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
8-27-12
...Theaters once played a more unifying role. Lebanon lived under French control from 1920 to 1943, and the lingering influence of France, along with the magnetism of Hollywood, led Beirut to what many here still consider a golden age of moviegoing.In the mid-1950s downtown Beirut was filled with glorious movie palaces like the Empire and the Majestic and the Roxy. Lebanese presidents attended premieres, and many still recall the rush of stepping into an air-conditioned theater during Ramadan or its bookend holiday, Id al-Fitr....Even in the early years, though, movie theaters were entwined with politics. The Communist Party met in a Beirut cinema in the 1920s. In 1974, a new theater in the Holiday Inn aimed to open with “The Tamarind Seed,” featuring Omar Sharif as a Russian agent, but the Russian Embassy protested. “They held it for two months,” Mr. Soueid said....
Source: Tico Times
8-24-12
COPÁN, Honduras – Under awnings that protect them from the rain, archeologists excavated rocks from a muddy hill at a new site found in Copán, in northwestern Honduras. The archeologists are determined to decipher a riddle about the disappearance of the Mayans. About 25 kilometers west of the main group of ruins, in the Río Amarillo Archeological Park, the site was discovered gradually in recent years, thanks to the work of nine experts from Honduras, Guatemala, France and the United States. “Here it shows that the fall [of the civilization] was abrupt; they left the buildings unfinished, and tools were strewn around, but the question is where did they go to never return?” said French researcher René Viel, during a tour organized by the Tourism Ministry for the international press. The tour is one of the activities put on by the Honduran government to celebrate the end of the Mayan calendar on Dec. 21....
Source: CNN.com
8-25-12
Washington (CNN) -- Some may not realize that the modern Republican Party owes its origin to the fight over slavery nearly two centuries ago.In the tumultuous mid-1800s, right before the Civil War, some political activists were concerned about keeping slavery from spreading into new western territories, and they saw no way to stop it through existing political powers: the Democrats and the Whigs (the pro-Congress party of the mid 1800s that largely destroyed itself in the 1852 elections in a battle over slavery).So they formed a new party, taking the name "Republicans" in a salute to earlier American politicians.By 1861, they had their first president: Abraham Lincoln. Soon after, slavery fell. The Whig party disappeared. And the Republicans began a long steady rise in power....
Source: Talking Points Memo
8-24-12
A progressive group called on Republican National Committee leader Pat Rogers to step down on Friday after emails showed him telling New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez’s staff that meeting with a group of American Indians “dishonored” Gen. George Armstrong Custer, the 19th century commander who killed scores of American Indians.“The state is going to hell,” Rogers, who is a member of the GOP executive committee and is currently in Tampa for the RNC convention, wrote in a June 8 email released by Progress Now New Mexico. Former Republican gubernatorial candidate Col. Allen Weh “would not have dishonored Col Custer in this manner,” he wrote....
Source: NYT
8-25-12
In Selma, Ala., a battle over what to do with a bronze bust of a contradictory and controversial Civil War general has lasted far longer than the war itself.Since the monument honoring Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest was unveiled in a city park in 2000, critics have called it a symbol of hate. Vandals littered it with trash, pelted it with cinder blocks and tried to pull it down with ropes before it was moved to a private cemetery. Finally in March, the bust vanished. A historical society called Friends of Forrest has offered a $20,000 reward for its return, and vowed to replace it with a new bust on a taller pedestal, guarded by an iron fence and a surveillance camera.The fight continued this week as about 20 protesters tried to block construction of the new monument by lying in the path of a concrete truck as crews tried to pour a ramp. Late on Thursday night, the Selma mayor, George Patrick Evans, decided to halt the work until the city attorney could review the plans. Meanwhile, an online petition at Change.org asking the City Council to ban the monument has more than 69,000 signatures....
Source: NYT
8-25-12
WASHINGTON — To the myriad indignities suffered by Congress, including stagnant legislation, partisan warfare and popularity on a par with petty criminals, add this: the Capitol’s roof is leaking, and there is no money to fix it.The Capitol dome, the nation’s grandest symbol of federal authority, has been dinged by years of inclement weather, and its exterior is in need of repair.The dome has 1,300 known cracks and breaks. Water that has seeped in over the years has caused rusting on the ornamentation and staining on the interior of the Rotunda, just feet below the fresco “The Apotheosis of Washington,” which is painted on the Rotunda’s canopy.Like most of what the federal government is on the hook to fix — highways, bridges and airports — the dome is imperiled both by tough economic times and by a politically polarized Congress. While Senate appropriators have voted to repair the dome, which has not undergone major renovations for 50 years, their House counterparts say there is not money right now. In that way, the dome is a metaphor for the nation’s decaying infrastructure....
