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: NBC Nightly News (with video)
June 15, 2012
Forty years after the Watergate scandal that brought down President Nixon, one of the five men arrested for breaking into the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate complex told NBC News he regrets what he did. NBC's Chuck Todd reports. Related Links
Source: NYT
June 15, 2012
More than 50 years after his plane was downed in the Soviet Union, Francis Gary Powers was posthumously awarded the military’s third-highest decoration on Friday.
Mr. Powers, the U-2 spy plane pilot whose story captured national attention during the cold war, was awarded a Silver Star from the Air Force in a ceremony at the Pentagon.
After his plane was downed in 1960, Mr. Powers was subjected to 107 days of interrogation, followed by a public trial in Moscow. He was imprisoned for more than two years thereafter.
Source: AP
June 14, 2012
LA PORTE, Texas (AP) — Children shimmy up the barrels of massive cannons on the upper decks of the 100-year-old Battleship Texas, focused on firing at an imaginary enemy and oblivious to the tension in the historic vessel's belly where a crew works on pumping out dozens of gallons of oil-laced water.The battleship where the young tourists roam became flooded over the weekend. Staff arrived Saturday and immediately noticed something was wrong with the ship that fought in World Wars I and II and has served since 1948 as a memorial and museum to those who sacrificed their lives.The vessel was sitting awkwardly in its slip. She was lower in the water and listing to the left."We got down to the lower portions of the ship and discovered that we had taken on more water than usual in areas that we normally don't," ship manager Andy Smith said. "They started pumping throughout the day Saturday, and it got progressively worse."...
Source: Yahoo News
June 13, 2012
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — A Kentucky museum where dinosaurs roam the biblical Garden of Eden is unveiling a national billboard campaign featuring the popular prehistoric reptiles.The cartoon billboards for the Creation Museum are appearing in several cities including Chicago, San Francisco and Houston and feature colorful dinosaurs drawn in a vintage comic book style.The popular attraction in northern Kentucky that opened in 2007 has drawn controversy and thousands of visitors with exhibits that challenge evolution and present the Old Testament's creation story....
Source: Yahoo News
June 14, 2012
A small handful of bones found in an ancient church in Bulgaria may belong to John the Baptist, the biblical figure said to have baptized Jesus.There's no way to be sure, of course, as there are no confirmed pieces of John the Baptist to compare to the fragments of bone. But the sarcophagus holding the bones was found near a second box bearing the name of St. John and his feast date (also called a holy day) of June 24. Now, new radiocarbon dating of the collagen in one of the bones pegs its age to the early first century, consistent with the New Testament and Jewish histories of John the Baptist's life....
Source: BBC News
June 13, 2012
Six Lewis Chessmen are to be displayed long-term at a new museum on the Western Isles, where more than 90 of the historic pieces were found.An agreement has been reached between Comhairle nan Eilean Siar (Western Isles Council) and the British Museum.The British Museum will loan the six pieces to the new museum at Lews Castle, in Stornoway, from 2014.Figures from the Lewis Chessmen have only previously been displayed on the islands on a short-term basis.A five-month exhibition last year, called Lewis Chessmen: Unmasked, attracted more than 23,000 visitors....
Source: NYT
June 14, 2012
TOKYO — The man thought to be the final suspect from the doomsday cult behind the 1995 nerve-gas poisoning in a crowded subway station here that killed 13 people and sickened thousands of others was arrested on Friday, the police said.Investigators arrested the suspect, Katsuya Takahashi, 54, near an Internet cafe in central Tokyo after receiving a tip that a man resembling the fugitive had been spotted there, according to the public broadcaster NHK. Mr. Takahashi was arrested on suspicion of murder....
Source: NYT
June 14, 2012
PINE RIDGE INDIAN RESERVATION, S.D. — Forty years after the siege at Wounded Knee by members of the American Indian Movement, the Oglala Sioux tribe has demanded that the federal government reopen dozens of cases it says the F.B.I. may have mishandled decades ago.Tribal leaders say that as many as 75 people were killed on Pine Ridge during a three-year period of internecine violence that followed the 71-day Wounded Knee standoff with federal troops in 1973, a time that came to be known on the reservation as the “reign of terror.”The federal government has declined so far to re-examine the cases....
Source: Star Tribune
June 14, 2012
The University of North Dakota dropped its contentious Fighting Sioux nickname for the third time Thursday, and officials expressed hope that the latest retirement -- fueled by this week's overwhelming statewide vote -- would finally stick.The move became official when the state Board of Higher Education voted to get rid of the university's moniker and Indian head logo, which had sparked lawsuits and threats of NCAA sanctions.Residents cast ballots Tuesday in numbers not seen in a primary election for more than five decades, and more than two-thirds favored putting the decades-old dispute to rest by dumping the name....
Source: NYT
June 14, 2012
In the 1969 summer of Woodstock, something mildly hallucinogenic was going on hundreds of miles away in Washington. The Senators, a famously bad team that had finished over .500 only four times in the previous 35 seasons, had become pretty decent.Ted Williams was the famous manager, Frank Howard would end up hitting 48 home runs, first baseman Mike Epstein would have his best year with 30 home runs of his own, and the Senators — yes, the Senators — would finish with an 86-76 record that was five and a half games better than the Yankees’ 80-81 mark.It was the first time that this second edition of the Senators (the first had bolted to Minnesota after the 1960 season) would finish over .500, and it would be the last. After two more seasons, they were off to Texas to become the Rangers, and Washington was left without baseball until the Nationals arrived in 2005....
