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: NYT
5-14-12
ROME — Since 1983, when 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi vanished on a street here on her way home from a music lesson, investigators have struggled to solve her disappearance. Various theories have tied the presumed kidnapping to intrigue involving the Italian secret services, organized crime, even the attempt to assassinate John Paul II — or possibly all three.On Monday, police forensic experts pursued yet another lead, exhuming the tomb of a notorious local crime boss at a Vatican church, where some speculated Emanuela might have been buried. Besides his remains, they found hundreds of other bones in an ancient ossuary nearby in the crypt. The police said they would test them to see if any might have been Emanuela’s.
Source: Salon
5-14-12
Perhaps you were shocked this month when you read that years ago, thanks to its association with international workers and the anarchist movement, May Day was officially named Loyalty Day by the federal government to avoid the appearance of condoning dissent. It’s creepy and Orwellian, but it’s not that unusual....But this isn’t a new American tradition. A simple search of other official national and state holidays shows that region by region, we have some pretty appalling holidays on the books. Here are just a few:Robert E. Lee’s birthday and other Confederate commemoration fetes: Several states, including Arkansas, Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Mississippi, don’t let Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday be celebrated without tacking on this commemoration of the Confederate general who led armies into the field to defend the genocidal institution of slavery. This is the first of a few official holidays in the former states of the confederacy that are a little bit sketchy....
Source: NYT
5-10-12
The day after President Obama endorsed gay marriage, Mitt Romney found himself responding to allegations that as a teenager he harassed a prep school classmate who later came out as gay.The account put Mr. Romney, who has struggled on the campaign trail to cast off his rivals’ image of him as privileged and insensitive, on the defensive about events nearly 50 years ago.The episode, reported by The Washington Post, occurred at Cranbrook, a private school that Mr. Romney, the son of an automobile executive-turned-governor, attended in Michigan. Mr. Romney returned from spring break in his senior year to find that John Lauber, a quiet, offbeat type, had bleached his hair blond....
Source: WaPo
5-11-12
BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. — Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenage son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.
Source: The Globe and Mail (Canada)
5-13-12
Taking advantage of Egypt’s political upheaval, thieves are preying on the country’s ancient pharaonic heritage.Illegal digs near ancient temples and in isolated desert sites have swelled a staggering 100-fold over the past 16 months since a popular uprising toppled Hosni Mubarak’s 29-year regime and security fell apart in many areas as police simply stopped doing their jobs. The pillaging comes on top of a wave of break-ins last year at archaeological storehouses — and even at Cairo’s famed Egyptian Museum, the country’s biggest repository of pharaonic artifacts....“Criminals became so bold they are digging in landmark areas,” including near the Great Pyramids in Giza, other nearby pyramids and the grand temples of the southern city of Luxor, said Maj. Gen. Abdel-Rahim Hassan, commander of the Tourism and Antiquities Police Department....
Source: NYT
5-10-12
Here’s one case where, as far as the city is concerned, crime can pay. Among the 840,000 archival images placed online recently by the city’s Department of Records are 1,326 police evidence photographs mostly taken from 1915 to 1920. The Municipal Archives gallery provides free research online and at a new visitors’ center at 31 Chambers Street behind City Hall, but a digital file or 8-by-10 print will cost $45.The crime scene photos are part of what Eileen Flannelly, a deputy records commissioner, describes as “the largest collection of criminal justice evidence in the world.”“When I look at these pictures, it’s like looking at an old gangster movie,” Ms. Flannelly said....
Source: AP
5-11-12
NEW YORK — Even after decades of in-depth Holocaust research, excruciating details are only now emerging about more than 1,100 German-run ghettos in Eastern Europe where the Nazis murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews.And there were nearly 200 more ghettos than previously believed, said Martin Dean, editor of the recently published “Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume II.” It’s part of a long-term effort to document every site of organized Nazi persecution, beyond the well-known Warsaw ghetto and extermination camps like Auschwitz.It “gives us information about ghettos that would slip into historical oblivion and be forgotten forever if we didn’t have this volume,” Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer said. “Who knew there were more than 1,000 ghettos?”...
