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
March 11, 2012
NIHONMATSU, Japan — Nobody knows whether Hiroshi Yokoyama’s elderly parents tried to outrun the tsunami that engulfed their home in Namie on the Fukushima coast a year ago.But Mr. Yokoyama does know that he would have looked for them high and low, if not for a second disaster that unfolded at the nuclear power plant just a few miles away, forcing him to abandon his search.As grieving families across the nation gathered Sunday to mark the anniversary of Japan’s 3/11 disasters — an earthquake and tsunami that ravaged the northeastern coast, killed almost 20,000 people and caused a huge nuclear radiation leak — some communities are still coming to terms with the calamity’s scale, complexity and lasting effects, and painful new revelations have shed light on how some of the victims died.
Source: NYT
March 11, 2012
To her many admirers, Elizabeth Bartlett Grannis was a humanitarian, social reformer and pioneering suffragist. To the First Church Disciples of Christ, which Grannis had attended faithfully for five decades, she was a “disturber of the peace.”Translation: she didn’t think the pastor — a popular and successful rainmaker for the congregation — ought to be making unwanted advances on women. Or men. And Grannis further believed that a young girl whom she had informally adopted ought to be welcomed at Sunday worship. Unfortunately, the year was 1906. And the child was not only squirmy: she was black.For these offenses, the congregation dismissed Grannis from its rolls after a trial conducted by church elders. Grannis scorned the inquiry as a “high-handed, star-chamber proceeding, illegal in every respect.” Until her death in 1926, however, she never stopped attending services, even though she was not formally a member of the church. (Public relations may have been in its infancy, but church leaders understood that physically barring an old woman from taking her place in a pew on Sundays would not create the best impression.)...
Source: ThinkProgress
March 9, 2012
During a speech at Wesleyan University last night, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia offered a strange revision of the time he joined with four of his conservative colleagues to make George W. Bush president:At the end of the speech, Scalia took questions from the audience. One person asked about the Bush-Gore case, where the Supreme Court had to determine the winner of the election.“Get over it,” Scalia said of the controversy surrounding it, to laughter from the audience.“Scalia reminded the audience it was Gore who took the election to court, and the election was going to be decided in a court anyway—either the Florida Supreme Court or the U.S. Supreme Court.It was a long time ago, people forget…It was a 7-2 decision [the decision was actually 5-4]. It wasn’t even close,” he said....
Source: Troy Times Union
March 9, 2012
TROY — The Union's Civil War battleship USS Monitor rode low in the water, a dark and menacing slash of metal with sides and decks fortified with tons of half-inch iron plates rolled at two mills in South Troy.Nobody had ever seen an armored naval vessel like it, more submarine than ship, with just 18 inches of freeboard visible above the waterline and a round gun turret protruding from the deck.Slack-jawed onlookers called the Monitor a "tin can on a raft."But the Monitor revolutionized naval warfare in the Civil War, tipped the balance of power for the Union Navy and carried hometown pride for Troy's indefatigable workers who met a brutal deadline as the War Between the States raged....
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
March 9, 2012
Google has been quietly slowing down its book-scanning work with partner libraries, according to librarians involved with the vast Google Books digitization project. But what that means for the company's long-term investment in the work remains unclear.Google was not willing to say much about its plans. "We've digitized more than 20 million books to date and continue to scan books with our library partners," a Google spokeswoman told The Chronicle in an e-mailed statement.Librarians at several of Google's partner institutions, including the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin systems, confirmed that the pace has slowed. "They're still scanning. They're scanning at a lower rate than the peak," said Paul N. Courant, Michigan's dean of libraries....
Source: NYT
March 8, 2012
As a presidential candidate, he was awkwardly disconnected, a wealthy Republican who struggled to earn the trust of the conservatives in his party.Now, two decades later, that candidate, the elder George Bush, is serving as a kind of political object lesson for a kindred spirit, Mitt Romney.As Mr. Bush tried to do, Mr. Romney is working to bridge two worlds inside the Republican Party: an establishment wing with which he feels comfortable and a rabble-rousing wing that has a big influence over policy and ideology.Mr. Bush managed to reconcile and unite both of those sometimes opposing forces, but not until he sought the White House as a sitting vice president in 1988. And those same divisions and suspicions from conservatives helped scuttle his re-election campaign four years later.Mr. Romney now faces some of the same challenges.
Source: BBC News
March 8, 2012
The oldest surviving film featuring a Charles Dickens character has been discovered, in the year of the 200th anniversary of the author's birth.The Death of Poor Joe, which dates back to March 1901, was discovered by British Film Institute (BFI) curator Bryony Dixon, in February.Until now the earliest known Dickens film was Scrooge or Marley's Ghost, released in November 1901."It's wonderful to have discovered such a rare and unique film," Ms Dixon said....
