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: West Cork Times
9-7-12
THE controversial killing of 13 protestants in and around Dunmanway in 1922 were not, as has been portrayed, an act of sectarian violence but an act of self-defence.That’s according to Cork history teacher Barry Keane and he says he has the evidence to prove it.Thirteen Protestants were killed, was it retaliation for the killing of Commandant Michael O’Neill and the pogroms in Belfast?Did British agents attempt to provoke a re-occupation of West Cork by the Essex regiment?Was it an attempt ‘to exterminate and drive out all Protestants from the area’ as historian Peter Hart claimed?...
Source: Lower Hudson Journel News
9-11-12
The leaders of Rye made historic preservation a top priority back in 1927, when they commemorated a set of milestones as relics from 1763.The engraved stones measured each mile from New York to Boston, and legend has it that Ben Franklin himself set them to determine the postal rates. Rye officials fought to reclaim one of the stones from publisher George Palmer Putnam, who had built it into his front porch.But the Boston Post Road milestones, such as they are today, demonstrate how difficult that task can be....
Source: NYT
9-10-12
The moments of silence. The musical interludes. The honor guards of policemen and firefighters, colleagues of those who died rescuing others on Sept. 11, 2001. And the reading of names, whether to honor the three victims from Nutley, N.J., or the nearly 3,000 others from around the world who died in the attacks.Across the country, the elements of a Sept. 11 anniversary commemoration have become familiar, from the World Trade Center site in Manhattan to the Pennsylvania field where United Flight 93 crashed to the dozens of New Jersey towns with neighbors to mourn. After the commemorations reached a peak of sorts for last year’s 10th anniversary, a sprinkling of communities have decided to scale back — prompted, they say, by a growing feeling that it may be time to move on.Nearly every ceremony will be smaller this year, even at the epicenter of the attacks. In a move that has drawn some controversy, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has stripped the New York ceremony of its presidents, governors and other politicians, who have in the past read literary or religious passages. Instead of Yo-Yo Ma, James Taylor and Paul Simon, bagpipers and a youth chorus will provide the music....
Source: CNN
9-11-12
The budgetary dispute that has delayed the opening of the National September 11 Memorial Museum has been resolved, according to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.The museum was scheduled to open on the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, but disagreements over funding, financing and oversight of the museum between the 9/11 Memorial and Museum Foundation and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey have halted construction. The foundation controls the memorial and museum; the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey owns the World Trade Center site.Late Monday, all parties entered into a "memorandum of understanding," an agreement that allows them to restart construction on the stalled museum project....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
9-10-12
A rare medieval book gives an insight into the bizarre medical practices used 500 years ago.It has gone on display for the first time at the University of Aberdeen.The De Hortus Sanitatis, which translates as the Garden of Health, shows some of the medical methods practiced in Scotland five centuries ago and is one of the earliest European medical texts.The book, first printed in Mainz, Germany, in 1491, is a fusion of late medieval science and folklore....Meanwhile, detailed illustrations reveal how physicians used to study the colour of urine to make diagnoses....
Source: AP
9-10-12
DENVER - A former University of Colorado professor who compared some Sept. 11 victims with a Nazi has lost his appeal to get his job back.The Colorado Supreme Court on Monday upheld a lower court decision against Ward Churchill....
Source: Takepart.com
9-9-12
Earlier this week, TakePart reported on the record lows recorded in the Earth’s dwindling Arctic ice cap coverage. The dire implications of reaching that kind of planetary milestone are obvious, but there is one consequence that could actually prove helpful to us.BBC reports that a 500-year old Alaskan Eskimo settlement was recently discovered eroding from under the permafrost, and it’s giving researchers the ability to study a culture that went through its own dramatic climate change centuries ago.
