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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: AP
SOURCE: AP (8-5-12)
A hundred meters (yards) or so from taxiing airliners, Iraqi archaeologist Ali al-Fatli is showing a visitor around the delicately carved remains of a church that may date back some 1,700 years to early Christianity.
The church, a monastery and other surrounding ruins have emerged from the sand over the past five years with the expansion of the airport serving the city of Najaf, and have excited scholars who think this may be Hira, a legendary Arab Christian center.
"This is the oldest sign of Christianity in Iraq," said al-Fatli, pointing to the ancient tablets with designs of grapes that litter the sand next to intricately carved monastery walls.
The site's discovery in 2007 and its subsequent neglect are symbolic of a Christianity that has long enriched this country, and is now in decline as hundreds of thousands have fled the violence that followed the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
At the same time, the circumstances of the find reflect a renaissance for Najaf, a holy Shiite Muslim city. The airport expansion that revealed the ruins was needed because Najaf attracts multitudes of pilgrims.
The ruins left in the baking heat are within the airport perimeter and relatively safe from vandals and looters. The site's stone crosses and larger artifacts have been moved to the National Museum in Baghdad.
For al-Fatli, it's all very tantalizing. "I know if we were to work more, we will find more and similar churches," he said.
But there is no money to mount a proper dig, he laments. In a country where bombings constantly kill people and much of the populace lacks reliable electricity or clean water, archaeological preservation is a low priority...
Historians believe Hira was founded around 270 A.D., grew into a major force in Mesopotamia centuries before the advent of Islam, and reputedly was a cradle of Arabic script...
SOURCE: AP (8-4-12)
Senator Robert C. Byrd obtained secret F.B.I. documents about the civil rights movement that were leaked by the C.I.A. and set off an angry confrontation between the two agencies in the 1960s, according to newly released F.B.I. records.
Mr. Byrd, a Democrat from West Virginia who died in June 2010 at age 92, sought the intelligence because he suspected that Communists and subversives were guiding the civil rights cause, the records show. Decades before he became the longest-serving member of Congress in history, he stalled and voted against major civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s. He also belonged to the Ku Klux Klan as a young man in the 1940s, and the F.B.I. cited that membership while weighing his requests for the classified information, the records show....
SOURCE: AP (8-2-12)
The skeleton of Australia's most notorious criminal will finally be returned to his descendants 132 years after he was executed, the government said Thursday, ending the family's long quest to find and properly bury the remains of a man many Australians now consider a folk hero.
Ned Kelly led a gang of bank robbers in Australia's southern Victoria state before he was hanged in 1880. The whereabouts of his corpse was long unknown, but forensic scientists identified Kelly's nearly headless skeleton last year after it was found in a mass grave outside a now-closed prison.
Most of Kelly's skull, which was stolen long ago, is still missing, but the identification of the skeleton was followed by a battle over what to do with his bones.
The property developer of the former Pentridge Prison site where Kelly's skeleton was buried had hoped to keep the remains on the grounds. Kelly's descendants wanted the skeleton so they could have a private burial....
SOURCE: AP (8-1-122)
Gaza's ruling Hamas has criticized a Palestinian official for visiting a memorial at the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz and paying respects to its 1.5 million victims there, most of them Jews.
Hamas official Fawzi Barhoum, expressing the Islamic militant group's position, claimed Wednesday that the Holocaust "is a big lie." He said last week's visit to the Auschwitz by Ziad al-Bandak, an adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, went against Palestinian public opinion. Abbas and Hamas are political rivals....
Name of source: NYT
SOURCE: NYT (8-4-12)
RIO DE JANEIRO — Her nom de guerre was Estela. Part of a shadowy urban guerrilla group at the time of her capture in 1970, she spent three years behind bars, where interrogators repeatedly tortured her with electric shocks to her feet and ears, and forced her into the pau de arara, or parrot’s perch, in which victims are suspended upside down naked, from a stick, with bound wrists and ankles.
