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: NPR
5-29-12
...Which presidential election in American history most resembles the coming election between President Obama and Mitt Romney — and why?1936: Franklin Delano Roosevelt vs. Alf Landon, says Alison Dagnes, who teaches political science at Shippensburg University. "The Republicans tried to attack FDR for his New Deal programs, saying they were too expensive and moved the country toward socialism — sound familiar?"...1980: Jimmy Carter vs. Ronald Reagan, says Andrew Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center. He cites the similarities: "Young, unknown president is elected after an unpopular administration — Nixon/Ford, Bush — economy in the doldrums, problems with Iran, sense of malaise."...2004: George W. Bush vs. John Kerry. "Definitely 2004," says Alan Abramowitz, a political science professor at Emory University. "This year, just as in 2004, you have an incumbent president running for re-election in a polarized and closely divided electorate."...
Source: NYT
5-29-12
The family of Dwight D. Eisenhower on Wednesday said it welcomed some aspects of a modified design for a memorial to honor the former president on the National Mall, but still has reservations about other components.The architect Frank Gehry changed the design in response to concerns raised by the family and others. The family had primarily objected to Mr. Gehry’s sculptural depiction of Eisenhower as a young man, a characterization inspired by a speech the returning general made upon his return from World War II in which he recalled his days as a “barefoot boy.” But the family said the focus on youth had diminished Eisenhower’s other accomplishments.Under the redesign, several statues depicting Eisenhower at various stages of his career were added and the family made no mention of that issue on Wednesday except to call many of the changes “positive and welcomed.”...
Source: NYT
5-30-12
LEIDSCHENDAM, the Netherlands — Charles G. Taylor, the former president of Liberia and a once-powerful warlord, was sentenced on Wednesday to 50 years in prison for his role in atrocities committed in Sierra Leone during its civil war in the 1990s.In what was viewed as a watershed case for modern human rights law, Mr. Taylor was the first former head of state convicted by an international tribunal since the Nuremberg trials in Germany after World War II.
Source: NYT
5-30-12
JOHANNESBURG — To the artist and a gallery director, it was a scathing piece of satire — a riff on Soviet-style propaganda aimed at a powerful president with a controversial sexual history who presides over a liberation movement-turned-political party that many here feel has lost its revolutionary appeal.But to that party, the African National Congress; many black South Africans; and, most of all, the man it depicted, President Jacob Zuma, the painting — which portrayed Mr. Zuma in a Leninesque pose with his genitals exposed — was a reminder of the pain and humiliation frequently visited on black bodies by white hands under apartheid.
Source: ThinkProgress
5-30-12
At a campaign rally in Las Vegas yesterday, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney touted the idea of making anyone who does not have a business background as ineligible for the White House as if they had been born in Kenya....Romney’s amendment would come as quite a shock to the last person to earn the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) graduated from the Naval Academy in 1958 and served more than two decades in the United States Navy, including more than five years as an prisoner of war. After retiring from the Navy at the rank of captain, McCain turned to politics and was elected to the House in 1983 and to the Senate in 1987. Because McCain devoted his life to serving his country, rather than to working in business, the Romney amendment would disqualify him from the White House.
Source: Star Tribune
5-29-12
The CARE package, a national icon after World War II, has come out of retirement -- retooled for the 21st century.The cardboard boxes stuffed with lard, egg powder, canned meat and other food essentials were a critical part of U.S. humanitarian aid to war-ravaged Europeans in the 1940s. Similar boxes were part of the war against hunger in Korea, Vietnam and other nations. But in 1967, the official CARE packages ended.Now the CARE package has been resurrected to mark its 65th anniversary. This time, however, it's a virtual package that funds modern tools to fight global poverty, such as education and health care....
