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This page features brief excerpts of news 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.
Highlights
Breaking News
This page features brief excerpts of news 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. Because most of our readers read the NYT we usually do not include the paper's stories in HIGHLIGHTS.
Name of source: Telegraph (UK)
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (5-11-10)
Dr Stephen Hughes, from the University of Technology in Brisbane, noticed that the error in the dictionary during research for an article for science teachers.
The OED definition of the word erroneously states that atmospheric pressure makes siphons work, when in fact it is the force of gravity.
Siphons draw fluid from a higher location to a lower one and are often used to remove liquid from containers, such as petrol tanks, that are hard to empty otherwise.
Dr Hughes said he was stunned when he realised that the dictionary had got the definition wrong.
"It is gravity that moves the fluid in a siphon, with the water in the longer downward arm pulling the water up the shorter arm," Dr Hughes said....
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (5-10-10)
The document – a roster of 801 Jewish workers whom the German businessman Oskar Schindler employed to spare them from Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War – is being offered for $2.2 million.
Rosenberg, Emilie Schindler's biographer, says she inherited the widow's interest in the list. The document went through several revisions and eventually saved more than 1,000 Jews. A handful of other surviving copies are held in museums and archives.
The Buenos Aires-based Rosenberg wants proof that the copy Mr Zimet is offering is genuine – and wants to block the sale if it is.
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (5-10-10)
The three chunks of mortar plummeted to the ground around dawn on Sunday, a few hours before thousands of tourists tramped through the gladiatorial arena.
They crashed through a wire protection net which was supposed to have prevented such accidents, but which is more than 30 years old.
Archeologists warned that disaster had only narrowly been averted and that visitors could have been badly injured or even killed by the debris.
The plaster, which dates from Roman times, fell from a 10 square foot section of roof in one of the stone entrance ways through which spectators used to file to watch gladiators take on wild animals, prisoners-of-war and each other.
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (5-10-10)
The questionnaire also asked workers to compare the Nazi dictator to their own chief executive.
Workers were asked to rate the "coolness" of other leaders including Richard Branson, Gordon Brown, Winston Churchill and England manager Fabio Capello.
The survey, entitled 'Making Leadership Cool', was rubber-stamped by NHS West Midlands Strategic Health Authority.
The project was part of a £10,000 project at West Midlands Ambulance Service.
The survey was circulated to all 3,300 workers at West Midlands Ambulance Service at the end of last month.
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (5-10-10)
Florrie Baldwin died peacefully in he sleep at the care home where she lived.
She became the oldest woman in Britain in 2007 and last year became the oldest in Europe.
Speaking when she became Britain's oldest woman, Florrie, of Leeds, West Yorks., who was born in 1896 during the reign of Queen Victoria, attributed her life span to an estimated 30,000 egg baps.
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (5-10-10)
A 14 inch long lower jaw belonging to one of the reptiles was found by an amateur fossil hunter.
Two of its teeth were still present and experts were able to analyse it and produce an artists impression of what the beast looked like.
They have named it Aetodactylus halli after it was uncovered by amateur fossil collector Lance Hall on a construction site near Dallas, Texas.
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (5-10-10)
The section of wood, from the original tree from which the apple fell that inspired Newton's theory of gravity, is normally held in the Royal Society's archives.
It was lent to British-born astronaut Dr Piers Sellers, who will be taking it into orbit, as part of the academic institution's 350th anniversary celebrations.
The tree sample will be accompanied on its trip into space by an image of Sir Isaac, also donated by the Royal Society.
Dr Sellers said: ''We're delighted to take this piece of Sir Isaac Newton's apple tree to orbit. While it's up there, it will be experiencing no gravity, so if it had an apple on it, the apple wouldn't fall.
''I'm pretty sure that Sir Isaac would have loved to see this, assuming he wasn't spacesick, as it would have proved his first law of motion to be correct. After the flight, we will be returning the piece of tree and a flown picture of Sir Isaac Newton back to The Royal Society.''
Lord Rees, Sir Isaac's successor as the current president of the Royal Society, said: ''We are both pleased and proud that such an extraordinary part of scientific history and important element of the Royal Society's archive collection can make this historic trip into space.
''Upon their return the piece of tree and picture of Newton will form part of the History of the Royal Society exhibition that the Society will be holding later this year and will then be held as a permanent exhibit at the Society.''
Nasa's space shuttle Atlantis will lift off for its final, 12-day mission, on May 14 carrying six crew members including Mr Sellers.
Dr Sellers was born in Crowborough, Sussex, in 1955. He was selected as an astronaut candidate by Nasa in 1996.
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (5-10-10)
Mr Obama, who often chides journalists and cable news outlets for obsessing on superficial coverage rather than serious issues, told a class of graduating university students that education was the key to progress.
"You're coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank all that high on the truth meter," Mr Obama said at Hampton University, Virginia.
"With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, - none of which I know how to work - information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation," Obama said.
He bemoaned the fact that "some of the craziest claims can quickly claim traction," in the clamour of certain blogs and talk radio outlets.
"All of this is not only putting new pressures on you, it is putting new pressures on our country and on our democracy."
Mr Obama, who uses the handful of Commencement addresses that he delivers each year to meditate on societal developments broader than the minutiae of everyday politics, warned the world was at a moment of "breathtaking change."
"We can't stop these changes... but we can adapt to them," he said, adding that US workers were in a battle with well-educated foreign workers.
"Education... can fortify you, as it did earlier generations, to meet the tests of your own time," he said.
Hampton University is a historically black college, and Mr Obama noted the huge disparity in educational achievement between African Americans and other racial groups in the United States and the world.
But he urged the graduates to take inspiration from the example of Dorothy Height, a civil and women's rights icon who died, aged 98, last month, who fought racial prejudice to secure a college education.
"A black woman, in 1929, refusing to be denied her dream of a college education," Obama said, reprising Miss Height's life story.
"Refusing to be denied her rights, refusing to be denied her dignity, refusing to be denied... her piece of America's promise."
Mr Obama argued that from the days of the pioneer politicians who founded the United States, until the modern day, education and knowledge had been the key to progress and US democracy.
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (5-7-10)
Conservationists are in discussions with museums over hosting the United States Army Air Force fighter thought to be the oldest surviving aircraft of its type.
