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: National Post (Canada)
8-1-13
British government files from 1983, opened to the public for the first time today, include an official’s view of the message Queen Elizabeth II would have broadcast to the nation in the event of World War III.The speech was drafted as part of a war-games exercise codenamed Wintex-Cimex, in which officials in NATO countries acted out responses to an attack by Soviet-led forces. In 1983, they ended the simulated conflict by launching a limited nuclear strike on the enemy.“I have never forgotten the sorrow and the pride I felt as my sister and I huddled around the nursery wireless set listening to my father’s inspiring words on that fateful day in 1939″ when World War II was declared, the scenario had the queen telling her subjects at noon on Friday March 4, 1983. “Not for a single moment did I imagine that this solemn and awful duty would one day fall to me.”...
Source: Telegraph (UK)
8-1-13
Margaret Thatcher’s 1983 visit to the Falklands was akin to a military operation in its own right and followed six months of meticulous planning.The prime minister visited the islands for four days in January to mark the 150th anniversary of the establishment of a permanent British settlement.The trip, less than eight months after the end of the conflict, had to be kept secret because of the “significant” threat from Argentina, confidential government files show.The documents, released today by the National Archives under the new 20-year rule, include extensive briefings from the Ministry of Defence marked “Secret UK Eyes A” about travel arrangements....
Source: Belfast Telegraph (UK)
8-1-13
Margaret Thatcher secretly considered the use of troops to break a strike by coal miners, according to newly released government papers.Documents released by the National Archives at Kew, west London, show the extent of the planning by Mrs Thatcher's Conservative government for the decisive showdown with the miners which helped define her political legacy.The papers show that ministers and officials repeatedly warned that a confrontation with the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and its leftwing leader, Arthur Scargill, was inevitable.Mrs Thatcher, who had been a minister in Edward Heath's government in the 1970s when it was brought to its knees by a miners' strike was only too well aware of the stakes involved....
Source: BBC News
8-1-13
Previously confidential files from 1983 released on Thursday by the National Archives in Kew shed new light on the ongoing attempts by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to deal with the political and security situations in Northern Ireland and, in particular, the threat by Sinn Féin to overtake the SDLP as the voice of Northern nationalism.Sinn Féin's record 13.4% of the regional vote in the June 1983 election and the return of its President, Gerry Adams, as MP for West Belfast came as a shattering blow to Mrs Thatcher, who had returned to power with a renewed mandate after the Falklands war.Ministers believed that up to a quarter of the Sinn Féin vote was down to impersonation and intimidation.At a cabinet meeting in June that year, Northern Ireland Secretary Jim Prior warned colleagues that the republicans' success could lead to the destruction of John Hume's SDLP....
Source: National Post (Canada)
8-1-13
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was advised that Canadians’ sensitivity “is a fact of life” spurred on by the country’s “ham-fisted neighbour to the south,” in a set of confidential briefing notes prior to her Canadian visit in 1983.Government files from 30 years ago, released this week by the British National Archives, included two telegrams dated Sept. 1 and Sept. 19, 1983 to No. 10 Downing Street to prepare Thatcher for her visit to Ottawa, Toronto and Edmonton. In them, Canada is described as a country that is “dominated commercially and culturally by the United States, but is inclined to resent this.”...
Source: NYT
7-31-13
LONDON — Thirty-year-old documents newly released by the British government reveal just how severely America’s decision to invade the Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983 tested the warm ties between Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan.While the two leaders had a strong and affectionate personal rapport, the British official papers reveal how little warning Mrs. Thatcher was given about the pending military invasion, a move that left the British irritated, bewildered and disappointed. They also show how Mr. Reagan justified the secrecy as a way to prevent leaks, and how the British later concluded that the invasion had in fact been planned long in advance. At one point during tense written exchanges, both leaders claimed, in defense of their opposing approaches to the unrest in Grenada, that lives were at stake....
Source: ArtDaily
8-3-13
ORANGE, VA.- The Montpelier Foundation today announced findings from new archaeological excavations at the lifelong home of James Madison – Father of the Constitution, Architect of the Bill of Rights, and Fourth President of the United States. Discovered by teams of professional archaeology staff, students and visitors participating in special “Archaeology Expeditions,” two newly revealed subfloor pits provide an initial footprint for field slave quarters on the Montpelier landscape.“Montpelier is unique among archaeological sites in the United States with regards to our ability to recreate and visualize the experience of enslaved life,” said Matthew Reeves, Ph.D., Director of Archaeology and Landscape Restoration at James Madison’s Montpelier. “Because the fields have lain fallow since Madison’s time, the sites we are discovering are virtually undisturbed. We are meticulously documenting available evidence from the sites so we can begin to reconstruct the farm in a way that will authentically represent the complexity of life on the plantation.”...
