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: WaPo
12-13-12
BLOEMFONTEIN, South Africa — South African President Jacob Zuma on Thursday honored anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela, who has been hospitalized since the weekend to recover from a lung infection.Zuma unveiled a statue of Mandela in the city of Bloemfontein, also called Mangaung, which next week hosts the ruling African National Congress party’s convention.“We will be able to yet again pay tribute to a man who became a symbol of both our struggle for freedom and the free and democratic South Africa,” Zuma said.Mandela, 94, was admitted on Saturday to 1 Military Hospital in Pretoria, the capital....
Source: Discovery News
12-11-12
A large labyrinth lies in the midst of Peru's Nazca Lines, according to the most detailed study on the enigmatic desert etchings created between 2,100 and 1,300 years ago.Completely hidden in the flat and featureless landscape, the labyrinth was identified after a five-year investigation into the arid Peruvian coastal plain land, about 250 miles south of Lima, where the mysterious geoglyphs are located."As you walk it, only the path stretching ahead of you is visible at any given point," Clive Ruggles of the University of Leicester's School of Archaeology and Ancient History, said....
Source: LiveScience
12-8-12
The largest ancient Egyptian sarcophagus has been identified in a tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, say archaeologists who are re-assembling the giant box that was reduced to fragments more than 3,000 years ago.Made of red granite, the royal sarcophagus was built for Merneptah, an Egyptian pharaoh who lived more than 3,200 years ago. A warrior king, he defeated the Libyans and a group called the "Sea Peoples" in a great battle.He also waged a campaign in the Levant attacking, among others, a group he called "Israel" (the first mention of the people). When he died, his mummy was enclosed in a series of four stone sarcophagi, one nestled within the other....
Source: Fox News
12-12-12
First he found the Titanic -- will he find the only ship more famous?Robert Ballard, the underwater archaeologist famed for discovering the wreck of the Titanic in 1985, claims to have found evidence of the biblical flood that Noah fled, surfing the waters for 40 days and 40 nights, according to Genesis. He says the Black Sea was once merely a freshwater lake -- until an enormous wall of water from the Mediterranean 200 times more powerful than Niagara Falls swept it and everything else away. Including Noah and his ark."We went in there to look for the flood," Ballard told ABC News. "Not just a slow moving, advancing rise of sea level, but a really big flood that then stayed ... the land that went under stayed under."
Source: NJ.com
12-9-12
COMMERCIAL TWP. — Aug. 15, 1781, Capt. James Riggins and his troops of the New Jersey militia took action against 15 British sympathizers boarding a boat on the Maurice River in Port Norris attempting to flee to New York.The skirmish became known as the Battle of Dallas Landing and was Cumberland County’s only officially-recorded battle where blood was shed during the Revolutionary War....
Source: EADT 24 (UK)
12-10-12
A HISTORIAN has made what he described as an “exciting” discovery when he investigated musical notes carved in stone at a building in Bury St Edmunds.Rob Lansman believes the Market Cross building in the town centre probably reveals the oldest ‘written in stone’ musical notation of the British national anthem.While researching his new book on public art in the town, he took a closer look at one of four panels, or reliefs, which shows the horned Greek god Pan with what looked like a page of sheet music....
Source: WaPo
12-10-12
TOKYO — At a Shinto shrine here lined with cherry trees, a war museum asserts a jarring and unrepentant storyline about Japan’s wartime past, brushing aside well-documented atrocities and describing its rampage through Asia as tragic but justified.The museum, making its case with videos and wall displays, says Japan “advanced through” Asia between 1931 and 1945 to protect neighboring countries from Western colonialism. There is no mention that the Imperial Army forced women into front-line brothels, or that its soldiers ransacked cities, using civilians for bayonet practice.The Yasukuni Shrine is a religious site, not a national one, and some Japanese visit simply to honor the war dead. But Yasukuni and its adjacent museum remain the symbolic heart of World War II militarism, when Shinto was the state-sponsored religion and an emperor-worshiping army tried to take control of Asia.