Source: AP
9-10-12
WARSAW, Poland – The American POWs sent secret coded messages to Washington with news of a Soviet atrocity: In 1943 they saw rows of corpses in an advanced state of decay in the Katyn forest, on the western edge of Russia, proof that the killers could not have been the Nazis who had only recently occupied the area.The testimony about the infamous massacre of Polish officers might have lessened the tragic fate that befell Poland under the Soviets, some scholars believe. Instead, it mysteriously vanished into the heart of American power. The long-held suspicion is that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn't want to anger Josef Stalin, an ally whom the Americans were counting on to defeat Germany and Japan during World War II.Documents released Monday and seen in advance by The Associated Press lend weight to the belief that suppression within the highest levels of the U.S. government helped cover up Soviet guilt in the killing of some 22,000 Polish officers and other prisoners in the Katyn forest and other locations in 1940.
Source: NC Department of Cultural Resources
9-10-12
WARRENTON- The illegal nighttime dumping of liquid contaminated with PCB (polychlorinated biphenyls) in 14 rural North Carolina counties led to the creation of a landfill 30 years ago. The choice of the site in rural Warren County sparked protests that gave birth to the environmental justice movement in America. A N.C. Highway Historical Marker will be dedicated to that protest movement on Saturday, Sept. 15, at 8 a.m. at Coley Springs Missionary Baptist Church at 224 Parktown Rd in Warrenton.
Source: AP
9-10-12
The Obama administration is opposing a Jewish group's bid to have civil fines levied against Russia for failing to obey a court order to return its historic books and documents - a dispute that has halted the loan of Russian art works for exhibit in the United States.In a recent court filing, the Justice Department argued that judicial sanctions against Russia in this case would be contrary to U.S. foreign policy interests and inconsistent with U.S. law.The Jewish group, Chabad-Lubavitch, based in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, has already convinced Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court here that it has a valid claim to the tens of thousands of religious books and manuscripts, some up to 500 years old, which record the group's core teachings and traditions....
Source: AP
9-10-12
A group of survivors from the Hiroshima atomic bomb attack have held a protest in Jerusalem calling for the end of nuclear weapons.The group visited Jerusalem holy sites on Monday and held signs reading "Nuclear Abolition" in Japanese.The visit comes amid growing tensions between Israel and Iran over the Islamic Republic's nuclear program. Israel and much of the West believe Iran is seeking nuclear weapons, a charge that Tehran denies....
Source: Washington Times
9-9-12
A Texas congressman who abandoned efforts this summer to “nationalize” the District of Columbia World War I Memorial on the Mall has crafted a revamped bill that would honor Americans who fought and died in the Great War on a site north of the Reflecting Pool.The House Natural Resources subcommittee on national parks, forests and public lands on Tuesday will hear testimony on the proposal by Rep. Ted Poe, Texas Republican, whose draft legislation now proposes a National World War I Memorial in Constitution Gardens, a shaded section of the federal parkland marked by a large pond just south of Constitution Avenue.While there is broad consensus that heroes of the conflict from 1914 to 1918 deserve a fitting memorial, the location has been a sticking point for local officials and advocates in the District. City lawmakers and other advocates have pushed for a memorial in Pershing Park, located on Pennsylvania Avenue about a block from the White House....
Source: NYT
9-8-12
THE September day when the brutal hurricane of 1938 hit the East End started out warm and sunny, but it ended up leaving behind a wasteland of uprooted trees, ruined houses and smashed cars. All that destruction, and more, is chronicled in an exhibition in East Hampton, “The Long Island Express: Rare Photographs of East Hampton Town After the 1938 Hurricane.” The Long Island Express is one of several names by which the hurricane came to be remembered.The story behind the exhibition, which is on display in the East Hampton Historical Society’s Clinton Academy, began about a year ago, said Richard Barons, the society’s director, when Camilla Jewett, who lives down the street from the museum and who recently turned 101, invited him to tea, as she often does....
