Breaking News

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: Winona Daily News (MN)
7-22-12

Questions remain about what happened to artworks donated to Winona State University

It was one of the largest gifts of art ever made to a teachers college.Now much of the collection has been lost.The Paul Watkins family donated about 600 pieces of artwork collected from around Europe to the Winona Teachers College over the course of a decade or so beginning in the 1920s. That kind of gift was unheard of in its time, and is still the largest art donation in Winona State University history.More than 80 years later, only about 250 of the items can still be accounted for, according to inventory and appraisal records collected and provided by WSU....

Source: National Geographic
7-20-12

"Dramatic" New Maya Temple Found, Covered With Giant Faces

Some 1,600 years ago, the Temple of the Night Sun was a blood-red beacon visible for miles and adorned with giant masks of the Maya sun god as a shark, blood drinker, and jaguar.Long since lost to the Guatemalan jungle, the temple is finally showing its faces to archaeologists, and revealing new clues about the rivalrous kingdoms of the Maya.Unlike the relatively centralized Aztec and Inca empires, the Maya civilization—which spanned much of what are now Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico's Yucatán region (Maya map)—was a loose aggregation of city-states. (Read about the rise and fall of the Maya in National Geographic magazine.)...

Source: National Post
7-17-12

Archives of French Jews deported to Auschwitz exhibited

PARIS — They are among France’s darkest days: Police dragged over 13,000 Jews from their homes, confined them in a Paris cycling stadium with little food or water, and then deported them to their deaths in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. But even in France, one of the most brazen collaborations between authorities and the Nazis during World War II is unknown to many in the younger generation.Police are hoping to change that, opening up their archives on France’s biggest single deportation of French Jews for the first time to the public on Thursday.The often chilling records are being exhibited in the Paris Jewish district’s city hall to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the two-day “Vel d’Hiv” roundup, named for the Velodrome d’Hiver, or Winter Velodrome. Many thousands were rounded up on July 16 and 17, 1942, then holed up in miserable conditions in the stadium, just a stone’s throw from the Eiffel Tower, before being bused to the French camp at Drancy and then taken by train to Auschwitz....

Source: BBC News
7-20-12

Vienna war memorial yields pro-Nazi and anti-war texts

Two conflicting texts - one pro-Nazi, the other pacifist - have been found under a statue at Vienna's main war memorial, Austrian officials say.Both messages were in a metal capsule left under the statue of the Unknown Soldier in 1935 - three years before Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany.The pro-Nazi message, by sculptor Wilhelm Frass, hopes for German unity under the Sonnenrad, the swastika.The anti-war message was signed by sculptor Alfons Riedel....

Source: Huffington Post
7-23-12

Strong case against Hungarian WWII criminal

BUDAPEST, Hungary -- The evidence against a 97-year-old Hungarian man accused of abusing Jews and helping deport thousands during the Holocaust is much stronger than a similar case last year that ended in a high-profile acquittal, experts say.Laszlo Csatary's role as a police officer and chief of an internment camp from where 12,000 Jews were deported to their deaths in Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps is amply documented and there are strong witness statements about his brutality, they said.Authorities charged Csatary last week with "unlawful torture of human beings," accusing him of being present in 1944 when trains bound for death camps were loaded and sent on their way, regularly using a dog whip to strike detainees and in one case refusing to cut holes in a train car to allow people to breathe. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison....

Source: NYT
7-21-12

A Nation That’s Losing Its Toolbox

...The Obama administration does worry publicly about manufacturing, a first cousin of craftsmanship. When the Ford Motor Company, for example, recently announced that it was bringing some production home, the White House cheered. “When you see things like Ford moving new production from Mexico to Detroit, instead of the other way around, you know things are changing,” says Gene B. Sperling, director of the National Economic Council....Traditional vocational training in public high schools is gradually declining, stranding thousands of young people who seek training for a craft without going to college. Colleges, for their part, have since 1985 graduated fewer chemical, mechanical, industrial and metallurgical engineers, partly in response to the reduced role of manufacturing, a big employer of them.The decline started in the 1950s, when manufacturing generated a hefty 28 percent of the national income, or gross domestic product, and employed one-third of the work force. Today, factory output generates just 12 percent of G.D.P. and employs barely 9 percent of the nation’s workers....

Source: NYT
7-22-12

Protest Gets a Pedestal Among Baseball’s Greats

Some of the thousands of people who gathered in Cooperstown, N.Y., on Sunday for the annual induction ceremony into the National Baseball Hall of Fame no doubt visited the attached museum to gaze at items connected to memorable moments or the greats of the game.But one display, near the center of an exhibit called “Today’s Game,” may have surprised some visitors because of its ties to the Occupy Wall Street movement.Inside a glass case was a white jersey with flowing blue lettering and a blue hat that might seem vaguely familiar to Brooklynites of a certain vintage. The team name, however, was the Tax Dodgers; the hat displayed a 1 percent logo.

