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Revolutionary War artifacts going on block

Dedham, Mass. –  Dr. John Warren heard the cannon fire and saw the flames from the battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775.  As a surgeon with Colonel Pickering’s Colonial Regiment in Salem, Dr. John Warren left Salem for Charlestown to tend to the wounded, carrying with him a tool of his trade, an amputation kit.  Warren knew that his older brother General Dr. Joseph Warren would be at Bunker Hill.  However, upon his arrival in Medford, he learned that his brother was missing.  Dr. Warren continued his journey to Cambridge, where for several days he made inquiries about his brother to soldiers that had survived the bloody battle.  Although the accounts of what transpired on Breed’s Hill varied, the truth was that his brother had been shot and killed, with his body bayoneted and buried in a shallow trench.  John Warren eventually went to Charlestown in search of his brother’s body, unfortunately, he was intercepted by a British sentry who bayoneted him in the side as a warning not to return.  

Correlation between academic achievement and Oval Office success

...Is there a correlation between success in the White House and a president’s perceived intelligence, or at least between academic performance and Oval Office success?American University historian Allan Lichtman told The Daily Caller that he believes so.“If you look at some of the least successful presidents,” he said, “they’re not exactly known for their [intellectual] prowess … Whereas the most brilliant of the presidents are all either very successful or at least reasonably successful.”How, then, does one explain Jimmy Carter, thought to be smart but generally considered a not-so-great president? What of Ronald Reagan, media-cast as an “amiable dunce” but considered by many to be a historically great chief executive?

German interior minister rejects compensation for German forced laborers after WWII

Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich on Sunday rejected demands to compensate Germans who were forced to work in neighbouring countries after World War II.Erika Steinbach, the president of the Bund der Vertriebenen (BdV), which represents Germans who were displaced after the war, wants the government to compensate people who were required to labour in nearby countries following the defeat of the Nazis. But the minister told Steinbach in a letter that what happened after the war was simply fate and cannot be compensated, according to the newspaper Bild am Sonntag. The BdV is widely loathed in eastern Europe for consistently making calls for compensation to those Germans displaced during and after the war. While many Germans had to perform forced labour in neighboring countries, BdV opponents argue the war only took place because Nazi Germany started it....

Vietnam embraces old enemy U.S. as counterweight to China

HANOI — Pham Binh Minh, whose father fought to force the United States out of Vietnam, is working fervently to elevate the interest and involvement of his country’s former enemy.Vietnam wants a U.S. presence for economic reasons and as a balance to China, the regional superpower. Mr. Minh is the new foreign minister; his father was part of Ho Chi Minh’s Communist regime during the bitter conflict of the 1960s and 1970s; later, he was foreign minister when Vietnam clashed with China.“One cannot imagine how fast the relationship between the United States and Vietnam has developed,” Mr. Minh, 52, said in Hanoi.“After 16 years of normalization, we’ve come to the stage where we’ve developed the relationship in nearly all aspects.”While the United States hasn’t fully erased the pain of that war, the Vietnamese, who suffered far more, have embraced their old adversary....

Egyptians styled their hair like Marilyn Monroe and Rihanna, archaeologists find

Ancient Egyptians used gels to style their hair, according to research on mummies indicating that some had looks similar to Marilyn Monroe and Rihanna.A study of male and female mummies has revealed the fashion-conscious Egyptians made use of a fat-based product to keep their hair in place.They used the styling gel on both long and short hair, tried to curl their hair with tongs and even plaited it in hair extensions to lengthen their tresses.It is thought they used the product in both life and death, with corpses being styled to ensure they looked good in the afterlife....

Zeus and Hera leave Acropolis for safe-keeping: official

A sculpture depicting Zeus and Hera, king and queen of the ancient Greek pantheon of gods, has been permanently removed from the Acropolis in Athens for safe-keeping, a project supervisor said Saturday.The sculpture -- one of the last of the original decorative pieces adorning the 2,500-year-old Parthenon temple -- will be showcased in the Acropolis Museum in Athens and will be replaced by a copy, architect Vasso Eleftheriou said.The Parthenon metope, or decorative frieze space, removed this week had been defaced by early Christians during the fall of pagan worship in Greece, and further damaged in later centuries by acid rain....