Source: Raleigh News and Observer
March 8, 2012
KURE BEACH -- There are hundreds of shipwrecks along North Carolina's treacherous coast, and some, like those of the ironclad USS Monitor or the Blackbeard flagship Queen Anne's Revenge, are famous.But that of the hapless Civil War blockade runner Modern Greece, which sits just beyond the surf near Fort Fisher, is in many ways the most important.The wreck, which was excavated 50 years ago, led to the creation of the state underwater archaeology unit that studies the other wrecks. It led to a state law to protect historic wreck sites from pilfering. It yielded such a large trove of artifacts that many have been used in experiments that advanced the tricky science of how to preserve historical treasures found underwater.As the first of about 30 blockade runners sunk along the coast near Wilmington while trying to bring arms and vital commodities to the Confederate states, the Modern Greece has an iconic status in North Carolina and maritime history.And this week -- just in time for events marking the 150th anniversary of its sinking -- thousands of artifacts from the Modern Greece were recovered from underwater....
Source: Science Daily
March 8, 2012
ScienceDaily (Mar. 8, 2012) — Archaeologists from the University of Bristol have unearthed a unique slave burial ground on the remote South Atlantic island of St Helena. The excavation, which took place in advance of construction of a new airport on the island, has revealed dramatic insights into the victims of the Atlantic slave trade during the notorious Middle Passage.The tiny island of St Helena, 1,000 miles off the coast of south-west Africa, acted as the landing place for many of the slaves, captured by the Royal Navy during the suppression of the slave trade between 1840 and 1872. During this period a total of around 26,000 freed slaves were brought to the island, most of whom were landed at a depot in Rupert's Bay. The appalling conditions aboard the slave ships meant that many did not survive their journey, whilst Rupert's Valley -- arid, shadeless, and always windy -- was poorly suited to act as a hospital and refugee camp for such large numbers. At least 5,000 people are likely to have been buried there.
Source: BBC News
March 7, 2012
As the Nazis tightened their grip on power in the late 1930s, Jews in Germany and Austria began to fear for their safety. Many fled abroad using well-documented methods such as the Kindertransport. But less well known is the story of thousands of Jewish women who fled to the UK by getting jobs as domestic servants.When Natalie Huss-Smickler arrived in England in 1938 as a 26-year-old, she found her new job as a domestic servant something of a shock compared with her secretarial work back home in Vienna."My first job in England was very, very hard," she says. "I had to work from 8am to 11pm with an hour's break, cleaning and scrubbing and looking after the house, with half a day off a week."After a few weeks I complained, saying it's a bit too hard. The lady of the house said, 'If it's too much for you, I'll send you back to Hitler.'"...
Source: NYT
March 8, 2012
DUBLIN — In what seems like a surreal subplot from a Dan Brown novel, a number of irreplaceable religious relics have disappeared from churches across the country, the Irish police and a senior cleric say.The latest in a series of such thefts involved the removal of the preserved heart of St. Laurence O’Toole, Dublin’s 12th-century patron saint, from the city’s historic Christ Church Cathedral. As there was no sign of forced entry to the cathedral itself, the dean of Christ Church, Dermot Dunne, initially believed the thief had probably hidden in the building when it closed on Friday evening, taken the artifact overnight and simply walked out the next morning.“Maybe someone stole it to order; it certainly seems plausible,” Dean Dunne said Monday in an interview at Christ Church. “Or maybe a religious fanatic wants the relic and paid somebody to steal it.”...
Source: Fox News
March 8, 2012
WASHINGTON – Wounded in both legs and wearing a U.S. Army field coat peppered with bullet holes, 1st Lt. Robert Schmitt led a desperate U.S. hilltop assault against advancing Chinese forces in one of the bloodiest battles of the Korean War. He never returned.The hunt for thousands of fallen American troops like Schmitt, missing from a conflict fought six decades ago, is about to resume in North Korea as tensions ease between the wartime enemies.A decade of search operations that led to the recovery and identification of 92 troops was suspended seven years ago, with the U.S. citing worries about the security of its personnel. That ended the only cooperation between the militaries of the two nations, which formally remain at war because the 1950-53 conflict ended with a cease-fire and armistice, not a formal peace treaty....
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
March 7, 2012
The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin announced today that it has acquired the papers of yet another significant contemporary literary figure: the novelist and short-story writer T.C. Boyle. The author of 22 books of fiction, including The Road to Wellville, Tortilla Curtain, World’s End, and When the Killing’s Done, Mr. Boyle is a professor of English at the University of Southern California. At Texas, his papers will join those of David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, Denis Johnson, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Bruce Sterling, among many others whose archives are housed at the center.
