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
January 23, 2012
PARIS — Relations between France and Turkey dipped to a nadir as the French Senate approved a bill late Monday criminalizing the denial of officially recognized genocides, including the Armenian genocide begun in 1915.
Source: The Star (UK)
January 13, 2012
This much is known: rare, medieval Jewish manuscripts have been discovered along the fabled Silk Road in Afghanistan and are for sale.Are they authentic? Scholars who have examined them say they are.The rest — who found them, where they came from, whether there are more to unearth — remains a mystery.But the discovery of the 200 or more documents, some in good condition and others crumpled or in fragments, has excited academic interest around the world....
Source: The Spectator (UK)
January 18, 2012
SOUTHAMPTON, ONT.—Wearing blue rubber gloves, Ken Cassavoy is carefully unfolding a threadbare flag on a boardroom table at the Bruce County Museum & Cultural Centre.Though greatly faded, the red, white and blue of a British Red Ensign are clearly visible — a Union Jack in the top left-hand corner, surrounded by a sea of red.This is the first time Cassavoy has unpacked the flag since he fetched it home on loan from Annapolis, Md., where for two centuries it has been a war trophy at the U.S. Naval Academy Museum.As flags go, the ensign isn’t shy. It’s nearly 8 feet tall and is still almost 10 feet long, even after being shortened by about 4 feet when, at some point, the naval museum put a linen backing on it....
Source: Boston Globe
January 23, 2012
WASHINGTON—Newt Gingrich called rival Mitt Romney a "terrible historian" but flubbed his own history in Congress on Monday night when he claimed the nation ran four consecutive budget surpluses during his time as House speaker. Romney attacked Gingrich's financial links to Freddie Mac while ignoring his own.------GINGRICH: "When I was speaker, we had four consecutive balanced budgets."THE FACTS: Actually, two.The four straight years of budget surpluses were 1998 through 2001. Gingrich left Congress in 1999, so he only had a hand in surpluses for his last two years. The budget ran deficits for his first two years as speaker.The highest surplus of that four-year string came in budget year 2000, after Gingrich was out of office.Overall, the national debt went up during the four years Gingrich was speaker. In January 1995, when he assumed the leadership position, the gross national debt was $4.8 trillion. When he left four years later, it was $5.6 trillion, an increase of $800 billion....
Source: BBC News
January 24, 2012
A rare cast of the death mask of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin has been sold to an anonymous bidder for £3,600 at an auction in Shropshire.The cast was taken in bronze from the original plaster death mask by an art dealer who was visiting Moscow in 1990.Richard Westwood-Brookes, from Church Stretton-based auction house Mullock's, said: "There are, we believe, only two of these in the West."...
Source: BBC News
January 22, 2012
The remains of a 300-year-old warship are to be raised from the sea bed, according to reports.The wreck of HMS Victory, a predecessor of Nelson's famous flagship, was found near the Channel Islands in 2008.The British warship, which went down in a storm in 1744 killing more than 1,000 sailors, could contain gold coins worth an estimated £500m.The Sunday Times says the Maritime Heritage Foundation is set to manage the wreck's raising.It also reports that the charity will employ Odyssey Marine Exploration to carry out the recovery....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
January 24, 2012
Tony Blair agreed to a secret deal to hand joint sovereignty of Gibraltar to Spain, according to explosive claims by a former Labour cabinet minister.Peter Hain reveals in his memoirs that he struck the deal with the Spanish government in 2002 to end the UK's 300-year control of the vital strategic outpost.He makes clear that he and Mr Blair were both prepared to ride roughshod over the objections of the people of Gibraltar in order to get their way, describing Mr Blair's attitude to the inhabitants as 'contemptuous'....The former Europe Minister revealed Mr Blair sanctioned the deal because he wanted to win the backing of the Spanish government – then led by Jose Maria Aznar – to help Britain take on France and Germany in EU negotiations.The agreement was only shelved when what he called 'hardliners' in the Spanish government – who wanted only full sovereignty – objected....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
January 23, 2012
Robert F Kennedy feared his children would be blinded by the mafia in an acid attack as revenge attack for investigating them, his widow has revealed.Speaking out for the first time in 30 years, Ethel Kennedy said that her late husband was anxious they would be targeted as retaliation for his probe into mafia racketeering.He saw a report about an American journalist who had been blinded in an acid attack by the mob and feared they would do the same to him.The disclosure will add to conspiracy theories that the mafia may have been responsible for Kennedy’s death.He was shot dead by Sirhan Sirhan in 1968 but speculation has raged that his crusade against the mob whilst serving as U.S. Attorney General may have be the root of his demise....