Source: NYT
8-1-13
TOKYO — Japan’s finance minister on Thursday publicly retracted comments he made this week that appeared to call on Japan’s current conservative government to emulate Hitler’s takeover of prewar Germany. The gaffe underscored the potential for disputes over Japan’s own wartime history to derail its popular prime minister, Shinzo Abe.The finance minister, Taro Aso, insisted that his comments on Monday, in which he seemed to say that Japan should learn how the Nazi party quietly rewrote Germany’s Constitution, were taken out of context. Faced with growing criticism in Japan and abroad, he countered that he had never meant to praise the Nazis. He said he had hoped to prompt debate in Japan over whether to change its current pacifist Constitution to allow a full-fledged military, as many conservatives now seek.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
8-2-13
It is perhaps the best known and most enduring image of the First World War: the commanding, moustached face of Lord Kitchener, his accusing, pointing finger and the urgent slogan “Your country needs YOU”.The picture is credited with encouraging millions of men to sign up to fight in the trenches, many of them never to return.But new research has found that no such poster was actually produced during the war and that the image was never used for official recruitment purposes. In fact, it only became popular and widely-used after the conflict ended....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
8-2-13
In an isolated corner of bucolic Belgium, down a dusty track that cuts through great fields of lettuce and shivering wheat, stands the farm that won Waterloo. Of the 170,000 people who visit the battlefield each year, few find their way to this particular spot. Fat wood pigeons coo undisturbed from the crumbling walls. The view across the miles of rolling fields over which Napoleon launched waves of attacks, is unspoilt by any building. The only sound of modern life is the faint roar of a motorway, hidden by a bank of trees.Hougoumont is largely unchanged from where, on Sunday June 18, 1815, it was the centre of action throughout the Battle of Waterloo. Of the tens of thousands who died that day, 6,500 men were killed, or suffered terrible injuries, at Hougoumont. Many were dumped in a mass grave there to deter thieves....
Source: BBC News
8-1-13
New data from Greenland ice cores suggest North America may have suffered a large cosmic impact about 12,900 years ago.A layer of platinum is seen in ice of the same age as a known abrupt climate transition, US scientists report.The climate flip has previously been linked to the demise of the North American "Clovis" people.The data seem to back the idea that an impact tipped the climate into a colder phase, a point of current debate.Rapid climate change occurred 12,900 years ago, and it is proposed that this is associated with the extinction of large mammals - such as the mammoth, widespread wildfires and rapid changes in atmospheric and ocean circulation....
Source: Wilmington Star News
8-2-13
Thalian Hall houses what might be the oldest painted stage curtain in the United States, a theater historian told a Wilmington audience Thursday."These things were not meant to last," said David Rowland, president of Pennsylvania's Old York Road Historical Society. Most surviving examples of drop curtains in New England date from only the 1890s at the earliest, Rowland said.Thalian Hall, however, still has its original drop curtain, which hung onstage when the historic theater opened on Oct. 12, 1858....
Source: NYT
8-1-13
ROME — Via dei Fori Imperiali, a multilane artery running through the heart of Rome, is typically a frenzy of swerving Vespas, zipping Smart cars and honking Fiat taxis.But Mayor Ignazio Marino is seeking to transform the avenue to something calmer, where Gucci loafers and sensible sneakers would rule.Mr. Marino’s plan to ban private traffic on the roadway, which bisects a vast archaeological site, from the central Piazza Venezia to the Colosseum, has prompted grousing and histrionic debate over a project that conservators say would solidify the world’s largest urban archaeological area.This being Rome, the first high-impact initiative of his seven-week-old administration, which goes into effect on Saturday, has provoked its share of unfavorable comparisons with the overweening ambitions of emperors past. “The mayor’s job is not to pass into history, but to work for his citizens,” said Luciano Canfora, a professor of classics at the University of Bari. “We already had Nero, that’s more than enough.”...
