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: Kansas City Star
11-22-12
Last month, a visitor delivered a small plastic bag containing several tree seeds to the Truman Library in Independence.The seeds had fallen from trees, still standing, that survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. Clifton Truman Daniel, eldest grandson of former president Harry Truman, had been presented them this summer in Japan.Library officials hope to plant the seeds in Powell Gardens and -- when saplings are sufficiently mature -- transplant them to the library grounds....Read morhere: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/11/22/3930473/truman-grandson-plants-seeds-of.html#storylink=cpy..
Source: NYT
11-22-12
LECOMPTON, Kan.
Source: WaPo
11-20-12
“The first real Thanksgiving was near here,” said Ailsa Firstenberg, a 16-year-old junior interpreter at Colonial Williamsburg, not far from the James River and the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia.Since she was 11 years old, Ailsa has put on a colonial costume to volunteer helping kids and their families get a better picture of America’s earliest days. It’s part of visiting historic Williamsburg and Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in what would become the United States, established on May 14, 1607....Many people think the first Thanksgiving happened in the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts in 1621 to celebrate a successful harvest. But Williamsburg historian Taylor Stoermer says settler communities in what was then called the New World often had celebrations to give thanks. Records show that Spanish conquistadors had religious Thanksgiving services at San Elizario, Texas, in 1598.And on Dec. 4, 1619, 38 settlers from England survived a storm to find land on the James River. The settlers were so glad to have survived the storm and at last be in Virginia, that ship’s captain, John Woodleaf, decreed Dec. 4 a day for giving thanks in the New World, Stoermer says....
Source: WaPo
11-20-12
NAIROBI, Kenya — History is repeating itself yet again in eastern Congo. Rebels supported by Rwanda are on the march. Civilians are fleeing. And higher powers appear to be taking sides.Congo and Rwanda have been at this stage before. First in 1996, then in 1998. Also in 2004 and 2008. The first two conflicts had their roots in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, but now the fighting is mostly over mineral wealth — including minerals used in the world’s smart phones and laptops....Rwanda’s 1996 and 1998 incursions into Congo were driven by Rwanda’s troubled ethnic past. Rwanda justified the invasions on the basis that its security was being threatened by a rebel group called the FDLR, a group of ethnic Hutus. Extremist Hutus killed more than 500,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus during the country’s 1994 genocide. But the FDLR today is nowhere near as powerful as it once was, and the Hutu threat is not such a concern to Rwandan President Paul Kagame, a Tutsi....
Source: WaPo
11-19-12
RICHMOND, Va. — The Civil War Trust has teamed up with the state to complete a $3.2 million campaign protecting 285 acres at Gaines’ Mill, where Gen. Robert E. Lee had his first major victory as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia.The preservation greatly expands the number of protected acres at Gaines’ Mill, the bloodiest chapter in the Seven Days’ Battles, making it a “monumental achievement” in the trust’s history, president James Lighthizer said....
Source: AP
11-17-12
MUMBAI, India — Hundreds of thousands of grieving supporters thronged the streets of Mumbai on Sunday for the funeral of Bal Thackeray, a Hindu extremist leader linked to waves of mob violence against Muslims and migrant workers in India.Nearly 20,000 policemen were on hand because of the violent history of the group. The mourners, however, remained calm and orderly as the body of Thackeray was cremated at Shivaji park where he had made political debut by addressing his first public rally 46 years ago....Thackeray’s Sena is among the most xenophobic of India’s Hindu right-wing political parties and held power in Mumbai from 1995 to 2000. His supporters often called him Hindu Hriday Samrat or emperor of Hindu hearts.In 1992, members of Hindu right-wing groups, including the Sena and the Bharatiya Janata Party, were instrumental in destroying a 16th century mosque in north India that they said was the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama, and Thackeray was blamed for the violence and rioting that followed. In Mumbai alone, nearly 1,000 people were killed....
