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
12-28-12
The Soviet Union used civil airliners to conduct secret Cold War spying missions over Britain, according to newly published Government files.
Some aircraft would switch off their transponders, alerting air traffic controllers to their position before veering off their approved flight paths to carry out aerial intelligence-gathering missions over sensitive targets, papers released by the National Archives under the 30-year rule show.
In a memorandum marked Secret for UK US Eyes Only, Defence Secretary John Nott informed prime minister Margaret Thatcher in December 1981 that the RAF was monitoring the hundreds of monthly flights through UK airspace by Warsaw Pact airliners.
Source: Yahoo
12-28-12
FBI files on Marilyn Monroe that could not be located earlier this year have been found and re-issued, revealing the names of some of the movie star's communist-leaning acquaintances who drew concern from government officials and her own entourage. But the files, which previously had been heavily redacted, do not contain any new information about Monroe's death 50 years ago. Letters and news clippings included in the file show the bureau was aware of theories the actress had been killed, but they do not show that any effort was undertaken to investigate the claims. Los Angeles authorities concluded Monroe's death was a probable suicide. Recently obtained by The Associated Press through the Freedom of Information Act, the updated FBI files do show the extent the agency was monitoring Monroe for ties to communism in the years before her death in August 1962.
Source: Special to HNN
12/28/12
The Museum of Liverpool has been awarded the European Museum Prize for 2013 by the Council of Europe.The human rights watchdog said that the museum traced the history of one of the most socially diverse cities in the UK and encourages local community members and faraway visitors alike to live together in dignity by promoting mutual respect between different ethnicities.The £72m museum, which is part of the National Museums Liverpool and built on a Unesco World Heirtage Site, will receive a bronze statuette by Joan Miro and will be on display for one year.The Council of Europe Museum Prize has been awarded annually since 1977 to a museum adjudged to have made an outstanding cultural contribution.
Source: Special to HNN
12/28/12
The 70th Anniversary of the Battle of the Atlantic will be commemorated next year with a series of events in London and Londonderry.
The final national commemoration, however, will be hosted by the city of Liverpool over the bank holiday weekend of May 24-27, 2013.
Around 5,000 veterans are expected to attend the parade led by the Band of the Royal Marines and HMS Eaglet guards after a thanksgiving service at the Anglican Cathedral.
The Battle of the Atlantic was the longest continuous military campaign in the Second World War and the port of Liverpool played a pivot role directing the battle's strategy from the Western Approaches HQ.
Source: Special to HNN
12/28/12
The BBC's Letter from America archive has recently been replenished after a British enthusiast answered the Corporation's plea for recordings of Alistair Cooke's "Letters."David Henderson provided an astonishing 620 "missing" episodes and follows in the footsteps of Roy Whittaker, another Cooke enthusiast, who supplied 470 on cassettes in November.The 920-programme online archive covers some of the seminal events in post-war American history up until Cooke's death in 2004 and went live earlier this year.Broadcast on Radio 4 between 1946 and 2004, it was one of the world's longest-running speech radio programmes with 2,869 "Letters" recorded.
Source: WSJ
12-25-12
DALLAS—Officials in the city where President John F. Kennedy was gunned down Nov. 22, 1963, want to observe the 50th anniversary of that day with a celebration of his life.The city plans a ceremony that would include readings from Kennedy speeches by historian David McCullough and military jets flying over Dealey Plaza, where the 35th president was shot. But some who believe the assassination was a conspiracy involving high-ranking U.S. officials say their views shouldn't be excluded from the commemoration. "It's absurd to move the discussion of his death to another moment," said John Judge, executive director of the Coalition on Political Assassinations, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that studies 1960s murders of public figures. "Our First Amendment rights are being violated."
Source: Telegraph
12-23-12
The disclosure emerged in a previously-unseen letter describing the famous match. Staff sergeant Clement Barker sent the letter home four days after Christmas 1914 when the British and German troops emerged from their trenches in peace.He described how the truce began after a German messenger walked across No Man's Land on Christmas Eve to broker the temporary cease-fire agreement. British soldiers went out and recovered 69 dead comrades and buried them. Sgt Barker said the impromptu football match then broke out between the two sides when a ball was kicked out from the British lines into No Man's Land.
