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: WaPo
April 8, 2012
SAN FRANCISCO — Shuttering dozens of California state parks to trim millions from the state budget will take more than simply hanging a “Closed” sign on trailheads and beach parking lots. Many on the closure list house thousands of historical treasures that must be packed up, catalogued and stored if deals are not reached to save them.The tens of thousands of items on public display paint a rich portrait of California’s past. Among them are rare crystalline gold nuggets at the California Mining and Minerals Museum in Mariposa, painting masterworks showing early 20th century San Francisco street scenes and coastal landscapes at Shasta State Historical Park, and the writer Jack London’s home and writing memorabilia in Sonoma County.California officials admit they have been overwhelmed by the unprecedented move to close the parks, and just months before the planned closures they are working to catalog these important pieces of state history so they can undertake a massive packing, moving and storage effort should a deal not be reached. And if the state does have to move thousands of delicate items, it does not currently know how much it will cost — or how much of its projected $22 million in savings it will lose to pay for packing and long-term storage....
Source: Guardian (UK)
April 3, 2012
Interest in the newly released 1940 US census was so great that the government website was nearly paralysed shortly after the records became available to the public.Miriam Kleiman, spokeswoman for the US national archives, said the site registered more than 22m hits in just four hours on Monday, from almost 2 million users. After eight hours there had been 37m hits.The government released the records for the first time after the 72-year confidentiality rule expired.It is the largest collection of digital information ever released by the National Archives. The records allow individuals and families to learn details about their past....
Source: WaPo
April 8, 2012
“Ultimately, I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress. And I’d just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is, the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint — that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law. Well, this is a good example. And I’m pretty confident that this Court will recognize that and not take that step.”-- President Obama, discussing the pending U.S. Supreme Court decision over his health care law, April 2, 2012
Source: Salt Lake Tribune
April 7, 2012
A Mormon missionary in the South in 1879 wrote that, "A person traveling among the Southern people realizes that though they have been whipped by the North, yet there is a feeling of enmity existing in their bosoms, which only needs a little breeze to inflame their passions to deeds of carnage and strife."In "Last Letter Home From Elder Joseph Standing" printed in the Deseret News, that same missionary said that "The 4th [of July] is not much cared for in the South."Three days after noting this lack of patriotic fervor, Standing would be shot and killed.Utahns sat out the Civil War and have a hard time understanding why broad swaths of the South refused to celebrate the Fourth of July even decades after the event. Many communities didn’t do so until World War II. The reason: Southerners have long memories and know how to carry a grudge.Utahns’ memories are shorter. We forget that it was dangerous to be a Mormon in the South. Along with blacks, Jews and Catholics, Mormons were a particular target of the white, Protestant establishment, which was intent on re-establishing its prewar privileges....
Source: Yahoo News
April 8, 2012
SANFORD, Florida (Reuters) - The year before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier by becoming the first African American to play major league baseball, he fled the racist threats of townspeople in Sanford, Florida, where Trayvon Martin was shot 66 years later.It was 1946 and Robinson arrived in this picturesque town in central Florida for spring training with a Brooklyn Dodgers farm team. He didn't stay long.Robinson was forced to leave Sanford twice, according to Chris Lamb, a professor at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, who wrote a graphic account of Robinson's brush with 100 angry locals in a 2004 book....
Source: Belfast Telegraph (UK)
April 10, 2012
A magical dwarf from sixth century Garvagh who could only be killed by a stake through the heart has been singled out as the possible source of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.Tracing nearly 120 years of the Transylvanian count’s enduring appeal, suggestions have been made that it might have been “the little known sixth century legend of Abhartach who could well be Ireland’s own Dracula.”“Abhartach was a tribal ruler in an area near the Derry town of Garvagh, a misshapen and tyrannical dwarf possessed of magical powers whose brutal reign eventually forced his terrified subjects to hire a mercenary called Cathain to assassinate him. Cathain accomplished his task only for the fearsome dwarf to emerge from his grave the next day demanding a bowl of blood from the wrists of his subjects to ‘sustain his vile corpse’,” according to the Irish Daily Mail....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 10, 2012
Britain wants Argentina to pay back £45 million in loans that the country's former military junta used to fund equipment that was later used in the invasion of the Falkland Islands.The demand comes amid continued tensions between London and Buenos Aires around the 30th anniversary of the war over the South Atlantic territory.Details of the loans, uncovered by a campaign group, showed how Argentina's government borrowed the money in 1979. It was partly spent on equipment used to seize the islands three years later, before they were recaptured by Britain....