Source: AP
11-19-12
GETTYSBURG, Pa. — Two-time Academy Award winning director Steven Spielberg expressed a sense of humility Monday as he delivered the keynote address during ceremonies to mark the 149th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address.”“I’ve never stood anyplace on earth where it’s easier to be humbled than here,” said Spielberg, whose biopic about the 16th president is currently in theaters.His remarks were made at the annual event at the Soldier’s National Cemetery in Gettysburg, near the site where Lincoln gave the famous oration amid the American Civil War in 1863, four months after the battle in which the Union turned back an invasion of the North by Confederate troops under Gen. Robert E. Lee....Related LinksHNN Hot Topics: "Lincoln": The Movie
Source: WaPo
11-19-12
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said in an interview that he isn’t certain what the age of the earth is, and that parents should be able to teach their kids both scientific and religious attempts to answer the question.“I’m not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States,” Rubio told GQ. “I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I’m not a scientist. I don’t think I’m qualified to answer a question like that.”...
Source: NYT
11-18-12
John and Yoko are there, talking for hours and hours — during a bed-in, at a “happening,” listening to the Beatles at home....Eric Clapton, between shows at the Fillmore East in 1970, struggles with a sense of responsibility for his new band, Derek and the Dominos.Those are among more than 100 interviews with rock stars, artists and assorted radicals recorded from 1969 to 1972 by Howard Smith, a longtime writer for The Village Voice. They have now been cataloged and packaged for the digital era as “The Smith Tapes” and will be released in monthly batches over the next year. The first, with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Lou Reed, Frank Zappa, Mr. Clapton and others, comes out Tuesday through Amazon’s MP3 store and next week on iTunes....
Source: MinnPost
11-19-12
The meeting was billed as a “visioning workshop” for Minneapolis residents interested in finding out what a Historic Conservation District might do for their neighborhoods. But before they got down to the business of “visioning,” they got a crash course in the difference between “Historic Conservation” and “Historic Preservation” districts from city planner John Smoley, who has a Ph.D. after his name.In Historic Preservation, Smoley explained, the building materials are as important at the total structure. This means that if the house you own in a Historic Preservation District needs new windows, you can’t just go to Home Depot and buy some that resemble the originals. The rules would require that materials, design and craftsmanship match the originals.He likened this process to restoring an autographed Babe Ruth baseball by replacing the old leather and stitching with new stuff and then duplicating the signature. The restored baseball might look great, but it is no longer historic or valuable — it’s just a baseball....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
11-18-12
A company of elite longbow archers perished aboard Henry VIII's flagship the Mary Rose when it sank almost five centuries ago, scientists have discovered.Researchers have identified the elite archers who died alongside sailors on Henry VIII's flagship, due to evidence of repetitive strain in their shoulders and spines.The ship sank off Spithead in The Solent in 1545, while leading an attack on a French invasion fleet. It stayed on the seabed until it was raised in 1982 and put on public display.Over the past two years, scientists from the University of Swansea have been working to identify almost 100 skeletons kept at the Mary Rose Museum, in Portsmouth....
Source: NYT
11-18-12
WASHINGTON — When President Obama lands in Yangon on Monday, he will be the first sitting American president to visit the country now known as Myanmar. But he will not be the first Obama to visit.The president’s Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, spent part of World War II in what was then called Burma as a cook for a British Army captain. Although details are sometimes debated, the elder Mr. Obama’s Asian experience proved formative just as his grandson’s time growing up in Indonesia did decades later.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
11-18-12
The ancient dwelling was uncovered during an archaeological excavation in a field on the outskirts of Edinburgh.A large oval pit nearly seven metres in length and studded with postholes is all that remains of the dwelling that has been dated to the Mesolithic period, around 10,252 years ago.A survey of the site was being conducted in preparation for the building of the Forth Replacement Crossing in a field in Echline, South Queensferry, just north of Edinburgh.Rod McCullagh, a senior archaeologist at Historic Scotland, said: "This discovery and, especially, the information from the laboratory analyses adds valuable information to our understanding of a small but growing list of buildings erected by Scotland's first settlers after the last glaciation, 10,000 year ago....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
11-16-12
A 5,500-year-old mystery murder could be one step closer to being solved after forensic experts found Ginger, the Egyptian mummy housed at the British Museum, was a young man stabbed in the back during peacetime.Forensic scientists have moved closer to solving a 5,500-year-old cold case crime after new technology allowed them to study fatal wounds on the body of a famous mummy.The corpse, known officially as the Gebelein Man, has been nicknamed Ginger due to his red hair and seen by millions of visitors to the British Museum.Experts, who used digital images and scanning technology, have now concluded he was almost certainly murdered by an assailant who caught him by surprise....
