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: AP
February 9, 2012
WESTERLY, R.I. (AP) — For two centuries it rested a mile from shore, shrouded by a treacherous reef from the pleasure boaters and beachgoers who haunt New England's southern coast.Now, researchers from the U.S. Navy are hoping to confirm what the men who discovered the wreck believe: that the sunken ship off the coast of Rhode Island is the USS Revenge, commanded by Oliver Hazard Perry and lost on a stormy January day in 1811."The Revenge was forgotten, it became a footnote," said Charlie Buffum, a brewery owner from Stonington, Conn., who found the shipwreck while diving with friend Craig Harger. "We are very confident this is it."...
Source: The Star Online
February 9, 2012
MADRID (Reuters) - Sitting at a wooden table before the judges of Spain's Supreme Court, Maria Martin Lopez recalls the day a lifetime ago when fascists loyal to General Francisco Franco shot her mother.White-haired and dressed in black, Martin, 81, described how her mother's killers had punished her afterwards by forcing her to drink castor oil and eat hot chillies in an act of cruelty designed to humiliate a six-year-old child."They asked for a thousand pesetas and since she didn't have them they threw her into the street. They were taking her to Arenas de San Pedro, but they killed her on the way," Martin said of that day in 1936.Her testimony, and that of other Franco victims, was broadcast during the trial of crusading human rights judge Baltasar Garzon, a case that has split the nation and rekindled debate over whether Spain should do more to face a painful chapter from its past....
Source: NYT
February 8, 2012
As my colleague David M. Herszenhorn reports, scientists are poised to take some highly anticipated samples from a deep subglacial lake in Antarctica, saying on Wednesday that they had succeeded in boring through more than two miles of ice....What evolutionary secrets Lake Vostok — named after the Russian research station above it — may hold after being sealed under ice for millions of years has tantalized scientists who hope to find evidence of previously unknown forms of life.Probing the mysterious depths of earth has also fascinated casual observers, some of whom gravitated toward more outlandish theories about what may be discovered in the ancient lake, including alien life forms or Hitler’s remains.That last theory, based on sketchy rumors of a Nazi base on the frozen continent, received an unlikely boost this week from Russia’s state-run news service, Ria Novosti, which said that the scientific mission had revived an “old theory saying that German Nazis may have built a secret base” at Lake Vostok “as early as the 1930s.”...Editor's Note: The article goes on to discuss the impossibility of the rumors.
Source: Discovery News
February 7, 2012
Costa Concordia captain Francesco Schettino wasn't the only seaman who drove his ship into the rocks off the Tuscan island of Giglio, ripping a huge gash in the hull that sent the 114,500-ton vessel tumbling onto its side.Before him, other ship commanders had a close encounter with the cursed reefs that jut out off the island's coast.In fact, more than a dozen ancient ships rest in Giglio's treacherous waters.One of them, a third-century Roman cargo vessel, lies about 1,000 feet south of the Concordia's bow at a depth of 130 feet.Loaded with fish sauce-filled jars, the late Roman imperial ship was on the same route followed by Schettino on Jan. 13, when it struck the infamous stretch of rock known as Le Scole....
Source: Guardian (UK)
February 8, 2012
In 1975, the US army corps of engineers opened a Louisiana spillway and discovered the remains of at least five pre-civil war slaves.On Wednesday night – 36 years later – army officials will meet members of the local community to discuss how they might finally lay their ancestors to rest.Fifty-two bones, along with a number of artefacts, including a bible and headstone, washed into a drainage ditch that the army had been building. It turns out that the spillway they were working on, built in the aftermath of the devastating 1927 Mississippi river flood, had been built on the grounds of two forgotten cemeteries for slaves and black union soldiers....
Source: NBC
February 8, 2012
In her first television interview [Wednesday night], former White House intern, Mimi Alford tells Rock Center special correspondent Meredith Vieira specific details about her alleged affair with President John F. Kennedy in 1962. In her book, Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath, Alford calls their encounters "sexual and fun." She also calls the President a "sensualist," who also enjoyed being completely silly, especially in the bathtub.
"He had a collection of little yellow rubber ducks and they were in the bathtub and rubber ducks sort of became part of the game," Alford told Vieira.