Source: Politico
8-25-12
(Reuters) - Former U.S. astronaut, Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, has died at the age of 82, U.S. media reported on Saturday.Armstrong underwent a heart-bypass surgery earlier this month, just two days after his birthday on August 5, to relieve blocked coronary arteries.As commander of the Apollo 11 mission, Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969. As he stepped on the moon's dusty surface, Armstrong said: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."...Related LinksNeil Armstrong: A Life in Pictures
Source: NYT
8-23-12
SEOUL — In the 1980s, Kim Young-hwan was a legend among South Korean student activists. His widely read pamphlets converted legions of students into firebomb-hurling agitators against the U.S.-allied military dictatorship in the South. They celebrated the North Korean leader Kim Il-sung and his “juche,” or self-reliance, doctrine and helped make anti-Americanism a centerpiece of the student movement — a legacy that continues to resonate in South Korean politics today.
Source: NYT
8-24-12
Biologists using tools developed for drawing evolutionary family trees say that they have solved a longstanding problem in archaeology: the origin of the Indo-European family of languages.The family includes English and most other European languages, as well as Persian, Hindi and many others. Despite the importance of the languages, specialists have long disagreed about their origin.Linguists believe that the first speakers of the mother tongue, known as proto-Indo-European, were chariot-driving pastoralists who burst out of their homeland on the steppes above the Black Sea about 4,000 years ago and conquered Europe and Asia. A rival theory holds that, to the contrary, the first Indo-European speakers were peaceable farmers in Anatolia, now Turkey, about 9,000 years ago, who disseminated their language by the hoe, not the sword....
Source: Taegan Goddard's Political Wire
8-24-12
Romney campaign manager told the Huffington iPad magazine that Mitt Romney's inner circle thinks a Romney presidency could look much like that of President James Polk after tackling issues like the federal debt and entitlement spending.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
8-24-12
The body of King Richard III may finally be found after archaeologists identified what they believe is his resting place – underneath a council car park in Leicester.Historical records show that Richard III was buried in the church of a Franciscan friary in Leicester shortly after his defeat and death at the hands of Henry Tudor's army in the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.But the destruction of the friary as Britain's monasteries were dissolved under Henry VIII and subsequent removal of its stone ruins meant that over the ensuing centuries the king's exact burial site was forgotten....
Source: The Atlantic
8-23-12
The ACLU announced earlier this week that a California school district is being sued by parents and students over its abstinence-only sex education program. Among other affronts to the concept of comprehensive sex education, the program's textbooks never once mention condoms -- not even in the chapters on protecting oneself from STIs and unintended pregnancy. If the program is forced to introduce contraception into their literature, they can look to a long, awkward history of trying to figure out how to do it.Manufacturers, health officials, and the public have found numerous ways to talk about contraception without really having to talk about it, as illustrated by a recent post from Collector's Weekly on the history of the condom in the U.S. Among the "creative relabeling" methods, condoms were marketed as "sheaths, skins, shields, capotes, and 'rubber goods' for the 'gents.'" Their packaging found artistic ways to evoke eroticism without specifically saying anything about sex:
Source: US News and World Report
8-23-12
If the stock market continues its surprising rally, Mitt Romney may be nothing more than a rich investor after the November elections, while President Obama gets started on a second term.That's the implication of an updated study on the effect of the stock market on presidential elections, which found a strong correlation between positive stock-market returns and the re-election of the incumbent when a sitting president is running for a second term. "Large stock market advances during the final three years of incumbent candidates' terms tend to be strongly associated with subsequent landslide victories," says the report from the Socionomics Institute, a research firm in Gainesville, Ga.It's hardly a revelation to suggest that a rising stock market boosts the re-election odds of an incumbent president. But the Socionomics research goes a step further by comparing the stock market to other factors such as unemployment, economic growth, and inflation—which, it found, have surprisingly little influence on presidential re-election bids. "The importance of these other variables remains relatively weak or insignificant when examined in combination with the stock market," according to the study....
Source: WaPo
8-21-12
Regret and apology are not themes candidates typically choose to underscore in campaign ads. But that’s exactly what Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) did Tuesday when he released a 30-second spot in which he apologizes for saying in a Sunday interview that “legitimate rape” rarely causes pregnancy.Akin’s not the first politician to take to the airwaves to say he or she is sorry. Here is a look back at who else has used a similar tactic in recent (and not-so-recent) years:Earl Pomeroy (2010): The North Dakota Democrat sought to reintroduce himself at the end of the campaign with an ad acknowledging that he had, on occasion, fallen short in the eyes of some voters. ”I know I’ve disappointed you with a vote here or there. But you can always count on the fact that I do what I do for the right reason — for the people of North Dakota,” he said at the end of the ad.Pomeroy didn’t mention specific votes, but his support for the federal health-care measure was a target of Republicans during the campaign. Ultimately, the ad didn’t work. Pomeroy was swept away in the midterm wave election that brought the GOP control of the House....