Source: Der Spiegel
8-2-13
Last week 10-year-old Alexander Kettler was playing in the attic of his grandmother's house in the northern German state of Lower Saxony when he came upon three mysterious cases in a cluttered corner. Neither his grandmother nor his father, a local dentist named Lutz Wolfgang Kettler, knew what was inside. So they hauled the dust-covered cases out of the attic, pried them open and peered inside with amazement."There was a huge sarcophagus and inside a mummy," said Lutz Wolfgang Kettler. "Then we opened the other cases and found an earthenware Egyptian death mask and a Canopic Jar," he added, referring to a container in which the ancient Egyptians kept the entrails of the deceased who had been mummified.As to the question of how the 1.6-meter (5.2-foot) mummy could have gotten to the small town of Diepholz, Kettler can only speculate. His father, who passed away 12 years ago, went traveling through North Africa in the 1950s, but spoke very little of his travels. "He was of the older generation who experienced a lot in the war and didn't really talk about anything. I do seem to remember him mentioning having been to the city of Derna in Libya," says Kettler. Had Kettler's father purchased the sarcophagus on his trip, it would have been possible for him to ship it to Diepholz via Bremerhaven....
Source: BBC News
7-22-13
Getting an office job can be a complicated process. There are the headhunters and references, psychometric testing and endless interviews....The Chinese had developed an examination system from hell that you had to pass to get into the imperial service. In place since the 7th Century, it consisted of a cascading series of dawn-to-dusk tests for which you had to memorise 400,000 characters of Confucian text and master the fiendishly rigid "eight-legged essay". The pass rate? A mere 1-2%.But the Brits were impressed, and some thought that exams could help them make a better fist of running the Empire.Charles Trevelyan, the permanent secretary to the Treasury 1840-59, was horrified by the Barnacle types in the civil service, once describing a colleague, as a "gentleman who really could neither read nor write, he was almost an idiot"...
Source: The Australian (AU)
8-2-13
THE desecration of an Aboriginal sacred site in the Northern Territory is a loss of heritage for all Australians, a magistrate says. Magistrate Sue Oliver on Friday found that OM (Manganese) Ltd damaged and desecrated a sacred site known in English as Two Women Sitting Down, at Bootu Creek, about 170km north of Tennant Creek.This is the first desecration conviction in Australia.The company blasted and mined 40 metres away from the site, causing it to collapse in 2011."What has been there for many thousands of years has been lost forever," Ms Oliver said....
Source: The Scotsman (UK)
8-2-13
EVERY primary school pupil in Scotland should be taught Gaelic, according to the government agency responsible for developing the school curriculum and carrying out school inspections.Education Scotland has said Gaelic should be put at the centre of an ambitious plan to teach children two foreign languages at primary school. The Scottish Government is currently considering a new approach to language learning, which would see pupils introduced to a second language in P1, and a third no later than P5.This is known as the 1 + 2 Approach to language learning, meaning pupils are taught in their mother tongue and two additional languages.Publishing its Gaelic Education Plan yesterday, Education Scotland said it was important to recognise the language’s “valuable contribution to Scotland’s heritage” as well its status as an official language. The quango said it hoped to see Gaelic at the “heart” of language learning while also increasing the impact of Gaelic-medium bilingual education....
Source: AP
8-2-13
RICHMOND, Va. — At the William King Museum in the heart of Appalachia, a panel of 16 small paintings depicting water mills along the region’s landscape is deteriorating, and along with it, important chronicles of southwest Virginia’s rural culture.The series of canvases taped to flimsy wood paneling is flaking and curators at the Abingdon museum are hoping to conserve it through a program has helped some of those previously involved apply for grants and help with fundraising efforts....
Source: NYT
8-2-13
WASHINGTON — The Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin finished removing a contentious phrase on the memorial for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Thursday in preparation for the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington at the end of the month.The phrase came from Dr. King’s “Drum Major Instinct” speech. It read, “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.”Critics of the memorial, including the poet Maya Angelou, said the phrase did not show the true nature of the full quotation. The actual quotation was: “Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.”...
Source: The Art Newspaper
8-1-13
Police in southern Italy have seized a large haul of well-preserved artefacts that were illegally excavated between the two southern towns of Benevento and Foggia, near Naples. A total of 584 antiquities were recovered, estimated to be worth around €2m and intended for sale on the black market.Investigations are ongoing, but so far 21 tombaroli, or graverobbers, have been identified by police, while a 46-year-old man from the area has reportedly been charged with handling stolen archaeological objects after investigators searched his property in the nearby town of Castelpagano.The artefacts are reportedly in very good condition and range from a large ancient Greek krater estimated to be worth around €150,000 to small pieces valued at around €1,500. The collection includes other Greek objects, including a group of fourth-century BC ceramic bowls decorated with red figures, various Etruscan and Corinthian objects, a set of 340 rare coins, many Roman lanterns and a particularly well-preserved helmet....
