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
7-30-12
President Obama’s biography — son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas — has long suggested that unlike most African-Americans, his roots did not include slavery.
Now a team of genealogists is upending that thinking, saying that Mr. Obama’s mother had, in addition to her European ancestors, at least one African forebear and that the president is most likely descended from one of the first documented African slaves in the United States.
The findings are scheduled to be announced on Monday by Ancestry.com, a genealogy company based in Provo, Utah. Its team, while lacking definitive proof, said it had evidence that “strongly suggests” Mr. Obama’s family tree — on his mother’s side — stretches back nearly four centuries to a slave in colonial Virginia named John Punch.
In 1640, Mr. Punch, then an indentured servant, escaped from Virginia and went to Maryland. He was captured there and, along with two white servants who had also escaped, was put on trial. His punishment — servitude for life — was harsher than what the white servants received, and it has led some historians to regard him as the first African to be legally sanctioned as a slave, years before Virginia adopted laws allowing slavery.
Source: AP
7-29-12
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Gray's Store in Adamsville village brought in customers for years with its old-fashioned marble soda fountain, cigar and tobacco cases, and Rhode Island johnny cakes.The 224-year-old business may be the oldest operating general store in America, although others have staked similar claims. The Rhode Island store near the Massachusetts line opened in 1788. Now owners say this year is its last.
Source: NYT
7-28-12
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PARIS — Early on a Thursday morning in July 1942, more than 4,000 police officers set out in pairs through the streets of occupied Paris, carrying arrest orders for scores of Jewish men, women and children. Within days, 13,152 people had been rounded up for deportation to death camps. No more than 100 would survive.
Source: CBS News
7-28-12
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The White House's case arguing President Obama never returned a bust of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill turned out to be somewhat of a bust itself.
Source: ABC News Radio
7-28-12
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London's Olympic Stadium became a vast meadow in an opening ceremony that evoked the history of the United Kingdom to kick off the 2012 Olympics.In the ceremony, choreographed by director Danny Boyle, London took the drama in the opposite direction from that taken by Beijing's Olympic organizers in 2008.
Source: Boston Globe
7-27-12
In April 1944, a German submarine prowling the waters off Nantucket torpedoed an American tanker caught straggling behind its convoy. The U-boat took cover beneath the sinking ship to avoid detection, but the flagship USS Joyce closed in and delivered a punishing depth charge attack that forced the damaged vessel to the surface.Under fierce attack, U-550 sank stern first. There it lay, its final resting place an enduring mystery for nearly 70 years.But earlier this week, after years of research and days of painstaking searches of the ocean floor, a crew discovered the elusive craft about 70 miles south of Nantucket. Crew members said the submarine was among the last undiscovered German warships along the eastern seaboard, where it once attacked merchant ships and forced blackouts in coastal cities.
Source: CNN
7-27-12
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It's the white whale of American elections: elusive, mythical and never realized. But could it finally happen this year? The likelihood that President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney will each net 269 electoral votes in November, instead of the 270 needed to win, is actually not so farfetched -- and for close observers of the Electoral College system, a tie would set off a wave of constitutional and political mayhem that would make the 2000 Florida recount seem like a tidy affair.
Source: AP
7-27-12
Elderly North Korean veterans pledged loyalty to their 20-something leader in Pyongyang during Korean War armistice commemorations Friday that were being closely watched after Kim Jong Un reshuffled the military and revealed he's married.Over the last two weeks, Kim has taken on the title of marshal and replaced his army chief - once a key mentor. Both moves were seen as an effort to build loyalty among the million-man armed forces and solidify his credentials as commander.North Korea also revealed Wednesday that the stylish woman at Kim's side in some public appearances this month is his wife. Images of her walking with Kim were choreographed to show the leader as modern, mature and down-to-earth, analysts said, and contrast sharply to his intensely private father, Kim Jong Il, who ruled for 17 years before his death in December.Kim Jong Un and his wife weren't at Friday's event. Hundreds of aging veterans were shown on state television in a huge auditorium as Choe Ryong Hae, the military's top political officer, stood beneath giant portraits of Kim Jong Il and North Korea founder Kim Il Sung and urged the crowd to "follow the leadership of Marshal Kim Jong Un and win 100 out of 100 battles."...
Source: NYT
7-24-12
Madonna defended her decision to use a swastika in a video during her current tour, saying it is a fit image for her message about “the intolerance that we human beings have for one another.”The Nazi symbol is superimposed on the forehead of the French National Front leader Marine Le Pen during a video that Madonna has been playing while she sings “Nobody Knows Me” at her concerts during a world tour. Last week, the far-right party said it would sue Madonna after a concert in Paris and accused her of cynically insulting Ms. Le Pen to gain publicity....