Source: Special to HNN
12-27-12
A new effort is currently underway to answer some of the outstanding questions surrounding the world's worst-ever chemical attack on civilians at Halabja.Returning to the Kurdish town 25 years on from the 1988 attack, the BBC's world affairs editor John Simpson interviewed those in search of identifying the original chemicals for the mustard gas used and the European companies suspected of supplying Saddam Hussein's Iraq.The mastermind behind the operation, Saddam's cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, previously known as "Chemical Ali," was tried and executed in 2010.
Source: Jon Wiener at The Nation website
12-26-12
December 26, 1862: thirty-eight Dakota Indians were hung in Mankato, Minnesota, in the largest mass execution in US history–on orders of President Abraham Lincoln. Their crime: killing 490 white settlers, including women and children, in the Santee Sioux uprising the previous August. The execution took place on a giant square scaffold in the center of town, in front of an audience of hundreds of white people. The thirty-eight Dakota men “wailed and danced atop the gallows,” according to Robert K. Elder of the New York Times, “waiting for the trapdoors to drop beneath them.” A witness reported that, “as the last moment rapidly approached, they each called out their name and shouted in their native language: ‘I’m here! I’m here!’” Lincoln’s treatment of defeated Indian rebels against the US stood in sharp contrast to his treatment of Confederate rebels. He never ordered the executions of any Confederate officials or generals after the Civil War, even though they killed more than 400,000 Union soldiers. The only Confederate executed was the commander of Andersonville Prison—and for what we would call war crimes, not rebellion....
Source: Teachers College Record Volume 114 Number 7, 2012
2012
Contemporary data indicate that, on average across a wide range of schools, A’s represent 43% of all letter grades, an increase of 28 percentage points since 1960 and 12 percentage points since 1988. D’s and F’s total typically less than 10% of all letter grades. Private colleges and universities give, on average, significantly more A’s and B’s combined than public institutions with equal student selectivity. Southern schools grade more harshly than those in other regions, and science and engineering-focused schools grade more stringently than those emphasizing the liberal arts.
Source: Chicago Trib
12-25-12
Chicago. The site where Michael Reese Hospital once stood isn't much to look at, just a 37-acre swath of overgrown land in Bronzeville, behind a shoddy chain-link fence.Developers are itching to build a casino or perhaps a sports entertainment complex on the city-owned property located in the shadows of downtown near the south lakefront. But residents of this historic African-American community have something grander in mind.They envision a Barack Obama presidential library.
Source: Newsweek
12-24-12
It was the story of a lifetime—and he couldn’t publish it. In Newsweek’s final print issue, former staff reporter Michael Isikoff gives the inside tale of how he uncovered President Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky in early 1998. Isikoff had been talking to Linda Tripp—a confidante of Lewinsky's—for months, and a source tipped him off that Tripp was cooperating with a Justice Department investigation.
Source: British Library
12-20-12
This decree (farmān) of Babur is dated 13 (or possibly 30) Zu’l-Qaʻdah 933 (August 1527), just a few months after his decisive victory over Rana Sanga of Mewar and his confederates at the battle of Khanwa in March 1527. It was issued in the name of Ẓahīr al-Dīn Muḥammad Bābur Ghāzī (‘holy warrior’, a title he had assumed after his recent victory) and confirms the grant of a village, Panchal Gul Pinduri (the exact form of the name is uncertain!) in the Pargana of Batala, Punjab, as a hereditary grant (suyurghāl) to the Qazi (magistrate) Jalāl al-Dīn. The revenue of this village amounted to 5,000 copper coins (tankah-i siyāh) and was tax-free. The beneficiary was not required to petition annually for the renewal of this grant....
Source: Baltimore Sun
12-16-12
The DNA of a battle that helped turn the tide of a war going horribly wrong for America lay buried just six inches below the surface in a Kent County cornfield.For nearly two centuries, the musket balls, canister shot and other artifacts from intense fighting at Caulk's Field waited to tell the story of a sweltering August night in 1814, when militiamen sprang a trap on a British raiding party bent on destruction.How did the citizen-soldiers best their battle-tested foes at Caulk's Field?...