Source: WaPo
June 4, 2012
Forty years after Watergate, a central question about the scarring chapter in U.S. history lingers: Did Richard M. Nixon’s misdeeds and downfall strip the nation of its innocence or affirm the resilience of the American system? ¶ In one vision, Watergate turned Americans into cynical people, mistrustful of government, ready to believe the worst of their leaders. Forty years after the botched burglary on Virginia Avenue NW, the squalor of Nixon’s presidency remains visible in our paralyzed, polarized politics, our alienation, our insistent disunity. ¶ Alternatively, Watergate shines as proof that the system works, that law and the Constitution prevail over the excesses of craven politicians. The details of the scandal, which resulted in the only resignation of a president in U.S. history, may fade with time, but Watergate lives on in the idealism of those who hold government to account — through grass-roots movements such as the tea party and Occupy Wall Street, investigative reporting, and public and private watchdog groups. ¶ The principal figures in the Nixon presidency and the two-year drive to reveal its misdeeds are mostly elderly men now, and the scandal that riveted the nation like no other is barely mentioned in most high school American history courses.
Source: CBS News
June 14, 2012
Forty years ago next Monday, The Washington Post printed its first story on what would become the biggest political scandal in U.S. history: Watergate. Now the two reporters who led the paper's investigation -- Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein -- say there was a lot more to it than we knew then.
Source: NYT
June 14, 2012
Stone Age artists were painting red disks, handprints, clublike symbols and geometric patterns on European cave walls long before previously thought, in some cases more than 40,000 years ago, scientists reported on Thursday, after completing more reliable dating tests that raised a possibility that Neanderthals were the artists.A more likely situation, the researchers said, is that the art — 50 samples from 11 caves in northwestern Spain — was created by anatomically modern humans fairly soon after their arrival in Europe.The findings seem to put an exclamation point to a run of recent discoveries: direct evidence from fossils that Homo sapiens populations were living in England 41,500 to 44,200 years ago and in Italy 43,000 to 45,000 years ago, and that they were making flutes in German caves about 42,000 years ago. Then there is the new genetic evidence of modern human-Neanderthal interbreeding, suggesting a closer relationship than had been generally thought....
Source: Reason
June 14, 2012
CORRECTION: I need my eyes checked. The Obama infoboxes are still there, but they appear to have been redesigned to look less like part of the other presidents' biographies. My apologies for the temporary blindness.***It appears as though the White House has decided that maybe the official biographies of other presidents are not the best place to campaign for President Barack Obama’s reelection....
Source: Salon
June 14, 2012
Acquiescing to CIA demands for secrecy, the National Archives announced Wednesday that it will not release 1,171 top-secret Agency documents related to the assassination of President Kennedy in time for the 5oth anniversary of JFK’s death in November 2013.“Is the government holding back crucial JFK documents,” asked Russ Baker in a WhoWhatWhy piece that Salon published last month. The answer, unfortunately, is yes. In a letter released this week, Gary Stern, general counsel for the National Archives and Record Administration, said the Archives would not release the records as part of the Obama administration’s ongoing declassification campaign. Stern cited CIA claims that “substantial logistical requirements” prevented their disclosure next year....
Source: Foreign Policy in Focus
June 6, 2012
In June 1940, when France fell to the German invasion, Italy seized the moment to attack British positions in Egypt, Kenya, and Sudan. By the end of March 1941, German Major-General Erwin Rommel's mechanized troops had driven the British out of Libya and back into Egypt. In late spring, German and Italian aircraft were pummeling Britain’s sea stations in the Mediterranean, making it difficult if not impossible for supply ships to reach British forces in the Middle East. The remaining sea route by which to deliver supplies to Egypt was via Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, but that was a protracted journey of three to four months, a luxury of time that Britain simply did not have....
Source: NYT
June 13, 2012
The owner of a home in Queens has not given much thought about the origin of the concrete and steel room buried beneath his basement. “When I bought this house, nobody came to see this,” said Francisco Lago, who purchased his two-story home about 30 years ago. “It was in ruins.”...Yet this unimpressive cramped space hidden away on a quiet block is a surprising link to a momentous period in American history: It is the only stand-alone private space remaining in the city to qualify as a bomb shelter, according to city records, a vestige of the cold war era when underground sanctuaries were promoted as offering refuge from a mushroom cloud....Besides being a historical curiosity, this forgotten room carries a tangible benefit — a tax break that has saved the Lagos thousands of dollars over the years. They are one of the few remaining beneficiaries of a bill passed by the state’s Legislature in 1961 that provides exemptions for shelters designed “in accordance with plans, regulations and orders of the State Civil Defense Commission.”...
Source: Associated Press
June 13, 2012
VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican newspaper reported Tuesday that 29 previously unpublished homilies said to be the work of one of the most important and prolific early church fathers have been discovered in a German library.The 3rd Century theologian Origen of Alexandria is considered to have played a critical role in the development of Christian thought. Pope Benedict XVI, himself a theologian, dedicated two of his 2007 weekly church teaching sessions to the importance of Origen's life and work....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
June 12, 2012
Among the thousands of men slain on the battlefield at Waterloo, he died, unrecognised and uncelebrated.But almost 200 years later, archaeologists have unearthed the remains of the soldier – with the musket ball that felled him still between his ribs.Historians believe he is from one of the Duke of Wellington’s British regiments, and described the discovery of the skeleton as one of the best ever war finds....
Source: NY Daily News
June 13, 2012
It’s the days before Camelot, as you’ve never seen them before.