Source: National Parks Traveler
5-13-12
Homesteaders flooding the American heartland in the 1860s couldn't have imagined electric lights, so if it were possible for any of them to return to Nebraska on May 20, 2012, they would be astounded indeed. A celebration of the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Homestead Act at Homestead National Monument of America will feature a laser light show... and much more from May 20-25.Event organizers have planned an impressive array of activities, and the location is certainly appropriate. Homestead National Monument of America, located in southeastern Nebraska, is located on the site of what's believed to be the first land claimed under the Homestead Act. Daniel Freeman filed his claim at 10 minutes after midnight on January 1, 1863—the first day the Homestead Act was in effect—at the Land Office in Brownville, Nebraska.Freeman's claim was only the first of many. By the time settlement under the Homestead Act ended in 1986, about two million individuals had used the Act to settle approximately 285 million acres—around eight percent of all the land in the United States....
Source: National Geographic
5-11-12
Before the brunches, before the gifts and greeting cards, Mother's Day was a time for mourning women to remember fallen soldiers and work for peace.When the holiday went commercial, its greatest champion gave everything to fight it, dying penniless and broken in a sanitarium. Of course, Mother's Day marched on without her and is today celebrated, in various forms, on a global scale.As early as the 1850s, West Virginia women's organizer Ann Reeves Jarvis held Mother's Day work clubs to improve sanitary conditions and try to lower infant mortality by fighting disease and curbing milk contamination, according to historian Katharine Antolini of West Virginia Wesleyan College....
Source: AP
5-8-12
WASHINGTON (AP) — The founding president of the Autry National Center of the American West, a group of museums in Los Angeles and Denver, has been named director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, the museum complex announced Tuesday.John Gray will lead one of the nation's most popular museums, which is on track to host 5 million visitors this year, beginning July 23. Gray had a 25-year career in commercial banking, served in the U.S. Small Business Administration in the Clinton administration and earned a master's degree in business administration before joining the museum field.In 1999, Gray became CEO of a museum devoted to the legacy of movie star Gene Autry in Los Angeles and is credited with transforming it into a major cultural center. Gray merged it with Colorado's Women of the West Museum and Los Angeles' Southwest Museum of the American Indian. The combined center with more than 500,000 objects also created the Institute for the Study of the American West....
Source: Inside Higher Ed
5-11-12
WASHINGTON -- Rep. Jeff Flake tried and failed this week to get his colleagues in the House of Representatives to slash the budget of the National Science Foundation, proposing an amendment to a 2013 spending bill that would have cut more than $1 billion from the agency's funds.But unable to convince his fellow House members that the government needs less research on physics, engineering and other fields, he chose a lower-hanging target: social science studies with easy-to-ridicule titles.And this time, he was persuasive.By a vote of 218-208, the House Wednesday night backed an amendment that would bar the NSF from spending any of its 2013 funds on its political science program, which allocated about $11 million in peer-reviewed grants this year. Explaining the amendment on the House floor Wednesday evening, Flake said that given his colleagues' reluctance to slash the agency's overall budget -- the House defeated his earlier amendment by a vote of 291 to 121 -- Congress should ensure, "at the least, that the NSF does not waste taxpayer dollars on a meritless program."...
Source: Io9
5-10-12
Japan's Unit 731 is one of the best kept and most horrifying secrets of World War II. Unit 731 experimented on Japanese and Chinese civilians as well as Russian and American POWs during the Second Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s and throughout World War II.Led by the enigmatic Dr. Shiro Ishii, Unit 731 committed thousands of macabre experiments and infected hundreds of thousands with the plague in China. Most of the scientists involved with Unit 731 escaped trial and entered mainstream society at the end of the war due to an agreement with Allied commanders, but a few are speaking of the horrors they committed in their old age....During the height of World War II, Unit 731 planned similar biological attacks for the United States. One early proposed mission involved a small kamikaze plane launched from a submarine that would unleash the plague upon the port of San Diego.
Source: WaPo
5-6-12
The CIA director revealed only a few details about the 21-year-old woman, a secretary among spies. In the agency’s annual memorial service for employees killed on the job, then-Director Leon E. Panetta announced that a new name had been inscribed with calligraphy inside the CIA’s Book of Honor: Barbara Annette Robbins, who had volunteered to go to Saigon during the Vietnam War and died in a 1965 car bombing at the U.S. Embassy.The private ceremony inside the agency’s main lobby last year marked the first time the CIA publicly acknowledged Robbins as one of their own. But the slain secretary holds enough historic titles to make her an object of curiosity within the CIA. Robbins was the first woman at the male-dominated CIA killed in the line of duty. She is the youngest CIA employee ever killed. And, according to Panetta, she was also the first American woman to die in the Vietnam War....
