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: Irish Times
February 27, 2012
AN INTERNATIONAL expedition led by British researcher William Lindesay believes that a 1,900-year-old wall in the heart of the Gobi Desert, which the Mongolians call the “Wall of Genghis Khan” is actually part of the Great Wall of China and was built by the Western Han dynasty.The Great Wall of China is made up of many different pieces, constructed at different times and spread over large parts of the country but this section in Mongolia was not previously thought to be part of the Great Wall.It is found 40km north of the China-Mongolian border in Ömnögovi Province, and is preserved to a height of 2.5m, giving defenders a bird’s eye view over the flat desert in order to observe the approach of enemies.“Overall, the Wall of Genghis Khan in Ömnögovi appears to be a missing piece of the Han Dynasty Great Wall which was routed through the heart of the Gobi around 115BC,” said Mr Lindesay, who has lived in China for 25 years and is one of the experts on the Great Wall, having published numerous books on aspects of its history....
Source: NYT
February 27, 2012
ON March 6, 1912 — before the Titanic sailed or sank, before the first Opening Day at Fenway Park — the National Biscuit Company made its first sale of Oreo sandwich cookies, to a grocer in Hoboken named S. C. Thuesen.A century later, the brand’s present owner, Kraft Foods, is readying a centennial celebration that looks ahead as well as back.The commemoration takes the form of what Kraft Foods is calling the first worldwide campaign for Oreo that is fully integrated, including traditional and new media, stores, events, promotions and public relations. There is even a tangible, edible way for consumers to take part: a limited-edition variety called Birthday Cake Oreos.The campaign is indicative of two trends reshaping consumer marketing. One, referred to on Madison Avenue as authenticity, involves responding to a growing interest among consumers seeking value in the provenance of brands as they search for products whose quality has been tested over time....
Source: WSJ
February 27, 2012
The late Sen. Edward Kennedy’s son, Patrick Kennedy, is asking Sen. Scott Brown to stop invoking his father’s name in the midst of a hard-fought battle over health care in a tough campaign.Mr. Brown, a Massachusetts Republican fighting to hold onto his seat, has been citing Mr. Kennedy, who had held the Senate seat for almost a half-century, in opposing President Barack Obama’s new rules on contraception. Under those rules, church-related institutions like Catholic universities must provide employees with insurance that covers contraception, but the insurance company, rather than the employer itself, can pay for it if the employer has religious objections.Mr. Brown has attacked that policy as a violation of religious freedom. He supports a “conscience” law saying employers don’t have to provide coverage for services they find religiously or morally objectionable. Critics say that’s so broad that it would let employers omit any coverage they dislike for any reason, from drug treatment to mental health services....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
February 27, 2012
From York’s Gothic cathedral to pinnacles of Victorian engineering such as the SS Great Britain, scores of landmarks across England tell the story of the nation’s history.But there are fears children are growing up ignorant of the role of major historical sites in ‘our island story’, despite having so many on their doorstep.The concerns have prompted ministers to ask English Heritage to draw up a list of local sites for schoolchildren to visit which would ‘bring history alive’.It is expected to include York Minster – northern Europe’s largest Gothic cathedral – as well as the SS Great Britain, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and the Dover Boat, the world’s oldest known seafaring vessel....