A Lone Oklahoma Tower’s Clear but Uncomfortable Links to 9/11

TULSA, Okla. — The phones rattled with the sound of an explosion. It was Sept. 11, and some of the traders at an energy company here had been speaking with colleagues at a financial company in the World Trade Center in New York. Suddenly, routine business calls became frantic dictations of final messages to loved ones. Then the lines went dead.In a strange twist of fate, the office tower here where those messages were scribbled — rising 52 stories above this sprawling oil town — bears an eerie resemblance to those fallen twins in New York, one so striking that executives would joke that the architect who designed all three buildings had simply shrunk his blueprints.Ten years after those phone conversations, the emotions and fears are still raw half a nation away from the site of the terrorist attacks, refreshed daily by the familiar profile of One Williams Center. Some see the tower as an unplanned memorial. Others worry that it is a potential target.“There is still fear,” said Linda Wagner, an accounting clerk who works in the building. “We are a miniature version in the middle of the country.”...

A church closed by roosting bats

Bats have driven out the worshippers from the 1,000-year-old church of St Hilda, Ellerburn, in Ryedale, North Yorkshire. For a decade volunteers have striven to keep the altar and woodwork clean, but the droppings from the bats have proved too powerful.“The smell is appalling,” Liz Cowley, a churchwarden told the BBC, “it’s a combination of ammonia from the urine and a musty smell from the droppings that catches at the back of the throat.” The roosting bats have soiled the interior, damaging the furnishings, including the altar. “You can see the urine marks on the altar, they won’t go away,” Mrs Cowley said.It is an offence for anyone intentionally to kill, injure or handle a bat, to disturb a roosting bat, or to damage, destroy or obstruct access to any place used by bats for shelter, whether they are present or not. It is even illegal to be found in possession of a dead bat....

King Arthur's round table may have been found by archaeologists in Scotland

The King's Knot, a geometrical earthwork in the former royal gardens below Stirling Castle, has been shrouded in mystery for hundreds of years.Though the Knot as it appears today dates from the 1620s, its flat-topped central mound is thought to be much older.Writers going back more than six centuries have linked the landmark to the legend of King Arthur.Archaeologists from Glasgow University, working with the Stirling Local History Society and Stirling Field and Archaeological Society, conducted the first ever non-invasive survey of the site in May and June in a bid to uncover some of its secrets....

I was not a Nazi collaborator, PG Wodehouse told MI5

PG Wodehouse was questioned by MI5 as a suspected collaborator for broadcasting from Berlin during the second world war. The creator of Jeeves protested that he was shocked and dismayed at the criticism his broadcasts had provoked in Britain.How the cosy world of Bertie Wooster collided with harsh reality is revealed in MI5 files released today at the National Archives. "I thought that people, hearing the talks, would admire me for having kept cheerful under difficult conditions," he said in a statement for MI5 in 1944.

Presidential collector's assistant pleads not guilty in theft

BALTIMORE (AP) — A presidential historian's assistant charged with conspiring to steal valuable documents from archives throughout the Northeast has entered a plea of not guilty.Twenty-four-year-old Jason Savedoff entered the pleas Friday morning in U.S. District Court in Baltimore.Savedoff and historian Barry Landau are charged with stealing historical documents from the Maryland Historical Society and conspiring to steal documents from other archives. Savedoff was released on bail last month, but had not yet entered a plea. Landau pleaded not guilty and was released....

Medical museum prepares move from Walter Reed campus

How do you move an 86-year-old skeleton across town? Hundreds of antique microscopes? A single lock of Abraham Lincoln's hair?This is the challenge the National Museum of Health and Medicine is facing. Under the direction of the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission, which was instituted in 2005, the museum will be moving from the Walter Reed campus in Northwest Washington to its new location at the Forest Glen Annex in Silver Spring, Maryland.Many have been watching the museum's neighbor, the 102-year-old Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Currently the hospital is working to transfer a different type of precious cargo -- wounded soldiers -- to the newly constructed Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., and the Fort Belvoir Community Hospital in Virginia....

New York’s History of Being Buffeted, Starting in 1821

Stephen Fybish, a 74-year-old weather historian from Manhattan’s Upper West Side, celebrated his second birthday in Jackson Heights, Queens, on Sept. 20, 1938, the day before the great hurricane struck New York City. Nonetheless, his mother often proudly reminded him, everybody who was invited made it to his party.The 1938 storm, which claimed 600 lives in the Northeast, devastated eastern Long Island, but spared much of the city, which, Mr. Fybish recalled, was soaked by about five inches of rain over two days and whipped by 60 m.p.h. winds.Like other hurricanes, even that storm paled in comparison to the fiercest gale ever recorded, the one that that slammed the city head-on near what is now Kennedy International Airport on Sept. 3, 1821 — before Mr. Fybish’s time, he acknowledges. The tide rose 13 feet and the Hudson and East Rivers converged in lower Manhattan....