Source: NYT
5-29-12
In hillside caves of southwestern Germany, archaeologists in recent years have uncovered the beginnings of music and art by early modern humans migrating into Europe from Africa. New dating evidence shows that these oldest known musical instruments in the world, flutes made of bird bone and mammoth ivory, are even older than first thought.Scientists led by Thomas Higham of the University of Oxford in England reported last week that improved radiocarbon tests determined that animal bones found with the flutes were 42,000 to 43,000 years old. This is close to the time when the first anatomically modern humans were spreading into Central Europe, presumably along the Danube River valley....
Source: Irish Times
5-29-12
Germany: A Nazi war criminal who escaped from a Dutch jail and lived as a fugitive in Germany for 60 years has died at the age of 90, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre has said.Klaas Carel Faber, number two on the centre’s list of most wanted Nazi criminals, was sentenced to death in 1947 in the Netherlands for the killings of at least 11 people at a staging post for Dutch Jews being taken to concentration camps....
Source: AFP
5-30-12
The White House tried to head off a diplomatic spat with Poland after President Barack Obama mistakenly called a Nazi facility used to process Jews for execution as a "Polish death camp."The linguistic faux pas overshadowed Obama's posthumous award of America's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to Jan Karski, a former Polish underground officer who provided early eyewitness accounts of the Nazi purge against Jews."Before one trip across enemy lines, resistance fighters told him that Jews were being murdered on a massive scale, and smuggled him into the Warsaw Ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself," Obama said....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
5-30-12
Once known as the wickedest city in the world when it was the playground of British buccaneers and explorers in the 17th century, little now remains of Port Royal....However, a campaign supported by the Jamaican government was launched this week to secure Unesco world heritage status for the sunken city to put it firmly back on the map.A seven-mile spit of golden sand arcs around Kingston bay protecting the capital. At the far end of the spit lies the small fishing village of Port Royal, which was once a bustling city and key British outpost in the 1600s.The port, which boasted a population of 7,000 and was comparable to Boston during the same period, was a playground for buccaneers like Henry Morgan, who docked in search of rum, women and boat repairs....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
5-29-12
They married in secret a few days before he went to war.Frank Fearing had no idea if he would ever see young Helen again, but he made her a solemn promise. Everywhere the American GI went with his unit, he would carve their names into a tree.The first was on Salisbury Plain, where he was stationed before joining the push towards Berlin in the wake of the D-Day invasion. The rest were spread across France and Germany, carved whenever time allowed.Helen Fearing never knew if it was just a romantic bluff, or if he had simply made up the story to impress her.But they clearly didn’t reckon on the determination of British student Chantel Summerfield and her remarkable archaeological quest....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
5-30-12
The mystery of how a U.S. World War 2 fighter pilot met his grisly end after crashing in a South Pacific island jungle has been revealed - after 31 years of painstaking work.Lt Moszek Murray Zanger was initially believed to have been shot and killed immediately after being captured by the Japanese following his 4,000ft parachuting out of his Corsair.He had collided midair with his wingman while out on patrol over Rabaul, Papua New Guinea.But a dogged forensic investigation has discovered he was in fact beaten, tried to flee in an inflatable dinghy and was captured by a Japanese Navy patrol boat....
Source: Yahoo News
5-30-12
ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Two Roman-era shipwrecks have been found in deep water off a western Greek island, challenging the conventional theory that ancient shipmasters stuck to coastal routes rather than risking the open sea, an official said Tuesday.Greece's culture ministry said the two third-century wrecks were discovered earlier this month during a survey of an area where a Greek-Italian gas pipeline is to be sunk. They lay between 1.2 and 1.4 kilometers (0.7-0.9 miles) deep in the sea between Corfu and Italy.That would place them among the deepest known ancient wrecks in the Mediterranean, apart from remains found in 1999 of an older vessel some 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) deep off Cyprus....
