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 2, 2011
The dark allure of Adolf Hitler has turned his tea house at the top of a Bavarian mountain into one of the most visited sites in Germany.Tourism authorities announced that over 300,000 people visited the retreat on the peak of the Kehlstein mountain which was built for him as a 50th birthday gift by Nazi party secretary Martin Bormann in 1939. This is nearly 30,000 up on last year.Although Hitler's Berghof home on the mountain was destroyed by the Allies in bombing raids and after WW2, the tea house survived to become a tourism magnet in peacetime....
Source: Gettysburg Times
Sep 2, 2011
The former Gettysburg Country Club has belonged to the National Park Service for just five months, but plans are already underway to restore the land to its Civil War appearance of 1863.However, significant alterations to the property, where the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg was fought in 1863, won't occur until after Gettysburg National Military Park completes a "Cultural Landscape Report."According to GNMP Superintendent Bob Kirby, the park intends to raze four buildings that previously served as maintenance or storage sheds for a nine-hole golf course. The park is in the process of awarding a demolition contract to remove a golf cart barn, a rest-room building made of concrete block, a wooden shelter, and a small masonry structure used as a well-house.They will likely be razed over the next month....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 2, 2011
Australian Christians are furious over changes to the national curriculum that will drop the terms BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini) from text books, replacing them with neutral, non-religious language.Under the new politically correct curriculum BC and AD will be replaced with BCE (Before Common Era), BP (Before Present) and CE (Common Era) .Peter Jensen, the Archbishop of Sydney, said that taking references to the birth of Jesus Christ out of school books was an “intellectually absurd attempt to write Christ out of human history” that he likened it to calling Christmas “the festive season”.“It is absurd because the coming of Christ remains the centre point of dating and because the phrase ‘common era’ is meaningless and misleading,” he told the Sydney Daily Telegraph....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 2, 2011
The terms BC, Before Christ and AD, Anno Domini, remain in common usage but have been expunged from the secular language of officialdom and academia.While they may not be the language of everyday life, the new terms BCE, Before Common Era and CE , Common Era (first invented in the sixth century AD) are now the rule in order to express politically correct sensitivity to non-Christians....As the Telegraph’s Christopher Booker noted: “The trouble with this politically-correct effort to spare offence to Muslims, Jews, atheists or other non-Christians from the use of a dating system tied to Jesus, is that it prompts any child to ask ‘So what is this Common Era based on?’, and brings up the very point it seeks to avoid.”...
Source: HNN Staff
Sep 2, 2011
The annual meeting of the American Political Science Association was briefly interrupted this afternoon when a woman protesting the appearance of Bush administration official John Yoo loudly denounced him from the floor when he began to speak. She continued remonstrating against him for three minutes and fifty-four seconds to the catcalls of the audience, who demanded she "shut-up" and leave. Eventually security escorted her out. She was allowed to leave before the police arrived.Yoo, a professor of law at Berkeley, has been the subject of protests for authoring memos in the Bush administration in defense of enhanced interrogation techniques denounced by critics as torture.He was speaking on a panel discussing "The 150th Anniversary of Fort Sumter: Lessons for Presidential Power Today."Yoo refused to be drawn into a debate with the woman, who charged him with defending torture. She demanded that audience members leave to signal their censure of his memos. None left.After she was physically forced to leave he proceeded with a shortened version of his talk. He said he didn't want to take up more time than he was allotted in the program.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 2, 2011
The BBC is risking the ire of Charles Dickens’s fans with a new BBC Two adaptation of his unfinished final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood....
Dickens wrote only half the psychological thriller before his death on June 9, 1870, leaving readers puzzling over how it might have ended.
Gwyneth Hughes - who wrote the TV thriller Five Days and Miss Austen Regrets - has taken on the unenviable task of completing the tale for a BBC Two drama, due to be broadcast in the bicentenary of Dickens’s birth next year.
The BBC insists the story remains relevant some 140 years after its conception, billing the two-part drama as “a strange, disturbing and modern tale about drugs, stalking and darkness visible”....