Source: National Library of Medicine
7-27-12
The National Library of Medicine (NLM), the world's largest medical library and a component of the National Institutes of Health, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) are forming a new partnership. They will collaborate to develop initiatives that bring together scholars, scientists, librarians, doctors and cultural heritage professionals from the humanities and biomedical communities in order to share expertise and develop new research agendas.Representatives from the NLM and the NEH signed a memorandum of understanding that outlines their partnership and recognizes their shared interest in advancing health and medical education, training and information dissemination for research, teaching and learning by the humanities and biomedical communities.As initial efforts, the partners will work together to:Explore areas of mutual interest for research, particularly in the fields of digital humanities and the history of medicine;Develop and participate in curricula and courses, training and internship opportunities, and other educational initiatives; and
Source: National Library of Medicine
7-27-12
The National Library of Medicine, the world's largest medical library and a component of the National Institutes of Health, has acquired a collection of over 200 books and periodical issues related to the literary achievements of the prominent American Civil War surgeon S. Weir Mitchell (1829-1914). Mitchell obtained his medical degree in 1850 from Jefferson Medical College and spent the following year in Paris, where he studied with noted physiologist Claude Bernard, who invented the concept of blind experiments to ensure objectivity in scientific observations. During the American Civil War, Mitchell was a surgeon at Turner's Lane Hospital in Philadelphia, where he treated many patients with nerve injuries. This work eventually led to his interest in neurology and neuropsychiatry. After the war, Mitchell returned to private practice. In 1870, he was appointed physician-in-charge of the Department for Nervous Diseases of the Philadelphia Orthopedic Hospital, where he would treat patients for over 40 years.
Source: AP
7-24-12
The towering, white mausoleum in downtown Caracas is for many Venezuelans a lot like Hugo Chavez, only in architectural terms: disproportionately larger-than-life, flamboyant and self-important.And no, the grand tomb was not built for Venezuela's socialist president, who has grappled with his own mortality in his recent battle with cancer and is running for re-election.It will cradle the remains of South American independence leader Simon Bolivar, who Chavez daily, rapturously and exhaustively exalts as the spiritual father of his own self-styled revolution....
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Source: AP
7-24-12
The 1912 Boston Red Sox World Series trophy presented to team manager Jake Stahl is going on the auction block.The sterling silver trophy will be auctioned Aug. 2 at Camden Yards in Baltimore during a national sports collectors convention.The trophy's current owner is Red Sox fan Robert Fraser. He says several companies wanted to auction it off for the 100th anniversaries of the team's World Series win against the New York Giants and the opening of Fenway Park...
Source: LA Times
7-24-12
Up the street from the old MGM lot, a tale of miracles is playing out at what was once the Culver City courthouse.Decommissioned in 2005, the low-slung, single-story building is the home of the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum, a monument to one woman's quest to preserve African American history — from slavery to modern times.Clayton once said: "If we're not careful, the record of our history in this country can be permanently lost. Right now it's just misplaced."She spent years tracking it down.The first miracle is its 2 million items — second only to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. Those items include 25,000 magazines, 20,000 books, 17,000 photographs, 1,000 pieces of sheet music, 700 films and 300 movie posters....
Source: Q13Fox.com
7-24-12
The Washington State History Museum will be opening a special exhibit in August on famous skyjacker D.B. Cooper, who parachuted out of a commercial airliner somewhere between Portland and Seattle with $200,000 in extorted cash in 1971 and was never caught.The case remains the only unsolved air piracy in American aviation history.Museum spokesman Margo Helgen said the museum in Tacoma wanted to emphasize the exhibit is not being held to promote a criminal, but to show “the nature of personal safety” and how “hijacking has changed over time and the response to it.”...
Source: NYT
7-23-12
WASHINGTON — Scott Lilly was a young member of Senator George McGovern’s presidential campaign staff in the summer of 1972, and he remembers the satisfaction he felt when Mr. McGovern chose Mr. Lilly’s home-state senator to be the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential candidate.But a few days after the convention that nominated Mr. McGovern and his running mate, Senator Thomas F. Eagleton of Missouri, Mr. Lilly said, he came to a realization. “It suddenly struck me out of the blue that they didn’t know,” he said, that the decision to pick Mr. Eagleton had been made without some crucial facts.
Source: NYT
7-23-12
The Bayreuth Festival has a new Dutchman, this one presumably minus a swastika tattooed on his chest. The bass-baritone Samuel Youn will take over the title role in Wagner’s “Flying Dutchman,” which opens on Wednesday, news reports said. Mr. Youn is replacing Evgeny Nikitin, who withdrew from the performances over the weekend after German news media reported that he had acquired a swastika tattoo in his youth, when he played in a Russian heavy metal band. Images show another tattoo partially covering the swastika....
Source: NYT
7-24-12
A $2.2 million expedition that hoped to find wreckage from Amelia Earhart’s final flight is on its way back to Hawaii without the conclusive plane images searchers were hoping to attain. But the president of the group leading the search, the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, said it still believes Earhart and her navigator crashed onto a reef off a remote island in the Pacific 75 years ago this month. The president, Pat Thrasher, said Monday that the group has a significant amount of video and sonar data that searchers will pore over on the return voyage to Hawaii this week and afterward to look for things that may be tough to see at first glance....
Source: LA Times
7-22-12
French President François Hollande on Sunday made an emotional mea culpa on behalf of his country for its part in the World War II roundup and deportation of more than 13,000 Jews from Paris.At the 70th anniversary of what is known as the Vel d'Hiv Raids, Hollande admitted the operation carried out by Paris police in 1942 was a "crime committed in France, by France."Hollande also praised former president and political rival Jacques Chirac who in 1995 became the first French leader to admit the roundup had been "France's fault."Until then, French presidents including Hollande's Socialist mentor François Mitterrand had contended that the wartime collaborationist Vichy government led by Marshall Philippe Petain did not represent the French Republic....
Source: USA Today
7-23-12
Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, has died of cancer at age 61, her organization has announced.On June 18, 1983, Ride was 32 when she launched aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger.Ride, a physicist, helped develop the shuttle's robotic arm....
