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: AP
7-18-12
A revolutionary discovery is rewriting the history of underwear: Some 600 years ago, women wore bras.The University of Innsbruck said Wednesday that archeologists found four linen bras dating from the Middle Ages in an Austrian castle. Fashion experts describe the find as surprising because the bra had commonly been thought to be only little more than 100 years old as women abandoned the tight corset.Instead, it appears the bra came first, followed by the corset, followed by the reinvented bra.One specimen in particular "looks exactly like a (modern) brassiere," says Hilary Davidson, fashion curator for the London Museum. "These are amazing finds."Although the linen garments were unearthed in 2008, they did not make news until now says Beatrix Nutz, the archaeologist responsible for the discovery....
Source: PBS Newshour
7-17-12
It's one of rock's seminal moments: It's 1965, the scene is the Newport Folk Festival, and Bob Dylan -- the godfather of folk music at the time -- walks on stage and plugs in. He plays an electric guitar for the first time in live performance.Fans boo their musical hero and Pete Seeger tries to switch off the power on his friend Dylan. And what became of the instrument that Dylan used as he transformed from folk master to rock & roll legend? Well, it went missing.A New Jersey woman, Dawn Peterson, believes she has the Fender Stratocaster with the sunburst pattern that belonged to Dylan. Turns out her father used to fly him and other famous musicians to and from gigs in his private plane. The guitar was left behind on the plane after the 1965 festival and remained in the family attic for decades, until Dawn started wondering about its origin after her father died....
Source: Star Tribune
7-17-12
Ron Geshick was 6 years old when a university archeologist showed up on the shores of Nett Lake in northern Minnesota and began digging for American Indian artifacts.Sixty-four years later, Geshick fought tears as more than 8,000 items unearthed in that dig were returned to the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa by the Minnesota Historical Society."It's like having a long-lost relative come home," Geshick, now a 70-year-old tribal elder, said after a spiritual guide led tribal leaders in celebrating the return of the items amid songs, prayers and a pipe ceremony this week. "Very powerful feelings come from these."The artifacts, some of which are believed to be nearly 3,000 years old, were returned as part of an ongoing effort by the Bois Forte Band and other American Indian communities to reclaim items taken from their lands....
Source: WaPo
7-18-12
WASHINGTON — Candy maker Mars Inc. is donating $5 million to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History to create a new gallery focused on business and innovation in the United States dating back to the 1700s, the museum announced Wednesday.The McLean, Va.-based maker of Snickers, M&Ms and pet foods will be the lead sponsor of a planned “American Enterprise” exhibit. The 8,000-square-foot multimedia gallery will trace the nation’s economic development from a small agricultural nation to one of the world’s largest economies.In announcing the gift, Smithsonian Secretary Wayne Clough said it will tell a broad story about business for visitors of all ages. The Smithsonian is naming the gallery the Mars Hall of American Business. It is scheduled to open in 2015 after a renovation of the museum’s west wing....
Source: Time.com
7-17-12
Bonnie Parker and Clyde Darrow are two of the most legendary outlaws in American history, thanks to their spree of murder and bank robbery in the 1930s. Now you too can own a piece of that history, as Bonnie’s .38-caliber Colt revolver and Clyde’s .45-caliber Colt pistol will join a host of other items in a Sept. 30 auction.The couple were wearing both weapons when they were ambushed by lawmen on May 23, 1934 and gunned them down; Bonnie’s Colt was discovered taped to her inner thigh and Clyde’s weapon was nestled in his waistband. The leaders of the Barrow Gang were responsible for at least 13 murders and countless robberies during the Great Depression, but their blossoming romance and daring heists made them folk heroes....
Source: WaPo
7-16-12
“John McCain ran for president and released two years of tax returns. John Kerry ran for president; you know, his wife, who has hundreds of millions of dollars, she never released her tax returns. Somehow this wasn’t an issue.”— Mitt Romney, on Fox News, July 16, 2012 “It's standard for the last Republican nominee, the last Democratic nominee.”— Romney senior adviser Ed Gillespie, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” July 15, 2012, answering a question on why Romney will release only two years of tax returns. In trying to fend off demands — from both Democrats and even some Republicans — that presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney release more than two years of tax returns, his campaign has sought to claim that releasing two years of tax returns is normal. (Romney so far has released his 2010 return and an estimate for his 2011 return.) Is that really the case? Let’s check out Gillespie’s claim, presumably about McCain and President Obama, and Romney’s claim that the tax returns of Teresa Heinz Kerry were “not an issue.”...