Source: Popular Archaeology
Sep 1, 2011
The Sicevo Gorge is a rugged, picturesque river canyon cut into the Kunivica plateau in southeastern Serbia. Containing a nature park, it draws visitors for its beautiful landscape, the result of the occurrence and interaction of geological, geomorphological and hydrological phenomena. But it also contains a series of caves, at least one of which has yielded evidence of human presence during the shifting glacial times of the Ice Age of present-day Europe. The Gorge was placed on the map of popular attention when, in 2008, anthropologists uncovered a partial human mandible (lower jaw), complete with three teeth, while excavating in a small cave. "We were looking for Neanderthals," said Dr. Mirjana Roksandic, a participating paleoanthropologist with the University of Winnepeg and a leading research team member. "But this is much better."
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 1, 2011
Benito Mussolini was a notorious womaniser, notching up a string of lovers and mistresses while forging an empire in Africa and building a fascist dictatorship.But a newly-discovered letter suggests that Il Duce's sexual conquests reached to the very top of the Italian establishment, to a princess who became the country's last queen.The revelation that Mussolini conducted an affair with Queen Maria Jose of Savoy in the 1930s is all the more surprising because the Belgian-born monarch was a critic of fascism and an important conduit during the war between the Allies and the Axis power.Evidence of the alleged affair between the two has emerged from a letter, published by an Italian magazine for the first time yesterday (wed), which was written by the dictator's youngest, Romano Mussolini, to an Italian journalist in 1971....
Source: BBC News
Sep 1, 2011
An ancient church in Beverley that dates back to the 12th Century has given the BBC access to a secret room hidden behind its altar.The room inside St Mary's Church contains some unusual artefacts that would not be normally found inside a parish church including a scold's bridle, which was an iron muzzle used as a form of punishment, and an elaborate maiden's garland from the 17th Century.How and why these objects turned up at the church is still a mystery.
Source: AP
Sep 1, 2011
LEXINGTON, Va. – About 100 people rallied Thursday evening in opposition to a proposal to limit the flying of the Confederate flag in the rural Virginia city where Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson are buried.The Sons of Confederate Veterans organized the "Save our Flags" gathering before the city, which was considering an ordinance to limit flags on downtown poles to just those of the United States, Virginia and the city of Lexington. The proposal has angered defenders of the divisive Southern symbol. It would not limit the flag's display elsewhere."I am a firm believer in the freedom to express our individual rights, which include flying the flag that we decide to fly," said Philip Way, a Civil War re-enactor who turned out for the late-summer rally clad in a Confederate wool uniform. "That's freedom to me."Mimi Knight, watching from a wrought iron fence at a sea of Confederate flags in a small city park, was not part of the rally. But she said she thought the city ordinance seemed too restrictive.
Source: BBC News
Sep 1, 2011
The extent of US medical experiments in Guatemala on STDs during the 1940s is greater than previously thought, health authorities have told the BBC.The number of infected people could be as high as 2,500, says the president of the Medical Association of Guatemala.According to a US report released on Monday, 1,300 Guatemalans were infected without their knowledge to study the effects of penicillin.US scientists knew they were violating ethical rules, the report found.There is also enough evidence to conclude there was collaboration between US and Guatemalan authorities at the time of the tests, Carlos Mejia, a member of the commission established by the Guatemalan government to investigate the experiments, told BBC Mundo.At least nine Guatemalan doctors were involved in these experiments, he said....
Source: Scientific American
Sep 1, 2011
"There's a reason we've never gone back to the moon," teases the poster for the new horror sci-fi flick "Apollo 18." The movie claims to reveal decades-old footage of astronauts on a secret mission two years after Apollo 17 — the last real expedition to the moon — flew in 1972. (Without giving away anything that isn't in the trailer, lunar aliens apparently share some blame for our 40-year absence from the moon.)In actuality, NASA did prepare for Apollos 18, 19 and 20. But these missions were scrapped amid budgetary concerns and a decline in public interest."The whole world was glued to Apollo 11," said David R. Williams, planetary curation scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "But by the time they got to 16 and 17, the general public just really wasn't that interested anymore." [Lunar Legacy: 45 Apollo Moon Mission Photos]
Source: BBC
Sep 1, 2011
At the end of the 19th Century, the thylacine had a price on its head.