Source: NYT
February 27, 2012
TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. — With two days left before the high-stakes Republican primaries in Arizona and Michigan, Rick Santorum delivered a full-throated defense of religion in public life on Sunday, appealing to the social conservatives who have revived his presidential campaign.In an escalation of the sometimes fiery language that he has used throughout the race, Mr. Santorum declared that colleges were no longer a “neutral setting” for people of faith and described how he had become sickened after reading John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech calling for the rigid separation of religion and politics.“What kind of country do we live in that says only people of nonfaith can come into the public square and make their case?” Mr. Santorum said on the ABC News program “This Week.”“That makes me throw up,” he said, adding later, “I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.”...Related LinksJoan Walsh: Santorum’s JFK Story Makes Me Want to Throw Up
Source: Haaretz
February 26, 2012
UNITED NATIONS - Locked inside UN headquarters is a huge but largely unknown archive documenting 10,000 cases against accused World War II criminals. Leading British and American researchers are campaigning to make the files - hundreds of thousands of pages in 400 boxes - public for the first time in 60 years, arguing that they are not only historically valuable but also might unearth legal precedents that could help bring some of today's war criminals to justice.The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington is also seeking to have the archive opened."It's outrageous that material which could help bring today's war criminals to justice and improve our understanding of the Holocaust is still secret," said British academic Dr. Dan Plesch, who is leading the push for access. "The whole archive should be online for scholars and historians."The archive belonged to the United Nations War Crimes Commission, a body established in October 1943 by 17 allied nations to issue lists of alleged war criminals - ultimately involving approximately 37,000 individuals - examine the charges against them and try to assure their arrest and trial....
Source: NJ.com
February 24, 2012
An historic, "Title Transfer Celebration" will be held at the Clinton Township Middle School, 34 Grayrock Road, 2 p.m. on Saturday, March 3. A reception will follow in the cafeteria.Descendant of a Revolutionary War loyalist accepts the deed to his ancestor's property from the Clinton Township School District for historic non-profit. This culminates a six-year struggle by The 1759 Vought House, Inc. to acquire and preserve this house as New Jersey's first loyalist museum. Congressman Leonard Lance, county historian Stephanie Stevens, township mayor, and others will speak.
Source: CNN Go
February 27, 2012
Cartoon pandas, Teletubbies, Ronald McDonald. At first glance they don’t seem to have much in common beyond a certain childlike quality. But during a visit to Bangkok you may discover another trait these popular cultural icons now share: their resemblance to Adolf Hitler.In the Thai capital’s latest outbreak of Nazi chic, pandas, Teletubbies and Ronald have metamorphosed into cutesy alter egos of the Führer, who seems to exert a childlike fascination over some young Thais....“Some foreigners get upset [when they see my T-shirts on sale] -- they come to my shop and complain,” acknowledges the owner of Seven Star, a small clothing shop at Terminal 21, a new designer mall in central Bangkok on Sukhumvit Road which is a popular tourist haunt.He’s a 30-something fellow who identifies himself by his nickname “Hut”, and is a graduate of a local university’s arts program. Hut does brisk business selling his T-shirts. Seven Star's most popular items, Hut notes, are his McHitler designs, which he sells alongside his caricatures of Michael Jackson, Che Guevara and Kim Jong-Il....“It’s not that I like Hitler,” Hut insists. “But he looks funny and the shirts are very popular with young people.”...
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
February 25, 2012
As the Queen advances indefatigably into the year-long festivities for her Diamond Jubilee, thoughts inevitably turn to the last British sovereign who survived to celebrate 60 years on the throne.Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 marked the refulgent patriotic zenith of the British Empire. Standing less than 5ft tall, but nevertheless a towering colossus throughout the world, the iconic Queen Empress gave her name to an age that produced an empire measuring some 40 million square kilometres, with 387 million subjects.It was an age characterised by extreme sexual repression, strait-laced morality and invincible ignorance. Victoria flatly refused to allow her government to legislate against lesbianism, not because she approved of it, but because she regarded it as a physical impossibility.But now an astonishing article, published this month in The Oldie magazine, seeks to explode this greatest of all royal myths....It claims that after the untimely death of her husband, Albert, the Prince Consort, Victoria sought sexual solace with her uncouth, arrogant and heavy-drinking Highland ghillie, John Brown. It further alleges that the Queen secretly married Brown in a clandestine ceremony and then bore him a child.
