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: Sunday Gazette
February 13, 2012
SHEPHERDSTOWN, W.Va. -- The National Park Service will hold two public meetings featuring a historian as it considers whether to add the Shepherdstown Battlefield to the system.The meetings are set for Feb. 23 at the Stephen T. Mather Training Center in Harpers Ferry and Feb. 25 at the Clarion Hotel in Shepherdstown....
Source: Politico
February 13, 2012
Some of former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy's personal papers are now public for the first time, including notes from her televised White House tour 50 years ago.
Source: Haaretz
February 13, 2012
"A small fish" is one expression whose literal meaning is identical in German and Hebrew. As in the holy tongue, when someone uses the term in German, the reference is to something of little value. The expression refers to someone low on the totem pole - to a person like John Demjanjuk, the Ukrainian guard at the Sobibor concentration camp who was convicted last May of abetting the murder of tens of thousands of Jews."Yes he is a small fish - of course, that's right. He was at the lowest level of the hierarchy. But from the perspective of my clients, who lost their families in Sobibor, there's no doubt that everybody, big fish or small, who participated in murder of their families should be brought to justice," opines Prof. Cornelius Nestler of Cologne University, who represented the victims' families in the Demjanjuk trial in Germany.Nestler, who is married to a Jewish woman, visited Israel this week for the first time in his life, as a guest of the Hebrew University's Institute for Advanced Studies, where he delivered a lecture entitled "Demjanjuk Trial: the Voice of the Victims."The problem prosecutors faced in this Demjanjuk trial, Nestler states, "was not to put him on trial for what he did, but rather to put him on trial after they [the prosecutors] have not prosecuted all sorts of higher ranking Nazi culprits in past decades."...
Source: The Uptake
February 12, 2012
This year marks the 150th Anniversary of the War of 1862. Some call it the Sioux Uprising or the US-Dakota War. Hundreds of Dakota men and women as well as white settlers in Minnesota lost their lives during a short-lived war that resulted in the exile of many Dakota.To this day, the war remains a wound that has yet to heal. After the battles were fought, many Dakota, mostly women and children were marched from Morton, Minnesota to Fort Snelling in bitter cold temperatures. They spent the winter at an interment camp. Many did not survive.Descendants of those who were marched to Fort Snelling mark this time through a special ceremony at the exact spot. They consider that 1862 internment camp the first concentration camp in the United States. Mendota Dakota Tribal Chair Jim Anderson allowed our cameras to be there because, as he says, “Ignorance is racism. We need to educate others about what happened to our people.”Tales of atrocities, death and hopes for peaceA memorial plaque at Fort Snelling says at least 130 of the Dakota died during the cold winter months of captivity.
Source: NYT
February 13, 2012
In the winter of 1962, the nation needed a hero.Americans had yet to recover from the Soviet Union’s launching of the first spacecraft, Sputnik, in October 1957 — a rude jolt to our confidence as world leaders in all things technological. The space race was on.Soon after he took office in 1961, President John F. Kennedy had thrown down the challenge to send men to the Moon by the end of the decade. But the Russians still set the pace, boastfully. They launched a dog into orbit, then the first man, Yuri A. Gagarin, and another, Gherman S. Titov.The United States lagged, managing only two 15-minute suborbital astronaut flights — only five minutes of weightlessness each time.Then, on Feb. 20, 1962 — 50 years ago next Monday — a Marine Corps fighter pilot from small-town America stepped forward in response to the country’s need. The astronaut was John Glenn, whom the author Tom Wolfe has called “the last true national hero America has ever had.”...
Source: NYT
February 11, 2012
For 32 years, a portrait of a serene Mary Todd Lincoln hung in the governor’s mansion in Springfield, Ill., signed by Francis Bicknell Carpenter, a celebrated painter who lived at the White House for six months in 1864.
The story behind the picture was compelling: Mrs. Lincoln had Mr. Carpenter secretly paint her portrait as a surprise for the president, but he was assassinated before she had a chance to present it to him.
Now it turns out that both the portrait and the touching tale accompanying it are false.
The canvas, which was purchased by Abraham Lincoln’s descendants before being donated to the state’s historical library in the 1970s, was discovered to be a hoax when it was sent to a conservator for cleaning, said James M. Cornelius, the curator of the Lincoln library and museum in Springfield. The museum is planning to present its findings at a lecture on April 26.