Source: Medievalists.net
March 26, 2012
Video emerged yesterday which appears to show that the town surrounding Crac des Chevaliers in Syria under artillery fire from Syrian forces. The two-minute video was posted on Youtube by Souria2011archives, an anti-government source that has uploaded over two thousand videos related to the uprising against the Assad regime....
Source: WBUR
April 9, 2012
The wall of silence in Indonesia surrounding one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century is beginning to fall apart. A forthcoming report by Indonesia's National Commission on Human Rights estimates that a purge of suspected communists during the mid-1960s killed between 600,000 and 1 million people.The violence reshaped Indonesia's political landscape and affected the course of the Cold War, just as the U.S. was escalating its fight against communism in Southeast Asia."We conclude that there have been gross human rights violations, which can be classified as crimes against humanity," says Yosep Adi Prasetyo, the commission's deputy chairman.He says the report places the blame squarely on Indonesia's military dictator Suharto, who died four years ago....A major general in the Indonesian army at the time, Suharto ousted Sukarno, the revered Indonesian independence leader and the country's first president, in the wake of the kidnapping and killing of senior Indonesian generals on Sept. 30, 1965....
Source: NYT
April 7, 2012
Jimmy Breslin assessed the Mets one recent afternoon, dressed in blue pajamas, red-and-green robe and black slippers.“They got no one,” he said, slumped on a sofa in his Manhattan apartment.To reach that conclusion, he first called Seymour Siwoff, who runs Elias Sports Bureau. Siwoff told him they were not very good.He told Breslin to call Jay Horwitz, the Mets’ public-relations chief. “I call him on some bus down south,” Breslin said, “and I say, ‘Who do you got?’ He tells me about Wright, Murphy and Lucas Duda.” Breslin pronounced Duda DOO-doh.Breslin jotted notes on a manila folder, homework for an interview with a reporter....
Source: NYT
April 7, 2012
The two young men had woefully little in common: one was a wealthy Mormon from Michigan, the other a middle-class Jew from Israel.But in 1976, the lives of Mitt Romney and Benjamin Netanyahu intersected, briefly but indelibly, in the 16th-floor offices of the Boston Consulting Group, where both had been recruited as corporate advisers. At the most formative time of their careers, they sized each other up during the firm’s weekly brainstorming sessions, absorbing the same profoundly analytical view of the world.That shared experience decades ago led to a warm friendship, little known to outsiders, that is now rich with political intrigue. Mr. Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, is making the case for military action against Iran as Mr. Romney, the likely Republican presidential nominee, is attacking the Obama administration for not supporting Mr. Netanyahu more robustly.
Source: NYT
April 8, 2012
New York, the city, knew all about the Titanic before the problem with New York, the ship.The Titanic — the largest passenger ship the world had seen, and the most unbelievably and unapologetically opulent — was an event before it was an event, and New York had read all about it in progress reports on the positioning of the stern frame, in accounts of its launching and in short paragraphs about brief test runs. And then, as it left Southampton, England, on its maiden voyage, it yanked the New York, which was alongside it at the pier, from its moorings.This was four days before the problem with the iceberg....
Source: NYT
April 8, 2012
Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan weighed in on the role of religion in politics in an Easter Sunday appearance on “Face the Nation,” pledging to fight President Obama’s contraception policy and defending Rick Santorum over a comment that reading John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech about the separation of church and state almost made him throw up.Speaking at a Catholic college in New Hampshire last fall, Mr. Santorum said that when he had read Kennedy’s speech, “I almost threw up.” He added: “In my opinion it was the beginning of the secular movement of politicians to separate their faith from the public square, and he threw faith under the bus in that speech.”...
