Breaking News

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
September 19, 2012

Dennis Hopper’s lost prints documenting 1960s US history, art scene go on show in Berlin

BERLIN — A collection of more than 400 recently rediscovered prints in which Dennis Hopper documented the U.S. arts scene of the mid-1960s, the civil rights movement and much more is going on show in Berlin — an exhibition that his children say offers an intimate glimpse at his youth.The black-and-white small-format photos in the exhibition, “Dennis Hopper — The Lost Album,” were taken between 1961 and 1967, when Hopper was out of favor in Hollywood and before he directed “Easy Rider,” which became a huge and unlikely success....

Source: WaPo
September 19, 2012

Netanyahu, Obama and JFK’s ‘red line:’ a misreading of history

“I think it's important to place a red line before Iran. And I think that actually reduces the chance of military conflict because if they know there's a point, a stage in the enrichment or other nuclear activities that they cannot cross because they'll face consequences, I think they'll actually not cross it. And that's been proved time and again. President Kennedy put a red line before the Soviets in the Cuban missile crisis. He was criticized for it, but it actually pushed back the world from conflict and maybe purchased decades of peace.” — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on CNN’S “State of the Union,” Sept. 16, 2012Earlier in the week we looked at the Israeli Prime Minister’s comments on how close Iran was to acquiring the material for a nuclear weapon. Now, let’s examine the historical facts concerning his example of a “red line” — President John F. Kennedy’s actions during the Cuban missile crisis, which occurred almost exactly 50 years ago.

Source: AP
September 18, 2012

Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History to install covered wagon on museum floor

WASHINGTON — The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History is installing a covered wagon from its collection to show more of its objects on the museum floor in Washington.On Wednesday morning, visitors will have a chance to see curators prepare and clean the 1800s-era Conestoga wagon to prepare it for exhibit....

Source: WaPo
September 20, 2012

From Little Rock Nine pioneer, a gift to Smithsonian museum

There is no blood or spittle on the black skirt set, the honor roll report card and the 1960 diploma from Little Rock’s Central High School.These ordinary markers from a girlhood education, being donated to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, bear no obvious testament to their power to rend a nation.But in the middle of the American Century, as the country reckoned with its oldest business, battles over race and citizenship were fought by people who placed their highest stakes in ordinary places — lunch counters, water fountains, schools. For Carlotta Walls LaNier, the youngest of the “Little Rock Nine,”who in 1957, under escort from the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, became the first black students to desegregate Central High, these items are artifacts of assertion....

Source: Politico
September 20, 2012

Paul Ryan: ’12 race like Carter vs. Reagan

Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan told House GOP lawmakers in a closed meeting Thursday that this election was just like the 1980 contest between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.Ryan said Carter lead Reagan late in the race, and Republicans have taken to comparing 2012 to the campaign three decades ago....

Source: NYT
September 19, 2012

Endeavour’s Last Journey, Through Contentious Space

LOS ANGELES — The space shuttle Endeavour traveled 122,883,151 miles during its 25 missions, bursting out of the atmosphere at more than 17,000 miles an hour. On the last flight of its 20-year career, a three-day victory lap across the country on the back of a transport aircraft, it will log a few thousand miles more before touching down for the final time on Friday at Los Angeles International Airport.But the final segment of Endeavour’s journey has proved perhaps the toughest yet: 12 miles through the dense urban landscape of Los Angeles, past streetlights and trees, to say nothing of city bureaucracy and politics, on its way to retirement at the California Science Center.

Source: NYT
September 17, 2012

All the TV News Since 2009, on One Web Site

Inspired by a pillar of antiquity, the Library of Alexandria, Brewster Kahle has a grand vision for the Internet Archive, the giant aggregator and digitizer of data, which he founded and leads.“We want to collect all the books, music and video that has ever been produced by humans,” Mr. Kahle said. As of Tuesday, the archive’s online collection will include every morsel of news produced in the last three years by 20 different channels, encompassing more than 1,000 news series that have generated more than 350,000 separate programs devoted to news....

Source: NYT
September 17, 2012

Last Chapter for a Court With a Place in History

MERIDIAN, Miss. — Across the street from a barbershop and upstairs from a post office sits a big empty room where Mississippi once began to face up to itself.Even on a steamy humdrum Thursday afternoon, this city’s stately federal courtroom looks like the kind of place where momentous things could happen, as they once did. The legal campaign to integrate the University of Mississippi got under way here in May 1961, and it was here that a local posse of Klansmen who murdered three civil rights workers faced justice at the hands of their neighbors, the first time that had happened in Mississippi.The court has remained in use over the decades since, though with a lower profile. Soon, however, it will be shut down for good, a victim of its quietness and the fiscal urgencies of Washington....

