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: BBC News
8-23-12
An elderly parishioner has stunned Spanish cultural officials with an alarming and unauthorised attempt to restore a prized Jesus Christ fresco.Ecce Homo (Behold the Man) by Elias Garcia Martinez has held pride of place in the Sanctuary of Mercy Church near Zaragoza for more than 100 years.The woman took her brush to it after years of deterioration due to moisture....
Source: WREG (Tennessee)
8-22-12
(Memphis) A lost piece of history was discovered in Chattanooga, TN.A recorded interview with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was found in an attic.It was part of an interview with Dr. King from 1960.The interview was going to be part of a book on race relations in Tennessee, but it was never finished. Now the story is available for everyone to hear.In the newly uncovered lost piece of history Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. discusses the civil rights movement as it happened.In the interview Dr. King told the interviewer, “When the history books are written in future years historians will have to record this movement as one of the greatest epics of our heritage.”...
Source: National Journal
8-22-12
Mr. Williams is fed up with Congress. For one, the governing body can't seem to build a post office within walking distance to his house. It's a mile a way for goodness' sake."I don't care a hang who gets to Congress," Mr. Williams says to a friend who compels him to vote in the upcoming election. "What's Congress ever given me except a lot of trouble? … You know what I think? I think we'd all be better off if there wasn't any Congress."...
Source: The Daily Beast
8-22-12
After sparking a rows twice this summer in Paris, pop icon Madonna struck a conciliatory note in the South of France on Tuesday night at her MDNA Tour concert in Nice. Gone was the litigious swastika pasted on a French politician's likeness, but for once, the singer was accused of cowering in the face of controversy.In July, the 54 year-old pop star sparred with France's far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen, 44. No stranger to controversy herself, the telegenic Le Pen - who placed third in France's presidential election this year after succeeding her firebrand father Jean-Marie as party chief - pressed charges after Madonna's July 14 stadium show in Paris projected an image of the politician with a swastika emblazoned on her forehead....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
8-21-12
When the George Orwell Memorial Trust proposed a statue of the writer for outside the BBC’s new headquarters it expected an enthusiastic response.However, not everyone appeared enamoured of the plan.According to Baroness Bakewell, who is backing the campaign, Mark Thompson, the Corporation’s outgoing director general, said the statue could not be erected on BBC premises because Orwell was “too Left-wing”.Orwell worked as a BBC journalist, producing radio programmes at Broadcasting House during the Second World War before leaving to publish Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
8-21-12
The family of a soldier who died in the Second World War were never told of his death because the telegram and his last will and testament were undiscovered for 67 years after they were left on a bus.The documents relating to Private Gordon Heaton were left on a bus by a delivery boy and was discovered in a lost property box in a bus depot in Birmingham last November.His devastated family never received the official telegram saying he had died – and when he never returned from the war, they were left to assume he had been killed in action.Touched bus drivers from the Acocks Green National Express depot launched a hunt to track down Private Heaton's family and finally let them know what happened to the hero....
Source: LiveScience
8-14-12
A self-described "satellite archaeology researcher" has garnered widespread media attention with claims that she has found two possible pyramid complexes in Egypt using Google Earth. But experts say her pyramids are nothing more than eroded hills infused with a heavy dose of wishful thinking.Angela Micol, a North Carolina-based woman who blogs at Google Earth Anomalies, says she discovered the two clusters of mysterious, angular mounds in the Egyptian desert while surveying satellite images of the terrain using Google Earth, the virtual map program. In its coverage, Gizmodo asserts that the desert structures look as if they have been "very deliberately arranged," and that they "bear all the hallmarks of ancient pyramid sites."...
Source: AFP
8-19-12
New evidence has emerged suggesting that Hungarian Nazi war crimes suspect Laszlo Csatary was sentenced to 20 years in jail after World War II in 1945 but then escaped, a historian said Sunday.Historian Zoltan Balassa told the online version of the HVG weekly he has discovered documents showing that Csatary was captured in the Hungarian town of Veszprem and then sentenced in Pecs, but that he then fled the country.The documents were found in Kosice, the town in present-day Slovakia where Csatary is accused of having committed war crimes as a senior police officer in Hungary's pro-Nazi regime with responsibility for the Jewish ghetto.