Source: Greenfield Reporter
February 25, 2012
LAFAYETTE, Ind. — John M. Harris spends each Tuesday and Wednesday quietly working in a small office surrounded by shelves stacked from floor to ceiling with boxes containing ... well, that's what Harris is finding out.Outside his office, a much larger room is filled with stacks of boxes, filing cabinets and a conference table for sorting. Throughout the Frank Arganbright Genealogy and Research Center, items are in storage -- items someone at some point considered historically significant.Nestled in his small office on the second floor of the center on 10th Street across from the Moses Fowler House, Harris' task is to computerize the Tippecanoe County Historical Association's hard-copy card catalogs and computerize years of donated items that escaped being enumerated or completely slipped through the cracks....
Source: NBC 10 Philadelphia
March 5, 2012
More than 200 years later, there's another tussle brewing at Princeton Battlefield State Park.Instead of the American and British Armies, this time the combatants are historical preservationists and the Institute for Advanced Study, which owns 21 acres next to the battlefield site and wants to use part of it for faculty housing....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
March 6, 2012
Last month, a copy of Leonardo's most famous painting rocked the art world with revelations about its provenance.Two weeks after it went on show to the public at the Prado, the museum's conservation team believe they are closing in on a conclusion about the painting's authorship.The most likely candidate is Gian Giacomo Caprotti, the apprentice known as "Salaì" - which translates as "Little Devil" - who went to work in Leonardo's workshop when he was ten years old.Many historians believe, though it is not proven, that Salaì was Leonardo's lover. He is presumed to be the youthful model for Leonardo's paintings 'St. John the Baptist' and 'Bacchus', as well as numerous drawings....
Source: Public Radio International
February 27, 2012
There are thousands of national landmarks in the United States. But less than 3 percent of them are dedicated to members of minority groups, such as Latinos and women.Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior and a former U.S. Senator from Colorado, believes more monuments should be created to honor the nation's diversity of heroes. He said the Interior Department is and can be instrumental in being the custodian of America's history.Surprisingly, Congress agrees with him.The Interior Department oversees all of the National Parks, the wildlife refuges and even monitors and regulates oil and natural gas drilling on public lands — both onshore and off."Our mission, in essence, is to be the custodian of America's natural resources and also to be the custodian of America's history," Salazar said. "It's in being the custodian of America's history that we do things like the celebration of the Civil War and the maintenance of forts in many places that are significant."...
Source: CNN.com
March 4, 2012
Los Angeles (CNN) -- If there was a second gunman in Sen. Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, who was it?Lawyers for convicted assassin Sirhan Sirhan claim their client did not fire any of the gunshots that struck the presidential candidate in 1968. And in their latest federal court filing, they also rule out another man some have considered a suspect -- a private security guard named Thane Eugene Cesar, who was escorting Kennedy at the time he was shot.Attorneys William Pepper and Laurie Dusek insist someone other than their client, Sirhan, fatally shot Kennedy. They now say the real killer was not Cesar, a part-time uniformed officer long suspected by some conspiracy theorists of playing a sinister role in the senator's murder.Pepper and Dusek made the claim in papers submitted to a U.S. District Court in Los Angeles late last month....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
March 6, 2012
Jamaica's prime minister has hinted that Britain might want to pay her country compensation for the "wicked and brutal" years of slavery in the days of Empire as she prepares to host Prince Harry on the latest leg of his Caribbean tour.Portia Simpson Miller said that if Britain wanted to apologise for slavery it would be "fine with us" and repeated her view that the Queen should be removed as head of state of the Commonwealth realm.In an interview with the BBC recorded hours before Prince Harry touched down at Kingston's Normal Manley Airport, Mrs Simpson Miller chose the four-day Diamond Jubilee visit to highlight the way her forebears had been wronged by the British."No race should have been subjected to what out ancestors were subjected to," she said. "It was wicked and brutal."We gained our freedom through the sweat, blood and tears of our ancestors and we are now free."If Britain wishes to apologise, fine with us, no problem at all."...
Source: Boston Globe
March 5, 2012
The bustle of lunchtime foot traffic today flooded narrow streets in downtown Boston. But pedestrians took care to step over a single red flower lying at the corner of Congress and State streets.The flower had been left on the brick monument marking the site of the Boston Massacre, which left five dead exactly 242 years ago today. On March 5, 1770, British soldiers opened fire on a crowd of colonists, killing Crispus Attucks and four others....