Source: WaPo
7-14-12
The photograph, scratched and undated, is captioned “Brother Jordan Anderson.” He is a middle-aged black man with a long beard and a righteous stare, as if he were a preacher locking eyes with a sinner, or a judge about to dispatch a thief to the gallows.Anderson was a former slave who was freed from a Tennessee plantation by Union troops in 1864 and spent his remaining 40 years in Ohio. He lived quietly and likely would have been forgotten, if not for a remarkable letter to his former master published in a Cincinnati newspaper shortly after the Civil War.Treasured as a social document, praised as a masterpiece of satire, Anderson’s letter has been anthologized and published all over the world. Historians teach it, and the letter turns up occasionally on a blog or on Facebook. Humorist Andy Borowitz read the letter recently and called it, in an email to The Associated Press, “something Twain would have been proud to have written.”
Source: NPR
7-17-12
While you're enjoying your coffee this morning, half a dozen scientists are already at work. They're not sitting at desks, however, but a few miles off the Florida Keys, 60 feet down on the ocean bottom.The researchers are living and working this week at Aquarius Reef Base, the world's last undersea research laboratory. The 25-year-old facility, built by the federal government, has hosted everyone from marine biologists studying endangered coral reefs to NASA astronauts training for weightless missions in space. But the Aquarius Reef Base itself is now endangered.Among marine researchers, there are few people more distinguished or respected than Sylvia Earle. Former chief scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and now explorer-in-residence at National Geographic, she's no stranger to what are called "saturation dives."Those are dives where people spend days, or even weeks, underwater. This dive, Earle says, marks an important scientific anniversary. It's been 50 years since saturation diving was first pioneered by underwater explorers Ed Link and Jacques Cousteau."This is a historic event, and I was invited," Earle said. "I didn't knock on the door; they knocked on my door, and I said, 'OK.' "
Source: Telegraph (UK)
7-14-12
It is a time capsule of Bomber Command, the unit that has seen its role overlooked since the end of the conflict.Now following the success of the memorial to the unit which was unveiled by the Queen in central London last month, the Second World War airbase at RAF Bicester could become a permanent museum to honour the courage of the bomber crews.The 348 acre airfield, which contains 19 Grade II listed buildings and 12 scheduled ancient monuments, has been put up for sale by the Ministry of Defence.Among those looking to take on the airfield is Bomber Command Heritage (BCH), a group of volunteers, who are planning to convert it into one of the country's foremost aviation museums....
Source: Medievalists.net
7-4-12
A previously unknown version of Martin Waldseemüller’s famous world map has been disocvered in the collections of the University Library in Munich. On this map, the New World appears for the first time under the name “America”, chosen to honor the explorer Amerigo Vespucci (1451 – 1512), whom Waldseemüller erroneously regarded as the discoverer of the continent.Waldseemüller and his colleague Matthias Ringmann created the map in their workshop in the monastery of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges around the year 1507. Four other versions of the map are known to exist, and one of them was sold at auction in 2005 for $1 million. This fifth version is created in so-called globe segments, which depict the world in twelve individual segments, or rather surface wedges, which taper to a point at each end and are printed on a single sheet, like cut-outs on construction paper. When correctly arranged, they form a small globe of about 11 cm in diameter. And in the three rightmost wedges, one sees a huge, boomerang-shaped landmass in the middle of an immense ocean. The globe places America in the remotest West, seen from Europe and Africa, on the far side of a wide, wide sea....
Source: AP
7-13-12
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Archaeologists in Mexico City have unearthed the skulls and other bones of 15 people, most of them the children of traveling merchants during Aztec times.Researcher Alejandra Jasso Pena says they also found ceramic flutes, bowls, incense burners, the remains of a dog that was sacrificed to accompany a child in the afterlife and other artifacts of a pre-Columbian civilization.Jasso Pena said Friday that construction was about to start on five buildings in a Mexico City neighborhood when the National Institute of Anthropology and History asked to carry out an excavation of the site first....
Source: Religion News Service
7-11-2
(RNS) A large-scale Bible museum will open in Washington, D.C., within four years, say planners who have been touring the world with portions of their collection.Cary Summers, chief operating officer of The Museum of the Bible, a nonprofit umbrella group for the collection of the billionaire Green family of Oklahoma, said they considered Washington, Dallas and New York but decided the nation's capital was the best location. The final name of the museum and its exact location have not been disclosed but planners hope to confirm a location later this summer.Research they commissioned found that the general population was more willing to travel to the nation's capital for a Bible-focused museum than the other two cities, Summers said....
