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: NYT
12-13-12
“Lincoln” received the most Globe nominations on Thursday, picking up seven. But this Hollywood awards show typically likes to spread its love around — perhaps because that makes for a livelier red-carpet spectacle — so “Argo” and “Django Unchained” were close behind with five nominations apiece. “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Les Misérables” and “Silver Linings Playbook” each received four.Related Links HNN Hot Topics: "Lincoln": The Movie
Source: Business Insider
11-29-12
On Jan. 23, 1968, the USS Pueblo, a Navy intelligence-gathering ship, was captured by North Korea....The ship remained in North Korea, which eventually docked it near Pyongyang, and turned it into a tourist attraction. Visitors can take a tour of the ship, and then watch a 20-minute video officials filmed of the North Korean view of the capture.But now the Pueblo is missing, NKNews.org. reports. A tour company, Koryo Tours, discovered the disappearance after employees returned from a trip. There is evidence the ship was in place on the Taedong River recently.
Source: WSJ
12-11-12
Careful who you call primitive: cave dwellers, it now emerges, were better at drawing animals than many of their highly trainer latter-day successors.Hungarian researchers analyzed 1,000 images of four-legged animals and found the surprising result that the cave artists were far more accurate at portraying the animals’ much-misunderstood gait. Before the work of photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who published his classic “Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements” in 1887, modern-era artists got the gait wrong a remarkable 83.5% of the time, the scientists found. Post-Muybridge, the error rate fell to 58%....
Source: WSJ
12-12-12
Researchers on Wednesday said they found the earliest known chemical evidence of cheese-making, based on the analysis of milk-fat residues in pottery dating back about 7,200 years. The discovery suggests Europe's early farmers added a cheese course to their diet almost as soon as they learned to domesticate cattle and started regularly milking cows.Scientists led by geochemist Richard Evershed at the U.K.'s University of Bristol tested ancient, perforated clay pots excavated at sites along the Vistula River in Poland, and found they had likely been used by prehistoric cheese mongers as strainers to separate curds and whey—a critical step in making cheese.The pots have long puzzled archeologists, but their new analysis, reported in Nature, revealed unique carbon isotopes of milk in the traces of fatty acids that had soaked into the ceramic sieves....
Source: WSJ
12-14-12
North Vietnam’s capture of Saigon during the tumultuous days of April 1975 is a pivotal moment in Asia’s post-colonial history, but the story of what happened next is relatively little-known, both in and outside the country. Huy Duc, a veteran Vietnamese journalist, is aiming to shed new light on the reunification of Vietnam and its aftermath in a new book called “The Winning Side.”Now based in Boston, Mass., where he is a Nieman fellow at Harvard University, Mr. Duc spent 20 years working in Vietnam, writing for local newspapers such as Tuoi Tre, Thanh Nien and Saigon Tiep Thi. He also published until 2010 the blogosin.org, which was ranked as the most popular blog in Vietnam, according to his Nieman profile.For the past three years, he has worked on bringing reunification-era Vietnam to life through in-depth interviews with witnesses, including people who went on to become key post-war leaders in Vietnam and shapers of what is now one Asia’s most promising emerging economies....
Source: WaPo
12-13-12
COPENHAGEN, Denmark — For years, the somber fairy tale about a lonely candle that wanted to be lit dwelt in oblivion at the bottom of a box in Denmark’s National Archives. Its recent discovery has sent ripples through the literary world because it is believed to be one of the first tales ever written by Hans Christian Andersen.The famed Dane wrote nearly 160 fairy tales in his life, including classics such as “The Ugly Duckling” and “The Little Mermaid.” The tale of the candle may have been written when he was still a teen, experts say.Retired historian Esben Brage said Thursday that he found the six-page text on Oct. 4 while searching through archive boxes that had belonged to wealthy families from Andersen’s hometown of Odense in central Denmark....