That former guerrilla is now Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff. As a truth commission begins examining the military’s crackdown on the population during a dictatorship that lasted two decades, Brazilians are riveted by chilling details emerging about the painful pasts of both their country and their president.
The schisms of that era, which stretched from 1964 to 1985, live on here. Retired military officials, including Maurício Lopes Lima, 76, a former lieutenant colonel accused of torturing Ms. Rousseff, have questioned the evidence linking the military to abuses. Rights groups, meanwhile, are hounding Mr. Lopes Lima and others accused of torture, encircling their residences in cities across Brazil. “A torturer of the dictatorship lives here,” they recently wrote in red paint on the entrance to Mr. Lopes Lima’s apartment building in the seaside resort city of Guarujá, part of a street-theater protest....
SOURCE: NYT (8-3-12)
SILETZ, Ore. — Local native languages teeter on the brink of oblivion all over the world as the big linguistic sweepstakes winners like English, Spanish or Mandarin ride a surging wave of global communications.
But the forces that are helping to flatten the landscape are also creating new ways to save its hidden, cloistered corners, as in the unlikely survival of Siletz Dee-ni. An American Indian language with only about five speakers left — once dominant in this part of the West, then relegated to near extinction — has, since earlier this year, been shouting back to the world: Hey, we’re talking. (In Siletz that would be naa-ch’aa-ghit-’a.)
“We don’t know where it’s going to go,” said Bud Lane, a tribe member who has been working on the online Siletz Dee-ni Talking Dictionary for nearly seven years, and recorded almost all of its 10,000-odd audio entries himself. In its first years the dictionary was password protected, intended for tribe members.
SOURCE: NYT (8-3-12)
The governor of Russia’s Krasnodar region, which will host the Winter Olympics in 2014, has enlisted the area’s Cossacks as an auxiliary police force, urging them to prevent darker-skinned Muslims from the North Caucasus from moving there.
The governor, Aleksandr Tkachev, in a speech to law enforcement officers on Thursday, announced that as of September, 1,000 Cossacks would be paid from the budget to maintain public order. In the speech, he said the Cossacks — whose paramilitary forces served the czars — could take measures beyond what the police were allowed.
“What you can’t do, the Cossacks can,” he told the officers in the speech, which was widely circulated on the Internet on Friday. “We have no other way — we shall stamp it out, instill order; we shall demand paperwork and enforce migration policies.”
He said that a neighboring region had stopped performing its traditional function as “a filter” between central Russia and the North Caucasus. Internal migrants from the North Caucasus are often not welcomed by ethnic Russians, who consider them outsiders.
He said ethnic Russians there were “already feeling uncomfortable,” and that the people who settled the region, Cossacks among them, “year after year are losing their position.”
“Who will answer when the first blood is spilled, when interethnic conflicts start? And sooner or later it will happen,” Mr. Tkachev said. He offered Kosovo as an example, saying that Albanians “began to destroy churches, forced the dominance of their culture, their religion, began conflicts, imposed pressure, blood, small war, big war. And that was it — there was no country, there were no people, thousands of refugees all over the world.”
Cossacks, the fearsome horsemen of 19th-century Russia, have experienced a revival under Mr. Tkachev, who has provided them with financial support, uniforms and official status. After last month’s floods, Cossacks were deployed to rescue survivors and distribute aid. Seven years ago they drove out a local population of Meskhetian Turks, something their leaders still celebrate, recently telling an American visitor, “We sent them to you!”...
SOURCE: NYT (8-3-12)
Gerald Gold, an editor for The New York Times who helped supervise the herculean task of combing through a secret 2.5-million-word Defense Department history of the Vietnam War, later known as the Pentagon Papers, to produce articles showing that officials had lied about the war, died on Wednesday at a hospice in Melville, N.Y. He was 85.
The cause was heart failure, his daughter Madeleine Gold said.