The Lockheed-P38 Lighting, known as the Maid of Harlech, crashed on the Gwynedd coast in 1942 when its engines cut out while taking part in secret training exercises.
In 2007 shifting sands revealed the plane for the first time in decades and the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) set about protecting it.
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (5-7-10)
Bolivar, a brilliant military tactician who liberated much of the continent of South America from centuries of Spanish rule, died at the age of 47 in Santa Marta, Colombia on Dec 17, 1830.
He had suffered from a mysterious illness that was believed at the time to be tuberculosis and spent his final days emaciated, coughing and bed ridden.
Dr Paul Auwaerter, an infectious diseases specialist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland carried out a detailed study of his recorded symptoms.
They included darkened skin, extreme weight loss, exhaustion, coughing, loss of consciousness and persistent headaches.
He found Bolivar's condition was probably caused by arsenic which may have entered his system through drinking contaminated water, or when doctors used the naturally occurring poison to try to cure headaches or haemorrhoids.
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (5-7-10)
Mr Medvedev's comments, which also included stinging criticism on the historical role of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, will be interpreted by many as an attempt to distance himself from Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, who has adopted a more ambiguous stance on Russia's often tragic history.
In an interview Mr Medvedev declared that nothing could justify Stalin's crimes against his own people.
He also spoke out strongly against any attempts to rehabilitate Stalin and sought to distance the Kremlin from a series of recent moves to rekindle his memory.
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (5-7-10)
Lieutenant-General Vasily Khristoforov, the top archivist for Russia's FSB security service, said Soviet military medics at the time were only able to determine that Hitler and his mistress Eva Braun had died after ingesting cyanide on April 30, 1945.
He said the "myth" that Hitler died an honourable death by simultaneously shooting himself in the head as he took a cyanide capsule appeared wide of the mark.
Soviet medics found no serious wounds on Hitler's heavily burned body either, he added.
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (5-7-10)
The newly-discovered 12 by 16 inch oil painting was long thought to have been a copy made in the style of the Renaissance master long after his death and dismissed as almost worthless.
But art historians now believe it to be a first draft by Raphael of part of a larger painting, The Holy Family (or 'The Pearl'), which hangs in Madrid's Prado museum.
Name of source: Spiegel Online
SOURCE: Spiegel Online (5-7-10)
The soldier with the Iron Cross on his chest lies in the middle of the street. His steel helmet has rolled away. The Red Army soldiers are turning him onto his back and cleaning their weapons. They take no notice of the photographer kneeling to take the picture. He's already taken dozens of shots today -- this time he's just chosen a corpse for the foreground.
It's a scene from the final days of the World War II, taken somewhere in the center of Berlin. For decades this picture, along with thousands of others, lay in the archives of a Berlin publishing house. Unnoticed. It is only now that the collection has come to light.
The pictures capture a moment in the city that had reached the end of 12 years of dictatorship and a devastating war: Signs of those final battles, of death, destruction and hopelessness -- but also of life growing once again among the ruins. They are photos that portray a grotesque normalcy, in contrast to the better-known images of heroic liberation and optimistic reconstruction. They provide documentation of the city's downfall in the blink of an eye between an end and a beginning. A Berlin that was just beginning to free itself from its lethargy.
The prints fill whole cabinets, endless shelves, countless boxes and files. Few journalists ever visit the photo archive on the first floor of the publishing house on Alexanderplatz -- even photo editor Peter Kroh rarely comes by. The photos he uses at the Berliner Kurier newspaper are usually delivered by photo agencies, or come from stock that was digitized long ago....
Name of source: WaPo
SOURCE: WaPo (5-11-10)
Ronald Reagan was heading to the White House, and Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman -- a champion for women's causes for whom Kagan had toiled 14-hour days as a campaign press assistant -- was leaving Capitol Hill. Kagan, then 20 and imbued with the liberal principles on which she had been raised, said she was flirting with despair that "there was no longer any place for the ideals we held. . . . I wonder how all this could possibly have happened and where on earth I'll be able to get a job next year."
Her piece for the Daily Princetonian on Holtzman's 1980 defeat was a rare moment, then and since, in which Kagan publicly described her emotions and politics in such strikingly personal tones. In the elite spheres of academia and government in which she has learned and worked, Kagan, 50, has more typically exhibited an analytical style, a knack for forging consensus, a pragmatism rather than a passion for her own ideas.
Her life experiences and intellectual style leave open the question of whether President Obama's choice for the Supreme Court would, if confirmed by the Senate, prove the counterweight liberals seek to the overt conservatism of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr.
"She's much more of a lawyer than a partisan," said Geoffrey R. Stone, a University of Chicago Law School professor who was dean when Kagan was hired there. "She is more interested as a scholar in thinking through hard issues rather than advocating particular ideological or political perspectives."
Within the orbits of law and intellectual thought, hers has been an establishment course. The product of two Ivy League universities and Oxford, she clerked for a leading appellate judge and a Supreme Court luminary, Justice Thurgood Marshall. She worked briefly for a blue-chip Washington law firm. Since then, she has alternated between two of the nation's foremost law schools -- Chicago and Harvard -- and the federal government, scaling to the heights of both realms. Last year, Obama chose her as the U.S. solicitor general -- the top attorney for the federal government before the Supreme Court she has now been selected to join....
SOURCE: WaPo (5-10-10)
Elena Kagan was 39 when President Bill Clinton nominated her for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, sometimes referred to as the second most important court in the land. The Republican-controlled Senate never brought her nomination for a vote before Clinton's presidency expired.
Kagan, now 50, went on to become the dean of Harvard Law School, and despite the lack of judicial experience, her name has appeared on every list of people a Democratic president should consider for the high court.
The expectation only grew when Obama made Kagan, a native New Yorker, the first woman to be named as solicitor general, the government's top appellate lawyer and representative at the Supreme Court....
Name of source: NYT
SOURCE: NYT (5-10-10)
In 1986, Mr. Reagan appointed Justice Scalia and elevated Justice William H. Rehnquist to replace Chief Justice Burger. But Mr. Reagan’s nomination of Robert H. Bork a year later was rejected by the Senate after an ideological clash. Only after that vote and another nominee withdrew did Mr. Reagan finally pick Anthony M. Kennedy, a more moderate conservative.