Source: NYT
February 8, 2012
HAVANA (AP) — The world is much changed since the early days of 1962, but one thing has remained constant: The United States’ economic embargo on Cuba, a near-total trade ban that turned 50 on Tuesday.Supporters say it is a justified measure against a repressive Communist government that has never stopped being a thorn in Washington’s side. Critics call it a failed policy that has hurt ordinary Cubans instead of the government.All acknowledge that it has not accomplished its core mission of toppling Fidel Castro or his brother and successor, Raúl.“All this time has gone by, and yet we keep it in place,” said Wayne Smith, who was a young American diplomat in Havana in 1961 when relations were severed and who returned as the chief American diplomat after they were partially re-established under President Jimmy Carter. “We talk to the Russians, we talk to the Chinese, we have normal relations even with Vietnam,” Mr. Smith said. “We trade with all of them. So why not with Cuba?”...
Source: NYT
February 7, 2012
In the centenary year of his birth, Alan Turing, the British mathematician and cryptanalyst regarded as one of the central figures in the development of the computer and artificial intelligence, has been denied a formal pardon by the government of Prime Minister David Cameron for his conviction in 1952 on charges of homosexuality, then a criminal offense in Britain....
Source: Physorg.com
February 6, 2012
Scientists digging in a Namibian national park have uncovered sponge-like fossils they say are the first animals, a discovery that would push the emergence of animal life back millions of years.The tiny vase-shaped creatures' fossils were found in Namibia's Etosha National Park and other sites around the country in rocks between 760 and 550 million years old, a 10-member team of international researchers said in a paper published in the South African Journal of Science.That means animals, previously thought to have emerged 600 million to 650 million years ago, actually appeared 100 million to 150 million years before that, the authors said.It also means the hollow globs -- about the size of a dust speck and covered in holes that allowed fluid to pass in and out of their bodies -- were our ancestors, said co-author Tony Prave, a geologist at the University of St Andrews in Scotland....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
February 7, 2012
The world's oldest works of art have been found in a cave on Spain's Costa del Sol, scientists believe.Six paintings of seals are at least 42,000 years old and are the only known artistic images created by Neanderthal man, experts claim.Professor Jose Luis Sanchidrian, from the University of Cordoba, described the discovery as 'an academic bombshell', as all previous art work has been attributed to Homo sapiens.The paintings were found in the Nerja Caves, 35 miles east of Malaga in the southern region of Andalusia....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 7, 2012
Mrs Green passed away in her sleep at a care home in Norfolk just two weeks before her 111th birthday.The great-grandmother signed up to the Women's Royal Air Force (WRAF) 93 years ago in September 1918, when she was aged just 17.She was the last surviving person to have served in WWI following the death of British-born sailor Claude Choules in Australia last year.During the First World War she worked at Narborough Airfield and RAF Marham, Norfolk, as an Officer's Mess steward.Mrs Green, who was born in London, lived with her daughter May, 90, in King's Lynn, Norfolk, but had moved into Briar House care home shortly before Christmas where she died on Saturday....
Source: ScienceNow
February 6, 2012
The scattered islands of the vast Pacific Ocean were settled by seafarers who set out from the eastern coasts and islands of Asia and traveled thousands of kilometers by boat. Meanwhile pre-Columbian South America was populated by people who crossed a now-vanished land bridge far to the north. Did these two groups ever meet in the New World? There's a good chance of that, according to a new study, which finds evidence that Easter Islanders may have reached South America and mixed with the Native Americans already there.University of Oslo immunologist Erik Thorsby first began analyzing the people of Easter Island in 1971 to see if he and colleagues could detect traces of an early contribution of Native Americans to Polynesians. He believes that his recent finds may show that Native Americans may have accompanied Polynesians from the coast of South America to Easter Island before the arrival of Europeans.The island, also called Rapa Nui, is a remote and rocky place 3700 kilometers west of the coast of South America. The people were forcibly deported to Peru in the 1860s and enslaved; therefore, evidence of mixed Polynesian and Native American genes may stem from this time. But Thorsby was able to use blood samples from the islanders, collected since the 1970s, to examine their DNA for particular genetic markers....