Source: Yahoo News
7-9-12
After classes let out one summer, Gettysburg College students took to the fields to fight in an epic battle.That was in July 1863, however.A prestigious liberal arts school, Gettysburg College, then-called Pennsylvania College of Gettysburg, played a pivotal role in the battle for both the Union and Confederate armies.According to National Park Service employee and Gettysburg College alumnus John Rudy ’07, students put down their books and rose to the governor’s call for emergency troops to defend the state and the town.The men were placed at Harrisburg as Company A of the 26th Pennsylvania Emergency Militia Regiment. By this time, the Confederate army was hot off a victory in Chancellorsville and it had to be stopped from punching a hole into Union territory. The students’ participation was vital....
Source: New Kerala
7-16-12
Washington : Tracking the impact of climate change today has been made possible by tools developed by nuclear scientists to detect radioactivity in the wake of testing of atomic bombs during the Cold War era, says a leading historian.Their insights and research have contributed enormously to enhancing knowledge about both carbon dioxide, which warms the earth and aerosols, which cool it. Otherwise, scientists today would have been in the dark about atmospheric changes, says historian Paul Edwards from University of Michigan, US....
Source: Salon
7-17-12
A former Hungarian police officer accused of responsibility for the deaths of nearly 16,000 Jews in World War II has been found living in Budapest.Britain’s Sun newspaper reportedly found a man believed to be Laszlo Csizsik-Csatary, now 97, living in the Hungarian capital.Sun reporters confronted Csatary at his apartment in an upscale suburb of Budapest about Canada revoking his citizenship in 1997.Answering the door in a long-sleeve shirt and underwear, Csatary told the newspaper, “I don’t want to discuss it.”...
Source: Ocala Star-Banner
7-8-12
"I looked at the archaeological evidence. There is absolutely no doubt that is a De Soto contact site, and I am 99.99 percent sure this is the town of Potano, the major Indian town," said Jerald Milanich, the author of multiple books about De Soto's expedition and curator emeritus in archaeology of the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida."Until now, we really had no one location until all the way up to Tallahassee. Now we have a midway place."LUCKY FINDWhite's initial discovery was less a product of painstaking exploration than dumb luck....White himself had walked his family's property for two years looking for remnants of what he thought was a 17th century Spanish cattle ranch. He found little more than Indian artifacts.Then in 2005, a series of hurricanes and storms inundated the 700-acre property owned by his wife, Michelle White, a bioarchaeologist....
Source: The Telegraph
7-16-12
The French foreign ministry has joined Nazi hunters and Jewish community groups to call on prosecutors in Hungary to arrest Laszlo Csatary, 97, for his role in organising the deportation of 15,700 Jews to their deaths in Auschwitz.
"We believe that Nazi criminals, wherever they are, must answer for their acts before justice," said a spokesman for the French foreign ministry.
Csatary, who tops the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's most-wanted list of the Nazi war criminals, was last weekend discovered living peacefully in Budapest under his own name.
He had left Canada when he was unmasked by war crimes investigators in 1995.
Source: BBC
7-15-12
The African Union has chosen South African Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma as its leader, making her the first woman to hold the post.Dlamini-Zuma beat incumbent Jean Ping of Gabon after a closely fought contest for the chairmanship of the organisation.In January, neither got the required two-thirds majority, leaving Mr Ping in office for another six months.The dispute has overshadowed other issues, especially security and trade.Voting had been broadly split along linguistic lines, with English-speaking countries tending to support Ms Dlamini-Zuma and French-speaking countries lining up behind Mr Ping.Senior officials had warned that failure to resolve the leadership deadlock would divide the AU and undermine its credibility....
Source: AFP
7-15-12
TOKYO — For six years US General Douglas MacArthur was lord of all he surveyed as supreme commander of the Allied forces in occupied Japan, gazing over Tokyo from a building requisitioned from an insurance company.Now, more than 60 years after Japan began governing itself again, his office is being opened to the public, just as he left it.The sixth-floor room has the original seats, desk and even an armchair where MacArthur would have sat as he presided over Japan's rise from the ashes of World War II.From the office, MacArthur oversaw the transformation of a country that waged a brutal war of acquisition across Asia into a peaceable nation that would become the economic powerhouse of the late 20th century....
Source: AP
7-15-12
Syria's 16-month bloodbath crossed an important symbolic threshold Sunday as the international Red Cross formally declared the conflict a civil war, a status with implications for potential war crimes prosecutions.The Red Cross statement came as United Nations observers gathered new details on what happened in a village where dozens were reported killed in a regime assault. After a second visit to Tremseh on Sunday, the team said Syrian troops went door-to-door in the small farming community, checking residents' IDs and then killing some and taking others away.According to the U.N., the attack appeared to target army defectors and activists."Pools of blood and brain matter were observed in a number of homes," a U.N. statement said.... The bloodshed appeared to be escalating. On Sunday, the International Committee of the Red Cross said it now considers the Syrian conflict a civil war, meaning international humanitarian law applies throughout the country.