Source: Amazon.com
8-23-12
Amazon.com has published a map of the United States that tracks, state-by-state, the percentage of conservative political books purchased on the site versus the number of liberal books.Overall, 56% of all political books are "red," (and not commie red -- the other kind), and only six states -- Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont -- plus the District of Columbia either break even or tilt blue.Check out the graphic, along with a list of the most popular political books (including Bill O'Reilly's Killing Lincoln and Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, both of which were finalists in our "bad history books" poll) by clicking here or on the link above.
Source: BuzzFeed
8-21-12
ROCKY RIDGE, Utah — About 60 miles south of Salt Lake City, at the end of a long, winding, dirt road off the highway, a small cluster of houses sits at the foot of a desert mountain. The neighborhood landscape is littered with children's things — plastic playground equipment, abandoned toys — and the backyards are covered in clotheslines, with denim shorts and Sunday dresses of all sizes hanging off them like ornaments.But the houses themselves command the most attention. They look as if someone took a bunch of starter homes and glued them together with communal kitchens and shared garages. The structures’ aesthetics vary, from utilitarian ranches with unpainted decks to well-kept A-frames with manicured lawns. And virtually every structure is in a state of renovation, expanding and shape-shifting to make room for more beds, more groceries, more children — and more wives.This is Rocky Ridge, Utah, one of the fastest-growing polygamist communes in the country, and an unlikely symbol of a genealogical subplot that links America's two main presidential candidates. While neither Mitt Romney nor Barack Obama is keen to talk about it publicly, the family trees of both are rooted in polygamy, a practice that, for each candidate, has defined generations of family history....
Source: Ghosts of DC
8-23-12
Exactly one year ago today, one of the most spectacular buildings in Washington was badly damaged by the earthquake that shook our city. So much so, that the repairs are going to cost millions of dollars and keep it under scaffolding for several years.If you love this building like we do, consider donating a few bucks to help restore this national treasure. You can give money online, so it’s effortless.And since we love this building so much, we want to highlight to tremendous history of the place with a “Three Things…” post. Also, a shout out goes to GoDCer Laura for suggesting this too. Three things won’t do justice to the place, but here are some fascinating stories about the place for you to share with your friends....
Source: CNN.com
8-22-12
Los Angeles (CNN) -- Information gathered by a renewed investigation into actress Natalie Wood's 1981 drowning death has persuaded the Los Angeles coroner to remove "accidental" from her death certificate, a detective said.The death certificate was amended on August 7 to list her death as caused by "drowning and other undetermined factors" rather than "accidental drowning," Los Angeles County Sheriff's Detective Kevin Lowe said Wednesday.Lowe and a partner are still working the case, which is an open and active investigation, Lowe said....
Source: The Australian
8-20-12
ORGANISED gangs are stripping Nazi memorabilia from the graves of soldiers who died on the Eastern Front and selling it in Britain. Armed Forces charities have expressed fury and frustration at the “deplorable” groups digging up the bodies of German soldiers to feed a multimillion-pound international industry in Nazi relics.The artefacts, ranging from small personal effects such as dog tags to parts of tanks, are sold over the internet or through informal networks. The human remains are then buried in mass graves, scattered, or sold.The Times has found hundreds of Nazi objects taken from battlefields in Demyansk, near Novgorod in Russia, and Kurland in Latvia, listed for sale on websites such as eBay. A reporter was also offered the chance to buy SS dog tags dug up from a battleground in east Germany at a militaria fair in Kent....
Source: Haaretz
8-21-12
When Israeli archaeologist Yoram Haimi decided to investigate his family's unknown Holocaust history, he turned to the skill he knew best: He began to dig.After learning that two of his uncles were murdered in the infamous Sobibor death camp, he embarked on a landmark excavation project that is shining new light on the workings of one of the most notorious Nazi killing machines, including pinpointing the location of the gas chambers where hundreds of thousands were killed.Sobibor, in eastern Poland, marks perhaps the most vivid example of the "Final Solution," the Nazi plot to wipe out European Jewry. Unlike other camps that had at least a facade of being prison or labor camps, Sobibor and the neighboring camps Belzec and Treblinka were designed specifically for exterminating Jews. Victims were transported there in cattle cars and gassed to death almost immediately....