Source: CBS News
February 7, 2012
The bells rang out over London where a congregation gathered to commemorate the birth 200 years ago not just of a man, but of the language he created.Charles Dickens works have been turned into more movies and stage plays than any other novelist. His themes of poverty and social injustice made more real perhaps because of his own rags to riches story. Dickens himself was sent out to work in a child labor sweatshop because he father was sent to debtors prison, or so says his great, great grandson.
Source: AP
February 7, 2012
Florence Green never saw the front line. Her war was spent serving food, not dodging bullets.But Green, who has died aged 110, was the last known surviving veteran of World War I. She was serving with the Women's Royal Air Force as a waitress at an air base in eastern England when the guns fell silent on November 11, 1918.It was not until 2010 that she was officially recognized as a veteran after a researcher found her service record in Britain's National Archives.
Source: AP
February 7, 2012
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Lifting a half-century veil of secrecy, Israel's Mossad spy agency is opening its archive this week to reveal the story behind the legendary 1960 capture of Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann.The "Operation Finale" exhibit, curated by a Mossad officer who can't be fully identified, displays never before seen items, names and documents that led to Eichmann's nabbing in Argentina. It also discloses new details, such as how forensic experts identified Eichmann by his ears.Eichmann was in charge of implementing Adolf Hitler's "final solution," the plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Six million Jews were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II.
Source: Huffington Post
February 7, 2012
Argentina has decided to rename its top flight football league after a warship sunk by the British Royal Navy during the Falklands conflict.When the season begins on Friday the Primera Division will be known as the Crucero General Belgrano Primera Division, according to regional press sources.The General Belgrano was controversially torpedoed, with the loss 323 men, by the submarine HMS Conqueror on 2 May 1982.Margaret Thatcher's decision to sink the Argentinian ship provoked outrage in some quarters as it was outside the exclusion zone Britain had imposed around the island....
Source: Jewish Telegraph Agency
February 5, 2012
(JTA) -- SNCF, the French national railroad, has handed over digital copies of hits World War II–era archives.The documents were transferred to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the Shoah Memorial in Paris, SNCF said Feb. 3 in a statement.The handover comes a year after SNCF President Guillaume Pepy admitted that the company participated in transferring Jews to Nazi concentration camps.SNCF said in the statement that it is working to adhere to its policy of being transparent about its past....
Source: AFP
February 6, 2012
They trek for days through crocodile-infested swamps and up rain-lashed mountain jungles, but the members of the Malaya Historical Group are not seeking treasure or ancient artefacts. Instead, they're after rusty wreckage.Over the past decade, the six amateur Malaysian military historians have helped locate the confirmed or suspected crash sites of 30 World War II aircraft -- helping bring closure for the families of more than 40 missing British and American air crews.Nearly 70 years after the end of the war, at least 100 British and American aircraft wrecks are believed scattered across the jungles of India, Thailand and Malaysia, along with the remains of their crews.As well as the battles for the Pacific Islands, allied forces waged war against Japanese forces whose regional conquests included previously British-held Singapore and Malaysia -- known then as Malaya....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 6, 2012
One of the founders of an anti-Hitler movement in wartime Germany has been declared a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church 69 years after he was beheaded by the Nazis.The church canonised Alexander Schmorell for his involvement in the White Rose group, which vented its disgust of Hitler and the Nazi regime by writing pamphlets opposing the regime and condemning the treatment of Soviet citizens under German occupation.The group also took to daubing walls in Munich, the birthplace of the Nazi party, with slogans such as "Down with Hitler" and "Freedom".Schmorell, who had a Russian mother, had been baptised into the Orthodox Church and remained a committed Christian till he was sent to the guillotine in 1943 aged 25....
Source: Irish Times
February 4, 2012
THE UN’s highest court has confirmed German immunity from prosecution over cases involving Nazi-era war crimes.The International Court of Justice in The Hague threw out a ruling by Italy’s highest court holding Germany liable for the 1944 Nazi massacre of 250 Italian partisans in Tuscany.Germany went to The Hague, arguing that a 1961 compensation payment of DM40 million to Italy had fulfilled German obligations under international law. It argued that no court had jurisdiction to force a foreign country to pay reparations and that the Italian ruling violated international rules on foreign state immunity....