Source: NYT
February 25, 2012
Joan Houston Hall, chief editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English, still remembers the day back in the late 1990s when she typed “scrid” into Google.The word, meaning scrap or bit, was to be listed in the dictionary as a purely New England piece of vocabulary traceable to 1860. But suddenly there it was on the Web site of a lathe maker in California.“I thought, ‘Oh no! This regionalism has jumped the country,’ ” Ms. Hall recalled recently in a telephone interview from her office at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.She e-mailed the lathe maker, who wrote back saying he had learned the word from his girlfriend, who was from Maine. A “nice, tight regionalism,” as Ms. Hall put it, was saved.Such was a particularly nerve-racking day in the life of one of America’s most ambitious lexicographical projects, which culminates with the publication by Harvard University Press of Volume V (Sl-Z) next month, a mere 50 years after the project was inaugurated by Frederic G. Cassidy, an exuberant Jamaican-born linguist given to signing off conversations with “On to Z!”...
Source: CNN
February 6, 2012
Richmond, Virginia (CNN) -- A historical society in Virginia, where slavery began in the American colonies in 1619, has discovered the identities of 3,200 slaves from unpublished private documents, providing new information for today's descendants in a first-of-its-kind online database, society officials say.Many of the slaves had been forgotten to the world until the Virginia Historical Society received a $100,000 grant to pore over some of its 8 million unpublished manuscripts -- letters, diaries, ledgers, books and farm documents from Virginians dating to the 1600s -- and began discovering the long-lost identities of the slaves, said society president and CEO Paul Levengood.The private, nonprofit historical society, the fourth-oldest in the nation, is assembling a growing roster of slaves' names and other information, such as the slaves' occupations, locations and plantation owners' names, said Levengood.The free, public website also provides a high-resolution copy of the antique documents that identify the slave....
Source: AP
February 24, 2012
ISTANBUL —As Turkey welcomes Syrians fleeing violence, the anniversary Friday of the deaths of more than 750 Jewish refugees who were denied shelter by Turkey in World War II was a reminder of perennial tension between pragmatic and humanitarian impulses.The SS Struma, whose passengers fled Romania and docked in Istanbul, was denied entry to Palestinian territory by colonial power Britain. On Feb. 23, 1942, Turkey towed the vessel to the Black Sea and set it adrift. A Soviet torpedo sank it the next morning, and only one person survived.The episode is a stain on an upbeat narrative of the Jewish experience in the mostly Muslim country, even if Jews are treated with far more tolerance than elsewhere in the region. Turkey dwells on the legacy of Ottoman rulers who welcomed Jews fleeing Christian persecution in Spain in the 15th century....
Source: History Today
February 23, 2012
Over 300 people gathered in Madrid last weekend for a series of events to mark the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Jarama when, inadequately armed and in filthy weather, hundreds of volunteers to the XV International Brigade lost their lives in their efforts to defend the city against Franco’s fascist forces.Unlike in February 1937 the sun shone and the smell of wild thyme filled the air as Irish and English visitors joined Spanish comrades for the 5th annual Jarama memorial walk. The three-hour procession, through olive groves and across scrubby terrain a few miles south-east of Madrid, halted at key spots close to Suicide Hill and the Sunken Road where over 150 members of the British Battalion were killed. Poems were recited and songs sung. The walk concluded at the ‘clenched hands’ monument to the International Brigades by one of Spain’s leading artists, Martin Chirino. A wreath was laid and two minute’s silence was held, broken by a rallying chorus of the Internationale.
Source: Today's Zaman
February 24, 2012
A Bible that is currently being kept in a museum in Ankara and is thought to be 1,500 years old includes a drawing of the Last Supper, media reports said on Friday.On Thursday Culture and Tourism Minister Ertuğrul Günay confirmed reports that a 1,500-year-old Bible that was discovered by police during an anti-smuggling operation in 2000 is being kept in Ankara today.A smuggling gang was reportedly convicted of smuggling various items seized during the operation, including the Bible, and all the artifacts were kept in a safe at an Ankara courthouse. The Bible, which was reportedly kept at the courthouse for years, was only recently handed over to the care of the Ethnography Museum of Ankara....
