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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.
SOURCE: BBC (2-12-13)
Researchers have created software that can rebuild protolanguages - the ancient tongues from which our modern languages evolved.
To test the system, the team took 637 languages currently spoken in Asia and the Pacific and recreated the early language from which they descended.
The work is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science....
SOURCE: ArchNews (2-11-13)
For decades, archaeologists have debated how farming spread to Stone Age Europe, setting the stage for the rise of Western civilization.
Now, new data gleaned from the teeth of prehistoric farmers and the hunter-gatherers with whom they briefly overlapped shows that agriculture was introduced to Central Europe from the Near East by colonizers who brought farming technology with them....
SOURCE: CityJ (Winter 2013, Vol. 23. No. 1.)
The Washington, D.C., region has long been considered recession-proof, thanks to the remorseless expansion of the federal government in good times and bad. Yet it’s only now—as D.C. positively booms while most of the country remains in economic doldrums—that the scale of Washington’s prosperity is becoming clear. Over the past decade, the D.C. area has made stunning economic and demographic progress. Meanwhile, America’s current and former Second Cities, population-wise—Los Angeles and Chicago—are battered and fading in significance. Though Washington still isn’t their match in terms of population, it’s gaining on them in terms of economic power and national importance....
SOURCE: CityJ (Winter 2013, Vol. 23. No. 1.)
After spending years dogged by unpaid debts, California labor leader Charles Valdes filed for bankruptcy in the 1990s—twice. At the same time, he held one of the most influential positions in the American financial system: chair of the investment committee for the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, or CalPERS, the nation’s largest pension fund for government workers. Valdes left the board in 2010 and now faces scrutiny for accepting gifts from another former board member, Alfred Villalobos—who, the state alleges, spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to influence how the fund invested its assets. Questioned by investigators about his dealings with Villalobos, Valdes invoked the Fifth Amendment 126 times....
SOURCE: NYMag (2-7-13)
Despite some tensions with his fellow Republicans, Chris Christie is well-positioned to become the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016. He's poised to easily win another term as governor; he polls strongly against Hillary Clinton; and he's successfully tapped into voter discontent about the partisanship, political posturing, and general bullshittery that plagues Washington. There's just one problem: Christie is very overweight — so much so that one esteemed former White House physician (a Republican, in fact) is worried he could die in office....
SOURCE: CNN (2-13-13)
Cardinal John Onaiyekan of Abuja, Nigeria, was asked last week at the celebration of Black History Month in Toronto if he thought that the time was ripe for an African pope. His answer attracted much cheering from the crowd of over 500 Catholics of African descent.
He said: "The time for an African pope was ripe even in the time of the Apostolic Fathers in the first century of the church.
SOURCE: CWN (February/March 2013)
A new 3D state-of-the-art sonar map released by NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, ExploreOcean, Teledyne BlueView and Northwest Hydro shows never-before seen details of the USS Hatteras, the only Union warship sunk in combat in the Gulf of Mexico during the Civil War.
The map was released on the 150th anniversary of the ship sinking on Jan. 11, 1863, after fighting the raider CSS Alabama approximately 20 miles off the coast of Galveston, Texas.
The Hatteras was a 210-foot-long iron-hulled steamship the U.S. Navy converted into a gunboat. Its wreck is largely intact 57 feet under water in sand and silt....
SOURCE: WaPo (2-12-13)
MAFRAQ, Jordan — To the caches of ammunition and medicines that they lug each day from this border city back into their homeland, Syrian rebels have added new tools to support their fight against President Bashar al-Assad: metal detectors and pickaxes.
The rebels, struggling to finance their effort, have joined an emerging trade in illicitly acquired Syrian artifacts and antiquities, selling off the country’s past as the war for its future intensifies....
SOURCE: WaPo (2-13-13)
The Library of Congress is sharing its National Recording Preservation Plan on Wednesday, outlining its strategy for safeguarding America’s sound recordings for future generations of listeners.
The congressionally mandated plan arrives after more than a decade of cooperation between the library and its National Recording Preservation Board, which includes composers, musicians, archivists, librarians, musicologists and other figures in the recording industry.
