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: BBC
Aug 24, 2011
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....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 24, 2011
Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, spoke of his pride at his historic achievement more than four decades ago during a rare public appearance in Australia. The former astronaut relived the moment he set foot on the lunar surface on July 21 1969 as he provided a personal commentary to attendees of an accounting seminar in Sydney.Speaking for more than hour on Wednesday, he told the crowd about the importance of team work and how risk taking contrasted to today’s “risk management” culture.The American, 81, also said he was in favour of establishing a permanent base on the moon for scientific research, similar to those in Antarctica.He spoke proudly about his preparation for the moon landing which made him a household name, as he took the audience through the mission’s final moments using never before seen footage....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 24, 2011
IKEA's billionaire founder Ingvar Kamprad was a member of the Swedish Nazi party and was such a concern to secret service they opened a file on him, according to a new book.
The 1943 file, revealed in a book published on Wednesday by Swedish journalist Elisabeth Åsbrink, will revive the long-standing controversy over the far right sympathies of the 85-year-old businessman.
It proves for the first time that Mr Kamprad was an active member of Svensk Socialistisk Samling – the successor to the Swedish Nationalist Socialist Workers Party – even detailing his membership number, 4013....
Source: Fox News
Aug 24, 2011
Some New York politicians and religious leaders are criticizing Mayor Michael Bloomberg for not offering clergy members a role in the high-profile ceremonies marking 10 years since the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, The Wall Street Journal reported. A spokewoman from Bloomberg's office told The Journal that the focus, as in past years, will be on the family members of the fallen. Rabbi Joseph Potasnik told the paper he understood the mayor's decision, saying, "I don't know how to make it possible for everyone to have a place at the table."There was a plethora of interfaith events, and New York Magazine even named New York Fire Department chaplain Mychal Judge, who died in the attack and is immortalized in a picture being carried from a tower, the "most famous victim of the World Trade Center attack."....
Source: AP
Aug 24, 2011
Former Vice President Dick Cheney says he had a secret resignation letter signed and stored in a safe for most of the Bush administration in case he became incapacitated.
Cheney says he signed the resignation letter in March 2001, just about two months after taking office. He says only President George W. Bush and one of the vice president's staff members knew the letter existed.
Cheney says one of the reasons for having a resignation letter on hand was his history of health problems, including multiple heart attacks. He says the letter could have been used if he had been incapacitated by a heart attack or stroke....
Source: CNN
Aug 24, 2011
Almost a decade after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, a new set of remains from the site has been identified, the New York City medical examiner's office announced.The remains are those of Ernest James, 40, said Ellen Borakove, the spokeswoman for the office. James' identification brings to 1,632 the number of victims named so far. As many as 1,121 victims still have not been identified, according to the medical examiner's office.A statement from the office said 2,753 people were reported missing after the towers fell. DNA testing was used to identify the majority of the named victims.The last set of remains identified from the attacks was in May, according to Borakove....
Source: LA Times
Aug 24, 2011
The Washington Monument is closed today after cracking in stones at the top of the structure was discovered Tuesday.The cracking was possibly caused by the magnitude 5.8 earthquake that shook the East Coast Tuesday afternoon....
Source: BBC
Aug 23, 2011
A druid who went to the High Court to try to stop researchers examining ancient human remains found at Stonehenge has failed in his legal bid.
King Arthur Pendragon wanted the remains found in 2008 to be reburied immediately.
He was fighting a Ministry of Justice decision allowing scientists at Sheffield University to analyse the samples for five more years.
His bid was rejected at a High Court hearing in London.
Mr Justice Wyn Williams refused to give Mr Pendragon permission to launch a judicial review action, ruling that there was insufficient evidence to show that the Ministry of Justice might have acted unreasonably....
