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
11-30-12
RICHMOND, Va. — Donna Gugger’s heart was heavy as she sifted through the scattered debris and devastation left by Superstorm Sandy along the Jersey Shore. Pieces of broken furniture. Shards of metal. Chairs ripped off patios. Blue jeans tossed out of bureaus.But there was something different about that swath of gray cloth with shiny brass buttons. She stopped to take a second look, leaning down to tug on an edge of the fabric that peeked out from under the sand. At first glance, she thought it was an elaborate Halloween costume — a jacket that reminded her of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper.It was no costume. Gugger had stumbled across an 80-year-old tunic owned by a 1933 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, a World War II hero described in his West Point yearbook as a soldier with a “heart like a stormy sea.”...
Source: WaPo
11-30-12
FONTAINEBLEAU, France — The single line of Napoleon’s secret code told Paris of his desperate, last order against the Russians: “At three o’clock in the morning, on the 22nd I am going to blow up the Kremlin.”By the time Paris received the letter three days later, the Russian czar’s seat of power was in flames and the diminished French army was in retreat. Its elegantly calligraphic ciphers show history’s famed general at one of his weakest moments.“My cavalry is in tatters, many horses are dying,” dictated Napoleon, the once-feared leader showing the strain of his calamitous Russian invasion, which halved his army....
Source: AP
11-29-12
NEW YORK — Trace Adkins wore an earpiece decorated like the Confederate flag when he performed for the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree Lighting but says he meant no offense by it.Adkins appeared with the earpiece on a nationally televised special for the lighting on Wednesday. Some regard the flag as a racist symbol and criticized Adkins in Twitter postings.But in a statement released Thursday, the Louisiana native called himself a proud American who objects to any oppression and says the flag represents his Southern heritage....
Source: NYT
11-29-12
JERUSALEM — The black-and-white photos show masses of people yearning for independence, celebrating a vote recognizing a state in Palestine. It was a day that generations of pupils would be taught to remember with reverence: Nov. 29.The jubilant revelers were Jews, the year was 1947, and the vote was held in the United Nations General Assembly. The Palestinians rejected the partition plan, which called for Jewish and Arab states to be established after the imminent expiration of the British rule over Palestine. The outraged Arabs soon started a war they eventually lost.Sixty-five years later to the day, the tables are somewhat reversed: Palestinians have turned to the General Assembly for a second chance — and it is the Israelis who have dismissed the vote, which resoundingly upgraded the Palestinians’ U.N. status, as a symbolic trifle....
Source: NYT
11-30-12
ROME — As its corporate sponsors continue to feel the pinch of the financial crisis, the Vatican has taken an unprecedented step and is appealing directly to tourists and collectors to help finance the restoration of Bernini’s 17th-century colonnade in St. Peter’s Square by buying limited edition stamps.The Vatican’s Philatelic and Numismatic Office is offering a souvenir sheet of two 10-euro stamps that could raise 3 million euros for the project, if all 150,000 are sold.“Fund-raising wasn’t going very well,” said the office’s director, Mauro Olivieri, who came up with the idea for the stamps this year after officials in various Vatican departments were invited to suggest initiatives to help pay for the colonnade’s restoration. The cleanup began in 2009 and was expected to take four years, but the work began to lag when funds dwindled....
Source: NYT
11-30-12
...[M]ost Americans in 2010 paid far less in total taxes — federal, state and local — than they would have paid 30 years ago. According to an analysis by The New York Times, the combination of all income taxes, sales taxes and property taxes took a smaller share of their income than it took from households with the same inflation-adjusted income in 1980.Households earning more than $200,000 benefited from the largest percentage declines in total taxation as a share of income. Middle-income households benefited, too. More than 85 percent of households with earnings above $25,000 paid less in total taxes than comparable households in 1980.Lower-income households, however, saved little or nothing. Many pay no federal income taxes, but they do pay a range of other levies, like federal payroll taxes, state sales taxes and local property taxes. Only about half of taxpaying households with incomes below $25,000 paid less in 2010....