“As a nation, we have good reason to be proud of our record of creativity in the sound-recording arts and sciences,” James H. Billington, librarian of Congress, said in a statement. “However, our collective energy in creating and consuming sound recordings has not been matched by an equal level of interest in preserving them for posterity.”...
SOURCE: WaPo (2-13-13)
AMMAN, Jordan — A Syrian government official warned Wednesday of rampant trafficking in antiquities from his country and appealed for U.N. help in halting the illicit trade that has flourished during the nearly 23-month-long civil war.
Syria’s turmoil has increasingly threatened the country’s rich archaeological heritage but the issue of smuggling artifacts has taken a back seat to more dramatic images as some of the most significant sites got caught in the crossfire between regime forces and rebels.
President Bashar Assad’s troops have shelled rebel-held neighborhoods, smashing historic mosques, churches and souks, or markets. Looters have stolen artifacts from archaeological excavations and, to a lesser extent, museums....
SOURCE: WaPo (2-10-13)
CHESTERFIELD, Va. — The Virginia Historical Society is going on the road to spread the word about its database of slave names.
Historical society staff will hold the first of five presentations Monday in Chesterfield on the project, which helps scholars and family historians examine the state’s slave-holding past. Called “Unknown No Longer,” the database now includes more than 10,000 names and 1,500 digital images of documents....
SOURCE: WaPo (2-11-13)
TOPEKA, Kan. — A new World War II exhibit starting this summer at the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum will pay tribute to the millions who fought, but organizers also have another purpose for the ambitious three-year project: getting young people engaged in the war’s relevance.
Karl Weissenbach, executive director of the library and museum in Abilene, said the “Leaders, Battles and Heroes” exhibit will be directed at younger generations that often know little about the war, its significance in world history or the impact of its outcome.
“It’s amazing how little information and understanding they have about World War II,” Weissenbach said. “You ask them questions and often you get a blank stare. That’s really unsettling.”...
SOURCE: WaPo (2-11-13)
JERUSALEM — When Joseph Ratzinger became pope in 2005, many in Israel wondered whether the German-born Cardinal with the Nazi past would prove a worthy successor to the popular Pope John Paul II, whose pluralistic path helped sooth centuries of fraught relations between Jews and Christians.
Eight years later, following his surprise resignation Monday, Israeli leaders lauded Pope Benedict XVI as a friend who helped promote dialogue and coexistence....
SOURCE: WaPo (2-11-13)
...The National Park Service said the contractor — a Lothian company called Greentree — was supposed to cut down a dead ash tree on the other side of the park. There was nothing wrong with the ginkgo....
It was memorialized in 2006 as part of the Park Service’s Witness Tree Protection Program, an effort to encourage the public to relate to the history of the city through its trees. Historian Jonathan Pliska wrote that the ginkgo was probably planted in 1873, although it may have been there earlier and been incorporated into the design of the square, which honors Adm. David Glasgow Farragut, the naval hero best known for saying: “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!”
The tree was 102 feet tall, with a crown spread of 79 feet and trunk circumference of 142 inches. That made it the largest ginkgo in Washington. Apparently it was a male, so it didn’t have that stinky fruit....
SOURCE: WaPo (2-11-13)
The Washington Post video team has created a video mashup of State of the Union addresses from the past sixty years -- check it out here.
Further Reading:
SOURCE: WaPo (2-11-13)
It’s difficult to pinpoint a precise moment when the office of the pope began to lose its vast political power, which had long placed the Holy See above even the kings and emperors of Europe, but has since declined to the point that now-retiring Pope Benedict XVI found few political accomplishments in his reign. But one day that stands out is Dec. 2, 1804.
A few weeks earlier, French voters had overwhelmingly approved a referendum elevating Napoleon Bonaparte from first consul to emperor, the beginning of the end of France’s democratic revolution. His coronation was to proceed in the manner of all Catholic monarchs, who still ruled most of Europe: he would kneel before the pope, then Pius VII, to receive a crown and blessing. The symbolism of the coronation reflected centuries of European political tradition, in which the Catholic church formally conferred royalty with the divine blessing that was thought necessary to rule; the church, in its power, had at times competed openly with those same monarchs....