Source: News Track India
8-17-12
London, August 17 (ANI): A Greyhound, owned by Adolf Hitler's deputy Rudolph Hess, took part in dog races almost every weekend in Wales during the war, a historian has revealed.Dewi Bowen, a Welsh historian, has said that Nimrod, the dog - a regular at Penydarren Park - was given to Hess after he took his crazy flight to the UK in 1941 in a bid to sue for peace with Winston Churchill.Hess spent most of his time as a Prisoner of war confined to Maindiff Court Military Hospital in Abergavenny.Bowen, 85, said that Nimrod was given to him in a bid to keep his mind off of committing suicide."Almost every Saturday afternoon during the Second World War a private soldier with a greyhound traveled down from Abergavenny to Merthyr Tydfil by train and dropped off at Cefn Coed to quench his thirst at the Railway Inn," the Daily Mail quoted him as saying....
Source: WDAY (Fargo)
8-17-12
Fargo, ND (WDAY TV) -- One Historian calls it the most important six-weeks in Minnesota History. The U.S.-Dakota war defined Minnesota and even the Red River Valley for decades to come. Its 150th Anniversary is tomorrow.Markus Krueger/Historical and Cultural Society of Clay Co.: "The Red River Valley in 1862 was the edge of the United States, the northwestern edge of the United States."After selling their land to the U.S. Government in the 1850s, the Dakota tribe in Minnesota was mistreated and cheated out of much of its money by Indian Agents and traders.Krueger: "Known by outsiders as the Sioux, they were quite literally starving to death."...
Source: NYT
8-20-12
SEOUL, South Korea — A former dictator’s daughter who cited Queen Elizabeth I of Britain as her role model became the first serious female contender for South Korea’s presidency on Monday when she was chosen as the governing party’s candidate for the election in December.Park Geun-hye, a daughter of President Park Chung-hee, who ruled South Korea from 1961 until his assassination in 1979, is the first woman and the first child of a former president to become the presidential candidate of a major political party in South Korea.Ms. Park, 60, won the nomination of the Saenuri Party by a huge margin, gathering 84 percent of the votes during a party convention. The remaining ballots were split among four other rivals....
Source: NYT
8-20-12
DIEPPE, France — The beaches of Normandy, for most, evoke images of D-Day, the Allied invasion that set the path to victory over Germany.Fewer people think of Dieppe, this ancient fishing and resort city about a two-and-a-half-hour drive east of those more famous beaches. This is, in part, because the word Dieppe, if it is known at all, evokes something much darker: one of the early and most crushing defeats for Allied forces at a time before the United States had fully mobilized to join them. This is especially true for Canadians, who suffered the heaviest losses here.But more than 2,000 people — including veterans, their family members, tourists and officials from France, Britain, Canada and the United States — descended on the city for Sunday’s commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Dieppe raid....
Source: Minnesota Historical Society
8-20-12
This month, the Minnesota Historical Society began a year long project to digitize and make available the manuscripts and audio recordings of Hubert H. Humphrey's public speeches. The speech texts, part of the larger Humphrey Papers (1883-1982) housed at the Society, contains 32,000 pages of drafts, typescripts, and transcripts for nearly every public speech dating from 1941, when Humphrey entered local Minnesota politics, until his death in 1978.The project also includes the digitizing of audio recordings of at least 50 particularly important speeches including his address at the 1948 Democratic National Convention, which helped launch his national career. In the stirring speech he argued in favor of a strong civil rights plank in the party's platform.Humphrey began his political career when he was elected mayor of Minneapolis in 1945. In November 1948, shortly after his speech at the 1948 Democratic National Convention, voters in Minnesota elected him to the United States Senate.
Source: Minnesota Historical Society
8-20-12
Just launched, a new website provides a public portal to the Walter F. Mondale Papers held in the [Minnesota Historical] Society collections. The website provides a fully articulated finding aid to the 1,500 cubic feet of Mondale Papers; contextualizes Mondale's career in a brief essay; provides easy access to thousands of digitized artifacts, photographs, and documents from the Mondale collection; and hosts an extensive interview with Mondale. Future content will include essays and podcasts featuring prominent Mondale scholars.Pat Gaarder, deputy director of programs said, "We are pleased to be able to share the history of this public figure in an easy-to-use way. Mondale speaks to Minnesota's history as well as the nation's history and we are proud that he has entrusted his papers to our care."The extensive Mondale Papers document his entire career, from his terms as Minnesota's attorney general (1960-1964), through his senatorial career (1964-1976), his years as vice president (1977-1980), his 1984 presidential campaign, his brief ambassadorial career and subsequent public service.The Society was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to process and describe the Walter Mondale Papers and to develop a Mondale web page.