After Neil Sheehan, a reporter for The Times, was given 47 volumes of top-secret documents, filling 7,000 pages, he and Mr. Gold checked in to a hotel suite in Washington to evaluate the material. Once they had determined its usefulness, they flew to New York to brief top editors, buying a seat for the documents so they could keep them in sight.
SOURCE: NYT (8-2-12)
DJENNE-DJENNO, one of the best-known archaeological sites in sub-Saharan Africa, spreads over several acres of rutted fields near the present city of Djenne in central Mali. The ruts are partly caused by erosion, but they’re also scars from decades of digging, by archaeologists in search of history and looters looking for art to sell.
When I was there last fall, a few archaeology students were in evidence. These days, with Mali in the throes of political chaos, it’s unlikely that anyone is doing much work at all at the site, though history and art are visible everywhere. Ancient pottery shards litter the ground. Here and there the mouths of large clay urns, of a kind once used for food storage or human burial, emerge from the earth’s surface, the vessels themselves still submerged.
The image of an abandoned battlefield comes to mind, but that’s only half-accurate. Physical assaults on Djenne-Djenno may be, at least temporarily, in abeyance. But ethical battles surrounding the ownership of, and right to control and dispose of, art from the past rage on in Africa, as in other parts of the world.
A few weeks ago the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, announced the acquisition of an American private collection of 32 exquisite bronze and ivory sculptures produced in what is now Nigeria between the 13th and 16th centuries. Within days the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments claimed, via an Internet statement, that the objects had been pillaged by the British military in the late 19th century and should be given back.
The image of an abandoned battlefield comes to mind, but that’s only half-accurate. Physical assaults on Djenne-Djenno may be, at least temporarily, in abeyance. But ethical battles surrounding the ownership of, and right to control and dispose of, art from the past rage on in Africa, as in other parts of the world.
A few weeks ago the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, announced the acquisition of an American private collection of 32 exquisite bronze and ivory sculptures produced in what is now Nigeria between the 13th and 16th centuries. Within days the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments claimed, via an Internet statement, that the objects had been pillaged by the British military in the late 19th century and should be given back...
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Name of source: NPR
SOURCE: NPR (8-4-12)
Sometime before the end of the month, when Republicans hold their convention in Tampa, Fla., Mitt Romney will announce his vice presidential running mate.
There's a good chance the finalists for that spot are wading through mountains of paperwork, and answering deeply personal questions about finances, past statements, friendships — and medical history.
A lot of that tedious process stems from something that happened 40 years ago this summer, when presidential candidate George McGovern decided to place Thomas Eagleton on the Democratic ticket. Joshua Glasser tells the story of that fateful decision in his new book, The Eighteen-Day Running Mate....
SOURCE: NPR (7-30-12)
In college, study of American history is often broken down into two chunks. Professors pick a date to divide time in two: 1865, after the Civil War, say, or 1900, because it looks good. So for those who teach courses on the first half, their purview is fairly well defined.
But those who teach the second half, such as Jonathan Rees, face a persistent problem: The past keeps growing. Rees teaches U.S. history and, like many teachers, every few years responds to major events by adding them to his lectures. But that means other important events get left behind. He wrote about this conundrum in a piece for The Historical Society blog, "When Is It Time To Stop Teaching Something?"
Rees tells NPR's Neal Conan that when he first started teaching, in the late '90s, he taught history up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. But "September 11th just changed things, so I had to change my course," says Rees. "And I'm still struggling with those decisions."
Of course, his lessons didn't change on the day of the attacks, but once students started showing up who had completely forgotten about it — "18-year-olds who were about seven when 9/11 happened" — he knew he had to teach it. But there are only so many hours of instruction in the semester.
Name of source: Secrecy News
SOURCE: Secrecy News (8-3-12)
In a floor statement yesterday, Sen. John McCain reiterated his criticism of the Obama White House for allegedly leaking classified information that endangered national security, and he repeated his call for appointment of a special counsel to independently investigate the claims.