SOURCE: WaPo (2-12-13)
Rep. Joe Courtney says he had no idea he was wading into controversy when he questioned the accuracy of a key scene in “Lincoln.”
After all, he knows Washington politics, not Hollywood politics.
Last week, the Connecticut Democrat called on Steven Spielberg to “correct an historical inaccuracy” in the Oscar-nominated box-office hit — a scene, at the film’s climax, suggesting that two of his state’s three representatives voted against outlawing slavery in 1865.
Courtney told us Monday he was captivated by the movie until it came to that moment: How, he wondered, could a Connecticut congressman have voted that way? “Our state abolished slavery completely in 1848. Children of slaves were emancipated by 1784,” he said. “The Harriet Beecher Stowe house in Hartford is a shrine in Connecticut history.” Courtney checked and discovered that the movie was wrong: In fact, all four of the Nutmeg State’s delegates voted for the 13th amendment....
SOURCE: WaPo (2-6-13)
Editor's Note: No, it did not.
As gun control moved toward the top of the American agenda after the Dec. 14 massacre at a Connecticut elementary school, gun rights activists began to invoke a curious analogy: the Holocaust.
On television, radio and in letters to the editor, the argument went that Hitler’s gun control laws left European Jews defenseless, and that the Holocaust would not have happened — or at least would not have been as catastrophic in scale — had Jews had guns....
Many American Jews and others have had enough of the claim, and are denouncing as specious the comparison between the Third Reich law that forbade Jews to own guns and current gun control proposals under consideration by President Obama, Congress and state legislatures.
The Anti-Defamation League “has always strenuously objected to the use of Nazi analogies to advance any kind of political debate, including the gun control debate,” said Deborah Lauter, the group’s civil rights director. “We believe it’s historically inaccurate and incredibly insensitive, particularly to Holocaust survivors and their families.”...
SOURCE: WaPo (2-6-13)
WASHINGTON — The Washington Redskins’ team name has been the subject of legal battles, political debate and now will be part of a scholarly discussion at the Smithsonian about the use of Native American mascots and nicknames in American sports.
The National Museum of the American Indian will host a daylong symposium Thursday entitled “Racist Stereotypes and Cultural Appropriation in American Sports.” Scholars, sports writers and Native Americans will gather for the public discussion.
The Redskins’ name, perhaps the most visible, has been the subject of ongoing debate. As recently as Tuesday night, Washington Mayor Vincent Gray specifically avoided saying the name of Washington’s NFL franchise in his State of the District speech and instead referred to “our Washington football team.”...
SOURCE: WaPo (2-6-13)
...[L]ess than 10 percent of [Haiti]’s 10 million people speak French fluently, and in most schools, even the teachers don’t understand it very well although they’re asked to teach in it.
The private Louverture Cleary School has already broken from that linguistic tradition and is instead emphasizing the Haitian Creole children speak at home. The school is also introducing students to Spanish from other parts of the Caribbean and the English they will likely need in the future....
Haiti’s 1805 Constitution declared that tuition would be free and attendance compulsory for primary students. But the quality of education lagged through the years, and plunged during the 29-year-long dynasty of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude, or “Baby Doc,” which ended in 1986. Haiti’s professionals fled into exile to escape political repression, spawning a major brain drain the country has never bounced back from....
SOURCE: AP (2-13-13)
RICHMOND, Va. — The remains of two unknown Union sailors recovered from the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor will be interred in Arlington National Cemetery on March 8, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said Tuesday.
“These may very well be the last Navy personnel from the Civil War to be buried at Arlington,” Mabus said in a statement. “It’s important we honor these brave men and all they represent as we reflect upon the significant role Monitor and her crew had in setting the course of our modern Navy.”