Source: Guardian (UK)
Aug 23, 2011
Archaeologists have discovered only the second known port of Roman Britain, where soldiers would have arrived in numbers from the Mediterranean to aid in the fight against some of the most stubborn and hostile of all the tribes they had to face.Over the last year, archaeologists have been digging near the Roman fortress of Caerleon, just north of Newport, south Wales, and have made some remarkable discoveries. On Tuesday, the site was declared the only known Roman British port outside London."It is extremely exciting," Peter Guest, leading the excavation team from Cardiff University, said. "What we have found exceeds all expectations. It now seems clear that we're looking at a new addition to our knowledge of Roman Britain."...
Source: Yahoo News
Aug 23, 2011
OKLAHOMA CITY (Reuters) - The nation's second-largest Indian tribe formally booted from membership thousands of descendants of black slaves who were brought to Oklahoma more than 170 years ago by Native American owners.The Cherokee nation voted after the Civil War to admit the slave descendants to the tribe.But on Monday, the Cherokee nation Supreme Court ruled that a 2007 tribal decision to kick the so-called "Freedmen" out of the tribe was proper.The controversy stems from a footnote in the brutal history of U.S. treatment of Native Americans. When many Indians were forced to move to what later became Oklahoma from the eastern U.S. in 1838, some who had owned plantations in the South brought along their slaves....
Source: East Anglian Daily Times (UK)
Aug 23, 2011
ALMOST 630 years of waiting are almost over as the face of Suffolk’s most iconic and tragic figure is set to be revealed.Forensic experts from Dundee University have been working to put a face to Simon Theobald of Sudbury who had his head hacked off by Watt Tyler’s rampaging mob during the peasant uprising in 1381 for his role in introducing the poll tax.In June the team removed the skull, which sits in a cubby hole in St Gregory’s Church, Sudbury, and took it to West Suffolk Hospital for a series of scans by a radiologist in the first phase of the process to reconstruct his face and reveal what he would have looked like....
Source: HNN Staff
Aug 23, 2011
Compiled from various sources. Historic earthquake information is from the U.S. Geological Survey.Tuesday has been a day of rolling and tumbling on the East Coast.A magnitude 5.8 earthquake struck near Mineral, Virginia at 1:51 p.m., with its effects felt as far away as Maine and North Carolina. Buildings were evacuated in New York and Washington, D.C., and national monuments in the nation's capital were closed for the day.Damage appears to be light, although the central tower of the National Cathedral suffered the loss of three pinnacles on its central tower.TMineral, Virginia is a town about an hour northwest of Richmond, within the Central Virginia seismic zone, an area crisscrossed with small faults that are a vestige of the formation of the Appalachian Mountains some 400 million years ago.
Source: NYT
Aug 22, 2011
STUTTGART, Germany — The swastika is illegal here, as is the Hitler salute. Germans have learned after decades of fighting their expression that the ideas behind them cannot be outlawed.But the question facing German officials today is whether pushing those ideas underground makes them more radical in the short term, and maybe even more attractive in the long run, precisely because they are forbidden.In the debate over the rise of the far right in Europe, Germany has remained, for obvious reasons related to its history, very much the exception. The kind of mainstream far-right parties so common in the rest of Europe are nowhere to be found here.But the anti-Islam and anti-immigrant ideas that have taken root across the Continent burst into the mainstream debate here last year when a book by an executive with Germany’s central bank, Thilo Sarrazin, blaming Muslims for “dumbing down” Germany sold more than a million copies. The national discussion culminated with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s declaration at a party conference last October that multiculturalism had “utterly failed.”
Source: NYT
Aug 22, 2011
WASHINGTON — Now we know: The arc of the moral universe is long, but it leads to a picturesque glade beside the Tidal Basin, with the Washington Monument providing sentry.After more than two decades of planning, fund-raising and construction, the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial — a four-acre tract south of the Mall featuring a granite statue of Dr. King — has officially opened to the public.The memorial will be formally dedicated on Sunday in a ceremony that is expected to draw perhaps a few hundred thousand people from around the country. But some of its earliest judges came on Monday, as hundreds of city residents and visitors stood in line for their turn to take a look.“I wanted to be part of this history,” said William Wilson, a retired federal employee. “This is the architecture of progress.”The dedication, which is to include remarks by President Obama, coincides with the 48th anniversary of the March on Washington and Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial.