Leery of another such showdown, President George Bush picked a so-called stealth candidate in David H. Souter in 1990, a move conservatives considered a betrayal after he turned out to be more liberal than expected. A year later, Mr. Bush appointed Justice Thomas, who was a favorite of the right, as were the second President Bush’s choices, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito. The 2005 nomination of Harriet E. Miers, on the other hand, collapsed amid a revolt by conservatives who feared another Justice Souter.
Liberals have had Scalia envy for nearly a quarter-century, only to be let down. They considered President Bill Clinton’s selections of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer to be satisfactory but not satisfying, much like the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor last year. While Justice Ginsburg came closest to what they were looking for, given her record of advocacy for women’s rights, she does not go far enough for them on capital punishment and other issues.
Richard Primus, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, said conservatives did more to influence Republican nominations because the energy on court advocacy is on the right, which still resents rulings that barred school-sponsored prayer, legalized abortion and upheld some affirmative action programs. “It still lives off of that anger, and nothing of that sort of fire has really taken hold on the other side,” Professor Primus said.
The left, by contrast, focuses on guarding the status quo, a less animating mission. “The quote-unquote liberals are defending the New Deal and Warren court inheritances,” said Bruce Ackerman, a constitutional scholar at Yale Law School....
SOURCE: NYT (5-10-10)
To stop her from becoming the nation's 112th justice, Democrats would have to abandon President Barack Obama and his second high court pick or almost all of the GOP senators would have to agree to filibuster the nomination -- more than a year after seven of them voted for Kagan to become the solicitor general.
It is unlikely that Republicans will try to block her, said Manuel Miranda, chairman of the conservative Third Branch Conference....
SOURCE: NYT (5-10-10)
She was the razor-sharp newspaper editor and history major at Princeton who examined American socialism, and the Supreme Court clerk for a legal giant, Thurgood Marshall, who nicknamed her “Shorty.” She was the reformed teenage smoker who confessed to the occasional cigar as she fought Big Tobacco for the Clinton administration, and the literature lover who reread Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” every year.
She was the opera-loving, poker-playing, glass-ceiling-shattering first woman to be dean of Harvard Law School, where she reached out to conservatives (she once held a dinner to honor Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia) and healed bitter rifts on the faculty with gestures as simple as offering professors free lunch, just to get them talking.
Elena Kagan has been all of these things, charting a careful and, some might say, calculated path — never revealing too much of herself, never going too far out on a political limb — that has led her to the spot she occupies today: the first female solicitor general of the United States, who won confirmation with the support of some important Republicans, and now, at 50, President Obama’s nominee for the United States Supreme Court.
SOURCE: NYT (5-7-10)
Her life may already have been distilled into pop culture, her name reduced to a punch line about shoes. But a couple of months shy of 81 years, Mrs. Marcos is battling to restore the Marcos dynasty in nationwide elections on Monday, watching over a daughter running for provincial governor and over her only son, who is running for the Senate, a national office that the family hopes will be a stepping-stone back to the presidency.
She herself has been crisscrossing a rural district here in the north, the home of her late husband, Ferdinand E. Marcos, in a campaign that has been violent, even by Philippine standards. On a recent Sunday evening, she attended a fiesta where she was introduced as “still the queen, still the winner.” The next day, she comforted the widow of one of her campaign organizers, the fourth one to be assassinated so far....
SOURCE: NYT (5-7-10)
Name of source: LA Times
SOURCE: LA Times (5-10-10)
Actually, the last time most Americans even took notice of Cox was in 1971 during his storybook wedding to Richard Nixon's oldest daughter in the White House Rose Garden. In the years that followed, the tall, fair-haired Cox turned up often by the side of his shamed father-in-law with the 5 o'clock shadow. The Harvard-trained lawyer altogether served three presidents, legions of legal clients, boards of trustees and good-government panels. He was also a regular at countless GOP fundraisers — the Manhattan blue blood looking at ease in a tuxedo.
Now, at 63, Cox has finally moved from stagehand to director, in the thick of a political drama.
He is the latest chairman of the New York Republican Party and has taken it upon himself to seek redemption for the GOP in this bluest of states. Some would argue he is also seeking deliverance for the family name....
SOURCE: LA Times (5-7-10)
There's no one to fix a leaky roof or complain about a broken window in a vacant building, which is one of the reasons why so many gems of late 19th- and early 20th-century architecture have disappeared from the depopulated hearts of American cities.
So in a way we Angelenos owe a collective thank you to Regino Mendez, a 60-year-old immigrant from Guatemala, for his contributions to historic preservation in the Pico-Union district, just west of downtown.
Mendez pays $300 a month to live in one room of a gorgeous, three-story, century-old Victorian on South Bonnie Brae Street. His building has gabled roofs and an oval window on the front door, and it's one of several homes on the block designated a National Register Historic District.
"In all of Los Angeles there isn't as tranquil a place to live as this one," Mendez told me, which is an odd thing to hear, given the presence in the surrounding neighborhood of at least a half-dozen gangs with overlapping turf. Inside the old Victorian, however, oak beams and creaking floors swallow noise, and Mendez sleeps soundly after a hard day's work at a local garment factory.
Mendez is helping to preserve that architectural gem for future generations simply by living in it. So are hundreds more families living nearby....
Name of source: AP
SOURCE: AP (5-7-10)
Local officials want swift work done to restore the crumbling ruins and start building restaurants and gift shops to draw in tourists, while antiquities officials in Baghdad favor a more painstaking approach to avoid the gaudy restoration mistakes of the past.
The ruins of the millennia-old city, famed for its Hanging Gardens and the Tower of Babel, have suffered heavily over the past decades. Deep in Iraq's verdant south, the cluster of excavated temples and palaces were mostly rebuilt by former ruler Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, using modern yellow brick to erect towering structures that marred the fragile remains of the original mud brick ruins. After Saddam's fall in 2003, a U.S. military base on the site did further damage.
SOURCE: AP (5-10-10)
Obama plans to announce his choice at 10 a.m. in the East Room of the White House. The source spoke on condition of anonymity because the decision, which came after a monthlong search, had not been made public. Shortly before 8 a.m., Kagan emerged from her Washington, D.C., apartment, got into the back seat of a vehicle and was driven to the White House. She did not acknowledge photographers and reporters who had gathered to await her appearance.