Source: WaPo
12-11-12
If you’re reading this and run into Albert Small’s wife, hide the newspaper. Mum’s the word, okay?The local real estate developer just bought a letter written by George Washington for $290,000 — but he hasn’t mentioned the purchase to Shirley, his spouse of more than 60 years.“I don’t tell my wife these things,” he told us Monday. “She doesn’t like to hear about it.”...
Source: WaPo
12-11-12
NEW YORK — Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal were knee-deep in preparing the follow-up to their Oscar-winning “The Hurt Locker,” a film that would chronicle the manhunt for Osama bin Laden, his escape in Tora Bora and the vanishing trail of the world’s most wanted man.“Then history changed,” says Bigelow.After a team of Navy SEALs killed bin Laden in his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2 last year, the director Bigelow and Boal, a journalist turned screenwriter, set about remaking their film. Whereas most films start with a concept or a dramatic arc, Boal and Bigelow built “Zero Dark Thirty” one source at a time, piecing together a narrative out of recent history shrouded in secrecy.The approach — a marriage of Boal’s reporting and Bigelow’s visceral action — has made “Zero Dark Thirty” a lightning rod. Though Sony’s Columbia Pictures won’t release it until Dec. 19 in New York and Los Angeles with a national release to follow on Jan. 11, it has already been hailed as the best film of the year, spawned a Pentagon investigation and elicited op-eds that say the film exaggerates the efficacy of torture....
Source: WaPo
12-11-12
The government has decided to remove a controversial inscription on the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial rather than replace it, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced Tuesday....The inscription comes from a powerful, difficult-to-distill sermon King delivered two months before he was assassinated in 1968.Speaking to the congregation of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, King critiqued the “drum major instinct,” shorthand for a showboat who leads the parade. Imagining his own eulogy, King made it clear he wanted to be remembered for a higher purpose.“Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice,” King said. “Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all the other shallow things will not matter.”When carved into granite on the north face of the memorial’s centerpiece, a statue of King emerging from a huge block of stone, the sentiment was edited from 46 words to 10, to fit the space available: “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.”...
Source: Yahoo News
12-10-12
A bundle of recent genetic studies have suggested modern humans had sex with Neanderthals thousands of years ago when the two populations roamed the planet alongside each other. However, the bones left behind by the two species don't bear any obvious traces of interbreeding, and a new study of monkeys in Mexico shows why we shouldn't expect them to.Researchers examined blood samples, hair samples and measurements collected from mantled howler monkeys and black howler monkeys that were live-captured and released in Mexico and Guatemala between 1998 and 2008. The two monkey species splintered off from a common ancestor about 3 million years ago; today they live in mostly separate habitats, except for a "hybrid zone" in the state of Tabasco in southeastern Mexico, where they coexist and interbreed.
Source: WaPo
12-7-12
Nobel Peace Prize winner and New York Times best-selling author Elie Wiesel will appear on the “Super Soul Sunday” series on OWN.The interview, which falls on the first day of Hanukkah, features the 82-year-old Holocaust survivor talking about his open heart surgery, being a witness to history as well as the impact of being among the victims of the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. Wiesel received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.The interview precedes a 2006 “The Oprah Winfrey Show” episode during which Wiesel and Oprah Winfrey travel to Poland where they visit the grounds of the Auschwitz death camp....
Source: WaPo
12-7-12
PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii — As crew members lined the edge of the Navy guided-missile destroyer, the ship’s whistle sounded. It was 7:55 a.m., the exact time the Japanese began bombing Pearl Harbor 71 years earlier.Friday’s moment of silence was part of the commemoration that drew some 2,000 people to Pearl Harbor — and many more to events around the country — to mark the anniversary of the surprise attack that killed thousands of people and launched the United States into World War II....
Source: WaPo
12-8-12
FREDERICKSBURG — On the second floor of the old brick building on Sophia Street, the three Confederate snipers waited for the Yankees.They had their muskets at the ready, and paper ammunition cartridges were lined up on the window sills.Outside, their comrades were retreating. There were shouts, crashes of gunfire and the sound of approaching drums. “Get ready!” rebel Andrew Prasse said as he leaned out a window. “All right, let ’em have it, boys!”They refought the Civil War’s Battle of Fredericksburg on Saturday, a few days shy of its 150th anniversary....