Sen. McCain cited a particular incident in 2009 described by David Sanger of the New York Times in which a senior National Security Council official arranged a special briefing for Sanger in the Presidential suite at a Pittsburgh hotel about a secret nuclear site in Iran.
"I wonder how many people have the key to the Presidential suite in that Pittsburgh, PA hotel? We might want to start there" in the search for the leakers, Sen. McCain said.
But it turns out that the resulting news story that appeared in the Times did not include classified information, and the discovery of the Iranian nuclear site was the subject of a public briefing the very next day. See "John McCain swings at White House over 2009 Iran leak to David Sanger," by Josh Gerstein, Politico, August 1.
An ongoing FBI investigation into leaks of classified information is "casting a distinct chill over press coverage of national security issues as agencies decline routine interview requests and refuse to provide background briefings," writes Scott Shane in the New York Times.
The congressional response to leaks of classified information is disingenuous or hypocritical, wrote Walter Pincus in "Lawmakers, media are duplicitous on leaks," Washington Post, August 1.
"While the Pentagon insists it's not doing anything that should alarm reporters, it has yet to offer a direct response as to exactly what it means when it says it's going to monitor news reports for unauthorized disclosures." See "Defense vague on plan to plug press leaks" by Austin Wright and Leigh Munsil, Politico, August 1.
Name of source: Pew
SOURCE: Pew (8-1-12)
The analysis finds that 28% of lower-income households in 2010 were located in a majority lower-income census tract, up from 23% in 1980, and that 18% of upper- income households were located in a majority upper-income census tract, up from 9% in 1980.
These increases are related to the long-term rise in income inequality, which has led to a shrinkage in the share of neighborhoods across the United States that are predominantly middle class or mixed income—to 76% in 2010, down from 85% in 1980—and a rise in the shares that are majority lower income (18% in 2010, up from 12% in 1980) and majority upper income (6% in 2010, up from 3% in 1980).
Name of source: Yahoo
SOURCE: Yahoo (7-31-12)
It was 100 years ago this month that Jim Thorpe put America on the world’s sports map and made the Olympics a global phenomenon. But the fight over Thorpe’s body still lingers in a federal court.
Two weeks ago, two of Thorpe’s sons were testifying in court-ordered mediation in a federal lawsuit over the final resting place of the late Olympian’s body, according to a northeast Pennsylvania newspaper.
Thorpe stunned the world by winning the pentathlon and decathlon in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics by a huge margin over two favorites. The news made global headlines, and Thorpe received a hero’s welcome in New York City.
Name of source: Medievalists.net
SOURCE: Medievalists.net (8-1-12)
Injured British soldiers have helped uncover the remains of a sixth Century Anglo-Saxon female in an excavation project to preserve the remains of a burial site on Salisbury Plain in southern England.
‘Davina’, as they have named the woman is believed to have died in her late teens to early 20s. She appears to have been a person of note, as she was buried in what would have been a prestigious burial site. They have also found the remains of an Anglo-Saxon male, who was buried with a bronze shield.
Name of source: Daily Mail
SOURCE: Daily Mail (8-1-12)
Secret Cabinet papers on the decision to invade Iraq could be kept from the public for three decades.
The crucial minutes of ministerial meetings in 2003 were approved for release under Freedom of Information laws but blocked at the last minute by the Attorney General.
Dominic Grieve’s ruling yesterday is a repeat of the decision made by Jack Straw in 2009 over the same papers.
Name of source: USA Today
SOURCE: USA Today (7-31-12)
Vidal died at his home in the Hollywood Hills at about 6:45 p.m. of complications from pneumonia, Burr Steers said. Vidal had been living alone in the home and had been sick for "quite a while," he said.
Along with such contemporaries as Norman Mailer andTruman Capote, Vidal was among the last generation of literary writers who were also genuine celebrities — fixtures on talk shows and in gossip columns, personalities of such size and appeal that even those who hadn't read their books knew who they were.
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