The two skeletons and the tattered remains of their uniforms were discovered in the rusted hulk of the Union Civil War ironclad in 2002 when its 150-ton turret was raised from the ocean floor off Cape Hatteras, N.C. Conservators of the wreck had a forensic reconstruction done on the two men’s faces in the longshot bid that someone could identify the sailors who went down with the Monitor 150 years ago....
SOURCE: AP (2-7-13)
WASHINGTON — The Smithsonian is celebrating Black History Month with a series of programs in February.
Throughout the month, the National Museum of American History will present performances by historical characters in “Join the Student Sit-Ins.” Visitors will meet a civil rights activist from 1960 and take part in a training session based on an actual civil rights manual to prepare for a sit-in. The performance is presented Tuesdays through Saturdays at 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.
On Monday, the National Museum of American History will mark the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation by hosting a webcast for high school students. Scholars will reflect on the abolition movement of the 19th century....
SOURCE: AP (2-7-13)
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — The legacy of onetime Confederate fighter and slave trader Nathan Bedford Forrest has sparked new discord in Memphis amid moves to rename parks whose very names recall the Old South.
Fresh division arose before the Memphis City Council voted recently to rename Nathan Bedford Forrest Park in Memphis, where a statue of Forrest stands and the general is buried. The council also voted to rename two other parks whose names evoke the Confederate Civil War heritage.
The fight over Forrest highlights a broader debate over what Confederate figures should represent in the 21st century. Other U.S. cities also have wrestled with the issue of naming parks and buildings after Confederate figures....
SOURCE: AP (2-5-13)
Montana lawmakers have rejected a proposal to name the Winchester Model 1873 the state rifle after Native American legislators said they couldn't honor a weapon that "devastated" their ancestors...
SOURCE: NYT (2-12-13)
...And, much as President François Hollande of France denies that his country is still the gendarme of francophone Africa, the columns of French soldiers and planeloads of paratroops embroiled in the newest fighting recall much earlier campaigns.
“There was a time when General Faidherbe pursued armed bands attacking the forts of the Sahel, and even then they professed radical Islam,” Bertrand Badie, a political science scholar in Paris, wrote in Le Monde, referring to Gen. Louis Faidherbe, who played a central role in solidifying French interests in the broad swath of desert known as the Sahel in the 19th century. “What have we done since then?”
For many years, French military intervention in Africa functioned as the guardian of French economic interests and of the large expatriate French communities who benefited from them in cities like Libreville in Gabon and Abidjan in Ivory Coast. French troops defined the longevity of protégé African leaders. The French presence was a postcolonial bulwark, too, against British influence in southern and eastern Africa....
SOURCE: NYT (2-12-13)
...Strong, stronger, strongest — one of those words has been used to describe the union in each of the last 17 State of the Union addresses.
But it was not always so. Presidents once used other words to describe the state of our union. President Jimmy Carter liked to call it “sound.” President Harry S. Truman liked to call it “good.” President Lyndon B. Johnson, in a lyrical moment, described the state of the union in 1965 as “free and restless, growing and full of hope.”
And when things were not going well, they said so.
“I must say to you that the state of the union is not good,” President Gerald R. Ford said in 1975, citing high unemployment, slow growth and soaring deficits. He added, “I’ve got bad news, and I don’t expect much, if any, applause.”...
What changed? The simple answer is President Ronald Reagan....
SOURCE: NBC News (video) (2-12-13)
Newly released letters reveal the tender side of Lyndon Baines Johnson during the beginning of his relationship with Claudia Alta Taylor, the future ‘Lady Bird’ Johnson.
SOURCE: University of Illinois (2-11-13)
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Behavioral problems among teenagers and preteens can be blamed on the violence, sex and gore portrayed in the media marketed to them – that was the topic of televised public hearings held by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in 1954 to address the scourge of comic books. The hearings, which resulted in the decimation of what was an enormous comic book industry, had been inspired in large part by the book “Seduction of the Innocent,” by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, based on his own case studies.
Wertham’s personal archives, however, show that the doctor revised children’s ages, distorted their quotes, omitted other causal factors and in general “played fast and loose with the data he gathered on comics,” according to an article by Carol Tilley, published in a recent issue of Information and Culture: A Journal of History.