Source: Raw Story
12-21-12
A Joseph Stalin statue went back up in the Georgian village of Alvani on Friday in a sign of the slipping authority of President Mikheil Saakashvili, who had ordered its removal.The pro-Western president is serving out what some are calling a lame-duck term ahead of elections next year from which he is barred on account of the end of his 10-year constitutional mandate.Saakashvili’s powers were weakened still further in October when the Georgian Dream party of his great rival, the tycoon Bidzina Ivanishvili, won parliamentary elections and appointed Ivanishvili as prime minister....
Source: Bloomberg News
12-20-12
Dec. 20 (Bloomberg) -- French President Francois Hollande called France’s 132-year colonial rule in Algeria “brutal and unjust,” stopping short of an outright apology, as he seeks to improve relations that have been troubled ever since the North African country won its independence 50 years ago.Citing France’s postwar reconciliation with Germany, Hollande told Algeria’s parliament during a two-day visit that he wants “a new age in relations” based on “recognition of the truth.”Hollande is the third French president to struggle how to frame relations with Algeria since the country’s president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, demanded in 2003 that France apologize for its “long, brutal and genocidal” rule. Bouteflika and other Algerian leaders have lately backed off those demands, and Hollande has already taken some steps toward Algeria, such as this year being the first French president to recognize the killings of 100 Algerian protesters in Paris in 1961....
Source: WaPo
12-19-12
Sixty years ago this month (December), London was enveloped under a toxic mix of dense fog and sooty black smoke for four days. This episode of polluted air is among the deadliest environmental disasters in recorded history.The event became known as the Great Smog of 1952. Over 4,000 more people died than usual for that time of year with an estimated 8,000 more fatalities in the following weeks from exposure to the noxious air pollution.While not as deadly – and not as well-known - hundreds of deaths have been attributed directly to episodes of severe smog in the U.S. over the 60 intervening years - including three killer smog events in New York City....
Source: WaPo
12-20-12
...Even if the world doesn’t end up exploding, [Dec. 21] still has some darker meaning for China, and not just because some people seem to be taking the prediction surprisingly seriously. Wong also wrote on Twitter, “Many Chinese have been buying candles because of rumors of a 3-day power outage to start on Dec. 21.” Chinese authorities recently arrested 500 members of a doomsday cult that was noisily predicting Dec. 21 as the day. The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos writes that “China is more taken with doomsday talk than you might expect,” something the government takes very seriously. “China has a long history of religion-infused political rebellions,” he writes.A new, award-winning book by historian Stephen Platt documents the Taiping Rebellion, a 19th-century religious insurrection that ended in tens of millions of deaths. Osnos writes, “But these days the Party is especially uncomfortable with obscure religious beliefs because, in the post-Socialist era, many in China have begun to hunt for something to believe.”...
Source: WaPo
12-20-12
THESSALONIKI, Greece — In a find that local Jewish groups have described as highly significant, Greek police said Thursday that hundreds of marble headstones and other fragments from Jewish graves destroyed during the Nazi occupation in World War II have been recovered.The 668 fragments were found buried in a plot of land in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second largest city, following a 70-year search for the remains of graves smashed when the city’s main Jewish cemetery was destroyed.The head of the city’s Jewish community, David Saltiel, said most of the gravestones found dated from the mid-1800s up until World War II....
Source: AP
12-20-12
Though the Mayans never really predicted that the world would end on Friday, some New Agers are convinced that humanity’s demise is indeed imminent. Or at least that it’s a good excuse for a party.Believers are being drawn to spots where they think their chances of survival will be better, and accompanying them are the curious, the party-lovers and people wanting to make some money.Here are some of the world’s key doomsday destinations and other places marked by fear and fascination:...RUSSIAFor $1,500, a museum is offering salvation from the world’s end in former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s underground bunker in central Moscow -- with a 50 percent refund if nothing happens.The bunker, located 65 meters (210 feet) below ground, was designed to withstand a nuclear attack. Now home to a small museum, it has an independent electricity supply, water and food — but no more room, because the museum has already sold out all 1,000 tickets....