Source: Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans
February 16, 2012
Last week, the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans (PAAIA) contacted Senator Robert Menendez regarding his amendment to the Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Human Rights Act of 2012, and its potential impact on the University of Chicago’s collection of Persian Artifacts.
Source: ABC News
February 23, 2012
More than a millennium ago in Central America, the great Maya civilization grew, flourished, built beautiful temples -- and then slowly but inexorably collapsed.What happened? A lot of things, but two scientists now say a key factor may have been nothing more than what they call a "modest reduction in precipitation."Drought and changing climate have been suggested before as factors that ended the Mayan era, but Martin Medina-Elizalde and Eelco Rohling, a team from the University of Southampton in England, went to the Yucatan Peninsula and figured out ways actually to measure long-ago rainfall. They measured oxygen isotopes in a stalagmite -- a pillar of sediment created by dripping water in a local cave -- and concluded that rainfall in the area probably dropped by about 40 percent between A.D. 800 and 1000.Forty percent is bad, but modern societies, able to pump up groundwater or build dams, would probably get by. The Maya could not....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 23, 2012
Students of economic history are in for a treat. An official studying deep in the bowels of the US Treasury library has recently uncovered a prize of truly startling proportions – an 800 page plus transcript of the Bretton Woods conference in July 1944, the meeting of nations which established the foundations of today's international monetary system.Bizarrely, this extraordiary manuscript has never before come to light. Professor Steve Hanke of John Hopkins University, whose former student it was who discovered the document, is now dashing to publish it in full in conjunction with his friend, Jacque de Larosiere. The first stage of the process, transcribing the type-written document into digital form is now complete, though it is not yet available. It's hoped eventually to produce a hard copy, book version.All previous accounts of Bretton Woods have been second hand, with historians apparently completely unaware that a full, and one must presume faithful, transcript of proceedings, had been taken....
Source: NYT
February 23, 2012
The Chinese city of Nanjing has suspended its sister-city relationship with Nagoya, Japan, after Nagoya’s mayor expressed doubts that the Japanese Army’s 1937 Nanjing Massacre actually took place, the Nagoya City Hall said Wednesday.The falling out began Monday, when Nagoya’s mayor, Takashi Kawamura, told a visiting delegation of Chinese Communist Party officials from Nanjing that he doubted that Japanese troops had massacred Chinese civilians. Most historians say that at a minimum, tens of thousands of civilians were slaughtered in Nanjing in one of the most infamous atrocities of Japan’s military expansion across Asia in the early 20th century.The falling out underscored how differing views of history remain a problem in Japan’s ties with the nations that it once conquered. While such denials are common by Japanese conservatives like Mr. Kawamura, they are rarely raised in such a public manner, or directly to Chinese officials. But there is also a widely shared perception in Japan that China’s government plays up the massacre for its own propaganda purposes....
Source: Irish Times
February 16, 2012
FIRST CENTURY AD. The Roman General Agricola reportedly says he can take and hold Ireland with a single legion. Some archaeologists have claimed the Romans did campaign in Ireland, but most see no evidence for an invasion. Imperial Rome and this island on its far western perimeter did share interesting links, however.The Discovery Programme, a Dublin-based public institution for advanced research in archaeology, is to investigate Ireland’s interactions with the empire and with Roman Britain, aiming to fill gaps in the story of the Irish iron age, the first 500 years after the birth of Christ.The project, Late Iron Age and Roman Ireland (Liari) could uncover a surprising role for Roman culture, predicts Dr Jacqueline Cahill Wilson, project leader. It offers “a new narrative for this formative period of early Irish history”....
Source: CBS News
February 22, 2012
Black History Month was marked in a very special way Wednesday. The president and the first lady attended the ground breaking for the National Museum of African-American History and Culture on the National Mall, where Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech still echoes.