“Lots of people have suspected for years that Wertham fudged his so-called clinical evidence in arguing against comics, but there’s been no proof,” Tilley said. “My research is the first definitive indication that he misrepresented and altered children’s own words about comics.”
SOURCE: Bismarck Tribune (ND) (2-7-13)
A bill to appropriate $250,000 for archaeological and historical surveys in the Killdeer Mountains battlefield area before oil wells are developed drew widespread support Thursday, until the owner of the land testified.
The Senate Government and Veterans Affairs Committee took no action on SB2341 following nearly two hours of testimony.
Sen Rich Wardner, R-Dickinson, one of the prime sponsors of the bill, said the area, which was the site of a battle between the U.S. Army and numerous American Indian tribes in July 1864, should be studied before more oil exploration is allowed....
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (2-12-13)
An excavation of a mausoleum in the grounds of Pentillie Castle in Cornwall is thought to have uncovered the body of Sir James Tillie, who died 300 years ago in 1713.
His final resting place has been a mystery for centuries – leading to him being dubbed Cornwall’s very own Richard III.
Sir James, who built the home in 1698, left instructions that on his deathbed he should not be buried....
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (2-11-13)
A painting of a sixtysomething Queen Elizabeth I, depicting her with facial wrinkles, is being exhibited at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC.
Produced by the studio of Gheeraerts in the early-mid 1590s, the painting now owned by the Elizabethan Gardens in North Carolina’s Outer Banks, is having its first public showing after conservation and authentication in 2010-2011.
The exhibition’s co-curator, Thomas Herron, an author and English professor at East Carolina University, noted that the reason for the portrait’s obscurity may lie in Elizabeth’s efforts to control her image.
And according to Anna Riehl, author of The Face of Queenship: Early Modern Representations of Queen Elizabeth I the Elizabethan Gardens portrait is a "rare exception in not covering up the queen's flaws”....
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (2-7-13)
Shakespeare's Globe will perform the bard's three Henry VI plays at historic battle sites of the Wars of the Roses.
As part of its new season, the theatre will stage the plays at Towton, Tewkesbury, St Albans and Barnet, which were all sites where battles took place.
The plays – billed under their original titles: Harry The Sixth, The Houses of York and Lancaster and The True Tragedy of the Duke of York – will be directed by Nick Bagnall and embark on a tour from June 26 until September 26....
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (2-6-13)
The wartime leader was an unrivalled speechwriter, prolific author and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, but despite being a lover of poetry, he was only known to have written one poem, as a schoolboy at Harrow.
Now a 10-verse poem penned over two pages in blue crayon by Churchill while he was serving in the army has emerged for sale at auction in London.
The poem is a rousing celebration of the British Empire and of going to war to defend her, and describes anxious sailors and marines ahead of a battle. It is said to have been influenced by Kipling and Tennyson....
SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (2-6-13)
The Church of England, with support from the Queen and government ministers, has reportedly turned down a number of requests to perform forensic tests to establish whether the bones buried in Westminster Abbey are those of the king’s two nephews.
According to previously confidential correspondence, permission to carry out DNA testing has been withheld for fear of setting a precedent for digging up royal remains to test various historical theories.
There was also uncertainty by the church about what would be done with the remains if the DNA tests were negative, The Guardian reported....
SOURCE: BBC News (2-12-13)
A new tool has been developed that can reconstruct long-dead languages.
Researchers have created software that can rebuild protolanguages - the ancient tongues from which our modern languages evolved.
To test the system, the team took 637 languages currently spoken in Asia and the Pacific and recreated the early language from which they descended.
The work is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science....
SOURCE: Discovery News (2-8-13)
Pablo Picasso, famous for pushing the boundaries of art with cubism, also broke with convention when it came to paint, new research shows. X-ray analysis of some of the painter's masterworks solves a long-standing mystery about the type of paint the artist used on his canvases, revealing it to be basic house paint.
Art scholars had long suspected Picasso was one of the first master artists to employ house paint, rather than traditional artists' paint, to achieve a glossy style that hid brush marks. There was no absolute confirmation of this, however, until now.