Kagan is known as sharp and politically savvy and has enjoyed a blazing legal career. She was the first female dean of Harvard Law School, first woman to serve as the top Supreme Court lawyer for any administration, and now first in Obama's mind to succeed legendary liberal Justice John Paul Stevens....
SOURCE: AP (5-8-10)
Now, a rare map of Boston watersheds is being restored at Tufts University and will offer a look at the history of an expansive water system that 2 million people learned not to take for granted during a massive water main break last week.
The 6-by-9 foot plaster and papier-mache map was hauled to a basement classroom, where students have spent the semester on the meticulous and sometimes boring job of giving the old map new life.
Conservator Ingrid Neuman, who is leading the project, said she knows of no similar maps.
"It's got great historic value," Neuman said. "It's irreplaceable. It goes beyond value ... because there's nothing to compare it to."
SOURCE: AP (5-8-10)
The lag since the indictment, due in part to a feud between the prosecutor and judge, is on track to be the longest for a major civil rights case since authorities in the 1970s began reopening investigations of the slayings of activists from the previous decade.
No trial date has been set for James Bonard Fowler on charges he killed Jimmie Lee Jackson in 1965 during the chaotic aftermath of a nighttime civil rights march in Marion. A grand jury indicted Fowler on murder charges May 9, 2007.
Jackson's daughter wonders if she'll ever be able to fill the gaps about what happened to her father when she was 4 years old....
Name of source: BBC
SOURCE: BBC (5-7-10)
The team was working on a £7m project to improve access between the city centre and the new Quays complex when the remains were unearthed on Tuesday.
The adult skeletons were uncovered, along with the remnants of a coffin, in the city's Kimbrose Triangle.
They will not be displayed and will instead be given a respectful reburial after they are examined.
SOURCE: BBC (5-10-10)
His announcement came as he and the Conservatives woo the Lib Dems in a battle to run the country.
Mr Brown's presence was seen as harming Labour's chances of Lib Dem backing.
The Tories reacted by making a "final offer" to the Lib Dems of a referendum on changing the voting method to the Alternative Vote system.
Conservative sources have told the BBC that on Monday morning the Conservative and Liberal Democrat teams were discussing a stripped-down deal in which the Lib Dems would not topple the Tories in a confidence vote.
SOURCE: BBC (5-10-10)
Authorities were threatening to exhume the body of Sir Gilbert Mackereth, who is buried in a San Sebastian cemetery, because of unpaid taxes on the plot.
The Sun newspaper has paid the 330 euro (£287) tax owed on the plot.
SOURCE: BBC (5-7-10)
The National Trust charity says the stolen objects provide a unique insight into the Raj and are irreplaceable.
The artefacts, including a Burmese bowl, caskets and a wine cooler were stolen from Kedleston Hall.
They were acquired by the viceroy for the 1903 Delhi Durbar - the celebration to mark a royal coronation.
Name of source: Chronicle of Higher Education
SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education (5-10-10)
In 2005, Ms. Kagan, along with several dozen other Harvard law professors, signed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold a lower-court ruling that overturned the Solomon amendment, a 1994 law that allows the federal government to withhold funds from colleges that bar or limit military recruiting on their campuses....
Name of source: Newsweek
SOURCE: Newsweek (5-10-10)
The New York-born Kagan would increase the Court's domination by establishmentarians who attended Harvard and Yale law schools—six and three justices, respectively—and its remoteness from the struggles of ordinary Americans. But what really animates most critics is hostility to a nominee whom they consider too liberal or too conservative.
Kagan gets it from both sides. Although she has been extraordinarily careful to keep her views on issues such as abortion, race, and religion to herself, most conservatives—convinced that Obama would never have chosen her had he not been confident of her positions on the big issues—suspect that she's too liberal. And some left-liberals warn that she's not liberal enough.
The conservatives' main strategy will be to portray her as representative of the academic left's hostility to the military—the nation's most popular major institution—and even (conservatives say) to America itself. This was the basis for the 31 Republican votes against confirming her as solicitor general....
Kagan's stance on this issue was the path of least resistance in the legal academic world. But it may not play well in Peoria. Indeed, even one moderate-liberal commentator, Peter Beinart, called Kagan's stance a "stupid and counterproductive" surrender to "the left-wing mindlessness that sometimes prevails on campus."
Ironically, Kagan also has forceful critics in the same left-wing circles that Beinart faults her for appeasing. They are especially unhappy with her failure to compile a record of aggressively advocating liberal causes over the years, with her hiring at Harvard of two or three conservative, white male professors—and too few women and minorities—and with her arguments as solicitor general in support of Obama terrorism policies similar to those of the Bush administration....
Name of source: Irish Times
SOURCE: Irish Times (5-10-10)
Writing the Famine in Fiction and Song is the theme for the first in a series of lectures organised by Mayo County Council and the Murrisk Development Association. Writer and songwriter Brendan Graham, vocalist Cathy Jordan and pianist Feargal Murray will participate in the literary and musical evening at the Holy Trinity Church, Westport, from 8pm.
Almost 90 per cent of Mayo’s population depended on the potato when blight hit crops from August 1845.
An estimated one million people died and another million emigrated as a result of the 1845-50 famine, and Mayo’s population dropped dramatically from almost 389,000 to just over 274,000 in the decade from 1841 to 1851.
Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs Pat Carey said the week-long programme “blends culture, history, music and song, and promises to be a fitting tribute to those who died or suffered loss in the Great Famine”....
Name of source: BBC News
SOURCE: BBC News (5-10-10)
It said the information had come from Eulex, the EU police mission in Kosovo, and Serbia was sending investigators.
The victims are believed to have been killed during the 1998-99 conflict, when Serbian forces fought ethnic Albanian rebels in Kosovo.
The grave is near the town of Raska, close to the border with Kosovo.
There had been rumours two years ago that the grave existed, but searches at that time found nothing.
'Beneath building'
The war crimes prosecutor's office said it would be several days before exhumations could begin at the site in Rudnica, about 180km (110 miles) south of Serbia's capital, Belgrade.
Officials said the remains were buried beneath a building whose foundations had been deliberately constructed to hide the site, reports the BBC's Mark Lowen in Belgrade.
