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: NPR
8-4-12
Sometime before the end of the month, when Republicans hold their convention in Tampa, Fla., Mitt Romney will announce his vice presidential running mate.There's a good chance the finalists for that spot are wading through mountains of paperwork, and answering deeply personal questions about finances, past statements, friendships — and medical history.A lot of that tedious process stems from something that happened 40 years ago this summer, when presidential candidate George McGovern decided to place Thomas Eagleton on the Democratic ticket. Joshua Glasser tells the story of that fateful decision in his new book, The Eighteen-Day Running Mate....
Source: NYT
8-3-12
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SILETZ, Ore. — Local native languages teeter on the brink of oblivion all over the world as the big linguistic sweepstakes winners like English, Spanish or Mandarin ride a surging wave of global communications.But the forces that are helping to flatten the landscape are also creating new ways to save its hidden, cloistered corners, as in the unlikely survival of Siletz Dee-ni. An American Indian language with only about five speakers left — once dominant in this part of the West, then relegated to near extinction — has, since earlier this year, been shouting back to the world: Hey, we’re talking. (In Siletz that would be naa-ch’aa-ghit-’a.)“We don’t know where it’s going to go,” said Bud Lane, a tribe member who has been working on the online Siletz Dee-ni Talking Dictionary for nearly seven years, and recorded almost all of its 10,000-odd audio entries himself. In its first years the dictionary was password protected, intended for tribe members.
Source: NYT
8-3-12
The governor of Russia’s Krasnodar region, which will host the Winter Olympics in 2014, has enlisted the area’s Cossacks as an auxiliary police force, urging them to prevent darker-skinned Muslims from the North Caucasus from moving there.The governor, Aleksandr Tkachev, in a speech to law enforcement officers on Thursday, announced that as of September, 1,000 Cossacks would be paid from the budget to maintain public order. In the speech, he said the Cossacks — whose paramilitary forces served the czars — could take measures beyond what the police were allowed.“What you can’t do, the Cossacks can,” he told the officers in the speech, which was widely circulated on the Internet on Friday. “We have no other way — we shall stamp it out, instill order; we shall demand paperwork and enforce migration policies.”He said that a neighboring region had stopped performing its traditional function as “a filter” between central Russia and the North Caucasus. Internal migrants from the North Caucasus are often not welcomed by ethnic Russians, who consider them outsiders.
Source: NYT
8-3-12
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Gerald Gold, an editor for The New York Times who helped supervise the herculean task of combing through a secret 2.5-million-word Defense Department history of the Vietnam War, later known as the Pentagon Papers, to produce articles showing that officials had lied about the war, died on Wednesday at a hospice in Melville, N.Y. He was 85.The cause was heart failure, his daughter Madeleine Gold said.
Source: Secrecy News
8-3-12
In a floor statement yesterday, Sen. John McCain reiterated his criticism of the Obama White House for allegedly leaking classified information that endangered national security, and he repeated his call for appointment of a special counsel to independently investigate the claims.Sen.
Source: NYT
8-2-12
DJENNE-DJENNO, one of the best-known archaeological sites in sub-Saharan Africa, spreads over several acres of rutted fields near the present city of Djenne in central Mali. The ruts are partly caused by erosion, but they’re also scars from decades of digging, by archaeologists in search of history and looters looking for art to sell.When I was there last fall, a few archaeology students were in evidence. These days, with Mali in the throes of political chaos, it’s unlikely that anyone is doing much work at all at the site, though history and art are visible everywhere. Ancient pottery shards litter the ground. Here and there the mouths of large clay urns, of a kind once used for food storage or human burial, emerge from the earth’s surface, the vessels themselves still submerged.
Source: AP
8-2-12
The skeleton of Australia's most notorious criminal will finally be returned to his descendants 132 years after he was executed, the government said Thursday, ending the family's long quest to find and properly bury the remains of a man many Australians now consider a folk hero.Ned Kelly led a gang of bank robbers in Australia's southern Victoria state before he was hanged in 1880. The whereabouts of his corpse was long unknown, but forensic scientists identified Kelly's nearly headless skeleton last year after it was found in a mass grave outside a now-closed prison. Most of Kelly's skull, which was stolen long ago, is still missing, but the identification of the skeleton was followed by a battle over what to do with his bones.The property developer of the former Pentridge Prison site where Kelly's skeleton was buried had hoped to keep the remains on the grounds. Kelly's descendants wanted the skeleton so they could have a private burial....
Source: Pew
8-1-12
Residential segregation by income has increased during the past three decades across the United States and in 27 of the nation’s 30 largest major metropolitan areas, according to a new analysis of census tract and household income data by the Pew Research Center.
The analysis finds that 28% of lower-income households in 2010 were located in a majority lower-income census tract, up from 23% in 1980, and that 18% of upper- income households were located in a majority upper-income census tract, up from 9% in 1980.
These increases are related to the long-term rise in income inequality, which has led to a shrinkage in the share of neighborhoods across the United States that are predominantly middle class or mixed income—to 76% in 2010, down from 85% in 1980—and a rise in the shares that are majority lower income (18% in 2010, up from 12% in 1980) and majority upper income (6% in 2010, up from 3% in 1980).
Source: AP
8-1-122
Gaza's ruling Hamas has criticized a Palestinian official for visiting a memorial at the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz and paying respects to its 1.5 million victims there, most of them Jews.Hamas official Fawzi Barhoum, expressing the Islamic militant group's position, claimed Wednesday that the Holocaust "is a big lie." He said last week's visit to the Auschwitz by Ziad al-Bandak, an adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, went against Palestinian public opinion. Abbas and Hamas are political rivals....
