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: SCPR
Jul 11, 2011
A memorial service for former First Lady Betty Ford will be held Tuesday afternoon at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church in Palm Desert. She and late President Gerald Ford worshipped there after he left office in 1977. Betty Ford died Friday at the age of 93.While she was First Lady, Betty Ford championed breast cancer awareness, abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment. But she also endured a very public battle with addiction to alcohol and pain killers.The Betty Ford Center was founded in October 1982. Ford expected that the center would be a Southern California center, according to John Schwarzlose, the CEO of Betty Ford Center.He says Ford "really underestimated the demand, the impact [of the center], because of her, and everything she stood for as a woman. That we'd be worldwide. And that today, 29 years later, we're the best known addiction center in the entire world, was something that really overwhelmed Mrs. Ford."...
Source: CS Monitor
Jul 11, 2011
Many Americans across the US were feeling the heat Monday, but how hot is it? The National Weather Service issued heat-related advisories for residents in 17 states, forecasting temperatures close to 100 degrees F. in the central and southern plains, and the middle and lower Mississippi Valley. In some parts of those regions, it will feel as hot as 115 degrees. Conditions are expected to continue into Tuesday.So far, the heat wave at hand is nowhere near as severe as the worst recorded since 1980, when the National Climate Data Center began compiling such data. Here is a look at the five deadliest US heat waves/droughts since then.#5 Spring and summer 2000About 140 people died during a heat wave and drought throughout the spring and summer of 2000, report officials with the National Climate Data Center. South-central and southeastern states were hit the hardest. Losses in agriculture and related industries topped $4.8 billion. During the heat wave, some areas experienced as many as 20 more days than usual of temperatures above 90 degrees F.
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Jul 11, 2011
Adolf Hitler ordered the Nazis to develop sex dolls to send to his troops being ravaged by disease after sleeping with French women, it's been revealed.The synthetic 'comforters' were made from silicone and designed to stop soldiers being laid low with syphilis.Smaller than life-size, the so-called ‘gynoids’ were to be targeted at the men most at temptation from a ‘quick adventure’ with a French prostitute.Initially, the Hungarian actress Kathe von Nagy was asked if the doll could be modelled on her, but she refused.Instead the look of the Aryan doll with blonde bob hair and blue eyes was left bland so soldiers could apply their own fantasy.
Source: Fox News
Jul 11, 2011
They haven't found the slingshot -- not yet anyway.But as archaeologists continue excavation at Gath -- the Biblical home of Goliath, the giant warrior improbably felled by the young shepherd David and his sling -- they are piecing together the history of the Philistines, a people remembered chiefly as the bad guys of the Hebrew Bible.
Source: WaPo
Jul 11, 2011
About 80 children sat in the oppressive heat on the South Lawn of the White House on Monday morning. White, black, American Indian children — a rainbow coalition itching for the adults to stop talking so they could grab their sticks and play their sport in the president’s back yard.And then Jim Brown’s former teammate came to the microphone, a resplendent ponytail poking out of the back of his hat.“The game you have now in your hands belongs to our nation,” Oren Lyons said, raising his lacrosse stick, admiring the wood workmanship.The stick, he said, represents the trees. The webbing, made of deer gut, “goes to the honor of our four-legged friends.”“For us, lacrosse is a spiritual game — a connection to everything around us, not just a sport,” Lyons said. “We forget that and we miss what the game can still be.”...
Source: NYT
Jul 11, 2011
Theodore Roosevelt — he’s the one who doesn’t have a highway in Manhattan named after him — seems to be enjoying a resurgent popularity among the city’s political and chattering classes.T.R. re-entered the collective consciousness on Monday when Bob Turner, a Republican, officially kick-started his campaign to fill the vacancy in New York’s Ninth Congressional District. You probably know it better as Anthony D. Weiner’s former House seat.Mr. Turner will run against the Democrats’ choice, Assemblyman David I. Weprin. Party leaders, not voters, picked both of these candidates to run in a special election that the governor set for Sept. 13. Sic transit the new era of political openness we’d been hearing so much about.
Source: NYT
Jul 11, 2011
WASHINGTON — As archivists prepare to make public 63 boxes of Robert F. Kennedy’s papers at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, his family members are having second thoughts about where they should be housed and are considering moving them elsewhere because they believe that the presidential library has not done enough to honor the younger brother’s legacy.
Many of the papers, dealing with Cuba, Vietnam and civil rights, are classified as secret or top secret. There are also 2,300 other boxes covering every stage of Robert Kennedy’s life, including his years as a United States senator and attorney general, most of which have already been opened for research.
