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
10-7-12
A doctoral student at Baruch College is studying the luminescent proteins of Bermuda fireworms, glowing green creatures that may have caught Christopher Columbus’s eye 520 years ago.At 10 p.m. on Oct. 11, 1492, Christopher Columbus saw a glimmer in the distance as he stood on the deck of the Santa María. The faraway flash was “so small a body that he could not affirm it to be land,” Columbus wrote, referring to himself in the third person.He called over two of his crew members, but the light was so faint that only one man could discern it. Staring harder, Columbus wrote, he “again perceived it once or twice, appearing like the light of a wax candle moving up and down, which some thought an indication of land.”...Related LinksHNN Hot Topics: Columbus Day
Source: NYT
10-6-12
Early in the summer of 1952, after his first year of dental school at Emory University in Atlanta, Perry Brickman received a letter from the dean. It informed him that he had flunked out.Mr. Brickman was mystified. He had been a B-plus student in biology as an Emory undergraduate and had earned early admission to dental school. He had never failed a course in his life.Over the next few weeks of that summer, Mr. Brickman found out that three of his classmates had also been failed. All of them happened to be Jewish. Yet instead of fighting back, Mr. Brickman and his friends searched for other dental schools and swallowed a shame that lasted decades....
Source: NYT
10-7-12
As the New York Film Festival slides into its final weekend on Friday, the fall’s other major cinematic event opens on Thursday, just a few blocks away. Celebrating its 10th anniversary, “To Save and Project,” the Museum of Modern Art’s international celebration of film preservation, offers a dense and varied collection of films that feels like a festival in itself — one that, unlike most, isn’t subject to the tyranny of the present.
Source: NYT
10-7-12
[Vladimir Putin turns 60 this week.]...For leaders of the Kremlin, turning 60 is no small matter. It is a milestone heavy with history and symbolism, sometimes marked by elaborate ceremony and sometimes not, but one that inevitably reminds the public that a clock is ticking, that even the most powerful, larger-than-life figures eventually yield to the grip of time....Stalin’s 60th birthday in December 1939 was such a big deal that it overshadowed news of the war between Germany and the Allies, and the Soviet Union’s own war with Finland. A new official biography was released, with an initial print run of one million copies, and Stalin was given the Order of Lenin, then the country’s highest honor.When Khrushchev received the same award on his 60th birthday in 1954, it was part of a growing body of evidence that he was gaining the upper hand in a power struggle. On his 60th birthday in 1966, Brezhnev was given an even higher award, Hero of the Soviet Union. He died in office in 1982.
Source: NYT
10-7-12
DUNVEGAN, Ontario — Although it produced “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the War of 1812 does not get much attention in the United States. In Canada, however, the federal government is devoting surprising attention to the bicentennial of the conflict, which it describes bluntly in a new television commercial as an act of American aggression against Canada.Much about the war is fiercely debated by historians but one thing is clear: Canada was not yet a country at the time of the war, which pitted the United States against the British.
Source: LiveScience
10-2-12
Ambivalence over the name of the third season of the year reflects its status as a relatively new concept. As natural as it seems today, people haven't always thought of the year in terms of four seasons.Fifteen hundred years ago, the Anglo-Saxons marked the passage of time with just one season: winter, a concept considered equivalent to hardship or adversity that metaphorically represented the year in its entirety. For example, in the Old English epic poem "Beowulf," the title character rescues a kingdom that had been terrorized by a monster for "12 winters."
Source: NYT
10-5-12
His name was Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, but you wouldn’t have known it from the speakers who paid tribute to him on Friday for his forceful, yet genial, guidance of The New York Times through more than three decades of turbulence and growth.From start to finish he was Punch, just Punch. It is how everyone knew him during his years as chairman and chief executive of The New York Times Company and publisher of its flagship newspaper.That boyhood nickname traveled with him throughout a life that ended last Saturday when he died at 86 after years of illness. And it was how he was referred to by relatives and former colleagues at a remembrance that was true to a man who prized orderliness and who, by all accounts, had scant interest in having people go on and on about him....
Source: NYT
10-5-12
A former manager at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in Manhattan was fired for raising health and security concerns at one of the most security-conscious places in the world, he claimed in a lawsuit filed on Friday.The former manager, Thomas Cancelliere, who was facilities director of the memorial, alerted his bosses that he believed that the water in the memorial’s signature fountains carried illness-causing bacteria, that exit gates were too narrow and could hinder an evacuation and that there were no security checks at a public garage directly below the off-site room where the memorial’s millions of visitors are screened, the lawsuit said....
Source: AP
10-5-12
he discovery of a tomb that experts believe might be that of a great Maya queen could redefine the understanding of women's political roles during the Classic Maya period, experts said Thursday.A team of U.S. and Guatemalan experts led by anthropologist David Freidel found a stone jar at a burial chamber in northern Guatemala that led them to believe it is the burial site of Lady K'abel, considered the military governor of an ancient Maya city during the 7th century...
Source: AFP
10-5-12
Archaeologists this week returned to Antikythera, the Aegean Sea island where sponge divers in 1900-1901 found the so-called Antikythera Mechanism, a remarkable 2nd-century BCE device that tracked the cycles of the solar system. "These are unexplored sea depths beneath a trade route known since antiquity," said Angeliki Simosi, head of Greece's ephorate of underwater antiquities."This is virgin territory," she told AFP. Believed to operate by crank and containing inter-meshing gears, the mechanism could be used to calculate eclipses and moon cycles. The technology was comparable to astronomical clocks that only appeared some 1,600 years later. It was found in the wreck of a cargo ship apparently carrying booty to Rome...