Source: WaPo
12-13-12
Beyond the unifying symmetry of the numbers, what binds and animates the new “Changing America: The Emancipation Proclamation, 1863, and the March on Washington, 1963” exhibit at the Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History and Culture gallery is the great press of American people toward freedom.It is a constant, relentless force before, during and after these iconic moments in history, with a sweep that is nationally momentous and deeply personal. It winds between the artifacts, giving them weight and suasion.The gallery, inside the American History Museum, divides into two sides and organizes around a quote from labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph: “Freedom is never given, it is won.”...
Source: WaPo
12-14-12
BERLIN — In a city filled with grand monuments to a tragic past, some here say the tiniest are the most powerful: the thousands of brass-topped cobblestones that are spreading over Berlin’s sidewalks.Six new ones showed up on one street the other day. Five more on another. Each one marks a victim of the Holocaust, placed in front of that person’s home. Together they form an expanding constellation of lives that were lived in this city before it turned against its own.This elegant capital has a grim, concrete-slab memorial covering five acres next to the Brandenburg Gate that is used for official events to commemorate the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. But now, thousands in Berlin have their own markers, placed there by an artist who has installed similar stones across Europe....
Source: AP
12-14-12
MILWAUKEE — The vast collection of J.R.R. Tolkien manuscripts initially sold senior Joe Kirchoff on Marquette University, so when the school offered its first course devoted exclusively to the English author, Kirchoff wanted in. The only problem: It was full and he wasn’t on the literature track.Undaunted, the 22-year-old political science and history major lobbied the English department and others starting last spring and through the summer and “kind of just made myself a problem,” he said. His persistence paid off.“It’s a fantastic course,” said Kirchoff, a Chicago native. “It’s a great way to look at something that’s such a creative work of genius in such a way you really come to understand the man behind it.”...
Source: AP
12-14-12
WASHINGTON — President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington for Civil Rights were 100 years apart, but both changed the nation and expanded freedoms.Beginning Friday, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture is presenting a walk back in time through two eras. A new exhibit, “Changing America,” parallels the 1863 emancipation of slaves with the 1963 March on Washington.An inkwell Lincoln used to draft what would become the Emancipation Proclamation is on display on one side of the timeline, while the pen President Lyndon Johnson used to sign the Civil Rights Act is on the other....
Source: NYT
12-14-12
Reviving a 20-year debate over illnesses of veterans of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, a new scientific paper presents evidence that nerve agents released by the bombing of Iraqi chemical weapons depots just before the ground war began could have carried downwind and fallen on American troops staged in Saudi Arabia.The paper, published in the journal Neuroepidemiology, tries to rebut the longstanding Pentagon position, supported by many scientists, that neurotoxins, particularly sarin gas, could not have carried far enough to sicken American forces.The authors are James J. Tuite and Dr. Robert Haley, who has written several papers asserting links between chemical exposures and gulf war illnesses. They assembled data from meteorological and intelligence reports to support their thesis that American bombs were powerful enough to propel sarin from depots in Muthanna and Falluja high into the atmosphere, where winds whisked it hundreds of miles south to the Saudi border....
Source: NYT
12-13-12
LONDON — New testimony that emerged Thursday deepened the intrigue surrounding the death of the former K.G.B. officer Alexander V. Litvinenko, offering “prima facie” evidence of Russian state involvement and indicating that he had been a paid agent of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, lawyers at a preliminary inquest hearing said.The accusations evoked the murky world of rumor, claim and counterclaim in which Mr. Litvinenko appeared to operate before his death in November 2006 and raised questions about his role in the twilight arena of competing intelligence services.Mr. Litvinenko died after ingesting a rare and highly toxic radioactive isotope, polonium 210, which British investigators later traced to a pot of tea served to him at an upscale hotel in Grosvenor Square, opposite the American Embassy in central London. British prosecutors have charged another former K.G.B. operative, Andrei K. Lugovoi, with the killing. Mr. Lugovoi has denied the charge....