Source: AP
Aug 22, 2011
BERLIN -- Berlin's Central and Regional Library says it will return books the Nazis stole from the Social Democratic Party, including an English-language copy of the Communist Manifesto.The copy dates from 1883 and is believed to have belonged to Friedrich Engels, who penned the original German work with Karl Marx in 1848....
Aug 22, 2011
Related Links: Bill Moyers Interview with HNNBill Moyers will be back on TV in January with a new series on public television, HNN has learned. Mr. Moyers alerted public television stations to the news this afternoon in a letter that explained that even though he is now seventy-seven, "I surely have one more season in me."He left public television more than a year ago, saying “It’s time to go.” But when the Carnegie Corporation offered to provide the lead grant for a new show featuring creative thinkers he and his wife Judith, his long-time television partner, decided to return to TV. He says they had enjoyed the time they had spent with their grandchildren, and with the help of Netflix "caught up on a lot of movies and television we had missed while meeting one deadline after another." But after sitting "for long stretches of time watching the hawks circle above our trees," he and Judith concluded they were not ready, quoting Tennyson, "to rust unburnished."
Source: The Root
Aug 22, 2011
The National Mall, a wide expanse in the heart of the nation's capital, is home to numerous monuments honoring U.S. presidents and military sacrifice. This week, the setting's latest commemorative work opens to the public: the long-awaited Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial.Bordering Washington, D.C.'s Tidal Basin between the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials, a 30-foot granite sculpture of the prominent civil rights activist looms. It's flanked by a crescent-shaped wall inscribed with 14 excerpts from some of King's most notable sermons and speeches. Further enhancing the site are 182 cherry blossom trees, which will reach full bloom each April, the month of King's death. And the memorial's street address, 1964 Independence Avenue, references the 1964 Voting Rights Act, a milestone of the civil rights movement....The vision to build a national memorial for Martin Luther King Jr. was initially conceived in 1984 by Alpha Phi Alpha, the African-American fraternity of which King was a member. Congress authorized the memorial in 1996, and two years later the Alphas set up a foundation to manage fundraising -- to the tune of $120 million -- and design.
Source: AP
Aug 22, 2011
Tourists and Washingtonians were about to get their first up-close look Monday at the memorial to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The site was set to open without fanfare around 11 a.m. to kick off a week of celebrations ahead of Sunday's official dedication.
The memorial sits on the National Mall near the Tidal Basin, between memorials honoring Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson.
Source: Fox News
Aug 22, 2011
On the 10th anniversary of the Sept.11 terror attacks, the national memorial to commemorate that day will open its doors. It is the first new construction on the 16-acre World Trade Center site.
To mark that day Fox News has teamed with Harper Collins Publishers to bring you the “Rise of Freedom” series in a fascinating new medium.
The electronic book is nothing new, but the EEB, or enhanced electronic book is all new.
On Tuesday, Aug. 23, the digital-only enhanced e-book, RISE OF FREEDOM: The New World Trade Center will be released.
It is the modern twist on the good old fashioned coffee table book and something you can enjoy again and again....
Source: BBC
Aug 20, 2011
A new drama tells the story of a Jewish lawyer who confronted Hitler 80 years ago - earning the dictator's life-long hatred. So who was Hans Litten?
In the Berlin courtroom, Adolf Hitler's face burned a deep, furious red.
The future dictator was not accustomed to this kind of scrutiny.
But here he was, being interrogated about the violence of his paramilitary thugs by a young man who represented everything he despised - a radical, principled, fiercely intelligent Jewish lawyer called Hans Litten.
The Nazi leader was floundering in the witness stand. And when Litten asked why his party published an incitement to overthrow the state, Hitler lost his composure altogether.
He was among the first of the fuehrer's political opponents to be rounded up after the Nazis assumed power.