Physicists at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Ill., trained their hard X-ray nanoprobe at Picasso's painting "The Red Armchair," completed in 1931, which they borrowed from the Art Institute of Chicago. The nanoprobe instrument can "see" details down to the level of individual pigment particles, revealing the arrangement of particular chemical elements in the paint....
SOURCE: Discovery News (2-7-13)
An abundance of gold wreaths appear to lay hidden in a subway network in Greece.
Indeed, excavation work during construction of a new subway in the northern city of Thessaloniki, Greece’s second largest city, has revealed another gold wreath – the ninth since work started in 2006.
Found on the site of an ancient cemetery at what will be the Dimokratias Station stop, the wreath of olive leaves lay buried for some 2,300 years.
According to the Greek Reporter, the wreath was found “inside a large box-type Macedonian tomb on the head of a buried body.”...
SOURCE: Time Magazine (2-10-13)
What would happen if Adolf Hitler woke up in modern-day Berlin to find that it was not occupied by Russian soldiers but instead by a vibrant, multicultural citizenry? This is the premise of the debut novel by German journalist Timur Vermes, Er Ist Wieder Da (He’s Back), which has topped Germany’s best-seller list.
Narrated in the first-person by Hitler, the story follows the Führer as he awakens from a 66-year sleep in his bunker beneath Berlin to find an entirely changed Germany. In the celebrity-obsessed modern-day city, everyone assumes the fulminating leader of the Nazi party is a comedian in character — and soon he becomes a celebrity with a guest slot on a Turkish-born comedian’s TV show. His bigoted rants are interpreted as a satirical exposure of prejudice, leading him to decide to start his own political party....
SOURCE: Huffington Post (2-10-13)
The Confederate flag was mistakenly raised for a few hours over the Mississippi Supreme Court in Jackson on Friday.
A replacement was needed a Mississippi state flag that was tattered and torn, Kym Wiggins, public information officer for the state Department of Fiance and Administration told the Clarion-Ledger.
Calling the incident, "highly unusual," Wiggins explained to the paper that a local vendor was tasked with the job of purchasing new state flags to replace the one that was torn. Wiggins claims they were given two boxes labeled "Mississippi State Flag," but the boxes actually contained Confederate battle flags. After a maintenance worker raised the flag, the mistake went unnoticed for a couple of hours....
SOURCE: CBS (2-10-13)
The team behind the 12-time Oscar-nominated film "Lincoln" talks about how they brought the president and his world to life. Lesley Stahl reports.
SOURCE: CBS (2-6-13)
Timbuktu was a center of learning centuries ago. Last week, French forces chased out Islamic militants who'd seized Timbuktu and tried to destroy its relics. But one man outsmarted the marauders.
Fabled Timbuktu these days is a small dusty town, but proud of its noble heritage as a center of Islamic culture, art and medieval scholarship. Last April, it was invaded by Islamic extremists who drove in to town with their heavy weapons and took over.
Abdul Kader Haidara was there. He's one of the keepers of a trove of priceless Arabic manuscripts. The extremists' arrival, he told us, triggered his emergency plan:
SOURCE: NY Mag (2-7-13)
SOURCE: Jewish Telegraph Agency (2-8-13)
SYDNEY, Australia (JTA) -- A war crimes investigator cast fresh doubts on the account of a purported Holocaust survivor who says he was a child mascot for Nazis.
Efraim Zuroff, the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, wrote to officials last week at the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, contesting the miraculous survival story of Alex Kurzem, an elderly man who now lives in Melbourne.
“Everything in this case appears to point to a scam, but only a comprehensive investigation can finally determine whether Kurzem is indeed a Holocaust survivor, which I very much doubt, or an impostor whose main motivation was to gain fortune and fame by distorting his unusual wartime experiences,” Zuroff wrote....
SOURCE: Archaeology (UK) (2-7-13)
Two days after unveiling a reconstruction of the face of Richard III, Leicester experts have now recreated how Greyfriars, his final resting place, might have looked.
