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: CS-Monitor
June 28, 2012
Japan and South Korea put on hold an intelligence sharing pact less than an hour before it was to be formally signed Friday, in a major embarrassment for both countries forced by a political outcry in Seoul.The military pact, the first between South Korea and Japan since World War II, had been seen as a breakthrough between two neighbors with a difficult history. Shortly before the signing was postponed, Japan's foreign minister had called the agreement a "historic event."he agreement caused an uproar in South Korea, which was ruled by Japan as a colony for several decades until the end of World War II in 1945. Critics say the government in Seoul, fearing a backlash from opponents who don't trust Japan, had pushed the pact through without allowing enough public debate....
Source: CS-Monitor
June 28, 2012
he Palestinians on Friday persuaded the U.N. cultural agency to list the Church of the Nativity — the place where Christians believe Jesus was born — as an endangered World Heritage site despite misgivings by churches in charge of the basilica.The Palestinians hailed the nod by UNESCO as a step forward in their quest for global recognition of an independent Palestine in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, captured by Israel in 1967.The centuries-old basilica is located in a part of the Israeli-occupied West Bank where the Palestinians have self-rule. UNESCO's decision was seen by them as validation of their rights to the territory....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 17, 2012
Scientists drew up a map of the British Isles revealing the genetic ancestry of people from different rural areas across the UK.After extensive DNA surveying, they found that Welsh and Cornish people were among the most genetically distinct groups in the country.One theory for the difference in their DNA is that they are a "relic" population, tracing their ancestry back to the tribes that colonised Britain after the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago.Welsh genes proved to be similar to those of the French and Irish, suggesting they were connected to the pre-Roman population....
Source: NYT
June 28, 2012
HAIFA, Israel — Estee Lieber was in a bit of a tizzy as she emerged from under the blow-dryer for the final walk-through on Thursday evening. “I don’t like it straight,” she complained, wearing a triple strand of pearls and her sash, while waiting to put on her velvety black dress slit up the side. “I’m not modern. In my eyes it’s not beautiful.”This was the first beauty pageant for Ms. Lieber, 74, who was born in Poland in 1937, was 5 when her father was killed by the Nazis in Germany, and 6 when her mother faced the same fate. It was the first time down the runway for all 14 finalists, in what was billed as the first-ever pageant of Holocaust survivors.They wore sensible shoes, and no swimsuits. Personal stories counted as much as poise....
Source: LA Times
June 28, 2012
Infuriated protesters shouted. Guards searched warily through bags. The whole thing might not have happened if not for a court injunction. But in Tokyo, the show went on, as Japanese visitors braved angry demonstrators and tight security to see photographs of Korean “comfort women.” The uproar over the black-and-white images taken by South Korean photographer Ahn Sehong in recent years underscores the sensitivity, decades later, concerning the plight of Korean women forced to serve the Japanese military as sex slaves during World War II. The women have repeatedly demanded that Japan punish the surviving members of the army responsible for the crime and pay government reparations for their suffering.Japan apologized two years ago for the wartime abuses, but some Japanese conservatives still deny there was an organized campaign of sexual slavery. Protesters deluged the Nikon company after it agreed to host the photographs in a Tokyo salon, prompting the company to cancel the show earlier this year.
Source: BBC News
June 28, 2012
A beauty pageant for Holocaust survivors has been held in Israel for the first time, stirring controversy.Fourteen women, aged 74 to 97, walked along a red carpet in the city of Haifa and described their personal sufferings from the Nazis during World War II.Hava Hershkovitz, 79, who had to flee her native Romania, was later crowned the winner of the pageant.Organisers said the contest was a celebration of life, but critics denounced it as offensive....
Source: Guardian (UK)
June 28, 2012
The day after she made one symbolic gesture –
Source: LA Times
June 25, 2012
They might well be the most powerful men and women in the nation, but most Americans probably couldn't pick the members of the U.S. Supreme Court out of a lineup. (Unless perhaps they were the only ones wearing long black robes.)......[A]ccording to a Pew Research Center Poll, a majority of Americans cannot name the court's chief justice. (The survey was taken in 2010, but there's little to suggest that Americans have been boning up on their Supreme Court knowledge since then.)From the survey: Only 28% correctly identified John Roberts as the chief justice of the Supreme Court. More than half said they didn't know....