Source: WaPo
12-10-12
DORDRECHT, Netherlands — Just as the first storms of winter roll in, Dutchman Johan Huibers has finished his 20-year quest to build a full-scale, functioning model of Noah’s Ark — an undertaking of, well, biblical proportions.Huibers, a Christian, used books 6-9 of Genesis as his inspiration, following the instructions God gives Noah down to the last cubit.Translating to modern measurements, Huibers came up with a vessel that works out to a whopping 427 feet (130 meters) long, 95 feet (29 meters) across and 75 feet (23 meters) high. Perhaps not big enough to fit every species on Earth, two by two, as described in the Bible, but plenty of space, for instance, for a pair elephants to dance a tango....
Source: AP
12-9-12
WASHINGTON — Just six blocks from the White House, the FBI’s hulking headquarters overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue has long been the government building everyone loves to hate. The verdict: It’s an ugly, crumbling concrete behemoth, an architectural mishap — all 2.4 million square feet of it.But in this time of tight budgets, massive deficits and the “fiscal cliff,” the 38-year-old FBI headquarters building has one big thing in its favor.It sits atop very valuable real estate, an entire city block on America’s Main Street, midway between the U.S. Capitol and the White House. Just how valuable? The General Services Administration intends to find out.This past week, the agency that oversees all federal buildings issued an invitation to developers: How would you like to build a new headquarters for the FBI in a different location? In exchange, we’ll consider throwing in the J. Edgar Hoover building and the underlying land as part of the transaction....
Source: NYT
12-8-12
Back when leaders led, followers followed and the news media made less noise, the commanding figures of American government retreated to Andrews Air Force Base to forge a bipartisan budget compromise.That 11-day summit meeting failed — despite the threat of deep automatic spending cuts, and despite the top Republican’s acknowledgment that taxes had to go up.A smaller group of negotiators later struck a deal inside the Capitol. That failed, too — defeated on the House floor by a coalition of liberal and conservative rebels.History now recalls those events in the fall of 1990, and the agreement Congress eventually enacted, as the opening chapter of Washington’s long, successful climb out of the deficit hole of the 1980s. And they offer a perspective on the current stalemate between a White House and a Congress struggling to repeat that achievement....
Source: NYT
12-10-12
MIAMI — Rick Scott, businessman turned politician, campaigned for governor in 2010 with promises to run Florida like a successful business — more efficiency, lower costs, less hand-wringing and measurable results.He meant higher education, too, but until recently that meant mostly shrinking budgets.Now, looking for more value on the remaining dollars, Governor Scott and Republican lawmakers are prodding Florida’s 12 state universities to find ways to steer students toward majors that are in demand in the job market.The message from Tallahassee could not be blunter: Give us engineers, scientists, health care specialists and technology experts. Do not worry so much about historians, philosophers, anthropologists and English majors....
Source: NYT
12-9-12
...In the civil rights era, the Supreme Court waited decades to weigh in on interracial marriage. On Friday, by contrast, the court did not hesitate to jump into the middle of one of the most important social controversies of the day, agreeing to hear two cases on same-sex marriage....In private correspondence in 1957, Justice Felix Frankfurter said the court was doing all it could to avoid hearing cases that would require giving the nation an answer about whether bans on interracial marriage — anti-miscegenation laws, in the parlance of the day — were constitutional....
Source: NYT
12-8-12
...Five hundred and twenty years after the start of the Inquisition, Spain opened the door to descendants of Sephardic Jews whose ancestors had fled the Iberian Peninsula, forced, in order to live in Spain or its colonies, to choose between exile or conversion to Christianity. Or worse.Top government officials pledged to speed up the existing naturalization process for Sephardic Jews who through the centuries spread in a diaspora — to the Ottoman Empire and the south of Italy; to Spain’s colonies in Central and South America; and to outposts in what are now New Mexico, Texas and Mexico.