Source: 3 News (New Zealand)
Jul 11, 2011
Archaeologists in Mexico made a dramatic discovery in the state of Morelos when they uncovered an 8th century monolith featuring an Aztec God weighing 60 tonnes.With agricultural images engraved on its side, the massive stone is believed to have been used by the Aztecs to call on the god of rain."These signs on the rock are fundamentally associated with agriculture and water. We think it's highly probable that it (the monolith) was used during rituals to ask for rain and it was placed in a position facing Popocatepetl," said archaeologist Raul Gonzalez.With the ritual stone also bearing the image of the Aztec god Tlaloc, experts are connecting the massive monolith to the nearby archaeological site of Xochicalco....
Source: BBC News
Jul 11, 2011
A lost painting by Renaissance artist Michelangelo has been hanging in a University of Oxford residence, an Italian scholar claims.The Campion Hall painting, which depicts the crucifixion, had been thought to be by Marcello Venusti.But Antonio Forcellino said infra-red technology had revealed the true creator of the masterpiece.It has been removed from a wall of the Jesuit academic community and sent to the Ashmolean Museum for safekeeping.'Excitement and concern'The master of Campion Hall, Father Brendan Callaghan, said: "It's a very beautiful piece, but far too valuable to have on our wall any more."...
Source: NYT
Jul 11, 2011
COLQUITT, Ga. — The heat and the drought are so bad in this southwest corner of Georgia that hogs can barely eat. Corn, a lucrative crop with a notorious thirst, is burning up in fields. Cotton plants are too weak to punch through soil so dry it might as well be pavement.Farmers with the money and equipment to irrigate are running wells dry in the unseasonably early and particularly brutal national drought that some say could rival the Dust Bowl days....Climatologists say the great drought of 2011 is starting to look a lot like the one that hit the nation in the early to mid-1950s. That, too, dried a broad swath of the southern tier of states into leather and remains a record breaker....“In the ’30s, you had the Depression and everything that happened with that, and drought on top,” said Donald A. Wilhite, director of the school of natural resources at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln and former director of the National Drought Mitigation Center. “The combination of those two things was devastating.”...
Source: BBC News
Jul 10, 2011
There are fears for the future of a 700-year-old Denbighshire church, a year after a £120,000 refurbishment.St Mary's Church in Rhuddlan owes £13,500 to the diocese of St Asaph, and the debt is expected to rise to at least £20,000.Priest-in-charge, the Reverend Peter Allsworth, said the church needed to almost quadruple its £173 weekly income to remain viable.The Diocese of St Asaph said it had "no intention of seeing the church shut".Despite the £120,000 restoration which was completed a year ago, the church is heavily in arrears with its parish share - a sum paid by all churches to the central diocese....
Source: WaPo
Jul 10, 2011
The Sunday airwaves brimmed once again with talk of what would – or would not – happen if lawmakers fail to meet the Aug. 2 deadline to raise the nation’s legal limit on borrowing. Unmentioned by either side was an obscure bit of budgetary history in which the country did default on some of its bills, and wound up paying the consequences.Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that inaction “would be catastrophic for the economy” and added that “no responsible leader would say the United States of America, for the first time in its history, should not pay its bills, meet its obligations.”...In fact, there was one short-lived incident in the spring of 1979 that offers a glimpse of some of the problems and costs that might arise if the stalemate on Capitol Hill continues. Then, as now, Congress had been playing a game of chicken with the debt limit, raising it to $830 billion – compared with today’s $14.3 trillion – only after Treasury Secretary W. Michael Blumenthal warned that the country was hours away from the first default in its history....
Source: NYT
Jul 10, 2011
WINSLOW, Ariz. — Alfred Moya was stopping at a restaurant in rural Gallup, N.M., on his way home to Phoenix in the summer of 2007 when he happened to glance at a newspaper article about children who had been sexually abused by a priest.Suddenly, his thoughts flashed to his own days as an altar boy in nearby Holbrook, Ariz., and the town’s charismatic priest, the Rev. Clement A. Hageman. “And then I started remembering,” he would later recount, according to court documents.Over the past few years, a growing number of predominantly Hispanic men from the string of dusty towns along Route 66 in Arizona have stepped forward, alleging that Father Hageman sexually abused them as boys when he worked in local parishes from the early 1940s until his death in 1975.
