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
7-15-12
For decades, nobody really talked about them: the thousands of Poles, mostly Roman Catholics, who risked their lives during World War II to save Jewish friends, neighbors and even strangers.Those discovered by the Germans were executed quickly, often with their entire families. And then, under communism, there was silence. The Jewish survivors would send letters and gifts in gratitude. But the Polish state ignored the rescuers. And they themselves kept quiet, out of modesty, or shame or fear of anti-Semitism. Sometimes they worried gift packages from the West would arouse the jealousy of neighbors in a period of economic deprivation."It wasn't considered anything to be proud of," said Ewa Ligia Zdanowicz , an 81-year-old whose parents hid a Jewish teenage girl in their home during the war.That era is over.
Source: AP
7-13-12
Folk singer and native Oklahoman Woody Guthrie was "probably not one of the favorite sons" when he was alive, a state senator said. But Guthrie's legacy has inspired a celebration in honor of his 100th birthday this Sunday at the annual festival in his hometown of Okemah.Guthrie, perhaps best known for his song "This Land is Your Land," was hotly political, speaking out against fascism and aligning himself with working class, influenced by his time in the Dust Bowl. Guthrie had a silly side, too, in ditties such as "Car Song." And his seemingly simple songwriting inspired countless musicians, among them Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger.Guthrie's son, singer Arlo Guthrie, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Friday that he believes his father would find humor in the fact that his life and music are being celebrated as part of the 15th annual Woody Guthrie Folk Festival, referred to by fans as WoodyFest...
Source: AP
7-14-12
Polish officials unveiled a statue of former President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II on Saturday, honoring two men widely credited in this Eastern European country with helping to topple communism 23 years ago.The statue was unveiled in Gdansk, the birthplace of Lech Walesa's Solidarity movement, in the presence of about 120 former Solidarity activists, many of whom were imprisoned in the 1980s for their roles in organizing or taking part in strikes against the communist regime.The bronze statue, erected in the lush seaside President Ronald Reagan Park, is a slightly larger-than-life rendering of the two late leaders. It was inspired by an Associated Press photograph taken in 1987 on John Paul's second pontifical visit to the U.S.The photographer who took the picture, Scott Stewart, expressed satisfaction that one of his pictures has helped immortalize "a wonderful moment in time between the two men."...
Source: BBC News
7-13-12
Scientists studying how North America was first settled have found stone spearheads and darts in Oregon, US, that date back more than 13,000 years.The hunting implements, which are of the "Western Stemmed" tradition, are at least as old as the famous Clovis tools thought for a long time to belong to the continent's earliest inhabitants.Precise carbon dating of dried human faeces discovered alongside the stone specimens tied down their antiquity.It has published the scholarly findings of an international team investigating the Paisley Cave complex in south-central Oregon....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
7-13-12
The surgical records detail the groundbreaking work of Dr Harold Gillies, the pioneering plastic surgeon who developed some of the world’s first successful skin grafts during the Great War.Dr Gillies developed early plastic surgery techniques to treat seriously wounded and disfigured soldiers, allowing them to go on to live a full life as civilians.Records relating to more than 3,000 soldiers treated at The Queen’s Hospital in Sidcup, Kent during the First World War have now been placed online for the first time.The index of 11,000 operations reflect procedures between 1917 and 1925, including details of soldiers, their names, regiments and ranks....
Source: Fox News
7-12-12
Maybe the 1992 movie Brendan Fraser film Encino Man wasn’t too far from the mark?Fossilized human feces and other evidence from a West Coast cave demonstrates the existence of a long-lost, 13,500-year-old American culture, scientists said Thursday. The fossilized feces, known to researchers as a coprolite, from the Paisley Caves in Oregon has turned assumptions about the history of the Americas on its ear.“Coprolites are as good as a human skeleton,” Dr. Thomas Stafford, Jr. of Stafford Research Laboratories said during a briefing for science journalists. This particular one left him stunned....