The prosecutor, Vladimir Vukcevic, said the discovery was a sign that Serbia was committed to coming to terms with its history.
"This is more proof that Serbia does not shy away from its dark past and is ready to bring to justice all those who have committed crimes," Mr Vukcevic was quoted as saying by AFP news agency.
Our correspondent says identifying the victims through DNA analysis is likely to take several more years - and prolong the painful period of reconciliation.
It is not the first time mass graves from the conflict have been found in Serbia. The bodies of more than 800 Kosovo Albanians were found in several locations in Serbia in 2001, including police compounds.
The bodies were moved out of Kosovo before a Nato bombing campaign forced Serbian security forces out of the region.
Other, smaller mass graves have been found containing Serbian victims of ethnic Albanians.
Researchers in Serbia and Kosovo say more than 11,000 people died in the Kosovo conflict, most of them ethnic Albanian, but at least 2,300 Serbian.
Hundreds missing
A further 1,800 people are classified as missing, according to Eulex figures, but are presumed to be dead.
A former top Serbian police official, Vlastimir Djordjevic, is currently on trial at the UN's Hague-based war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslovia.
He was allegedly involved in the murders of hundreds of ethnic Albanians and the deportation of 800,000 others from Kosovo during the conflict, when he was in charge of police forces in Serbia.
He denies charges of deportation, murder and persecution.
He was a close aide to the late Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who died in tribunal custody in 2006 before a verdict was reached in his trial for war crimes.
Belgrade withdrew forces from the Serbian province of Kosovo in 1999 after a Nato bombing campaign, and the area was put under UN control.
Kosovo's declaration of independence in 2008 has been recognised by more than 50 countries, including the US and most EU states, but not recognised by more than 100, including Serbia and Russia.
Recent Serbian governments have been pro-Western and last year the country submitted a formal application to join the EU.
But membership negotiations cannot begin in earnest until two war crimes suspects - including the former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic - have been captured.
SOURCE: BBC News (5-10-10)
For a modest sum, guests can stay at a grim-looking hotel in Slovakia's Tatra Mountains, to relive the sights, sounds, and smells of pre-1989 holidays, the BBC's Rob Cameron reports.
It's 8.30am and holidaymaker Viera Kubisova is eating breakfast. I think I've upset her.
"It's history. That's all it is. It's history, and it'll never be erased," she says, waving a spicy sausage at me.
She is upset because I've asked if she was bothered by the bust of Stalin in the hotel lobby.
"It's our history and it's inside us," she continues, still brandishing the sausage.
"People of my generation felt it for 40 years. We lived it, and we'll never be able to detach ourselves from it."
Viera, from the Slovak capital Bratislava, is one of 80 or so Czechs and Slovaks who have spent a week enjoying a "retro" holiday in the style of the workers' breaks that used to be organised by the Communist Revolutionary Trade Union Movement - or ROH, to use the Czech acronym.
The holidays were a reward for a year of toil in the offices, factories, and coal mines of socialist Czechoslovakia.
Spirit of socialism
Mostly middle-aged or elderly, Viera and friends have come to the large and eerie Hotel Morava in Tatranska Lomnica, a winter resort in Slovakia's Tatra Mountains, to rekindle fond memories of ROH holidays gone by.
The hotel rooms are gloomy and claustrophobic. There is a weird smell in the bathroom. Ugly 1950s chairs sit empty at the end of silent corridors. It is a bit like the hotel in Stephen King's The Shining, only with Lenin and Stalin playing the ghosts.
And for some guests the authentic communist ambience is all part of the hotel's charm.
But surly communist-style service is no longer a feature.
"The idea came about totally by chance," explains Petr Krc, Czech travel agency owner and creator of the ROH retro holiday.
"The Morava's manager was showing us round the basement, and we came across a storeroom. Inside were boxes and boxes of flags, towels, napkins, cutlery, glasses, all with the ROH logo on them," he says.
"I said to him 'What are you going to do with this lot?' And he said 'I don't know, guess we'll hire a skip and chuck it'. And I said 'For God's sake, don't do that! You're sitting on a goldmine!'"
At 7am, the hotel wakes with a start. Loudspeakers crackle into life, blaring out a mixture of revolutionary songs and socialist-era pop. Those guests still asleep are roused by a hotel worker with a whistle.
Bleary-eyed and yawning, the holidaymakers are dragged out onto the hotel lawn for some vigorous open-air exercise.
At this point it becomes clear that the whole thing is more of an elaborate practical joke than a real exercise in nostalgia.
Dressed in an assortment of pyjamas, nightcaps and red scarves, the guests try their best to keep up with the exercises before collapsing, some in fits of giggles, on the grass.
"I really wouldn't politicise it too much, it's just a bit of a laugh," says Vladimir Polak, dressed in the light blue uniform of the Communist Union of Youth. Vladimir clearly bade farewell to youth several decades ago, so presumably the uniform is not his original.
"It's about reliving your memories - in my case childhood memories of having to stand on the pavement and wave a red flag on May Day. We're just having a bit of fun."
The fun continues with a train ride to a neighbouring resort, where a mock May Day parade awaits. Even Lenin is on hand to greet the marchers; clearly he was the only local man with a goatee and a flat cap. I also don't remember anything in the history books about Lenin wowing revolutionary crowds with jokes.
"Look, you have to laugh at communism," says Petr Krc, when I ask him whether if it is really appropriate to make light of a brutal totalitarian dictatorship.
"Back then, we had to whisper, you couldn't make jokes about the regime. Now all of us are laughing - and this time we're laughing out loud."
SOURCE: BBC News (5-10-10)
She was born in Brooklyn. Her mother was an actress and her father ran a small hotel.
Horne's parents separated when she was three, and she was boarded out. She did not live with her mother again until she was 15.
A year later she became a chorus singer in Harlem's fashionable Cotton Club. Her mother used to chaperone her there every night.
At 19, she ran away from home, got married and went on to raise two children.
Musical numbers edited
By now she had begun to sing regularly on radio and toured with Noble Sissle's orchestra in the mid-1930s, and sang with the Charlie Barnett band in the early 1940s.
After conquering New York's Cafe Society club, she was snapped up by Hollywood on the coming of sound.