Source: NYT
June 27, 2012
Almost two million years after their last meals, two members of a prehuman species in southern Africa left traces in their teeth of what they had eaten then, as well as over a lifetime of foraging. Scientists were surprised to find that these hominins apparently lived almost exclusively on a diet of leaves, fruits, wood and bark.If you are what you eat, the new research and other recent studies suggest there was more diversity in the diets of early prehumans, both within and between species, than previously understood. And this could in part account for the recently recognized physical diversity among the long intermediate line of hominins belonging to the genus Australopithecus.The dietary pattern of the enigmatic species, Australopithecus sediba, discovered four years ago in the Malapa caves northwest of Johannesburg, was unexpected for several reasons. It contrasted sharply with available data for other hominins in the region and elsewhere in Africa; they mainly consumed grasses and sedges from the savanna....
Source: AP
June 27, 2012
"Who do I call if I want to call Europe?"Variations of that question have been attributed for decades to Henry Kissinger, but the former U.S. secretary of state says he doesn't think it originated with him.The 89-year-old, who served as America's top diplomat under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford in the 1970s, said Wednesday that he thinks an Irish foreign minister first used the expression in describing a meeting between the two."I am not sure I actually said it," Kissinger told an audience that included diplomats and academics. He then drew laughs when he added, "But it's a good statement so why not take credit for it?"...
Source: Nature
June 27, 2012
An eerie "red crucifix" seen in Britain's evening sky in ad 774 may be a previously unrecognized supernova explosion — and could explain a mysterious spike in carbon-14 levels in that year's growth rings in Japanese cedar trees. The link is suggested today in a Nature Correspondence by a US undergraduate student with a broad interdisciplinary background and a curious mind1.A few weeks ago, Jonathon Allen, a biochemistry major at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was listening to the Nature podcast when he heard about a team of researchers in Japan who had found an odd spike in carbon-14 levels in tree rings. The spike probably came from a burst of high-energy radiation striking the upper atmosphere, increasing the rate at which carbon-14 is formed (see 'Mysterious radiation burst recorded in tree rings').
Source: Huffington Post
June 28, 2012
According to new research, society's social networking obsession may not be exclusive to the 21st century.Now, researchers believe the concept can be traced back to the 16th and 17th centuries as part of the Italian Academies, where scholars created nicknames for themselves, developed emblems and mottos to form groups for information exchange.Renaissance specialists first came across the network while cataloging and researching for the project, "The Italian Academies 1525–1700: The first intellectual networks of early modern Europe' -- a joint four year research project between the British Library, Royal Holloway, University of London, and Reading University....
Source: NYT
June 27, 2012
WASHINGTON — Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is not known for delivering laugh lines. But she drew chuckles from a group of liberal lawyers not long ago while recalling how Justice Elena Kagan, 52, had suggested during an oral argument before the Supreme Court that people born before 1948 were old.“Next year I will turn 80, God willing,” Justice Ginsburg said. “ ‘I’m not all that old,’ I told my youngest colleague.”Justice Ginsburg is the eldest member of a court that includes four justices in their 70s, making it among the oldest courts since the New Deal era. Its decisions during this historic “flood season,” as Justice Ginsburg described the end-of-term rush, are likely to make the panel — and the tenure of some of the justices — a significant issue in the presidential campaign....
Source: NYT
June 25, 2012
Over the past five years or so, the Romanian Cultural Institute has become an important force in global cultural exchanges, promoting writers, artists and especially the critically acclaimed cinema movement known as the Romanian New Wave. But the coalition government that recently came to power in Romania has ordered an end to that international focus as it tightens its political control over the institute, actions that have set off protests among arts groups throughout Europe and the United States.Under an “emergency decree” handed down on June 14, the institute, a non-partisan entity that formerly reported directly to the president, now responds to a Senate riven by partisanship. Its new mandate: to direct its activities at the Romanian diaspora community. As a result, collaborations with American arts institutions — including Lincoln Center, co-sponsor of an annual Romanian film festival, and publishing houses specializing in translated literature — could be in jeopardy. And in recent days, organizations including the Museum of Modern Art, Film Forum and Melville House have sent letters to the new prime minister and other government authorities, urging them rescind the measure....