Source: Yahoo
7-31-12
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It was 100 years ago this month that Jim Thorpe put America on the world’s sports map and made the Olympics a global phenomenon. But the fight over Thorpe’s body still lingers in a federal court.Two weeks ago, two of Thorpe’s sons were testifying in court-ordered mediation in a federal lawsuit over the final resting place of the late Olympian’s body, according to a northeast Pennsylvania newspaper.
Source: Medievalists.net
8-1-12
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Injured British soldiers have helped uncover the remains of a sixth Century Anglo-Saxon female in an excavation project to preserve the remains of a burial site on Salisbury Plain in southern England.‘Davina’, as they have named the woman is believed to have died in her late teens to early 20s. She appears to have been a person of note, as she was buried in what would have been a prestigious burial site. They have also found the remains of an Anglo-Saxon male, who was buried with a bronze shield.
Source: Daily Mail
8-1-12
Secret Cabinet papers on the decision to invade Iraq could be kept from the public for three decades.
The crucial minutes of ministerial meetings in 2003 were approved for release under Freedom of Information laws but blocked at the last minute by the Attorney General.
Dominic Grieve’s ruling yesterday is a repeat of the decision made by Jack Straw in 2009 over the same papers.
Source: NPR
7-30-12
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In college, study of American history is often broken down into two chunks. Professors pick a date to divide time in two: 1865, after the Civil War, say, or 1900, because it looks good. So for those who teach courses on the first half, their purview is fairly well defined.But those who teach the second half, such as Jonathan Rees, face a persistent problem: The past keeps growing. Rees teaches U.S. history and, like many teachers, every few years responds to major events by adding them to his lectures. But that means other important events get left behind. He wrote about this conundrum in a piece for The Historical Society blog, "When Is It Time To Stop Teaching Something?"
Source: USA Today
7-31-12
Gore Vidal, the author, playwright, politician and commentator whose novels, essays, plays and opinions were stamped by his immodest wit and unconventional wisdom, died Tuesday, his nephew said Tuesday.
Vidal died at his home in the Hollywood Hills at about 6:45 p.m. of complications from pneumonia, Burr Steers said. Vidal had been living alone in the home and had been sick for "quite a while," he said.
Along with such contemporaries as Norman Mailer andTruman Capote, Vidal was among the last generation of literary writers who were also genuine celebrities — fixtures on talk shows and in gossip columns, personalities of such size and appeal that even those who hadn't read their books knew who they were.
Source: BBC
7-31-12
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The earliest unambiguous evidence for modern human behaviour has been discovered by an international team of researchers in a South African cave.The finds provide early evidence for the origin of modern human behaviour 44,000 years ago, over 20,000 years before other findings.The artefacts are near identical to modern-day tools of the indigenous African San bush people.
Source: Guardian
7-30-12
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The ancient Colosseum in Rome is slanting about 40cm lower on the south side than on the north, and authorities are investigating whether it needs urgent repairs.Experts first noticed the incline about a year ago and have been monitoring it for the past few months, Rossella Rea, director at the 2,000-year-old monument, said in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera.
Source: Yahoo News
7-24-12
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A British beach has been closed as Army bomb disposal experts deal with nearly 1000 bombs and rockets littering the sand after storms uncovered the remnants of a World War II bombing range. The deadly arsenal cascaded on to Mappleton beach near Hornsea after being dislodged from cliffs by the bad weather.Army experts have already blown up at least 15 of the old bombs.
Source: CBS News
7-30-12
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There are museums dedicated to barbed wire and Spam, hobos and yo-yos -- even trash. Yet there is no major museum for the treasures of the American Revolution. But there are plans to right that wrong -- with a museum to be built with public and private funds in the city where America was born.In a secret location in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Scott Stephenson has been cataloging artifacts form the Revolutionary War.
Source: Daily Mail
7-29-12
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A feud has broken out between members of the Wagner opera family in Germany as the leader of the clan threatens legal action unless they co-operate with a 'moral house cleaning' aimed at de-Nazifying the world's leading opera festival. Katharina Wagner, who now directs the annual Bayreuth Festival of Richard Wagner's operas, wants family members to turn over every document they have in a bid to exorcise the ghosts of the Third Reich - including 'potentially explosive' letters penned by Hitler to Winifred Wagner, the Englishwoman who became head of the family in wartime.
Source: National Park Service
7-30-12
Today, the National Park Service officially launched the Star-Spangled Banner National Historic Trail with a ceremony in the Fell's Point neighborhood of Baltimore, MD. Partners from all nine regions along the trail were recognized for their hard work to develop the trail in their local areas.
"The launch of the Star Spangled Banner Trail is a key part of our nation's bicentennial celebration of the War of 1812," said U.S. Senator Ben Cardin. "It will provide Marylanders and visitors with a way to access and appreciate the sites engaged in our nation's Second War of Independence. Highlighted by kiosks, wayside signs, and highway markers, the trail will offer a unique combination of land and water-based sites and give visitors a unique understanding of Maryland's role in the war that helped shaped our nation."
With help from regional partners, important sites along the trail are now ready for visitors in southern Maryland, the Upper Bay, Maryland's Eastern Shore, Prince George's County, Anne Arundel County, Baltimore City and Baltimore County, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the District of Columbia.