The strange marsupial carnivore, which became extinct in 1936, was thought to kill sheep. Sheep farming was the backbone of the Australian economy, and the government duly set up a bounty scheme to exterminate the species.
But a new study has now revealed that the marsupial carnivore's jaws were too weak to snare a struggling adult sheep.
The findings are reported in the Journal of Zoology.
As well as revealing the injustice of its being hunted, the study also suggests that the animal's diet contributed significantly to its demise....
Source: BBC
Sep 1, 2011
The world's earliest sophisticated stone tools have been found near Lake Turkana in northwest Kenya.
The teardrop-shaped hand-axes date to about 1.76 million years ago, and would have been used for a range of tasks from chopping wood to cutting up meat.
They would have been so useful in fact that scientists describe them as the "Swiss army knife" of the Stone Age.
Researchers tell the journal Nature that the tools were probably made by the human ancestor Homo erectus.
This was a bigger-brained, smarter and more dextrous creature than any human species before it....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 1, 2011
Eva Peron, the former Argentine first lady, is believed to have kept Nazi treasures taken from wealthy Jewish families killed in concentration camps, according to a new book.
Source: AP
Sep 1, 2011
The headless remains of Australia's most storied criminal, Ned Kelly, have been identified, officials said Thursday, ending a decades-long mystery surrounding the final resting place of a man now seen by many as a folk hero.
Kelly, who led a gang of bank robbers in Australia's southern Victoria state in the 19th century, was hanged in 1880. His corpse's fate was unknown, though it was long suspected his body lay alongside 33 other executed inmates in a mass grave at a prison.
Officials pinpointed the location of the grave site in 2008 and later exhumed the bodies for analysis. A DNA sample from one of Kelly's descendants confirmed that one of the skeletons -- which was missing most of its skull -- was that of the notorious Ned, said Victoria Attorney General Robert Clark....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Sep 1, 2011
One of America’s most famous historical figures who wrote the Declaration of Independence might not have fathered his slave’s children after all.It had been believed for more than a decade that former U.S. President Thomas Jefferson fathered his slave Sally Hemings’s youngest son, Eston.But DNA evidence that showed a Jefferson male fathered the boy actually suggests Mr Jefferson’s brother Randolph was the dad, a new book says.It’s an important debate because of America’s history of slavery and race - and Mr Jefferson’s controversial ownership of slaves....
Source: The Star
Aug 31, 2011
YORK, ENGLAND—Helen Brower is a window cleaner and people pay five pounds ($7.25) an hour to watch her work.Brower is one of a half dozen glaziers hired to clean and restore the world’s largest collection of medieval stained-glass windows. They festoon York Minster, one of Europe’s largest cathedrals and they need to be cleaned every 125 years....On Wednesday and Friday afternoons, tours — with a maximum of 10 people — are conducted into the bowels of the cathedral to watch glaziers work on the medieval window panes. While down there visitors can also see remains of the Roman fortress that once stood on this site before the cathedral was built between 1220 and 1472. Yes, it took 252 years.Another sign of York’s Roman heritage is the high stone wall surrounding the city’s ancient core. Much of it was built by the Romans back in 71 AD, about the same time they were building the colosseum in Rome....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Aug 31, 2011
It is a long journey down into the dark - and back into the depths of history.But it certainly isn't a trip for the claustrophobic. The ancient tunnels of Hirbet Madras near the Sea of Galilee, in Israel, are so tight that they are almost impassable in places.
Source: BBC
Aug 31, 2011
The tomb for the original builders of Stonehenge could have been unearthed by an excavation at a site in Wales.
The Carn Menyn site in the Preseli Hills is where the bluestones used to construct the first stone phase of the henge were quarried in 2300BC.
Organic material from the site will be radiocarbon dated, but it is thought any remains have already been removed.
Archaeologists believe this could prove a conclusive link between the site and Stonehenge.
The remains of a ceremonial monument were found with a bank that appears to have a pair of standing stones embedded in it.
The bluestones at the earliest phase of Stonehenge - also set in pairs - give a direct architectural link from the iconic site to