Source: CNN.com
8-19-12
(CNN) -- The USS Constitution, or "Old Ironsides," sailed under her own power Sunday for just the second time in some 130 years.The Constitution set out on Boston Harbor in Massachusetts to commemorate the 200th anniversary of her victory over a British frigate during the War of 1812. The battle earned Constitution her "Old Ironsides" nickname."I cannot think of a better way to honor those who fought in the war as well as celebrate Constitution's successes during the War of 1812 than for the ship to be under sail," said Cmdr. Matt Bonner, Constitution's 72nd commanding officer.Some 285 people were on board the ship, which sailed under her own power for 17 minutes, traveling a distance of 1,100 yards....
Source: NYT
8-18-12
At age 90, William Blair Jr., a former Negro League pitcher, Dallas-area civil rights leader and longtime newspaperman, came to the realization that much of the history he had lived through had already been forgotten by younger generations.“They don’t know. They don’t read nothing,” he said by telephone this week from his office at The Elite News, the publication he founded in 1960 to bring light to Dallas’s often-overlooked black community.He recently turned over the photographs, newspapers and memorabilia he had collected to the University of Texas at Arlington Special Collections Library. It took seven trucks to haul Mr. Blair’s collection to the university, which intends to develop a public exhibition around it.Mr. Blair hopes visitors to the exhibition, particularly young ones, will develop a deeper appreciation for the area’s history. “There’s stuff in there they don’t know,” he said. “That’s stuff I’ve had for years.”...
Source: Boston Globe
8-15-12
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Australia’s highest court ruled Wednesday that a 90-year-old citizen cannot be extradited to Hungary to face accusations he tortured and killed a Jewish teenager during World War II.The High Court upheld a lower court’s decision that reasoned war crimes charges former Hungarian soldier Charles Zentai may face did not exist at the time of the slaying, a conclusion criticized by the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center.Hungary says Zentai is suspected of beating the teen to death in Budapest in 1944 for failing to wear a star identifying him as a Jew. Zentai, who migrated to Australia in 1950 and later became a citizen, has denied the allegation and has been fighting extradition since 2005....
Source: Korea Times
8-16-12
A Korean scholar has discovered a confidential Japanese Army document showing that it sent “comfort women” to provide sex to frontline soldiers in Southeast Asia during World War II. Kim Moon-gil, head of the Korea-Japan Culture Research Institute based in Busan, said Thursday he obtained the document in May from the historic records archive of Japan’s Ministry of Defense. The record showed the military was in charge of “managing” sex slaves _ which runs counter to the Japanese government’s claim that it was not involved in recruitment or management....
Source: Fox News
8-18-12
Man-made debris seen in underwater video filmed off the coast of a Pacific Island may reportedly be from Amelia Earhart’s plane, which researchers believe disappeared somewhere over the Pacific in 1937.Reuters reported that The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) conducted a $2.2 million expedition to Nikumaroro, a remote island. When the group returned to Honolulu and inspected the video, they noticed a trail of man-made debris they say may be wreckage of Earhart’s plane."It's still very early days, but we have man-made objects in a debris field in the place where we'd expect to find it if our theory on the airplane is correct," Ric Gillespie, the director for TIGHAR, told Reuters. The group reportedly examined 30 percent of the video collected....
Source: AP
8-17-12
JACKSON, Miss. — Commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War can be an angst-filled task in Mississippi, with its long history of racial strife and a state flag that still bears the Confederate battle emblem.Well-intentioned Mississippians who work for racial reconciliation say slavery was morally indefensible. Still, some speak in hushed tones as they confess a certain admiration for the valor of Confederate troops who fought for what was, to them, the hallowed ground of home and country.“Mississippi has such a troubled past that a lot of people are very sensitive about commemorating or recognizing or remembering the Civil War because it has such an unpleasant reference for African-Americans,” said David Sansing, who is white and a professor emeritus of history at the University of Mississippi....