Source: AP
February 9, 2012
MEXICO CITY (AP) -- The ruins aren't particularly impressive, just some stone and clay footings for houses that probably supported walls of wood or clay wattle. And it's that very ordinariness that has experts excited.The remnants being uncovered in the hills east of Mexico City at a spot known as Amecameca are from an ancient neighborhood - a home to regular folks."What makes this important is that it is a residential area, not a ceremonial or religious site," said Felipe Echenique, a historian for the National Institute of Anthropology and History, or INAH, which is in charge of reviewing the site....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 10, 2012
Twenty-one German soldiers entombed in a perfectly preserved World War One shelter have been discovered 94 years after they were killed.The men were part of a larger group of 34 who were buried alive when an Allied shell exploded above the tunnel in 1918 causing it to cave in.Thirteen bodies were recovered from the underground shelter but the remaining men had to be left under a mountain of mud as it was too dangerous to retrieve them.Nearly a century later French archaeologists stumbled upon the mass grave on the former Western Front during excavation work for a road building project.Many of the skeletal remains were found in the same positions the men had been in at the time of the collapse, prompting experts to liken the scene to Pompeii....
Source: LiveScience
February 9, 2012
With a weight that rivals a baby elephant, a meteorite that fell from space some 30,000 years ago is likely Britain's largest space rock. And after much sleuthing, researchers think they know where it came from and how it survived so long without weathering away.The giant rock, spanning about 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) across and weighing 205 pounds (93 kilograms), was likely discovered by an archaeologist about 200 years ago at a burial site created by the Druids (an ancient Celtic priesthood) near Stonehenge, according to said Colin Pillinger, a professor of planetary sciences at the Open University.Pillinger curated the exhibition "Objects in Space," which opens today (Feb. 9) and is the first time the public will get a chance to see the meteorite. The exhibition will explore not only the mystery that surrounds the origins of the giant meteorite, but also the history and our fascination with space rocks....
Source: Discovery News
February 9, 2012
Yesterday we celebrated the birth (in 1828) of legendary science fiction novelist Jules Verne, who penned such classic works as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and From the Earth to the Moon.The latter is one of the earliest depictions of space travel in popular fiction, featuring a capsule shot out of a cannon. It seems absurd by modern standards, but there's a hint of solid science underneath the fiction.Set a few years after the resolution of the American Civil War, the novel centers on the disaffected members of the Baltimore Gun Club. The men are bored and restless; there are no new artillery weapons to construct and test, nothing left to blow to smithereens.So their leader, Impey Barbicane (!), proposes they build a gigantic cannon to fire a projectile to the moon. Ultimately the plucky Gun Club succeeds in launching not just a projectile, but three men into space.Verne's notion of launching men to the moon with a cannon seems implausible at best, but some of the underlying principles are quite sound, given how little was known at the time.
Source: CBS News
February 9, 2012
It's almost like losing an old friend, News came Thursday is that bankrupt Eastman Kodak will stop making cameras.
Source: CBS News
February 9, 2012
Boston College is facing a crisis that's both moral and legal. The school collected an oral history of the vicious war between Irish Protestants and Catholics -- a history that includes many confessions of murder.
Source: Bloomberg News
February 9, 2012
The FBI released a decades-old file it kept on Apple co-founder Steve Jobs that noted his past drug use and cites interviews with people who say he had a penchant to "distort reality."The 191 pages of FBI records are part of a 1991 background check of Jobs, who died in October 2011, for an appointment by former President George H.W. Bush to the President's Export Council.The file includes the results of interviews with Jobs and those who knew him. The records reinforce the picture of Jobs that has been known to many followers of his career and Apple. Biographer Walter Isaacson's best-selling book about Jobs, released last year, outlines his use of drugs and mercurial personality. While many people interviewed by the FBI described Jobs favorably, some said he wasn't always truthful.