Why Hurricanes Have Names: The History Behind Hurricane Nomenclature

As Hurricane Irene continues to batter the Bahamas and churn toward the northeastern United States, some may be wondering why this menacing swirl of peril goes by such an innocuous name. Why do we bestow people’s names on volatile storms in the first place? Find out more about the history of hurricane nomenclature and how it’s changed over the years.For as long as people have been tracking and reporting hurricanes, also known as tropical cyclones, they’ve been struggling to find ways to identify them. Until well into the 20th century, newspapers and forecasters in the United States devised names for storms that referenced their time period, geographic location or intensity; hence, the Great Hurricane of 1722, the Galveston Storm of 1900, the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 and the Big Blow of 1913. Meanwhile, hurricanes in the tempestuous West Indies were named for the Catholic saint’s days on which they made landfall.

Fossil redefines mammal history

A small, 160-million-year-old Chinese fossil has something big to say about the emergence of mammals on Earth. The shrew-like creature is the earliest known example of an animal whose kind evolved to provide nourishment to their unborn through a placenta. Its features clearly set it apart from marsupial mammals, which adopt a very different reproductive strategy. The discovery pushes back the date the two groups took up their separate lines, according to Nature magazine. The journal carries a paper written by a team of palaeontologists led by Zhe-Xi Luo from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, US. It describes the fossil remains of an animal unearthed in China's northeast Liaoning Province, which has produced so many stunning fossils in recent years....

Chile to probe Gen Bachelet's death under Pinochet

A judge in Chile has agreed to investigate the death in prison of Gen Alberto Bachelet during the rule of Gen August Pinochet in the 1970s. Judge Mario Carroza will review a complaint brought by relatives of the victims of military rule alleging that Gen Bachelet was tortured to death. Gen Bachelet was loyal to President Salvador Allende, deposed in a 1973 military coup led by Gen Pinochet. Gen Bachelet's daughter Michelle became Chile's first female president in 2006. A group representing the relatives of victims of Gen Augusto

Missing Lincoln Documents returned to National Archives [video]

Cheney Memoir Leaked to NYT

The New York Times "obtained" a copy of former Vice President Dick Cheney's memoir, In My Time, which is to be released next week and reports the book "opens with an account of Mr. Cheney's experiences during the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when he essentially commanded the government's response from a bunker beneath the White House while Mr. Bush -- who was away from Washington and hampered by communications breakdowns -- played a peripheral role. But Mr. Cheney wrote that he did not want to make any formal statement to the nation that day."...

Saudis 'find evidence of early horse domestication'

Saudi officials say archaeologists have begun excavating a site that suggests horses were domesticated 9,000 years ago in the Arabian Peninsula.The vice-president of the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities said the discovery at al-Maqar challenged the theory it first took place 5,500 years ago in Central Asia.Ali al-Ghabban said it also changed what was known about the evolution of culture in the late Neolithic period.A number of artefacts were also found.They included arrowheads, scrapers, grain grinders, tools for spinning and weaving, and other tools that showed the inhabitants were skilled at handicrafts.Mr Ghabban said carbon-14 tests on the artefacts, as well as DNA tests on human remains also found there, dated them to about 7,000 BC....

Rabbi Fabricated Swashbuckling Tales of Saving Holocaust Torahs, Prosecutors Say

He described himself as a risk-taking rabbi who had been “beaten up, thrown in jail and gone $175,000 into debt” on “expeditions” to Eastern Europe. He said his mission was to rescue and restore Torahs that had been “wrenched from their communities during the Holocaust” and place them with congregations that would look after them.“I guess you could call me the Jewish Indiana Jones,” he wrote in 2004.But on Wednesday, the rabbi, Menachem Youlus, was arrested in Manhattan on fraud charges. Court papers said he had never gone to the far-flung places he talked about and had made up the stories he told about discovering Torahs at the sites of the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps — or in Iraq in 2007.Instead, prosecutors accused him of selling fake Torahs and pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars through Save a Torah, the nonprofit organization he co-founded in 2004. A postal inspector who investigated Rabbi Youlus’s dealings also challenged his tale of financial troubles, saying in court papers that the rabbi had never been deeply in debt....