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
9-27-12
The highly anticipated auction of a painting believed to be a Renoir and purchased for $7 at a West Virginia flea market has been canceled, after evidence surfaced this week that the piece was stolen from the Baltimore Museum of Art decades ago.An FBI investigation is now under way, according to the museum director Doreen Bolger, who said museum officials are trying to learn why the painting does not appear on a worldwide registry of stolen and lost art.The discovery of the theft was made after a Washington Post reporter uncovered documents in the museum’s library proving that the institution had the painting from 1937 up until at least 1949. Museum officials then searched their archives, where they found paperwork showing that the Impressionist work, “Paysage Bords de Seine,” or “Landscape on the Banks of the Seine,” was pilfered from their building nearly 61 years ago...
Source: Fox News
9-27-12
DETROIT – A tip from a dying man could finally be the missing clue in the mystery of what happened to Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa, who vanished 37 years ago. MyFoxDetroit.com reports investigators are searching the ground beneath a suburban Detroit driveway after a man told authorities he saw a body being put into the ground around the same time Hoffa disappeared. The man is said to be dying of cancer and was not identified by police. After the tip was received by the Roseville Police Department, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality used ground penetrating radar on a 12-foot-by-12-foot patch beneath the driveway, said agency spokesman Brad Wurfel....
Source: Fox News
9-27-12
WASHINGTON – A little-known official translation of the U.S. national anthem to be sung in Spanish is now part of the Smithsonian Institution's collection.After World War II, musician and composer Clotilde Arias was commissioned by the U.S. State Department to write a translation that could be sung to the original "Star-Spangled Banner" tune. Curators say it was sent to U.S. embassies in Latin America.There are few records of this translation ever being performed, though. Now the National Museum of American History plans to bring it to a live audience. Performances by a full choir are planned for Saturday afternoon....
Source: CBS News
9-26-12
(LiveScience) It sounds like a mash-up of Indiana Jones' plots, but German researchers say a heavy Buddha statue brought to Europe by the Nazis was carved from a meteorite that likely fell 10,000 years ago along the Siberia-Mongolia border.This space Buddha, also known as "iron man" to the researchers, is of unknown age, though the best estimates date the statue to sometime between the eighth and 10th centuries. The carving depicts a man, probably a Buddhist god, perched with his legs tucked in, holding something in his left hand. On his chest is a Buddhist swastika, a symbol of luck that was later co-opted by the Nazi party of Germany....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
9-27-12
David Cameron struggled with David Letterman's impromptu questions about British history. How would you do?Who wrote 'Rule, Britannia!'?Mr Cameron wrongly guessed at Edward Elgar. Letterman informed him that the song was actually based on a poem written by James Thomson and set to music by Thomas Arne in 1740.In the days of colonisation, Britain really did rule the world. The sun never set on the empire. We look back on that as just awful don't we?Mr Cameron said: "I think there were some good bits and some less than good bits. Obviously we had a bit of a falling out at that time. I like to think we're getting over it."...
Source: ABC News
9-26-12
The story of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the love-struck bandits who rose to fame during America's public enemy era before suffering a violent death at the hands of police, has resonated across generations, spawning films, music, even an annual festival. Starting Sept. 30, some of the most crucial pieces of that iconic American story will be for sale to the public.The center piece of the auction, which is being held at RR Auction at the Crowne Plaza Nashua, in New Hampshire, is a Colt .38 detective special revolver. The revolver, nicknamed "the squat gun" because Bonnie was squatting on it at the time of her death, was found taped to Bonnie's thigh after she was shot and killed by Texas Ranger Captain Frank Hamer and his posse. Hamer later speculated that it was hidden there because it is one of the few locations "no gentleman officer would search."...