Source: NYT
June 28, 2012
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. surprised many on Thursday by providing the crucial fifth vote for upholding President Obama’s health care law. To those on the left who viewed him as an ideologue eager to pull the court rightward in a political fashion, this will now begin a re-examination of his style and legacy as it will for those on the right who considered the law unconstitutional and relied on him to make that point.Many scholars have said that Chief Justice Roberts sought to balance his own conservatism with his desire to build faith in the law and the nation’s legal institutions. But it was still striking to hear Mr. Roberts, who arrived on the court in 2005 appointed by George W. Bush, announce the upholding of the central legislative pillar of the Obama administration. He did arrive on the bench asserting the desire to restore the court’s reputation and reduce partisan rhetoric. But he was seen by many, at least on the left, as a right-winger more devoted to conservative politics than the purity of the law. That could change....Related LinksHNN Hot Topics: Health Care Reform
Source: CBS News
June 27, 2012
Today Congress took a step to right an injustice.They awarded the Congressional Gold Medal -- the highest civilian honor -- to the Montford Point Marines, the first African-Americans to serve in the corps. Their sacrifices were long overlooked.
Source: WaPo
June 27, 2012
For decades, McGuinness was an avowed enemy of the British empire — a representative of a paramilitary group that in 1979 killed the queen’s beloved cousin Louis Mountbatten with a bomb planted on his fishing boat.But in a potent sign of just how far the peace process in Northern Ireland has come, the queen and McGuinness, now deputy first minister in Northern Ireland’s provincial government, exchanged pleasantries at a meeting in Belfast that would have been difficult for McGuinness’s Irish nationalist party, Sinn Fein, to stomach even a few years ago.“You could see it as a last piece in a jigsaw peace process which has been very slowly and carefully put together over 20 years,” said Diarmaid Ferriter, a professor of modern history at University College Dublin....
Source: United States Naval Institute
June 27, 2012
While publicly claiming neutrality between Argentina and the U.K. during the 1982 Falklands War, President Ronald Reagan’s administration had developed plans to loan a ship to the Royal Navy if it lost one of its aircraft carriers in the war, former U.S. Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman, told the U.S. Naval Institute on June 26.Lehman and then Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger agreed to support U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with the loan of the amphibious warship USS Iwo Jima , he said.“We agreed that [Weinberger] would tell the President that we planned to handle all these requests routinely without going outside existing Navy channels,” Lehman said in a speech provided to the U.S. Naval Institute he made in Portsmouth, U.K. “We would ‘leave the State Department, except for [Secretary of State Al] Haig, out of it.’”...
Source: WaPo
June 26, 2012
The life of Carl Sagan now fills the tabletops of two vast rooms in the Madison Building of the Library of Congress. The life arrived in recent weeks at the building’s loading dock on 41 pallets containing 798 boxes.Sagan famously talked about billions of stars and billions of galaxies, and it appears that he saved roughly that many pieces of paper.The material documents Sagan’s energetic career as an astronomer, author, unrivaled popularizer of science and TV star, and it ranges from childhood report cards to college term papers to eloquent letters written just before his untimely death in 1996 at age 62. Also in the mix are files labeled F/C, for “fissured ceramics,” Sagan’s code name for letters from crackpots.And there’s this, from Johnny Carson, after Sagan declared that he’d never actually used the much-satirized phrase “billions and billions” on “The Tonight Show”: “Even if you didn’t say ‘billions and billions’ you should have. — Johnny.”...
Source: CS Monitor
June 27, 2012
It was a moment pregnant with symbolism, but one that remained closed to the public and was initially intended to not even be photographed: a senior Irish republican shaking the hand of the British Queen.The deputy first minister of Northern Ireland shaking the hand of the monarch who remains head of state of Northern Ireland would normally be a fairly mundane affair. But the office is held by Martin McGuinness – not just a Sinn Féin politician, but also a leader of the Irish Republican Army, which fought a three-decade bloody civil conflict against British forces.Given who he is, the handshake is being hailed as the final major act of the Irish peace process....