Source: Fox News
September 18, 2012

Etruscan pyramids spotted in Italy

The first ever Etruscan pyramids have been located underneath a wine cellar in the city of Orvieto in central Italy, according to a team of U.S. and Italian archaeologists.Carved into the rock of the tufa plateau -- a sedimentary area that is a result of volcanic activity -- on which the city stands, the subterranean structures were largely filled. Only the top-most modern layer was visible."Within this upper section, which had been modified in modern times and was used as a wine cellar, we noticed a series of ancient stairs carved into the wall. They were clearly of Etruscan construction," David B. George of the Department of Classics at Saint Anselm, told Discovery News....

Source: NYT
September 18, 2012

Was Jesus married?

 A historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School has identified a scrap of papyrus that she says was written in Coptic in the fourth century and contains a phrase never seen in any piece of Scripture: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife ...’ ” The faded papyrus fragment is smaller than a business card, with eight lines on one side, in black ink legible under a magnifying glass. Just below the line about Jesus having a wife, the papyrus includes a second provocative clause that purportedly says, “she will be able to be my disciple.” The finding was made public in Rome on Tuesday at the International Congress of Coptic Studies by Karen L. King, a historian who has published several books about new Gospel discoveries and is the first woman to hold the nation’s oldest endowed chair, the Hollis professor of divinity.

Source: NYT
September 17, 2012

Restoring the Walls, and the History, at Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair

KETRZYN, Poland — For nearly three years, Hitler commanded the Third Reich from a vast network of bunkers and buildings hidden in the forest here, guiding his genocidal war effort from an encampment called the Wolf’s Lair.But while Poland went to great lengths to preserve the memory of Nazi death camps like Birkenau, the significance of this historic outpost was largely lost. Under lease to a private company, the Wolf’s Lair was transformed into a place to take pottery lessons and play paintball. Although most people still come here for the historic value, there is little in the way of educational materials, and at least one nod to the past is more kitschy than thoughtful: visitors can pose for photos wearing Nazi uniforms.

Source: LiveScience
September 14, 2012

Soldiers' Sandals Lead to Caesar-Era Roman Fort

Archaeologists say they've identified the oldest known Roman military fortress in Germany, likely built to house thousands of troops during Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul in the late 50s B.C. Broken bits of Roman soldiers' sandals helped lead to the discovery.Researchers knew about the large site — close to the German town of Hermeskeil, near the French border — since the 19th century but lacked solid evidence about what it was. Parts of the fort also had been covered up or destroyed by agricultural development."Some remains of the wall are still preserved in the forest, but it hadn't been possible to prove that this was indeed a Roman military camp as archaeologists and local historians had long suspected," researcher Sabine Hornung, of Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz (JGU), said in a statement....

Source: LiveScience
September 17, 2012

Enormous Roman Mosaic Found Under Farmer's Field

A giant poolside mosaic featuring intricate geometric patterns has been unearthed in southern Turkey, revealing the far-reaching influence of the Roman Empire at its peak.The mosaic, which once decorated the floor of a bath complex, abuts a 25-foot (7-meter)-long pool, which would have been open to the air, said Michael Hoff, a University of Nebraska, Lincoln art historian and director of the mosaic excavation. The find likely dates to the third or fourth century, Hoff said. The mosaic itself is an astonishing 1,600 square feet (149 square meters) — the size of a modest family home.  "To be honest, I was completely bowled over that the mosaic is that big," Hoff told LiveScience. [See Photos of the Roman Mosaic]

Source: LiveScience
September 7, 2012

Hunt for Lost King's Grave Uncovers 17th-Century Garden

The search for the grave of English King Richard III has uncovered a garden said to hold a memorial to the medieval monarch.University of Leicester archaeologists announced today (Sept. 7) that they have found paving stones that may belong to the garden of Robert Herrick, a mayor of Leicester who built a mansion and garden over the church where Richard III was buried. In 1612, a man named Christopher Wren visited Herrick and reported that the garden contained a 3-foot (1-meter) tall stone pillar inscribed, "Here lies the body of Richard III sometime King of England."