Source: Fox News
5-24-12
Nothing James Browne learned in flight school prepared him for “The Hump,” a perilous, Himalayan no-man’s land that became a graveyard for hundreds of fearless WWII-era fliers who battled Japanese fighters, impossible weather and a supply route from hell. Somewhere high above the Himalayas, the aircraft’s wings iced over. The best guess is that it stalled out and dropped like a rock, landing in the rugged mountain jungle, its location a mystery that would endure for more than 70 years. Browne, who grew up in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, Capt. John Dean, the pilot and a veteran of the legendary Flying Tigers, and a Chinese crewman were listed as missing in action.The plane was one of hundreds to go down in the rugged and remote mountain region fliers dubbed “The Hump” by American fliers who dodged Japanese fighter planes, steering their unarmed and rickety aircraft for 20-hour stretches with unreliable instruments in winds that could reach 200 mph. Experts believe more than 700 planes crashed trying to surmount the Hump, making the Himalayan region an inaccessible tomb of legendary fliers and rusted fuselages....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
5-24-12
A leather-bound religious text, thought to date from the fifth century but discovered only 12 years ago, will cause the collapse of Christianity worldwide, claims Iran.The book, written on animal hide, apparently states that Jesus was never crucified and that he himself predicted the coming of the Prophet Muhammad, according to the the Iranian press.Written in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, the gospel even predicts the coming of the last Islamic messiah, the report adds....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
5-25-12
Jesus died on Friday, April 3, 33AD, according to an investigation which matches his death to an earthquake.The investigation, from the International Geology Review, looked at earthquake activity around the Dead Sea, which is around 13 miles from Jerusalem.The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 27, says that as Jesus lay dying on the cross, an earthquake shook the area, scattering graves and making the sky go dark....
Source: CNN.com
5-25-12
Belfast, Northern Ireland (CNN) -- Audio recordings locked inside a college library in the United States might help solve a decades-old murder mystery, but the release of those tapes could damage the fragile peace in Northern Ireland.In December 1972, the widow Jean McConville was taken from her home in Belfast and her 10 children."They came about tea time and they dragged her out of the bathroom and dragged her out," remembers McConville's daughter, Helen McKendry, who was then a teenager....
Source: CNN
5-23-12
Washington (CNN) – After sitting in storage for nearly a decade, George Washington’s signature statement on religious liberty will go on display this summer in the city where freedom of religion was enshrined in the Constitution: Philadelphia.America’s first president wrote the letter to a Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790, assuring American Jews that their freedom of religion would be protected. The document will go on display this summer for the first time since 2002 in an exhibition at Philadelphia’s National Museum of American Jewish History.For nine years, the letter has been kept out of public view, in storage at a sterile Maryland office park a few hundred feet from FedEx Field, where the Washington Redskins play. CNN took an inside look at the document in September.
Source: AP
5-24-12
NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- For years, varied and sometimes wild claims have been made about the origins of a group of dark-skinned Appalachian residents once known derisively as the Melungeons. Some speculated they were descended from Portuguese explorers, or perhaps from Turkish slaves or Gypsies.Now a new DNA study in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy attempts to separate truth from oral tradition and wishful thinking. The study found the truth to be somewhat less exotic: Genetic evidence shows that the families historically called Melungeons are the offspring of sub-Saharan African men and white women of northern or central European origin.And that report, which was published in April in the peer-reviewed journal, doesn't sit comfortably with some people who claim Melungeon ancestry."There were a whole lot of people upset by this study," lead researcher Roberta Estes said. "They just knew they were Portuguese, or Native American."...
Source: Telegraph (UK)
5-24-12
A renowned French forensic scientist has launched an investigation into the death of Richard the Lionheart, examining a tiny sample of the 12th century monarch's heart to try to understand what germ killed him. Richard I died from an infection at the age of 42 after being poorly treated for a crossbow wound during a siege of a French castle.Philippe Charlier, who previously helped dispel claims that Napoleon was poisoned to death by his British captors, has been given exclusive access to a tiny sample of the heart of the crusading English kingKing Richard, famed for his bravery, brutality and bad temper, ruled England from 1189 to his death in 1199.