Source: AP
January 24, 2012
BOSTON – President John F. Kennedy's library is releasing 45 hours of privately recorded meetings and phone calls, providing a window into the final months of his life.The tapes include discussions of conflict in Vietnam, Soviet relations and the race to space, plans for the 1964 Democratic Convention and re-election strategy. There also are moments with his children.On one recording, made days before Kennedy's assassination, he asks staffers to schedule a meeting in a week. He tells them he's booked for the weekend, with no time to meet with an Indonesian general then, either."I'm going to be up at the Cape on Friday, but I'll see him Tuesday," JFK tells staffers....Related LinksABC News Video
Source: York Press (UK)
January 23, 2012
MEN with Viking surnames filled the meeting room of New Earswick Folk Hall and queued to help research into the ethnic origins of the British people.Academics were collecting DNA from men with Viking names to see if they are directly descended from the Scandanavian traders and seaman who once ruled York and Yorkshire.It was the first of four gatherings across northern England and followed a public appeal for people with Viking surnames to come forward.The project will feature in a future BBC eight-part documentary series on the history of ordinary British people – the Great British Story – and BBC photographers were at the event....
Source: BBC News
January 24, 2012
The first international drug treaty was signed a century ago this week. So what was the war on drugs like in 1912?Today it is taken for granted that governments will co-operate in the fight against the heroin and cocaine trade.But 100 years ago, narcotics passed from country to country with minimal interference from the authorities. That all changed with the 1912 International Opium Convention, which committed countries to stopping the trade in opium, morphine and cocaine.Then, as now, the US stood in the vanguard against narcotics. While the UK's position is unequivocal today, a century ago it was an unenthusiastic signatory, says Mike Jay, author of Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century.The real concern a century ago was over alcohol, he argues. "There was a big debate over intoxication as there was concern about the heavy, heavy drinking culture of the 19th Century."...
Source: BBC News
January 23, 2012
It's exactly 40 years since a Japanese soldier was found in the jungles of Guam, having survived there for nearly three decades after the end of World War II. He was given a hero's welcome on his return to Japan - but never quite felt at home in modern society.For most of the 28 years that Shoichi Yokoi, a lance corporal in the Japanese Army of world War II, was hiding in the jungles of Guam, he firmly believed his former comrades would one day return for him.And even when he was eventually discovered by local hunters on the Pacific island, on 24 January 1972, the 57-year-old former soldier still clung to the notion that his life was in danger."He really panicked," says Omi Hatashin, Yokoi's nephew.Startled by the sight of other humans after so many years on his own, Yokoi tried to grab one of the hunter's rifles, but weakened by years of poor diet, he was no match for the local men....
Source: Spiegel Online (DE)
January 19, 2012
Prior to World War II, the Ardeatine Caves were mined for the volcanic material known as tuff for use in cement production. But by March 24, 1944, production had long since ceased. On that day, torches inside the cave's corridors and hollows provided makeshift lighting. Outside, in the afternoon sun, trucks were hauling prisoners to the site -- a total of 335 men, the youngest of whom was only 15. They were all Italian.The German occupiers wanted to avenge an attack that communist partisans had carried out a day earlier on a German police unit in Rome's Via Rasella. The victims of this retaliatory act were chosen at random. Most of them had been imprisoned in a Gestapo jail in the Italian capital or were being detained by the Wehrmacht, Germany's Nazi-era military. None of them had been involved in the attack....[E]ven if it continues to be publicly commemorated to this day, neither German nor Italian officials had any interest in bringing its perpetrators to justice. Indeed, the only person to be punished for it was Herbert Kappler, the SS officer in charge of German police and security services in Rome during the war. He was sentenced to life in prison in 1948.