Source: Minneapolis Star Tribune
September 17, 2012

MN black history museum misses its opening date for third time

A new museum celebrating the history of blacks in Minnesota failed to open as scheduled last weekend, the third time in the past year it has missed its own deadline for opening to the public.The doors were locked Monday at the Minnesota African American Museum and Cultural Center at 1700 3rd Ave. S. in Minneapolis on Monday, and construction work had stopped. Inside, wires were hanging from wall outlets....Mahmoud El-Kati, professor emeritus at Macalester College and a member of the museum board, said he was aware the museum was not going to open last Saturday. But El-Kati said he was not privy to information about negotiations between the museum and the bank that holds the museum's mortgage....

Source: AP
September 17, 2012

Antietam 150th prompts reflection on loss, freedom

Hundreds on Monday marked the 150th anniversary of the Civil War Battle of Antietam amid patriotic music and cannon fire, recalling the mind-boggling carnage and an ensuing Confederate retreat that Abraham Lincoln considered divine approval for abolishing slavery.Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation five days after the 1862 battle in Maryland, "a decision that transformed and redefined the purpose of the Civil War and ignited the modern Civil Rights movement," National Park Service Associate Director Stephanie Toothman said at the commemoration.More than 23,000 men were reported killed, wounded or missing in the dawn-to-dusk clash at Antietam, making the battle of Sept. 17, 1862, the bloodiest day of combat on U.S. soil....

Source: CS Monitor
September 17, 2012

Alps glaciers' retreat expose WWI relics

They lay undetected for more than a century, a hidden legacy of the highest, most forbidding battlefield of World War I.But last month, as Italy sweltered through one of the hottest summers on record, a cache of more than 200 rusted explosives emerged from beneath a melting sheet of ice in the Dolomite range in the country’s north.......The explosives – probably stored in an ammunition dump carved into what was once a massive glacier – were discovered by mountain-rescue experts during a routine border-police patrol.They emerged from the 3,200 meter (10,500 ft.) high Ago di Nardis glacier in the Trentino region of northern Italy, which during the First World War was bitterly contested by Italian troops fighting the opposing forces of the Austro-Hungarian empire....

Source: NYT
September 17, 2012

Dictionary Translates Ancient Egypt Life

Ancient Egyptians did not speak to posterity only through hieroglyphs. Those elaborate pictographs were the elite script for recording the lives and triumphs of pharaohs in their tombs and on the monumental stones along the Nile. But almost from the beginning, people in everyday life spoke a different language and wrote a different script, a simpler one that evolved from the earliest hieroglyphs.These were the words of love and family, the law and commerce, private letters and texts on science, religion and literature. For at least 1,000 years, roughly from 500 B.C. to A.D. 500, both the language and the distinctive cursive script were known as Demotic Egyptian, a name given it by the Greeks to mean the tongue of the demos, or the common people.Demotic was one of the three scripts inscribed on the Rosetta stone, along with Greek and hieroglyphs, enabling European scholars to decipher the royal language in the early 19th century and thus read the top-down version of a great civilization’s long history....

Source: Smithsonian Magazine
October 1, 2012

JFK after dark

On January 5, 1960, just three days after announcing that he would run for president, Senator John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, held a small dinner party in Washington, D.C. Their guests included Ben Bradlee, then Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief, and his then-wife, Tony, and Newsweek correspondent James M. Cannon. Cannon taped the conversation for research on a book he was writing. After he died, in September 2011, the tapes became part of the collection of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston; a transcript is published for the first time in the new book Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy, edited by Ted Widmer. In this exclusive excerpt, the candidate muses on the sources and purpose of power.JFK: This is on? Can it get me from there?Bradlee: [unclear] How come? Was it Joe’s death that started the . . . ?Cannon: Why did you get started in politics? Why were you ever interested in it?JFK: In the thirties, when I was home from school, the conversation was always about politics. Want a cigar?Cannon: It’s all right. Talk loud.

Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
September 16, 2012

Supporters rally against Georgia Archives closure

A firestorm has erupted over the state’s decision to sharply curtail public access to the Georgia Archives.The announcement late Thursday quickly became a cause celebre for academics and family genealogists alike as thousands signed online petitions and Facebook pages through the weekend.Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp said even he was unhappy — and it was his decision.“To reduce public access to the historical records of this state was not arrived at without great consternation,” Kemp said. “I will fight during this legislative session [starting in January] to have this cut restored so the people will have a place to meet, research and review the historical records of Georgia.”...