Source: The Local (DE)
5-10-12
A rare Nazi police report on the deportation of nearly 1,000 Jews from Düsseldorf has been unearthed in a London archive. It is only the second of its kind ever found, as most such records were destroyed towards the end of the war.Police captain and SS member Wilhelm Meurin was responsible for guarding the deportation train which left Düsseldorf on November 14, 1941 in freezing temperatures, and travelled east for four days. He said that although 300 of the people on the train were no longer capable of walking, “the unloading in Minsk could be conducted at the desired speed.” He also reported that 8,000 Russian Jews had already been “removed and... shot” from the Minsk ghetto....
Source: LiveScience
5-10-12
The oldest-known version of the ancient Maya calendar has been discovered adorning a lavishly painted wall in the ruins of a city deep in the Guatemalan rainforest.The hieroglyphs, painted in black and red, along with a colorful mural of a king and his mysterious attendants, seem to have been a sort of handy reference chart for court scribes in A.D. 800 — the astronomers and mathematicians of their day. Contrary to popular myth, this calendar isn't a countdown to the end of the world in December 2012, the study researchers said."The Mayan calendar is going to keep going for billions, trillions, octillions of years into the future," said archaeologist David Stuart of the University of Texas, who worked to decipher the glyphs. "Numbers we can't even wrap our heads around." [End of the World? Top Doomsday Fears]...
Source: Science Daily
5-10-12
ScienceDaily (May 10, 2012) — Evidence for a forgotten ancient language which dates back more than 2,500 years, to the time of the Assyrian Empire, has been found by archaeologists working in Turkey.Researchers working at Ziyaret Tepe, the probable site of the ancient Assyrian city of Tušhan, believe that the language may have been spoken by deportees originally from the Zagros Mountains, on the border of modern-day Iran and Iraq.In keeping with a policy widely practised across the Assyrian Empire, these people may have been forcibly moved from their homeland and resettled in what is now south-east Turkey, where they would have been set to work building the new frontier city and farming its hinterland....
Source: Innovation News Daily
5-8-12
A new online tool, made by a team of historians and information technology specialists at Stanford University, shows just how long and costly it was to send people and wheat between cities in the Roman Empire. "It's Google Maps for the ancient world, complete with the 'Avoid Highways' feature," Scott Weingart, a doctoral student in library sciences at the University of Indiana, wrote in a blog-post review. Weingart was not involved in creating the tool, called ORBIS, but its creators asked him to preview and comment on it. His review appeared May 4 in the Editor's Choice column in Digital Humanities Now....
Source: AP
5-3-12
PERRYVILLE, Ky. — A central Kentucky couple has sold 140 acres from the Civil War Battle of Perryville to the Civil war Preservation Trust for $725,000.Perryville Battlefield State Historical Site specialist Joni L. House told The Advocate-Messenger (http://bit.ly/Kb6WFs ) that the acquisition gives the group an opportunity to keep a piece of history intact that otherwise might be developed.The Civil War Preservation Trust is a national nonprofit supported by donors who believe like House does that such areas should be off limits to development and available for future generations....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
5-6-12
As a king with a well known weakness for wives, Henry VIII had no shortage of candidates lining up to be his next queen.But for one of his six spouses, marrying the king proved to be her greatest regret.A new exhibition about the life of Katherine Parr, Henry’s sixth and final wife, reveals how she felt obliged to marry the king against her “own will” and rekindled her romance with an old flame, possibly while Henry was still alive.Katherine’s feelings for Sir Thomas Seymour, one of Henry’s closest courtiers, are included in letters on public display for the first time at Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire where she is buried....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
5-6-12
He is remembered as an austere and pious figure, unconcerned with his appearance – even demanding that portraits show "warts and all".But scientific research has shed new light on Oliver Cromwell, suggesting a more effete side to the republican ruler.Chemical tests on the contents of a collection of mysterious pots which once belonged to the Lord Protector have revealed them to be luxurious, perfumed cosmetics.The research was carried out by scientists at Exeter University and has been presented in an academic journal. Their analysis showed the contents to be soft soap, most likely made from olive oil....