She appeared in a cluster of musicals including Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather, the title song of which became her signature tune.
Her mixed ancestry - she was part white, Blackfoot Indian and Senegalese - affected her career.
During a period when black women were cast as menials, not stars, Lena Horne found many of her numbers edited out of the versions shown in southern states.
The studios lightened her appearance with special white make-up. But she refused to play stereotyped roles.
On one occasion for a film musical, she refused to be cast as an exotic Latin American.
"I don't have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I'd become," she later said. "I'm me, and I'm like nobody else."
On tour, she often slept on the coach when hotels refused to rent her a room. She became active in the civil-rights movement and was blacklisted in the McCarthy era.
In the 1960s she became increasingly vocal, once throwing a lamp at a fellow customer in a Beverley Hills restaurant for making a racial slur.
Horne also marched on Washington DC in 1963 along with 250,000 other people to hear Martin Luther King deliver his "I have a dream" speech.
Catalogue of tragedy
She was happily married for 24 years to a white man, Lennie Hayton, musical director of MGM in Paris. But this only added to her emotional pressure.
By the 1950s, in musicals like Jamaica, black artists were beginning to gain acceptance.
Lena Horne went on to win international fame, finding her niche giving jazz renditions to popular songs such as Honeysuckle Rose and The Lady is a Tramp.
For 13 months in 1971-72 she suffered a catalogue of tragedy. First she lost her father. Then her son from her first marriage died of kidney failure. Soon afterwards, Lennie Hayton had a fatal heart attack.
Shattered, she went into retirement but, after a time, friends persuaded her to resume her career.
It reached a late climax in 1981 when her one-woman show, the award-winning The Lady and her Music, based on her life and career, ran for more than a year on Broadway and, subsequently, in London.
Name of source: National Parks Traveler
SOURCE: National Parks Traveler (5-10-10)
Take, for instance, these opening passages from Acadia National Park, Maine, written for the summer season of June 15-October 15 1931, back when Horace M. Albright was the National Park Service director:
Our national parks are areas of superlative scenery which are set apart and maintained by the Federal Government for the use and enjoyment of the people. They are the people's property; the Government, the people's agent and trustee.
Few in number, but covering an extraordinary range of landscape interest, they have all, with a single exception, been formed by setting aside for park purposes lands already held in ownership by the United States and lie in the nationally younger regions of the country to the westward of the Mississippi.
The single exception is Acadia National Park, occupying old French territory on the coast of Maine and created in 1919 from lands collected during the previous decade and presented to the Government. The name it bears commemorates the ancient French possession of the land the part it had in the long congest to control the destinies and development of North America. The park is unique as a member of the national system in its contact with the ocean and inclusion of nationally owned coastal waters in its recreational territory.
Acadia National Park lies surrounded by the sea, occupying as its nucleus and central feature the bold range of the Mount Desert Mountains, whose ancient uplift, worn by immeasurable time and recent ice erosion, remains to form the largest rock-built island on our Atlantic Coast; 'l'Isle des Monts deserts," as Champlain named it, with the keen descriptive sense of the early French explorers.
What was important to the Interior Department and the National Park Service when compiling this 22-page pamphlet on Acadia?
Well, before addressing Acadia there was an entire page -- yes, one entire page -- that listed the country's "National Parks at a Glance." In 1931, this list could indeed fill just one page: Acadia, Bryce Canyon, Carlsbad Caverns, Crater Lake, General Grant, Glacier, Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, Great Smoky Mountains (proposed, the authors noted), Hawaii (no clear delineation among the parks that now exist in that state), Hot Springs, Lassen Volcanic, Mesa Verde, Mount McKinley (you know it as Denali), Mount Rainier, Platt (no longer a separate park unit), Rocky Mountain, Sequoia, Sullys Hill (also no longer a park unit), Wind Cave, Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Zion.
Alongside each of those parks was a sentence or two of "distinctive characteristics." For instance, Bryce Canyon was described as holding "Box canyons filled with countless array of fantastically eroded pinnacles -- Best exhibit of vivid coloring of earth's materials."
Crater Lake, meanwhile, was a "Lake of extraordinary blue in crater of extinct volcano -- Sides 1,000 feet high -- Interesting lava formations -- Fine fishing."
Yosemite harbored "Valley of world-famed beauty -- Lofty cliffs -- Romantic vistas -- Many waterfalls of extraordinary height -- 3 groves of Big Trees -- High Sierra -- Waterwheel Falls -- Good trout fishing."
Here are some other interesting snippets from the pamphlet. Keep in mind when they were written, how society then viewed nature, and where we stand today.
On Acadia being a "Wild-Life Sanctuary"
One important aspect of our national parks and monuments is that they -- unlike the forests, devised to follow economic lines -- are absolute sanctuaries, islands of shelter for the native life in all but noxious forms. Like the monasteries in the Middle Ages that sheltered -- all too fragmentarily -- the literature and learning of the classic period, they are a means of incalculable value for preserving in this destructive time the wealth of forms and species we have inherited from the past and have a duty to hand on undiminished to the future, so far as that be possible.
In this aspect of a wild-life sanctuary, plant and animal, Acadia National Park is remarkable. Land and sea, woodland, lake, and mountain all are represented in it in wonderful concentration. In it, too, the northern and temperature zone floras meet and overlap, and land climate meets sea climate, each tempering the other. It lies directly in the coast migration route of birds and exhibits at its fullest the Acadian forest, made famous by Evangeline, and the northernmost extension of that great Appalachian forest which at the landing of De Monts stretched without a break from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf and is the oldest, by the record of the rocks, and richest in existing species of any mingled hardwood and coniferous forest in the Temperate Zone. And it possesses, also, a rich biologic field in the neighboring ocean, the parent habitat of life.
On "Motor Travel" in the park
No place in the East offers an objective point of greater interest for motor travel than Acadia National Park and its surrounding coast resorts, which provide accommodations for its visitors. In addition to the park roads, there is an excellent system of State and town roads encircling and traversing Mount Desert Island which reaches every point of interest. These roads have a combined length of over 200 miles, and exhibit a combination of seashore and inland scenery not found elsewhere on the eastern coast.