Source: Scientific American
9-27-12
A Buddhist statue brought to Germany from Tibet by a Nazi-backed expedition has been confirmed as having an extraterrestrial origin.Known as the "iron man," the 24-cm high sculpture may represent the god Vaiśravaṇa and was likely created from a piece of the Chinga meteorite that was strewn across the border region between Russia and Mongolia between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago, according to Elmar Buchner of the University of Stuttgart, and his colleagues.In a paper published in Metoritics & Planetary Science, the team reports their analysis of the iron, nickel, cobalt and trace elements of a sample from the statue, as well as its structure. They found that the geochemistry of the artifact is a match for values known from fragments of the Chinga meteorite. The piece turned into the iron man would be the third largest known from that fall...
Source: AP
9-27-12
Living space in Braunau is scarce, but an imposing Renaissance-era building stands empty in this post-card pretty Austrian town because of the sinister shadow cast by a former tenant: Adolf Hitler.With its thick walls, huge arched doorway and deep-set windows, the 500-year-old house near the town square would normally be prime property. Because Hitler was born here, it has become a huge headache for town fathers forced into deciding what to do with a landmark so intimately linked to evil....
Source: AP
9-26-12
Forensic experts have found 10 bodies as they began to excavate a mass grave where Muslim Bosniaks killed during the 1995 massacre in the eastern town of Srebrenica are believed to have been hidden.Srebrenica was the worst massacre in Europe since World War II and took place in an area that was officially under U.N. protection during the 1992-95 Bosnian war...
Source: WaPo
9-25-12
DAKAR, Senegal — Ten years after one of the worst maritime disasters in history, the few survivors and dozens of families of the dead gathered in Senegal to pay homage to victims of the Joola, a Senegalese ferry that sank off the coast of Gambia, killing 1,863 people.That’s 361 more than died when the Titanic went down, taking with it 1,502 people.The Joola was overloaded with passengers and survivors say it was already listing from the excess weight on the night of Sept. 26, 2002, when it ran into a storm.Survivors wept at the graves Wednesday. Among the 64 who made it out alive was Victor Djiba. He says he has been taking sleeping pills since 2002, because although he managed to get out, his friend traveling with him perished....
Source: NJ.com
9-25-12
PRINCETON TOWNSHIP – The Princeton Battlefield Society has filed another lawsuit aimed at stopping a faculty housing development proposed by the Institute for Advanced Study on land that the group argues was a key Revolutionary War battlefield.The preservation group filed suit Friday asking the courts to reverse an approval the project was given by the Delaware and Raritan Canal Commission last month.The IAS sought waivers from the DRCC to build the development in stream corridors, according to the battlefield society’s appeal filing. The commission gave default approval because of a rule that a project is automatically approved if the commission is unable to act on an application in 45 days....
Source: Herald Online (SC)
9-20-12
McCONNELLS — After six years of research, historians say they have pinpointed the site of Huck’s Defeat – a skirmish in York County that set the stage for larger victories that turned the tide of the Revolutionary War against the British.The precise location of the battle officially remained a mystery for more than a century until York County historian Michael Scoggins and a team of archaeologists explored a 10-acre patch of land in Historic Brattonsville. The Culture & Heritage Museums of York County announced the discovery Thursday.History books can be updated to say that Huck’s Defeat took place near the home of James Williamson, a settler who lived close to the present-day town of McConnells in southwestern York County, Scoggins said.The discovery paves the way for a new, national historic site open to the public at the Brattonsville living history village, where Williamson’s 18th century plantation and the Huck’s Defeat battlefield are located....
Source: NYT
9-25-12
SAPELO ISLAND, Ga. — Once the huge property tax bills started coming, telephones started ringing. It did not take long for the 50 or so people who live on this largely undeveloped barrier island to realize that life was about to get worse.Sapelo Island, a tangle of salt marsh and sand reachable only by boat, holds the largest community of people who identify themselves as saltwater Geechees. Sometimes called the Gullahs, they have inhabited the nation’s southeast coast for more than two centuries. Theirs is one of the most fragile cultures in America.These Creole-speaking descendants of slaves have long held their land as a touchstone, fighting the kind of development that turned Hilton Head and St. Simons Islands into vacation destinations. Now, stiff county tax increases driven by a shifting economy, bureaucratic bumbling and the unyielding desire for a house on the water have them wondering if their community will finally succumb to cultural erosion....