Built in 1230, Greyfriars was one of the first Franciscan friaries to be established in England, just 6 years after the order came to Britain, but it was completely demolished during the 16th century Dissolution of the Monasteries.
Now artist and archaeological illustrator Jill Atherton has recreated the friary church, as well as the choir where Richard’s grave was located, in sketches based on similar Medieval buildings, together with archaeological evidence from the recent excavation , including window fragments and pieces of lead, suggesting stained glass, together with stonework, pieces of a large window frame, and roof and floor tiles....
SOURCE: Fox News (2-7-13)
In a symbolic move to teach “personal responsibility,” an Idaho lawmaker has proposed requiring every high school student in the state to read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.”
State Sen. John Goedde introduced legislation on Tuesday that would require Idaho secondary students to read and pass an examination on the iconic 1957 novel touted by conservatives like Rep. Paul Ryan and Rush Limbaugh....
SOURCE: Fox News (2-1-13)
MOSCOW – The Soviet soldiers used their own bodies as shields, covering women and children escaping on ferry boats from a Nazi bombardment that killed 40,000 civilians in a single day. It was the height of the Battle of Stalingrad, one of the bloodiest conflicts of World War II.
"They were all hit in the back," said 90-year-old Alexei Stefanov. "But they did not flee."
Stefanov is among the few surviving veterans of the battle, which claimed 2 million lives and raged for nearly 200 days before the Red Army turned back the Nazi forces, decisively changing the course of the war. Russia celebrates the 70th anniversary of that victory on Saturday, with President Vladimir Putin taking part in ceremonies in Volgograd, the current name of the city in southern Russia that stretches along the western bank of the Volga River....
SOURCE: CS Monitor (2-6-13)
At least 35 small pyramids, along with graves, have been discovered clustered closely together at a site called Sedeinga in Sudan.
Discovered between 2009 and 2012, researchers are surprised at how densely the pyramids are concentrated. In one field season alone, in 2011, the research team discovered 13 pyramids packed into roughly 5,381 square feet (500 square meters), or slightly larger than an NBA basketball court.
They date back around 2,000 years to a time when a kingdom named Kush flourished in Sudan. Kush shared a border with Egypt and, later on, the Roman Empire. The desire of the kingdom's people to build pyramids was apparently influenced by Egyptian funerary architecture....
SOURCE: Yahoo News (2-7-13)
Researchers’ recent confirmation that a body long hidden under a municipal parking lot is King Richard III will no doubt stir interest in British archaeology — as it should. While X never marks the spot and you’re unlikely to unearth an undiscovered king, Britain’s long history means that almost anywhere you plant a shovel, there’s history to be found.
From Iron Age forts to Victorian gardens, hundreds of archaeological digs are happening in Britain at any given time – and many of them welcome volunteer diggers to help uncover the past. Instead of just visiting Britain’s ancient churches, villages and stone circles, you could be part of the teams that are discovering new sites and artifacts every day. Just get ready for a little hard work....
SOURCE: Royston Crow 24 (2-7-13)
Archaeologists have found evidence of settlements in the grounds of Wimpole Hall, where they have been carrying out digs ahead of a programme which will see thousands of trees planted in the grounds of the house.
Stephen Macaulay, senior project archaeologist at Oxford Archaeology East is leading a team of five who are digging small pits around the house.
He said: “We know from maps dating back to the 1600s that there were villages and hamlets around Wimpole Hall, such as Bennall End and Thresham End. But the owners of the house at the time, the Chicheley family, decided they wanted to surround it with parkland, so they turfed everybody out and landscaped over the area....
SOURCE: PoliticalWire (2-4-13)
"As President Obama and lawmakers from both parties begin to take their first tentative steps toward again rewriting the nation's immigration laws, opponents warn that they are repeating the mistakes of the 1986 act, which failed to solve the problems that it set out to address. Critics contend that the law actually contributed to making the situation worse," the Washington Post reports.
"An estimated 3 million to 5 million illegal immigrants were living in the United States when the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was passed. Now there are upwards of 11 million. And the question of who gets to be an American, far from being settled, has been inflamed."