Source: LiveScience
11-29-12
Call it a card player's dream. A complete set of 52 silver playing cards gilded in gold and dating back 400 years has been discovered.Created in Germany around 1616, the cards were engraved by a man named Michael Frömmer, who created at least one other set of silver cards.According to a story, backed up by a 19th-century brass plate, the cards were at one point owned by a Portuguese princess who fled the country, cards in hand, after Napoleon's armies invaded in 1807.At the time they were created in 1616 no standardized cards existed; different parts of Europe had their own card styles. This particular set uses a suit seen in Italy, with swords, coins, batons and cups in values from ace to 10. Each of these suits has three face cards — king, knight (also known as cavalier) and knave. There are no jokers. [See Photos of the Silver Playing Cards]...
Source: CBS News
11-29-12
NORFOLK, Va. -- On Saturday, a legendary naval veteran will retire after a half-century of service. The USS Enterprise was the world's first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and traveled the world in war and in peace.In five decades as one of the most powerful warships on the sea, the USS Enterprise's moment of greatest peril came one morning in 1969 during a final battle drill before heading to Vietnam...."On each F-4 Phantom, there were eight five-inch rockets and six 500-pound bombs," says [Michael] Carlin, the author of TRIAL: Ordeal of the USS Enterprise 14 January, 1969.The exhaust from a service vehicle overheated the fuse on one of those rockets, touching off what one sailor called "the vortex of hell" -- and all of it was recorded in silent horror by a deck camera.
Source: Bloomberg News
11-29-12
Central Intelligence Agency employees murdered military scientist Frank Olson in 1953 after he raised concerns about testing chemical and biological weapons on human subjects without their consent, according to a lawsuit brought by his two sons.
Eric and Nils Olson, in a complaint filed against the U.S. yesterday in Washington, said the agency has covered up the cause of their father’s death for 59 years. Frank Olson, who the CIA admitted was given LSD a few days before his death, didn’t jump from a 13th floor window of the Statler Hotel in New York City, but rather was pushed, they claim.
“The circumstances surrounding the death mirrored those detailed in an assassination manual that, upon information and belief, the CIA had drafted that same year,” Scott Gilbert, a lawyer for the Olsons, wrote in the complaint.
Source: LA Times
11-29-12
In "Hyde Park on Hudson," the retelling of the visit of the king and queen of England to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in upstate New York in 1939, there's a particularly remarkable scene: Roosevelt's mother — who owned the house where everyone stayed — had purchased a brand-new toilet seat for the royals. But after they left she returned it to the store where she bought it. The shop owner was delighted, hanging the seat in his front window. That's in the movie — and it happened in real life."People will think that was made up," says screenwriter Richard Nelson. "But that's hard to make up, and it's all true."
Source: NYT
11-27-12
The Cyrus Cylinder — one of the most famous objects in the British Museum — will travel from its home in London to five museums in the United States next year.Often referred to as “the first bill of human rights” because its inscription encourages freedom of worship throughout the Persian Empire, it is a small clay object — not quite nine inches long — bearing an account, in Babylonian cuneiform, by Cyrus, the King of Persia of his conquest of Babylon in 539 B.C. The cylinder was found in what was once Babylon, now Iraq, in 1879 during a British Museum excavation and has been on display at the museum ever since. It is one of the most famous objects to have survived from the ancient world....
Source: WaPo
11-28-12
NEW YORK — An upcoming auction of over 300 historical documents includes rare letters written by Vincent van Gogh, George Washington, John Lennon and other iconic figures.The property of an anonymous American collector is being offered by Profiles in History in an online and phone auction on Dec. 18.Among the highlights is a two-page letter from Washington to an Anglican clergyman.Another top item is a signed van Gogh letter, written in 1890, to Joseph and Marie Ginoux, who were proprietors of the Cafe de la Gare in Arles, France, where the Dutch post-impressionist artist lived for a time....
Source: WaPo
11-29-12
Thursday marks 80 years for the Federal Diary, our regular column on and for the Federal workforce. It launched Nov. 29, 1932. A small box at the bottom of that day’s front page announced its arrival.Federal Diary columnist Joe Davidson described The Diary’s origins in a column in Thursday’s paper: When the Diary began covering issues involving federal employees — a core segment of The Washington Post audience — president-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt and congressional leaders were discussing legislation to legalize beer....
