Discovery News. He was part of a four-person dendrochronology team from the Tree Ring Lab working on samples of the vessel's white oak planks and its hickory keel. Other tree species used in the boat's construction included spruce and southern yellow pine, reported wood deterioration researcher Robert Blanchette of the University of Maine.
Source: IPS News
Sep 7, 2011
PARIS, Sept 7, 2011 (Tierramérica) - The latest archeological findings in the Mirador Basin of Guatemala lend further credence to the theory that the Maya civilisation that once flourished there was brought down by environmental causes such as deforestation.A major exhibition at the Musée du Quai Branly in París until Oct. 2, "Maya: From Dawn to Dusk", features over 150 pieces of art and ceramics from El Mirador, in northern Guatemala, and illustrates the scientific and artistic sophistication of this ancient Mesoamerican civilisation.
Source: AP
Sep 7, 2011
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The USS Iowa — the last surviving World War II battleship without a home — will head to the Port of Los Angeles to stand as a permanent museum and memorial to battleships, the Navy said Tuesday. The nonprofit Pacific Battleship Center, which has been working to bring the ship to Los Angeles, beat out the San Francisco Bay area city of Vallejo. The Navy's decision also comes six years after the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted against making a public display of the ship in that city, citing local opposition to the Iraq war and the military's stance on gays, among other things....
Source: NYT
Sep 7, 2011
The Museum of the City of New York will take over the beleaguered Seaport Museum New York using a $2 million grant from the corporation in charge of developing Lower Manhattan, according to state, city and museum officials who made the deal public on Wednesday....The Seaport Museum, at 12 Fulton Street and formerly named the South Street Seaport Museum because of the district where it stands, was founded in 1967 and explores the maritime history of New York through artifacts, historic ships and service boats. It has always been a modest operation, catering to tourists and nautical buffs.The City Museum, on Fifth Avenue between 103rd and 104th Streets, explores the city’s history through exhibitions and public programs. It is in a strong financial position for the takeover with a budget that has been in balance since 2003 and with a $90 million renovation that is about 70 percent complete....
Source: Yahoo News
Sep 6, 2011
Ten years after the terrorist attacks, and less than a week from the ribbon-cutting at the new World Trade Center, the New York City mayor says it's time to retire Ground Zero.
In a speech delivered this morning on Wall Street, Michael Bloomberg said the new construction and memorial on the site has made the name no longer fitting, news site DNAinfo.com reports.
His call for the name change isn't the first: For years Downtown residents have asked officials to stop calling the two rising skyscrapers and eight-acre memorial "Ground Zero," according to the article, saying that moniker recognizes only the past destruction rather than the promise of recovery.
The largest tower at the new World Trade Center will reach 1,776 feet, becoming the tallest building in the country when completed, while towers two, three, and four will each be successively shorter.
Despite the years of construction delays and cost overruns, Bloomberg says the half-finished office complex on the site of the former twin towers is the center of a growing and vibrant neighborhood, which boasts its highest population since the 1920s...
Source: Reuters
Sep 6, 2011
LONDON (Reuters) - It's a lesson that Germany might not want to hear, but history suggests that greater centralization of tax and spending powers is the outcome when monetary unions run into crises like the one now sorely testing the euro zone.In a study of the political and fiscal record of five federal states, economic historian Michael Bordo concludes that such a policy response is already unfolding in the European Union, as illustrated by the creation of a euro area financial rescue fund."History suggests that the creation of a union-wide bond market with a common bond may prove to be a successful way to finance increases in public expenditure to prevent the malaise experienced today in Europe," Bordo wrote in a paper co-authored with Agnieszka Markiewicz and Lars Jonung....
Source: NPR
Sep 6, 2011
The headline writers at USA Today put it this way: "9/11: How One Day Changed Our World." National Geographic observed that the attacks of Sept. 11 would "alter the course of history."But the shocking assaults in 2001 on the World Trade towers, the Pentagon and the planned hit on the Capitol were not the first surprise attacks that changed the way humans do business.Through the centuries, there have been unexpected strikes on civilian targets that occurred during wars — declared or not — and peacetime attacks that came completely out of the blue. The Sept. 11 attacks fall into the latter category.Sudden assailments have toppled societies and shaken civilizations. The element of surprise can be a very potent change agent. And, perhaps, the most powerful weapon of all.One of the earliest accounts of an epic surprise attack comes from Greek mythology: the Trojan Horse. The episode, explains George Dameron, a history professor at Saint Michael's College in Colchester, Vt., is associated with the 10-year war between Greeks and Trojans....
Source: AFL-CIO Blog
Sep 6, 2011
Most American children never receive any education about the union movement’s proper place in our country’s history and its many contributions to the nation’s development, according to a new report.“American Labor and U.S. History Textbooks: How Labor’s Story Is Distorted in High School History Textbooks,” sponsored by the Albert Shanker Institute in cooperation with the American Labor Studies Center, surveys four major textbooks that together account for most of the market in U.S. history textbooks. The report found that these textbooks often present labor history in a biased, negative way, focusing on strikes and strike violence while giving little or no attention to the employer abuse and violence that caused the strikes....
Source: Fox News
Sep 6, 2011
Nuclear physics might soon solve a long-standing Leonardo da Vinci mystery -- the fate of a lost masterpiece known as the "Battle of Anghiari."
Source: The Atlantic
Sep 6, 2011
Scientists have collected evidence for years that modern humans interbred with our ridge-browed Neanderthal ancestors in Eurasia. But in Africa, where the homo sapien species is said to have emerged, a lack of genetic evidence has left researchers scratching their heads about exactly how we came to beat out not only the Neanderthals, or homo neanderthalis, but other archaic species like homo erectus and homo habilus. A new paper published by Michael Hammer from the University of Arizona, however, provides evidence that homo sapiens not only interbred with Neanderthals in Eurasia, they also had sex with several species of our ancestors across the African continent. And they did it often. "We think there were probably thousands of interbreeding events," said Hammer. "It happened relatively extensively and regularly."
Source: Live Science
Sep 5, 2011
Our species may have bred with a now extinct lineage of humanity before leaving Africa, scientists say.Although we modern humans are now the only surviving lineage of humanity, others once roamed the Earth, making their way out of Africa before our species did, including the familiar Neanderthals in West Asia and Europe and the newfound Denisovans in East Asia. Genetic analysis of fossils of these extinct lineages has revealed they once interbred with modern humans, unions that may have endowed our lineage with mutations that protected them as we began expanding across the world about 65,000 yeas ago.