Source: NYT
Jul 10, 2011
The question was, have you ever taken a murderer across the Hudson?“Not that I know of,” said Capt. Tim Byam, at the wheel of a New York Waterway ferry bound for Weehawken, N.J.At that, the man in the blue blazer standing behind Captain Byam piped up: “He was a killer, but was he a murderer? The other guy had a gun, too.”It was not a non sequitur. The “he” was Aaron Burr, the vice president under Thomas Jefferson. The “other guy” was Alexander Hamilton, the former secretary of the treasury.And the man in the blazer the other morning was David O. Stewart, a lawyer-turned-historian who was retracing Burr’s trip to Weehawken, a trip Mr. Stewart said Burr never should have taken. It led to the infamous duel that left Hamilton dying — and Burr’s reputation in tatters....
Source: Deseret News
Jul 9, 2011
...Historians and critics have struggled for more than a century to identify children Joseph Smith may have had through polygamous marriages in the 1840s. If definitive answers could be found, it would shed light on how plural marriage was introduced to Mormons by Joseph Smith in Illinois. Brigham Young succeeded Joseph Smith as leader of the LDS Church and announced the practice publicly in Utah. The church ended polygamy in 1890....But questions remain today — particularly whether Joseph Smith, who had nine biological children with his wife Emma Smith, had any children through a polygamous wife. Perego, a senior researcher at the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, has looked at this question since 2003 when a descendant of Moroni Pratt called him on the phone.
Source: NYT
Jul 9, 2011
It was two weeks before the liftoff of the Apollo 11 mission when Thomas Moser’s boss walked into his office at NASA and announced, “We’re putting a flag on the moon.”Mr. Moser, then a 30-year-old mechanical engineer, was put in charge of designing a flag mechanism that could not only fit into the lunar module and survive the flight, but also make the flag appear to fly on the windless moon.His solution involved two sections of a staff, a telescoping tube and a nylon flag bought at a local housing goods store (Sears, he thinks). But in order for the flag to fit the staff, its edges needed to be trimmed. “They were throwing it all in the trash,” Mr. Moser recalled of the remnants in a recent interview, “so I picked it up out of the trash can, mounted it and had Neil Armstrong sign it.”Forty-two years later, Mr. Moser is auctioning off those flag remnants. The expected selling price: $100,000....
Source: NYT
Jul 8, 2011
PHILADELPHIA — Who owns 10 exceedingly rare American gold coins from 1933?Is it the family of a local gold dealer who died 21 years ago? Or is it the United States government, which produced a half million of the coins before melting all of them — well, almost all of them — down?Family members, who say they found the coins in a safe deposit box in 2003, argue they are the rightful owners of the exquisite “double eagle” $20 coins, each now worth millions of dollars. The government argues that the coins, never officially released, belong to the United States, and not the heirs of Israel Switt, the gold dealer.And so to court....
Source: Politico
Jul 8, 2011
DETROIT - Presidents past and current paid tribute to former first lady Betty Ford, who died Friday at age 93.Ford’s battles with cancer and substance abuse inspired millions to seek treatment. Betty Ford’s husband, Former President Gerald Ford, died in December 2006.The couple married in 1948, the same year he was elected to Congress. She was thrust into the spotlight in 1974 when he became president after the resignation of President Richard Nixon. She was diagnosed with breast cancer weeks later and won acclaim for her openness and courage....
Source: NYT
Jul 8, 2011
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — There was a time, some of us remember, when a countdown at Canaveral stopped the world in its tracks. On television or at the launching, every breath was held at liftoff and every eye followed the fiery plume of ascent, up and away. Godspeed, said someone who was everyone....“We’ve come full circle since 1961, back to when we had yet to show we could launch people into space,” said Steven J. Dick, a retired NASA chief historian. “We will be hitching rides from the Russians to go to the space station that is mainly ours.”The irony of having to send our astronauts up in Russian Soyuz capsules is as plain as cold war history. The Soviet Union’s early dominance of space, manifested by the Sputnik surprise in 1957 and subsequent feats, prompted the United States to match and then surpass the Soviets in a program topped off by the Apollo 11 lunar landing in 1969. Human spaceflight would have come along anyway, but not with quite the urgency of the Soviet-American competition....
Source: BBC
Jul 8, 2011
Adolf Hitler's hometown in Austria has revoked the Nazi leader's honorary citizenship - even if he never may have been given it.
The council in Braunau am Inn decided to strip Hitler of any honour he may have received and which did not expire automatically after his death in 1945.
Hitler was actually born in Ranshofen in 1889, and the village made him an honorary citizen in 1933.
Ranshofen later became part of Braunau, and is now seen as Hitler's birthplace....