Source: NYT
12-14-12
The illegal immigrants had crossed the river in defiance of the law, then escaped capture by sneaking past armed patrols in the dark. They did not have the required paperwork and were ordered to leave, but the authorities suspected the immigrants would probably defy them.It is a scenario that happens every day on the Texas-Mexico border. But in this particular incident, the immigrants were white, English-speaking Americans who were looking for a better life in Texas. And the authorities who were trying to keep them out were Mexican.The episode offers some modern lessons, according to one Texas official.In 1830, Mexico passed a law banning almost all immigration from the United States and provided for military garrisons along its border to enforce it....
Source: Discovery News
12-13-12
Imagine peeking into an old garden shed and discovering the oldest woodworking shop in United States. It's a kind of traditional woodworker's dream. This is basically what happened to a University of Delaware professor recently."The first time I saw it, I about fell over,” said Ritchie Garrison, professor of history professor and director of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware. "It was a bit like walking into the past."The discovery was entirely accidental. Garrison and Michael Burrey were in the process of revamping Garrison's 19th century house in Plymouth, Mass. Burrey was also working on a project at a local preschool in Duxbury, Mass., where he discovered what turns out to be a 18th century joiner's shop. Garrison invited several experts in material culture got to see the shop for themselves....
Source: NYT
12-13-12
BANGKOK — For decades Douglas A. J. Latchford, an 81-year-old British art collector, has built a reputation as one of the world’s great experts in Khmer antiquities, one whose generous return of treasures to Cambodia garnered him knighthood there in 2008.But last month Mr. Latchford, who lives here in an apartment brimming with Asian artifacts, was depicted less chivalrously in a civil complaint filed by the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan.The federal lawyers said Mr. Latchford, identified in court papers only as “the Collector,” bought a 10th-century Khmer warrior statue in the early 1970s knowing that it had been looted from a jungle temple during the Cambodian civil war....
Source: NYT
12-13-12
LONDON — Nearly a quarter of a century after one of the most brazen killings in Northern Ireland’s decades of sectarian violence, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain said Wednesday that there had been “a shocking level of state collusion” and offered an apology to the family of the slain man.
Source: NYT
12-13-12
MOSCOW — In his first major speech since returning to the presidency, Vladimir V. Putin on Wednesday called on Russians “not to lose ourselves as a nation,” urging them to look for guidance in Russia’s historic and traditional values — and not in Western political models — as it charts its post-Soviet development.Mr. Putin also sent tough messages to officials in his government, warning that their spending will now be monitored and that the prosecutor’s office had been empowered to seize illegally acquired assets. He recommended barring officials and other political figures from holding stocks and bank accounts outside Russia and said the government would begin to closely scrutinize officials’ foreign real estate holdings.
Source: NYT
12-13-12
WASHINGTON — Even before its official release, “Zero Dark Thirty,” the new movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, has become a national Rorschach test on the divisive subject of torture.The film’s unflinching portrayal of the Central Intelligence Agency’s brutal interrogation of Al Qaeda prisoners hews close to the official record, offering a gruesome sampling of methods like the near-drowning of waterboarding.
Source: WaPo
12-12-12
LONDON — It was an archaeological hoax that fooled scientists for decades. A century on, researchers are determined to find out who was responsible for Piltdown Man, the missing link that never was.In December 1912, it was announced that a lawyer and amateur archaeologist named Charles Dawson had made an astonishing discovery in a gravel pit in southern England — prehistoric remains, up to 1 million years old, that combined the skull of a human and the jaw of an ape....It was 40 years before the find was definitively exposed as a hoax, and speculation about who did it rages to this day. Now scientists at London’s Natural History Museum — whose predecessors trumpeted the Piltdown find and may be suspects in the fraud— are marking the 100th anniversary with a new push to settle the argument for good....
Source: WaPo
12-13-12
Afghanistan’s history since 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded to prop up a sympathetic government, has been dark and often violent....But, before all that, the country was a remote and poor but not-so-bad place. Attesting to the pre-1979 Afghanistan and how much it has changed is this excerpt from a 1970s Lonely Planet travel book, which described the country as “vastly appealing.” The country’s biggest problems at the time, according to the excerpt unearthed by a Reddit user, were slow travel, “aloof” locals, and “banditry....