Source: NY Daily News
January 10, 2012
LABADIE, Mo. — It was bravery at the highest level: William Shemin defied German machine gun fire to sprint across a World War I battlefield and pull wounded comrades to safety. And he did so no fewer than three times.Then, with the platoon’s senior soldiers wounded or killed, the 19-year-old American took over command of his unit and led it to safety, even after a bullet pierced his helmet and lodged behind an ear.Yet Shemin never earned the nation’s highest military citation, the Medal of Honor — a result, many suspected, of the fact that he was Jewish at a time when discrimination ran rampant throughout the U.S. military....
Source: Washington Times
January 23, 2012
Officials in the District are accustomed to asking Congress for full voting rights on behalf of the city’s 600,000 residents or for greater control of city finances - and getting no satisfaction.So when members of Congress proposed the “nationalization” of the District of Columbia World War I Memorial — the only memorial on the Mall exclusively for D.C. veterans — city officials did not jump to support the plan.“The District of Columbia Memorial is for the people of the District of Columbia and it will never be otherwise,” Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s nonvoting member of Congress, said Monday....
Source: BBC News
January 23, 2012
Anti-Jewish feeling is "significantly" entrenched in German society, according to a report by experts appointed by the Bundestag (parliament).They say the internet has played a key role in spreading Holocaust denial, far-right and extreme Islamist views, according to the DPA news agency.They also speak of "a wider acceptance in mainstream society of day-to-day anti-Jewish tirades and actions".The expert group, set up in 2009, is to report regularly on anti-Semitism.The findings of their report, due to be presented on Monday, were that anti-Jewish sentiment was "based on widespread prejudice, deeply-rooted cliches and also on plain ignorance of Jews and Judaism"....
Source: Think Progress
January 23, 2012
In 2010, the conservatives who controlled the Texas Board of Education caused an uproar when they made radical changes to the history curriculum for the state’s 4.8 million public school students. The changes included referring to the country’s first black president as “Barack Hussein Obama,” and requiring students to “contrast” Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ inaugural address with Abraham Lincoln’s philosophical views.To whitewash one of the darkest practices in America history, conservatives proposed that textbooks refer to the slave trade as the “Atlantic triangular trade.”Now Tennessee Tea Party members are taking their efforts a step further and trying to eliminate references to slavery in American history textbooks. Salon reports that Tea Partiers who fetishize America’s founders are “demanding” that students not be taught that many of them owned sla
Source: The Daily Caller
January 22, 2012
CORAL SPRINGS, Fl. — The most exciting part of former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum’s rally Sunday was the soul band that opened for him.Mixing anti-Democratic Party and anti-Obama diatribes with soul classics, “Michael the black man” (as he introduced himself) and his band provided entertainment and smooth tunes both before and after Santorum spoke.During his act, Michael Warns (“Michael the black man’s” real name, according to an associate) urged support for the Republican Party while comparing Democrats to slave masters....Related LinksHNN Hot Topics: Election 2012
Source: The Blaze
January 23, 2012
There have been many accusations made against Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney from conservative opponents, liberals and the media, in regards to his record at Bain, record on abortion, and record on Romneycare.But few have questioned the immigration record of his ancestors.On The Chris Matthews Show Sunday, MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell went there:"And looking ahead to the next primary in Florida, 30 percent of the Hispanic community is Cuban-American. That’s a smaller proportion, and so the Hispanic community there is different. And they are less prone to be susceptible to Mitt Romney’s really hard line on immigration, more prone to the Newt Gingrich approach to immigration. The other interesting little fact is about the Mexican Romneys, those looking back at all of those records say that Mitt Romney should look back at the records because the Romneys that came back from Mexico to the United States, they crossed the border illegally."
Source: LiveScience
January 23, 2012
A recently discovered mysterious "winged" structure in England, which in the Roman period may have been used as a temple, presents a puzzle for archaeologists, who say the building has no known parallels.Built around 1,800 years ago, the structure was discovered in Norfolk, in eastern England, just to the south of the ancient town of Venta Icenorum. The structure has two wings radiating out from a rectangular room that in turn leads to a central room."Generally speaking, [during] the Roman Empire people built within a fixed repertoire of architectural forms," said William Bowden, a professor at the University of Nottingham, who reported the find in the most recent edition of the Journal of Roman Archaeology. The investigation was carried out in conjunction with the Norfolk Archaeological and Historical Research Group.