Source: NYT
9-8-12
A dispute between Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo over the $1 billion museum at ground zero has dragged on for so long that the museum will not open in time for the 11th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks — or even for the next one.Aides to Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Cuomo have so far been unable to resolve their differences over which government agencies will pay the operating costs of the museum, which is intended to document the terrorist attacks of 2001 and honor the nearly 3,000 victims. The two sides also remain at odds over who will have oversight of the museum and the surrounding memorial.
Source: NYT
9-7-12
The instructions from the Israeli government were clear in the hours after Palestinian terrorists killed two Israeli athletes at the Munich Summer Olympics in 1972, took nine others hostage and demanded the release of more than 200 Arab prisoners.“The Israeli government does not negotiate with terrorists,” read the urgent cable, marked classified and sent to the Israeli ambassador in Bonn, the capital of what was then West Germany, on Sept. 5, 1972. “The government expects the German authorities to do everything in their power to rescue the hostages.”…Now for the first time, these and dozens more classified documents relating to the killing of the athletes have been made public after four decades left sitting in cardboard boxes in the Israel State Archives, the repository of the country’s collective memory and many of its secrets. Their publication last week was timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the Munich massacre.
Source: Nowsourcing
9-7-12
Source: NPR
9-6-12
1) Bill Clinton. After all, it takes a cool guy to know a cool guy. "Obviously Bill Clinton," says Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University. During the 1992 election, Clinton explored new ways to reach voters, like appearing on MTV and playing the saxophone on a late night talk show. Clinton's popularity, Zelizer says, "even in the middle of impeachment, demonstrated a kind of admiration many had for his personal style."2) John F. Kennedy. The smoothie from Massachusetts "was certainly cool in terms of charisma and demeanor," Zelizer says. The stark contrast between Kennedy and Richard Nixon in the 1960 debates "might have set the standard for what it meant to be cool."...
Source: WSJ
9-6-12
Being out in the world took on new meaning at the 39th Telluride Film Festival. All of the natural attractions were in place—the perfumed breeze, the azure sky, the scudding clouds, the Rocky Mountains as backdrop to a whirl of urban sophisticates done up as alpine rustics. Still, watching many of this year's films meant being out in the larger world of political strife, seething violence and history's tumult.In some cases, the chosen mode was entertainment. "Argo," a terrific Hollywood thriller directed by and starring Ben Affleck, takes place during the Iran hostage crisis that began in the fall of 1979; it's just the kind of smart, accomplished film the studios should be making, and seldom do. In "No," Pablo Larraín's sensational fact-based political drama from Chile, Gael García Bernal plays an outwardly callow ad executive who's determined to drive the Pinochet dictatorship from office. (His genial insight, which the movie explores with a playful sense of paradox, is that democracy can be packaged like any other consumer product.) "Hyde Park on Hudson" has Bill Murray as a buoyant FDR on the eve of World War II, and Laura Linney as one of the women who loves him....
Source: WaPo
9-6-12
Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), the third-ranking Democrat in the House, greeted the delegation from his neighboring home state before likening President Obama invoked of one of the great icons in his party’s history, President John F. Kennedy.Riffing throughout his speech on JFK’s famous paraphrase of a Chinese proverb, “we are not here to curse the darkness; we are here to light a candle,” Clyburn said that the “fundamental” difference between the two major-party tickets is that “President Obama has lit candle after candle, bringing our country out from the darkness of recession, only to see Republicans douse the flames and amuse themselves cursing the darkness.”...
Source: NYT
9-6-12
Sept. 11 is approaching, and American television is maintaining a polite distance. Since last year, when more than two dozen new documentaries and memorials were presented for the 10th anniversary of the 2001 attacks, our attention has receded again. Apparently the most appropriate gift for an 11th anniversary is reruns.A close but not exhaustive survey of prime-time schedules through Tuesday turned up five new specials on the attacks, all on cable. New to America, that is — two are leftover inventory, having been shown in Britain last year. Why in Britain? Because all these TV documentaries about the most significant event in our recent history were made there, four by the same company, Testimony Films....