Source: Washington Times
January 18, 2012
VIENNA, Va., January 18, 2012 — What Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s forces did not accomplish at Vicksburg, Mississippi in July 1863, "successors" to that hallowed ground are now trying to accomplish, slowly but surely. And they have four legs.A significant number of wild hogs that were driven further inland by the flooding of the Mississippi River are attacking the battlefield and cemetery, making it look for all the world like an erratic plowing contest has been held there. The animals are taking over the 1,800-acre park and the future of monuments, earthworks, and trenches as well as grave markers is in peril. The porkers may be a more devastating enemy than Grant’s men ever were.The area had been an important one in the war. Grant had barely beaten back the Confederate incursion into Kentucky and his attention turned again to the Mississippi River. If he could control the river, he could isolate the western theater from the eastern Confederate States, but to do this, he must first capture the city of Vicksburg. Confederate Gen. John C. Pemberton had been ordered by Gen. Robert E. Lee to defend Vicksburg at all costs....
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
February 8, 2012
HARRISBURG -- The House Gaming Oversight Committee held a hearing today on a bill that would impose 10-mile no-casino "buffer zone" around the Gettysburg National Military Park and the Flight 93 Memorial Park.House Bill 2082 is needed, said Rep. Paul Clymer, R-Bucks, to protect the "sacred memory" of the soldiers who died in battle at Gettysburg July 1-3, 1863, which he said was the "turning point of the Civil War," and of the heroic passengers on Flight 93 that stopped terrorists from crashing the plane into a building in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11, 2001.The National Civil War Trust, the Gettysburg Battlefield Association and Preservation Pennsylvania supported the bill, which the committee will vote on at a later date. Some business advocates in Gettysburg favor a casino, saying it would bring additional jobs and visitors to an area already popular with tourists....
Source: AP
February 7, 2012
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (AP) — Groups trying to protect Logan County's Blair Mountain from mining have no legal standing to sue because they don't own any of the property involved in the long-running dispute, the West Virginia Coal Association argues in a new court filing.The association's friend-of-the-court brief asks U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton to grant summary judgment to the U.S. Department of Interior. It argues the Sierra Club and other several other groups have no legal standing to sue Interior, the National Park Service or the Keeper of the National Register of Historic Places.Walton has scheduled a status conference for March 1....
Source: NYT
February 9, 2012
CARMEL VALLEY, Calif. — Just in time for Valentine’s Day comes the ultimate gift for the Dr. Strangelove in your life: the 21,000-square-foot Jamesburg Earth Station, a satellite relay base from the Kennedy era that was built to survive a nuclear attack.Perched on a remote hillside overlooking the Ventana Wilderness here on California’s Central Coast, it is a white elephant that costs $3 million, a tech-lover’s paradise on 161 acres and equipped with a 97-foot satellite dish. (Though the signs reading “Danger: High Voltage” are perhaps not the best marketing tool.)
Source: NYT
February 9, 2012
TOKYO — Japan and the United States said Wednesday that they were renegotiating a 2006 agreement in order to expedite the removal of 8,000 Marines from Okinawa. Under the current terms, their departure has been stalled until progress is made on relocating an important Marine air station on the island, a chronic underlying irritant in relations between the two countries.Both sides have agreed to rework part of the agreement that makes relocation of the air station, the Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, a precondition for moving the Marines, who along with their dependents were supposed to be transferred to Guam by 2014.
Source: Press Europ
February 9, 2012
In a shadowy area of recent French history, the ideological battle over a wound that has yet to heal remains ongoing. Ranged against each other, two camps of intellectuals, politicians and activists are at war over a question that is as simple as it is terrible: is France in part to blame for the Rwandan genocide which claimed 800,000 lives in one month?Close to 18 years after the massacre, the question remains the subject of virulent controversy, which says as much about internal political divides in France as it does about the 1994 genocide itself.No other recent event has resulted in such entrenched positions, personal hatreds, and such a level of verbal fury: not even Bosnia or Kosovo. You have to go back to the Algerian war – or refer, to a lesser degree, to the Palestinian question – to find such serious allegations, and such a rift between two camps, which in this case can be roughly designated as “anti-France” against “eternal France.
Source: AP
February 7, 2012
WASHINGTON – Descendants of Harriet Tubman have gathered at The President's Gallery by Madame Tussauds and unveiled a wax statue of the woman who led hundreds of slaves to freedom.Tubman's great-great-great-grand-nephew, Charles E.T. Ross, and Tubman's great-great-grand-niece, Valery Ross Manokey, were present at the Washington wax museum Tuesday to see the statue join a collection of historical figures....