Source: Discovery News
11-16-12
The 16th-century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe did not die of mercury poisoning, according to a team of researchers who have analysed the scientist's remains.The study started in 2010, as Brahe's remains were exhumed from his grave in Prague in a bid to investigate long standing rumors about the astronomer's untimely death.Brahe died on Oct. 24, 1601, only 11 days after the onset of a sudden illness. The first astronomer to describe a supernova, Brahe was apparently in good health and at the height of his career....
Source: Discovery News
11-14-12
Evidence of the miserable life lived by the Maya during the Spanish conquest of the 16th century has emerged in an ancient settlement of Mexico's east coast, as archaeologists unearthed dozens of infant skeletons with signs of malnutrition and acute anemia.Found in the recently opened archaeological site of San Miguelito, in the middle of the hotel chain area of Quintana Roo, near Cancun, the human burials were excavated within 11 housing buildings dating to the Late Postclassic Mayan Period (1200 – 1550).Archaeologists of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) estimate that at least 30 burials belong to infants between the ages of three and six. The majority suffered from hunger and most likely died of related diseases....
Source: NBC 17 (NC)
11-14-12
Wednesday morning, a petition calling for North Carolina to secede from the United States reached 25,000 signatures, meaning the White House will respond following a review of the petition.......[T]he overriding question is whether [the petition is] worth [its] salt.Not so much, says University of North Carolina professor Joseph Glatthaar. A professor of history in Chapel Hill, Glatthaar specializes in the American Civil War and American military history; he is also president of the Society for Military History.Glatthaar explains that secession is unconstitutional, citing the Supreme Court's 1869 ruling in "Texas v. White."The decision said that Texas, as well as the rest of the Confederacy, never left the Union during the Civil War, because a state cannot secede from the United States without agreement from both the state and federal government....
Source: Tom Blanton in Foreign Policy
11-14-12
Tom Blanton is director of the independent non-governmental National Security Archive (at George Washington University), which has published 2,163 of Kissinger's "memcons" in The Kissinger Transcripts: A Verbatim Record of U.S. Diplomacy, 1969-1977, edited by William Burr (Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 2005), and 15,502 of Kissinger's telcons, The Kissinger Telephone Conversations, also in the Digital National Security Archive series from ProQuest. The CIA director was blackmailing the secretary of state; a nuclear deal with Iran was in the works; and the U.S. president wanted to pursue Middle East peace. President Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger -- then serving as both secretary of state and national security adviser -- discussed all of this and more on the morning of March 5, 1975. Loyal assistant Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft took notes to provide this practically verbatim Secret memorandum of conversation, published here for the first time, which the National Security Archive obtained through a Mandatory Declassification Review request to the Gerald R. Ford Library.
Source: WaPo
11-14-12
VATICAN CITY — Reviving a long-dead language might sound like a tall order for a church that’s already weakened by widespread secularization and the fallout from decades of a painful child abuse scandal.But Pope Benedict XVI seems convinced that revitalizing the study and use of Latin among priests and seminarians is a necessary step for the church’s future.On Saturday (Nov. 10), Benedict established a “Pontifical Academy of Latinity” tasked with “promoting the use of Latin” inside and outside the Catholic Church.Ever since its earliest days, the church “has spoken and prayed in all the languages of humanity,” the pope wrote in the letter announcing the creation of the new Vatican department....
Source: Religion News Service
11-14-12
It’s tempting to view the sex scandal surrounding retired Army Gen. David Petraeus through a religious lens.After all, most faiths forbid adultery, and even before his fall from grace, some Pentagon colleagues compared Petraeus to the biblical King David — another proud and powerful warrior.The comparison seemed even more apt after the former four-star general’s resignation from the CIA on Friday. “More than one officer cited the biblical adultery of King David and Bathsheba,” wrote The New York Times.The Bible says that David acted righteously and kept God’s commandments — except in the case of Uriah the Hittite, Bathsheba’s husband....