Source: AFP
7-11-12
RAMALLAH, Palestinian Territories — Israel poisoned the late Yasser Arafat with the lethal radioactive substance polonium, a nephew of the veteran Palestinian leader alleged on Thursday, prompting an Israeli denial."We accuse Israel of killing Yasser Arafat by poisoning him with that lethal substance," Nasser al-Qidwa told AFP, referring to polonium, traces of which were recently found on clothing worn by Arafat when he was ailing."Those responsible for that assassination should be held accountable and judged," said Qidwa, who is also president of the Yasser Arafat Foundation.Allegations that the long-time Palestinian leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate was poisoned were resurrected earlier this month after Al-Jazeera news channel broadcast an investigation in which experts said they had found high levels of polonium on his personal effects....
Source: Irish Times
7-12-12
A 1,000-year- old hoard of gold coins has been unearthed at a famous Crusader battleground where Christian and Muslim forces once fought for control of the Holy Land, Israeli archaeologists said yesterday.The treasure was dug up from the ruins of a castle in Arsuf, a strategic stronghold during the religious conflict waged in the 12th and 13th centuries.The 108 coins – one of the biggest collections of ancient coins discovered in Israel – were found hidden in a ceramic jug beneath a tile floor at the clifftop coastal ruins, 15km from Tel Aviv.“It is a rare find,” said Oren Tal, a professor at Tel Aviv University who leads the dig. “We don’t have a lot of gold that had been circulated by the Crusaders.”...
Source: AP
7-11-12
The pain that seared Srebrenica 17 years ago burned fresh Wednesday as tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims came to bury their dead in the town whose name is now synonymous with genocide.In a ceremony broadcast live on television across the country, 520 coffins were placed in the ground as tears flowed like water from family and friendsOn the anniversary of Europe's worst massacre since World War II, 30,000 Muslims traveled to a memorial center in Srebrenica to honor the thousands of Muslim men and boys slaughtered in July 1995 by Serb forces...Tired of listening to political speeches every year, the families of the victims allowed only Holocaust survivor Rabbi Arthur Schneier of the Park East Synagogue in New York to address them during Wednesday's ceremony...
Source: NYT
7-11-12
North and South America were first populated by three waves of migrants from Siberia rather than just a single migration, say researchers who have studied the whole genomes of Native Americans in South America and Canada.Some scientists assert that the Americas were peopled in one large migration from Siberia that happened about 15,000 years ago, but the new genetic research shows that this central episode was followed by at least two smaller migrations from Siberia, one by people who became the ancestors of today’s Eskimos and Aleutians and another by people speaking Na-Dene, whose descendants are confined to North America. The research was published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Source: Chattanooga Times Free-Press
7-10-12
Organizers have canceled the 25th annual 2012 Scopes Festival, citing "unforeseen circumstances.""We appreciate the efforts by those who have been working hard to prepare for a festival that would be both entertaining and educational and regret that we will not be able to produce the festival this year," Scopes Festival Chairman Tom Davis said in an email....
Source: NBC Nightly News (with video)
7-10-12
Fifty years ago today, the Space Age gave birth to the age of satellite communication as we know it — though it wasn't clear at the time just how world-changing that outer-space angle would turn out to be. In retrospect, you could argue that the launch of AT&T's Telstar 1 satellite on July 10, 1962, made as much of a mark on the space frontier as Sputnik.
At the time, Americans worried that outer space was turning into a Cold War battleground, thanks to the Soviet Union's launch of the first-ever satellite (Sputnik in 1957) and the first human in space (Yuri Gagarin in 1961). "Only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new, terrifying theater of war," President John F. Kennedy declared in 1962.
Source: NYT
7-10-12
LE THOR, France — If the French loved John F. Kennedy, there is a special spot in their hearts for Pierre Salinger, his rotund, cigar-smoking, francophone-ish press secretary whose maternal grandfather served in the Assemblée Nationale and fought to clear Capt. Alfred Dreyfus.So it’s not surprising that here in this medieval Provençal village east of Avignon, where Mr. Salinger spent his last years with his fourth wife, there is a temple to the jovial spokesman who traded a prizewinning journalistic career for a roller-coaster life of politics, public service, comedy and tragedy.In a memoir published nine years before his death at a local hospital in 2004 at 79, Mr. Salinger averred distaste for what he called the “Camelotization” of the Kennedys....