Source: WaPo
11-29-12
It’s sometimes best to fade into history.That’s especially true if your claim to fame has been an affair with a famous politician who later became president. Case in point: Gennifer Flowers, who sold her sex stories about Bill Clinton to the tabloid “Star” and nearly derailed Clinton’s presidential bid in 1992. She appeared in Penthouse, landed a book deal and wrote the steamy “Gennifer Flowers: Passion & Betrayal” in 1995.And now she’s back....
Source: WaPo
11-29-12
Since 2000, the Japanese government has surveyed public opinion toward a handful of foreign countries, and this year’s results found something surprising and potentially quite significant. The number of respondents who reported they feel “friendly” toward Japan’s two most important neighbors, China and South Korea, have hit record lows. Those holding negative views of South Korea exceed those with positive views for the first time in the survey’s history, a dramatic and rapid reversal of previous scores. The number of Japanese who lack “affinity” for China now exceed those with positive feelings for the country by a proportion of over four-to-one. Here are the official results (the blue represents “friendly” feelings, the black line negative), and below that some thoughts on why this matters:...
Source: WaPo
11-28-12
WASHINGTON — Jill Biden and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta joined an effort Wednesday to build an education center at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to tell the stories of generations of veterans killed in combat, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.They gathered with military families for a ceremonial groundbreaking on a site next to the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall for the $85 million museum. Organizers still must raise $38 million before construction can begin.The veterans group that built the Vietnam memorial wants to open the center in 2014, in time to welcome the last troops home from Afghanistan....
Source: Religion News Service
11-29-12
...“Today’s secessionist movements are just the latest example of a long parade of breakaway groups (in American history) seeking to restore some lost ideal,” said Peter J. Thuesen, professor of religious studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. “The problem is that the ideal is invariably a mirage.”Seeking purity through separation has marked American religious history since the Puritans sailed from Holland to establish a holy beacon in the New World. It helps explain why Baptists, Presbyterians and others have splintered into countless subgroups over the years, and why the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina disaffiliated from the Episcopal Church this fall....Secessionists, such as Russell Longcore of Marietta, Ga., take inspiration from history. He sees secession as pursuit of God-given liberty, such as when American colonies seceded from Britain in 1776, when Southern states left the Union in the 1860s and when the Soviet Union dissolved into 15 separate states two decades ago....
Source: Fox News
11-28-12
Is this [CLICK LINK] a photograph of the iceberg that did the unthinkable: sinking the RMS Titanic?
On April 12, 1912, Captain W. F. Wood aboard the steamer S. S. Etonian photographed a massive iceberg with a distinctive elliptical shape. Wood found the picture remarkable enough to print it out and annotate it with the current latitude and longitude.
Two days later, on April 14, the “unsinkable” Titanic struck an iceberg and sank to bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. That iceberg had the same elliptical shape, according to sketches made on the ship. Wood had captured the remarkable piece of ice, said Craig Sophin, a Titanic expert and consultant to the auctioneers.
Source: Discovery News
11-27-12
An 11th-century book by a revered Baghdad Muslim scholar turns out to be a tongue-in-cheek guide for party crashers, according to the researcher who translated the book into English.The tome was originally authored by al-Khatib al-Baghdadi, a well known scholar of the Prophet Mohammed's teachings.According to Emily Selove of the University of Manchester, who did the translation, he wrote the book to remind readers "that every serious minded person needs to take a break."...
Source: Telegraph (UK)
11-28-12
A lost squadron of Spitfires buried in Burma after the Second World War could be flying again within three years, experts said today.Archaeologists will begin digging for the historic hoard of at least 36 British fighter planes in January.A proportion of the aircraft will then be carefully packaged and brought back to the UK next spring, where they will be restored.David Cundall, a farmer and aviation enthusiast from Scunthorpe, Lincs, has spent 16 years researching the project after being told about the burial by a group of US veterans....