Source: NYT
April 8, 2012
...England and his friend and roommate, Alvin Watts, 32, waged what city leaders believe was a racially motivated shooting rampage in the predominantly black neighborhoods of north Tulsa early Friday morning, driving through the streets in a pickup truck and randomly shooting pedestrians. Three black people were killed, and two others were wounded in the attacks....Tulsa officials said the shootings were unlike anything the city had ever seen in its modern history. None of the victims knew one another, and all of them were shot within a few miles. Mr. Henderson said he had heard from constituents that in one of the shootings, the suspects had approached their victims at random and asked for directions. “When they turned around to walk away, they just opened fire,” Mr. Henderson said.In 1921, Tulsa was the scene of a riot that is one of the deadliest episodes of racial violence in the nation’s history, in which a mob of white Tulsans destroyed a black neighborhood and killed dozens, perhaps hundreds, of black residents....
Source: LA Times
April 4, 2012
Rick Santorum, watch out: Stephen Colbert is watching you. In recent weeks, the satirical host has made it his mission to fact-check the hyperbole-prone presidential candidate; he even launched a Twitter hashtag, #inmyheart, ridiculing Santorum's tall tales about Dutch euthanasia.On Tuesday night, Colbert once again criticized Santorum, this time for his false claim that "seven or eight of the California system of universities don’t even teach an American history course."
Source: LA Times
April 3, 2012
The curator of the Catalina Island Museum opened the door to a musty backroom a few weeks ago hoping to find material for an upcoming exhibit on the World War II era. Closing the door behind him, he trudged down a narrow aisle lined with storage boxes and bins filled with gray photocopies of old letters, civic records, celebrity kitsch — and dust. "No luck," curator John Boraggina muttered. But as he made his way to a back corner, he noticed another row of boxes. He carried the largest to a table, blew off the dust and lifted the lid.Inside were leather-bound journals and yellowing photographs showing freshly unearthed skeletons lying on their backs or sides, or curled as if in sleep. Many were surrounded by grinding stones, pots and beadwork....
Source: BBC News
April 5, 2012
The wreck of the Titanic is to come under the protection of the United Nations cultural agency Unesco.The agency says more than 700 divers have visited the site, 4,000m under water off the coast of Canada.The ship will fall under the 2001 Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage once it passes the 100th anniversary of its sinking on 15 April....
Source: BBC News
April 5, 2012
The Italian government has launched a 105m euros (£87m) project to save one of the world's greatest archaeological treasures, the ancient city of Pompeii.There has been growing concern that the site, where volcanic ash smothered a Roman city in AD79, has been neglected.A number of structures have fully or partially collapsed, including the "House of Gladiators" which fell down 18 months ago....
Source: MSNBC
April 4, 2012
As a former United States Secret Service agent assigned to guard Jacqueline Kennedy for four years, Clint Hill went from being her dutiful protector to her close friend and confidant. In "Mrs. Kennedy and Me," he shares candid moments between him and the first lady. [He speaks out now for the first time.]
Source: Guardian (UK)
April 5, 2012
When the great west doors of York Minster swing open on Thursday and the Queen makes her way along the nave of the packed church for the ancient service of distributing Maundy Money, she will also be walking towards a small pit from which human bones have been pouring by the barrow load, the remains of some of the earliest Christians to worship on the site.Tantalising finds include 30 skulls and a jumble of bones used to backfill a trench by the medieval builders of the present cathedral, and a man whose stone-lined and lidded grave was chopped off by Walter de Gray's 13th-century walls, leaving only his shins and feet in place.Potentially the most significant finds are two nondescript round holes, with groundwater bubbling up through the mud. They are post holes that could date from the time of the earliest Christian church on the site, after the Roman empire disintegrated in the 5th century and before raiding Vikings arrived in the 8th century and the Normans in the 11th century.