Source: Irish Times
6-30-12
NINETY YEARS ago this week, a 17-year-old Dublin boy peered through his Kodak folding brownie camera from his family home on Essex Quay, to capture smoke billowing from the Four Courts in the first act of the Civil War.Joe Rodgers’s image remained hidden among his vast collection of snaps for decades until his family found it and transferred it to a negative about 20 years ago.This lay in a box with old medals until it was recently digitised by his grandson, also named Joe Rodgers, a history student, who wanted to give it a public showing for the 90th anniversary. The photographer died in 1998....
Source: WSJ
7-10-12
The Pentagon reversed course Tuesday and said it may create a database to allow the public to check on the veracity of people's claims to have earned military honors—a project officials previously said was impractical.The Supreme Court last month struck down a 2006 law that made it a federal crime to lie about receiving military medals, adding in the ruling that a database would be a better way to head off false claims.In a 2009 report to Congress, the Pentagon concluded a database wouldn't be practical because privacy concerns would prevent the use of social security numbers or birth dates needed for an accurate public record....
Source: NYT
7-9-12
BAGAN, Myanmar — Fires, floods, treasure seekers and ficus trees have by turns withered this ancient royal capital, but in many ways it still looks as it might have eight centuries ago.More than 2,200 tiered brick temples and shrines sprawl across an arid 26-square-mile plain on the eastern bank of the Irrawaddy River, remnants of a magnificent Buddhist city that reached its height in the 11th and 12th centuries.These monuments, on a red-dirt plain thinly populated by monks and goat herders, are an unparalleled concentration of temple architecture, featuring sophisticated vaulting techniques not seen in other Asian civilizations and elaborate mural paintings whose counterparts have not survived well in India....
Source: WaPo
7-9-12
Repairs that could keep the earthquake-damaged Washington Monument closed into 2014 will require the exterior and part of the interior of the 555-foot structure to be shrouded in scaffolding, the National Park Service has announced.The estimated $15 million project will necessitate the temporary removal of part of the granite plaza surrounding the monument, and the bracing of huge stone slabs that now rest on cracked supports near the structure’s to
Source: Mercury News
7-9-12
Beginning a new chapter in one of America's oldest conservation battles, environmental groups Monday are expected to turn in enough signatures to qualify a November ballot measure in San Francisco that would require the city to draw up a plan to drain Hetch Hetchy Reservoir.The reservoir in Yosemite National Park and the Tuolumne River that flows into it are the main water source for 2.5 million Bay Area residents who live in San Francisco or on the Peninsula, as well as in parts of San Jose and Alameda County....
Source: Politico
7-4-12
Every president is fascinated with presidential history.But President Barack Obama’s interest is deeper and wider than most, and more public. He’s invoked Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and even Richard Nixon. He’s mocked Ulysses S. Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes.For Obama, presidential history is less textbook and more guidebook — and his shifting focus on particular presidents has both reflected and informed his shifting sense of his own presidency.Obama came into office aiming to be a transcendent, uniting figure in the mold of Lincoln. He hoped to guide the nation with a common purpose through an economic crisis, like FDR did.Four years later, Obama has retrenched and recalibrated, adopting more populist rhetoric to fight the forces aligned against him and to portray himself as a champion of the middle class....
Source: Berkeley NewsCenter
7-9-12
BERKELEY — Interviewers at the Bancroft Library’s Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) are betting there are just as many cool stories to tell about the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as its colorful cousin across the bay.In fact, the ROHO team at University of California, Berkeley, is issuing a widespread appeal for accounts from the people who designed, built and painted the Bay Bridge as well as its toll takers, managers and maintenance teams, engineers, painters, architects, and others involved from the early days of the span’s construction and through the 1950s.“This is part of an oral history series that will explore the role of the iconic bridges in shaping the identity of the region, as well as their place in architectural, environmental, labor and political history,” said Sam Redman, a historian and director of ROHO’s Bridges and the San Francisco Bay Oral History Project....