On "Motor Camping"
A public camp ground is maintained in the park for motorists bringing their own camping outfits. The ground is equipped with running water, modern sanitary conveniences, outdoor fireplaces, electric lights, and places to wash clothes. It is under the close supervision of the park authorities, and safety and freedom from annoyance is assured. No charge is made for the camping privilege.
Selected "Rules and Regulations"
Camping -- No camp shall be made except at designated localities, and when made must be kept neat and orderly. Blankets, clothing, hammocks, or any other articles of camp equipment shall not be hung or exhibited near any public road or trail. Camp grounds must be thoroughly cleaned before they are abandoned. Cans, bottles, cast-off clothing, and all other debris shall be placed in garbage receptacles or buried in pits provided for the purpose.
Fires -- Fires constitute one of the greatest perils to a park. They shall not be kindled except with the express permission of the superintendent or his representatives, and in designated localities; they shall be lighted only when necessary, and when no longer needed shall be completely extinguished, all embers and ash beds being smother with earth or water so that no possibility remains of their again becoming alive. No lighted match, cigar, or cigarette shall be dropped in grass, twigs, leaves, or tree mold, or thrown away unextinguished.
Hunting -- The park is a sanctuary for wild life of every sort, and hunting, killing, wounding, capturing, or frightening any bird or wild animal in the park is strictly prohibited.
Gambling -- Gambling in any form, or the operation of gambling devices, whether for merchandise or otherwise, is prohibited.
Dogs and cats -- Cats are not permitted in the park and dogs only when under leash.
More evidence of the simpler, comparatively less-expensive time is found in the pamphlet's listing of hotels and boarding houses. Rooms ranged from $2 and up, some with three meals a day. Telephone numbers for the establishments were three digits. Imagine that.
Name of source: St. Petersburg Times (FL)
SOURCE: St. Petersburg Times (FL) (5-5-10)
A stranger from the Netherlands was asking about her family. And he offered some startling news of his own.
"Being a collector of WW II items and stories and, in the first place, a great admirer of the American soldiers that liberated our country at the end of WW II, I found while using my metal detector a Dog-Tag with the name: Milton S. Reese written on it,'' wrote a man called Felix de Klein.
Is she Milton S. Reese's granddaughter, he asked. Is her mother Midge Trubey and is she Milton S. Reese's daughter? Did Milton S. Reese serve in the U.S. Army during World War II and was he in the Netherlands?
"You have found the right person and the right family," she replied.
By then, Trubey, house manager at Ronald McDonald House Central in St. Petersburg, had broken the news to her mother, Midge, a retired caterer, florist and event planner.
Midge Trubey and her sisters, Alice Blanc and Robin Ragsdale, likened the news to having their adored father, who died in 1992, back — if only for a moment.
"It truly is like your lost loved one just reaches out to touch you,'' Midge Trubey, 61, said.
"It's kind of like a little bit of Daddy popping back up again," said Blanc, 55, who works in claims for Allstate.
Ragsdale, a former Indian Rocks Beach resident who retired to Anna Maria Island, added: "It's one of those things you don't ever expect to have happen. It's like Daddy coming back and saying, 'Hi, I'm here.' "
Their father had been a communications sergeant during World War II, serving with the Army's 101st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles. He was awarded the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star.
Over in the small Dutch village of Hernen, de Klein, 43, a married father of two young children, was curious about the American whose dog tag he'd found. After scouring the Internet, he found Melanie Trubey through her work at Ronald McDonald House. Days later, the carpenter wrote in an e-mail to the St. Petersburg Times that his hobby as a collector of World War II artifacts had been inspired by his grandfather's stories of the conflict.
"With my metal detector, I go to the battlefields of Market Garden and dig up all the relics,'' he said, referring to the Allies' Operation Market Garden, described as one of the boldest plans of World War II.
De Klein found the dog tag bearing Milton S. Reese's name at the site of a U.S. field hospital. As to how it got there, one only has to turn to the late St. Petersburg man's daughters, each of whom is the repository of a different piece of his story.
"When they made the invasion, he was in a glider and the glider crashed into a tree. Daddy was in a field hospital,'' Midge Trubey said.
Their father and another soldier survived the crash, said Blanc, who learned parts of her father's tale when the Army buddy visited the family home. Their father was piloting the glider when it crashed, Blanc said. The equipment it carried rolled forward, trapping or killing their fellow soldiers. Her father and his buddy were rescued by a first aid convoy, which promised to send help for the others.
"Unfortunately, the Germans came through and they killed them,'' Blanc said.
Ragsdale, 60, had heard few details of her father's war story.
"He broke his ankle,'' she said. "He never elaborated what happened to him after that and how he got to where he got.''
After the war, their father returned home and married.
"Mother was divorced with two of us girls and he had never been married and fell madly in love with my mom,'' Midge Trubey said, adding that she was 3 at the time and sister Robin was 1.
Their mother, Sarah Jane, and father had two more daughters, Alice, and Carol Ann, the baby of the blended family. Carol Ann died three years ago.
• • •
For more than three decades, their father worked for the city of St. Petersburg. His jobs included assistant to the city manager, director of service and information and manager of central records and mail service. He was sanitation director during the contentious 1968 sanitation strike. Midge Trubey said her father's car was checked for bombs every morning before he went to work and when he left at night. He also helped start the Mainsail Arts Festival.
Milton Reese was 71 when he died.
For his family, news of the find an ocean away is bittersweet.
Blanc, the keeper of her father's Bronze Star, badges and the flag from his funeral, wants to donate some of the memorabilia to de Klein for his private collection in the Netherlands.
"He's very proud that the Americans freed his country. It's quite moving that he's doing this,'' she said.
There's one thing she hopes de Klein would do for her. She wants to touch the dog tag that hung near her father's heart more than 60 years ago.
Then, she promises, she'd send it back.
Name of source: Cleveland.com
SOURCE: Cleveland.com (5-9-10)
"Guard!" says a male voice on the recording, which two forensic audio experts enhanced and evaluated at the request of The Plain Dealer. Several seconds pass. Then, "All right, prepare to fire!"
"Get down!" someone shouts urgently, presumably in the crowd. Finally, "Guard! . . . " followed two seconds later by a long, booming volley of gunshots. The entire spoken sequence lasts 17 seconds.