Source: CBS News
9-25-12
Photographer Lewis Hine is well known for his iconic pictures of workers high atop the Empire State Building. But before becoming famous for snapping pictures above the streets of New York, Hine worked as an anti-child labor investigator. Between 1908 and 1924, Hine worked for a private advocacy organization, The National Child Labor Committee. Over the course of 16 years, he took more than 5,000 pictures of children working, often illegally, in mills and mines across the United States. The photos were meant to shock Americans into reforming child labor laws. Almost 75 years after labor reform was enacted though, one man is still haunted by the photos.
Source: LA Times
9-16-12
The fighting that killed or wounded 21,000 Americans in the rolling hills of western Maryland was over in about 12 grisly hours.But a century and a half after the bloodiest day in American military history, the struggle to preserve the ground where Union and Confederate soldiers fought the Battle of Antietam only now appears close to a declaration of victory.As Americans gather to honor the sacrifice of those who fell Sept. 17, 1862 — as they are doing this weekend and Monday on the 150th anniversary — they will do so at one of the nation's best-preserved Civil War sites....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
9-23-12
One of Britain’s greatest spies of the Second World War, a secret agent who went by the code name White Rabbit, has been identified as the inspiration behind Ian Fleming’s James Bond.He’s the dashing secret agent who surrounded himself with women, ruthlessly despatched his enemies and had a series of swashbuckling adventures.It is not James Bond but a real Second World War hero who has now been identified as the inspiration behind Ian Fleming’s fictional creation.A new biography of Wing Commander Forest “Tommy” Yeo-Thomas, one of Britain’s greatest secret agents of the war, claims the writer based the character of 007 on the spy and recreated many of his real life experiences in his novels....
Source: NYT
9-25-12
Ancient dentistry has been discovered in a 6,500-year-old human jawbone: a lump of beeswax that appears to be the earliest evidence of a dental filling.The beeswax was probably applied to ease pain from a crack in the enamel and dentin layers of the tooth, said Claudio Tuniz, a nuclear paleoanthropologist at the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics in Italy.He and his colleagues report their findings in the journal PLoS One.The details, based on this single finding, are fuzzy, said the study’s first author, Federico Bernardini, an archaeologist at the center....
Source: NYT
9-24-12
A giant Roman mosaic, made up of thousands of marble cubes just half a cubic inch in size, is being unearthed in southern Turkey.The 1,600-square-foot mosaic, which consists of colorful geometric patterns, probably dates from the third or fourth century A.D., said Michael Hoff, a professor of art history at the University of Nebraska, whose team has been working since 2005 to excavate ruins in Antiochia ad Cragum, which was once a city on the southern coast of what is now Turkey.First spotted in 2002 but uncovered just this summer, the mosaic is so large that Dr. Hoff and his team have exposed only about 40 percent of it. The rest will be unearthed next summer....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
9-23-12
It is one of Britain’s most intriguing archeological mysteries.When two almost perfectly preserved 3,000-year-old human skeletons were dug up on a remote Scottish island, they were the first evidence that ancient Britons preserved their dead using mummification.The scientists who uncovered the bodies also found clues that one of them – a man buried in a crouching position – was not a single individual, but had in fact been assembled from the body parts of several different people.The discovery began a 10-year investigation into what had led the bronze-age islanders to this strange fate....
Source: CBS News
9-24-12
The war between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland ended more than a decade ago. But, a new battle has broken out over an oral history that contains some of the Irish Republican Army's (IRA) deepest secrets."As they always say, the victors write the history," Delours Price said.The history she is talking about is when Catholics and Protestants were at war in Northern Ireland and when Delours and her sister Marian were IRA fighters trying to force the British out....