Source: AP
10-5-12
Mexican archaeologists say they have determined that the ancient Mayas built watchtower-style structures atop the ceremonial ball court at the temples of Chichen Itza to observe the equinoxes and solstices, and they said Friday that the discovery adds to understanding of the many layers of ritual significance that the ball game had for the culture.The structures sit atop the low walls of the court, where the Mayas played a game that consisted, as far as experts can tell, of knocking a heavy, latex ball with their elbows, knees or hips, through a stone ring set in the walls...
Source: AP
10-5-12
Hundreds of people gathered in the tiny Mississippi Delta town of Ruleville to dedicate a statue of civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer.Hamer died in 1977. She was known for saying she was "sick and tired of being sick and tired."...
Source: AP
10-5-12
Mexican archaeologists said Friday they uncovered the largest number of skulls ever found in one offering at the most sacred temple of the Aztec empire dating back more than 500 years.The finding reveals new ways the pre-Colombian civilization used skulls in rituals at Mexico City's Templo Mayor, experts said. That's where the most important Aztec ceremonies took place between 1325 until the Spanish conquest in 1521.The 50 skulls were found at one sacrificial stone. Five were buried under the stone, and each had holes on both sides - signaling they were hung on a skull rack....
Source: AP
10-4-12
ST. LOUIS (AP) — Doris Spates was a baby when her father died inexplicably in 1955. She has watched four siblings die of cancer, and she survived cervical cancer.After learning that the Army conducted secret chemical testing in her impoverished St. Louis neighborhood at the height of the Cold War, she wonders if her own government is to blame.In the mid-1950s, and again a decade later, the Army used motorized blowers atop a low-income housing high-rise, at schools and from the backs of station wagons to send a potentially dangerous compound into the already-hazy air in predominantly black areas of St. Louis....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
10-4-12
Ironbridge Gorge, regarded by historians as the cradle of the industrial revolution, has been saved for the nation with a multi-million pound government grant.The gorge – which was described by writer Charles Hulbert in 1837 as “the most extraordinary district in the world” – has been under threat from landslides.However, Communities secretary Eric Pickles will announce today [thurs] that the Government has committed £12million to “save” the gorge.The cash will go to restoring and protecting the gorge and its bridge so that generations can enjoy the landscape that sparked a new age of modernity in Britain.
Source: NYT
10-2-12
FORT WORTH — Millions of Texans have read the “Victory or Death” letter written at the Alamo more than 170 years ago. But only a small number of them have ever laid eyes on the original — a brief plea for reinforcements written by Lt. Col. William Barret Travis on Feb. 24, 1836, as he and his outnumbered men faced the Mexican Army.Whether it ever returns to the Alamo is now a hotly debated issue.The letter has become one of the most revered documents in Texas history, and one of its phrases — “Victory or Death,” which Colonel Travis underlined three times — has endured as an unofficial Texas slogan, turning up on flags and, occasionally, in the speeches of politicians, including one that Gov. Rick Perry gave last year as he campaigned for president....
Source: LiveScience
9-28-12
Ancient scraps of fabric found in a grave in Denmark are not made of cultivated flax as once believed, but instead are woven from imported wild nettles, suggesting the grave's inhabitant may have traveled far for burial. This discovery, announced today (Sept. 28) in the journal Scientific Reports, casts a new light on the textile trade in Bronze Age Europe, said study researcher Ulla Mannering, an archaeologist at the University of Copenhagen.
Source: LiveScience
9-29-12
A scrap of papyrus from the early Christian era that refers to Jesus having a wife has met with extreme skepticism since its unveiling 11 days ago. Many scholars have declared the so-called "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" a modern forgery — one that probably postdates Dan Brown's 2003 novel, "The Da Vinci Code." Others say that conclusion is too hasty.What are the experts' arguments for and against its authenticity? And will the world ever know for sure whether this dogma-defying artifact is real?
Source: Telegraph (UK)
9-25-12
The English-language book, published in 1942, paints Adolf Hitler as a man of peace and dwells at length on Britain’s class inequalities and “atrocities” committed in Ireland and India.However, it also celebrates British landscape and culture, in particular the works of Shakespeare.A rare copy of the work, entitled “Hirt’s Englandkundliches Lesebuch fur die Oberstufe an Oberschulen” (“Hirt’s English textbook theory for colleges and high schools”), will go on sale at auction this week.The book’s front cover is illustrated with an idyllic picture of the River Avon and Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-Upon-Avon, Warwick, where Shakespeare was baptised and buried....
Source: AP
10-1-12
BERLIN (AP) — Prosecutors in Germany said Monday they have shelved their investigation of 17 former German SS soldiers who were part of a unit involved in a Nazi wartime massacre of more than 500 civilians in Italy, because of a lack of evidence.The decision brings to a close a decade-long investigation of the former members of the 16th SS-Panzergrenadier Division "Reichsfuehrer SS," eight of whom are still alive, on allegations they were involved in the Aug. 12, 1944, killings in the Tuscan village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema.The SS unit descended upon the village that morning ostensibly to hunt for partisans, but instead rounded up and shot villagers, according to survivors. Others were herded into basements and other enclosed spaces and killed with hand grenades....