The previously undetected command could begin to explain the central mystery of the Kent State tragedy - why 28 Guardsmen pivoted in unison atop Blanket Hill, raised their rifles and pistols and fired 67 times, killing four students and wounding nine others in an act that galvanized sentiment against the Vietnam War.
The order indicates that the gunshots were not spontaneous, or in response to sniper fire, as some have suggested over the years....
Name of source: CBN.com
SOURCE: CBN.com (5-8-10)
Israel's very existence as a country is anchored "first and foremost" in the country's "national and emotional legacy," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in February.
Sadly, many Israeli youngsters don't even know their own history....
Name of source: ABC News (AU)
SOURCE: ABC News (AU) (5-7-10)
The remains of the soldiers, who were killed in the 1916 Battle of Fromelles, were discovered in 2008....
Name of source: English.news.cn
SOURCE: English.news.cn (5-8-10)
Hu spoke while meeting with representatives of the Russian veterans of World War II, who participated in the battles for the liberation of China's Northeast.
"It is an ironclad fact that China and the Soviet Union have made exceptional contributions to the success of the world's anti-fascist war, and the Chinese people highly valued the Soviet people's role in the war and would always firmly remember the Soviet people's assistance to us at a critical juncture," Hu said.
Hu also called for strengthened strategic coordination between China and Russia in a complex and volatile international situation....
Name of source: Gulf News (Qatar)
SOURCE: Gulf News (Qatar) (5-9-10)
Radwan Atassi, the grandson of former president Hashem Al Atassi and a historian of modern Syria, says this change could be attributed to a number of recent developments.
“The government is no longer passive about that period of history as five decades have already passed,” Atassi told Gulf News.
“Reconnecting also creates an identity for Syrians to build on and the new generation under the age of 50 has renewed interest in learning about their modern history which for a period of many years became unknown to most Syrians.”
“Whereas the past used to be looked upon as grim, a new phenomenon is occuring where it is being romantisised as if it had no shortcomings or mistakes, which was not the case at all.”...
Name of source: Io9
SOURCE: Io9 (5-8-10)
Disclaimer: It's almost impossible to quantify or define "worst" in this context. Number of lives lost? Amount of environmental damage? Sheer volume of oil spilled, or coal ignited? There's no way to be completely scientific about it. We attempted to compile the most horrifying, or objectively largest, disasters, and also to represent the different types of disasters that have befallen our fossil fuel industry. Feel free to chime in in comments with your own "favorite" disasters.
And two of the biggest disasters stem from Iraq's actions in the 1990 Gulf War — so they were intentional, but still qualify for a place on the list.
Largest Oil Spill Of All Time: Really, this list could be mostly oil spills. There have been so many. You only have to look at the Wikipedia page to see that enough oil has been splashed in the water to keep all our cars running for decades. The largest, in terms of volume of oil, was the Gulf War Oil Spill, in which Iraq opened the valves at its oil terminal and dumped oil into the Gulf, in an attempt to keep U.S. forces from landing. The resulting slick was 4,242 square miles, and five inches thick. It's between five and 27 times bigger than the Exxon Valdez spill. The largest accidental oil spill, in gallons, was Ixtoc I in Mexico, which dumped half a million tons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico and polluted 162 miles of U.S. beaches. A rare sea turtle's natural habitat was flooded, and the endangered turtles had to be airlifted to safety. Honorable mention also has to go to the Atlantic Empress, a Greek oil tanker that managed to be involved in two separate massive oil spills....
Name of source: Discovery News
SOURCE: Discovery News (5-6-10)
For a long time, scientists believed that evolution was progressive, and that organisms evolved toward perfection through competition and superiority, much like the progression of human invention and technology. The prevailing wisdom has been that dinosaurs out-competed other similar reptile groups, taking over the world suddenly and by storm.
But life on Earth does not evolve like the personal computer, the internet, or cell phones do. Dinosaurs are not newspapers, or Kindle, and humans are not iPads.
Instead we evolve at random, governed only by the forces of natural selection. When applied to the study of dinosaurs, scientists realized they did not necessarily rise to dominance because of some innate superiority. Dinosaurs, the paper's authors suggest, dinosaurs were Triassic underdogs who owe their ascent to opportunism rather than superiority.
Name of source: The Independent
SOURCE: The Independent (5-7-10)
The team's efforts were led by Professor Vance Watrous and Matt Buell of the University at Buffalo. Located on the north coast, Gournia was in use during the neo-palatial period (ca. 1700-1450 BC), when Minoan civilization was at its height. The town sits atop a low ridge with four promontories on its coastline. Two of these promontories end in high vertical cliffs that give the town a defensive advantage, and it is here that the fortification system was discovered.
The town consists of around 60 tightly-packed houses, a ship shed, and a small palace in the centre, and archaeologists have discovered evidence of wine making, bronze-working and stone-working at the site. “Gournia gives you, the visitor, a real feeling of what an Aegean town was actually like. Walking up the streets, past the houses, you feel like you’ve been transported into the past,” said Buell.
Name of source: Fox News
SOURCE: Fox News (5-7-10)
It is the first time that human skeletons dating from the end of the Neolithic period to the Bronze Age have been discovered in Morocco, said Youssef Bokbot, leader of the team carrying out the digs.
The digs, which began in 2006, were in a cave 11 miles from Khemisset.
Name of source: CNN
SOURCE: CNN (5-7-10)
Three years after the 11 million-gallon spill in Prince William Sound blackened 1,500 miles of Alaska coastline, the herring on which he and other Cordova fishermen heavily relied disappeared from the area. Platt and some others stuck around, fishing for salmon and hoping things would improve.
The herring never returned to Cordova. Platt's income plummeted, severely straining his marriage and psyche. He dipped into his sons' college funds to support his family.
SOURCE: CNN (5-7-10)
The network announced their programming plans for the upcoming year Thursday, and among some of the shows in the script development phase is a half-hour cartoon called “JC.”
The series would be about “JC (Jesus Christ) wanting to escape his father's enormous shadow and to live life in NYC as a regular guy. A lot has changed in 2000 years and he is the ultimate fish out of water,” according to a press release. “Meanwhile his all-powerful yet apathetic father would rather be playing video games than listening to JC recount his life in the city. JC is a playful take on religion and society with a sprinkle of dumb.”