Source: NYT
7-22-12

Top Afghans Tied to ’90s Carnage, Researchers Say

MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan — The atrocities of the Afghan civil war in the 1990s are still recounted in whispers here — tales of horror born out of a scorched-earth ethnic and factional conflict in which civilians and captured combatants were frequently slaughtered en masse.Stark evidence of such killings are held in the mass graves that still litter the Afghan countryside. One such site is outside Mazar-i-Sharif, in the north. It lies only half-excavated, with bones and the remains of clothing partially obscured by water and mud from recent flooding. Experts say at least 16 victims are here, and each skull that lies exposed is uniformly punctured by a single bullet-entry hole at the back.The powerful men accused of responsibility for these deaths and tens of thousands of others — some said to be directly at their orders, others carried out by men in their chain of command — are named in the pages of a monumental 800-page report on human rights abuses in Afghanistan from the Soviet era in the ’80s to the fall of the Taliban in 2001, according to researchers and officials who helped compile the study over the past six years....

Source: Telegraph (UK)
7-22-12

Landslide uncovers WW2 bombs

The East Riding beach of Mappleton, near Hornsea, was used as a practice bombing range during the Second World War - but the bad weather has led to ground movement which exposed one of the biggest arsenals ever uncovered yesterday.The fins of many of the bombs have been left sticking out of the mud and rock which has fallen onto the beach.With holiday crowds flooding to the coast, coastguards are warning visitors thinking of grabbing a souvenir that the bombs may be "highly volatile" and capable of causing tragedy.Coastguards say the odd item of explosives often turn up in dribs and drabs after being embedded in the cliffs for decades in the area....

Source: NYT
7-22-12

In New Exhibit, Disney Lends Its Star Power to Reagan, and Vice Versa

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library sits on top of the world here, a majestic tribute to a former president filled with testimonials to his life: the Air Force One that flew him around the globe, the gowns that Nancy Reagan wore to inaugural balls, a video re-enactment of his near assassination, movie clips from his Hollywood days and memorabilia from his campaigns for California governor.But the other afternoon, hundreds of people lined up outside the door waiting to view a most unlikely addition to this presidential library: Mickey Mouse.In an unusual collaboration of presidential scholarship and mass-market entertainment — featuring two men who, truth be told, were never particularly close — the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and the Walt Disney Company have joined together to open a sprawling, nine-month exhibition drawn from the Disney archives....

Source: NYT
7-21-12

Chauvinist sculpture moving

Even before “Civic Virtue” was unveiled in 1922, there were protests against it. The immense statue, installed in City Hall Park, featured a naked, hulking man representing virtue, standing atop nude female figures, representing vice. Women’s groups protested the symbolism. Later, art critics lamented the inelegance of the work. Time healed no wounds. Politicians, most prominently Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, griped about being mooned each day on the way to work. For years, there were efforts to exile the sculpture: the Bronx, Brooklyn and Randalls Island were all considered. But the piece was finally carted off to Kew Gardens, Queens, where it has decayed outside Borough Hall for the past 70 years, enduring, every few decades, another bout of criticism that it was ugly and sexist. Now this little-loved statue seems on the verge of yet another exile — this time to Brooklyn. Appropriately enough, its next and perhaps final resting place there, according to city leaders, may be in a graveyard.

Source: AP
9-21-12

Troops march in San Diego gay parade - in uniform

Some of the loudest cheers Saturday at San Diego's gay pride parade were for active-duty troops marching in military dress, the first time that U.S. service members participated in such an event while in full uniform.Dozens of soldiers, sailors, and Marines marched alongside an old Army truck decorated with a "Freedom to Serve" banner and a rainbow flag. They were joined by dozens more military personnel in civilian clothes, but the uniforms stood out among the flower-bedecked floats and scantily clad revelers.Spectators waved signs reading, "Thank you for your service." A woman held a placard that said: "My gay son is a Naval officer.""Today is so important," said Navy Lt. Brian McKinney, who marched with his civilian partner, Hunter Hammonds. "It's about putting on my uniform and taking pride in my service, my fellow service-members, my family and myself. It's something I'm incredibly thankful for."In a memorandum sent to all its branches this year, the Defense Department said it was making the allowance for the San Diego event even though its policy generally bars troops from marching in uniform in parades.

Source: AP
7-22-12

Japan probes alleged cover-up at nuclear plant

Japanese authorities are investigating subcontractors on suspicion that they forced workers at the tsunami-hit nuclear plant to underreport the amount of radiation they were exposed to so they could stay on the job longer.Labor officials said Sunday that an investigation had begun over the weekend following media reports of a cover-up at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, which suffered multiple meltdowns following the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami disasters.A subcontractor of plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co., or TEPCO, acknowledged having nine workers cover their dosimeters with lead plates late last year so the instrument would indicate a lower level of radiation exposure.The investigation marks the first time the government has looked into the case, believed to be part of a widespread practice at the plant since it was hit by the worst atomic crisis since Chernobyl....

Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
7-21-12

Freedom Rides remembered

The anger that led Lewis Zuchman and Luvaughn Brown to self-destructive moments as teenagers ultimately fueled their dedication to a movement.Zuchman grew up white and Jewish in New York. He quit college and served time in jail before he was 19. Brown, an African-American in segregated Mississippi, ran away from an abusive family life and was prone to raise his fists in an instant.They met as teenage Freedom Riders in the early 1960s, part of an historic non-violent movement that helped force the desegregation of the transportation facilities in the South."It was a reasonable way to fight what I wanted to fight all along, but didn't know how," said Brown, now 67.Brown and Zuchman, 70, reminisced on Saturday at a discussion and film screening about the Freedom Rides at the African American Museum in Philadelphia. The event was part of programming associated with an exhibit of 82 mixed-media portraits of Freedom Riders by New York artist Charlotta Janssen....

Source: Fox News
7-18-12

Mona Lisa model's remains discovered?

It's the face that launched a thousand imitations. Now, archaeologists are convinced they've found the body of the real Mona Lisa.Buried in a crypt beneath a convent in Florence, Italy, archaeologists believe they have uncovered the skeleton belonging to the model who posed for Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece in 1504.The wife of a rich silk merchant, Lisa Gheradini, is generally accepted by historians to be the woman with the mysterious smile.Lisa Gheradini, whose married name was Giocondo, became a nun after her husband's death. She was buried in the grounds of the Convent of Saint Ursula where she died in 1542, aged 63....

Source: Telegraph (UK)
7-19-12

Horrors of Scott expedition revealed

The extreme conditions, which eventually claimed the lives of five including Scott himself, were described by Apsley Cherry-Garrard in letters to his mother.An assistant zoologist, he joined the Terra Nova expedition aged 24 and was eventually part of the search party that found the frozen bodies of his companions after six months.The letters, which have come to light through a family member 100 years after Scott died, are expected to fetch £80,000 when they are auctioned by Christie's, according to the Guardian.They chart the ill-fated exploration of the South Pole, which had already been completed by a Norwegian rival before it began in 1910....

Source: Telegraph (UK)
7-19-12

Hundreds of bars of silver rescued from WWII shipwreck

The treasure, worth 1.4 million troy ounces of silver, was found on the wreckage three miles beneath the Atlantic.The operation to retrieve the 1,203 bars from the SS Gairsoppa was the heaviest and deepest underwater mission to remove precious metal from sunken vessels.It was discovered last September and the metal was reportedly valued at around £155 million in today's prices.The Gairsoppa, a cargo ship, sank in February 1941, 300 miles south-west of Galway in Ireland....

Source: CBS News
7-9-12

Hitler's car found online by New Jersey dealer

(CBS News) EDGEWATER, N.J. -- An auto repair shop owner was shocked to find out that a Mercedes-Benz he purchased over the Internet for a customer has strong ties to Adolf Hitler. "He was surprised," Zenop Tuncer, owner of Euro Tech Motors, told CBSNews.com in recalling his conversation with the customer. "We were all surprised!" Tuncer, whose shop specializes in classic cars, got a request from real estate developer Fred Daibes to find a Mercedes-Benz 540K. However, Tuncer could only procure a 1942 Mercedes 320 Cabriolet D convertible, which Daibes agreed to buy. Tuncer said he should have been tipped off because the car looked like a military car....

Source: Telegraph (UK)
7-19-12

Exam howlers reveal Stalin's sausage roll plan

What was Stalin's key weapon in controlling Eastern Europe? Sausage rolls, according to one student.Apparently the Russian dictator was not building up a buffer zone in the region after the end of the Second World War, but a "buffet zone".The blooper is just one of the exam howlers submitted to the Times Higher Education (THE) magazine for its annual competition.This year's entries reveal how university students have been stumped by historical events, or simply caught out by spelling mistakes.In a paper on the Cold War, the student for whom Stalin's actions were more along the lines of a street party than a military move wrote: "In 1945, Stalin began to build a buffet zone in Eastern Europe."...

Source: abc news
7-18-12

48 Tons of Silver Recovered From World War II Shipwreck

An American company has made what is being called the heaviest and deepest recovery of precious metals from a shipwreck.The Tampa, Fla.-based Odyssey Marine Exploration, Inc. announced Wednesday that it had recovered 48 tons of silver bullion from the SS Gairsoppa, a sunken British cargo ship in three miles of water off the coast of Ireland. Between the Gairsoppa, torpedoed by a German U-boat during World War II, and the SS Mantola, sunk by a German submarine during World War I, Odyssey said in a press release that about 240 tons of silver may be recovered by the end of the operation....