This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream
media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously
biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in
each source note. Quotation marks are not used.
Source: NYT
November 19, 2011
Jacqueline Piatigorsky, one of the most important figures in American chess in the 1960s, turned 100 this month.Piatigorsky, a member of the Rothschild banking family, was married to the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, and together they sponsored three significant chess events. The first was a 1961 match between Bobby Fischer and Samuel Reshevsky, the two best American players.It was a best-of-16 match, and after 11 games, each man had won twice and the other games were draws. And that is how it ended. Fischer quit after a fight with Mrs. Piatigorsky over the scheduling of the 12th game. (Fischer wanted an afternoon game so he could sleep in, and she wanted a morning game so she could attend a concert by her husband later in the day.)...
Source: NYT
November 19, 2011
DALLAS — Few figures in pop culture are more closely linked to the devil than Robert Johnson. Not only did the blues hero write “Me and the Devil Blues” and “Hellhound on My Trail,” but legend has it that he sold his soul in exchange for his guitar skills.In a twist, a Dallas church is now preserving the legacy of the bluesman who sang about walking alongside Satan.In June, the First Presbyterian Church of Dallas bought 508 Park Avenue, the downtown building where, in 1937, Johnson recorded almost half of the 29 songs that make up his entire discography. The church purchased the dilapidated three-story Art Deco building after its previous owner tried to have it demolished because it was unmarketable, due in part to its proximity to the Stewpot, a community center run by First Presbyterian that provides medical services and counseling for Dallas’s homeless.“Robert Johnson’s signature song is ‘Cross Road Blues,’ and a lot of people we serve are at the crossroads, too, brushing shoulders with the negative side of life,” said the Rev. Bruce Buchanan, executive director of the Stewpot and an associate pastor at First Presbyterian. “Johnson’s story isn’t foreign to us at all.”...
Source: NYT
November 19, 2011
DAKAR, Senegal — The world-turned-upside-down of the European debt crisis reached a new extreme last week when Europe came pleading for lucre where it once only seized it: Africa.The hands-out visit on Thursday of Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho of Portugal to its former colony Angola — once a prime source of slaves, then a dumping ground for the mother country’s human rejects and now swimming in oil wealth — was a milestone of sorts.While Europe’s financial distress has already revived bad historical memories — 70 years after Nazi occupation, Greeks are grumbling about taking marching orders from German gauleiters — and reversed others — there was talk of a Chinese rescue for the continent that once humiliated it — the Angola-Portugal moment has had no equal in its upfront plaintiveness.“Angolan capital is very welcome,” Mr. Passos Coelho said in Luanda, the capital city. That may be an understatement: the former colony’s cash could be essential as Portugal is forced to sell off state-owned companies and shutter embassies after a $105 billion International Monetary Fund bailout this year....
Source: NYT
November 19, 2011
...Law schools’ aversion to all things vocational has been much debated, both inside and outside the academy. But critics are fighting both tradition and the legal academy’s peculiar set of neuroses.“Law school has a kind of intellectual inferiority complex, and it’s built into the idea of law school itself,” says W. Bradley Wendel of the Cornell University Law School, a professor who has written about landing a law school teaching job. “People who teach at law school are part of a profession and part of a university. So we’re always worried that other parts of the academy are going to look down on us and say: ‘You’re just a trade school, like those schools that advertise on late-night TV. You don’t write dissertations. You don’t write articles that nobody reads.’ And the response of law school professors is to say: ‘That’s not true. We do all of that. We’re scholars, just like you.’ ”This trade-school anxiety can be traced back to the mid-19th century, when legal training was mostly technical and often taught in rented rooms that were unattached to institutions of higher education.
Source: USA Today
November 18, 2011
If you want to prepare for Thanksgiving like a real Pilgrim this year, here's what you should do: Cancel the plane reservations. Stop jotting down recipes. Leave the libations alone.For the Pilgrims and Puritans, "thanksgiving" days were spontaneous and sober affairs.When friends arrived from overseas, European Protestants defeated Catholics in battle, or a bumper crop was reaped, the Pilgrims dedicated a day to thanking divine Providence.They would have considered it presumptuous to schedule a thanksgiving day in advance, said Francis Bremer, an emeritus professor of history at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. "It assumes that God is going to be good to you each particular year."...
Source: Hurriyet Daily News
November 18, 2011
France's foreign minister today said that his country could host a Turkish-Armenian joint history commission meeting.Alain Juppe defined the incidents of 1915 as a challenging issue, and all countries were making a memory homework about their history.Such a memory homework could be done in a history commission, Juppe told a joint press conference with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu in Ankara....
Source: Star Tribune
November 18, 2011
LOS ANGELES - A yacht captain said on national TV Friday that he lied to investigators about Natalie Wood's mysterious death 30 years ago and blames the actress' husband at the time, Robert Wagner, for her drowning in the ocean off Southern California.The circumstances of her death remain one of Hollywood's enduring mysteries and continue to create renewed intrigue, with homicide detectives unexpectedly re-opening the case Thursday that had long been classified as a tragic accident.A Los Angeles County sheriff's detective will speak to reporters Friday about the decision to take another look at the Oscar-nominated actress' nighttime demise in the chilly waters off Southern California on Nov. 29, 1981. Wood drowned after spending several hours drinking on Catalina Island and a yacht with Wagner, fellow actor Christopher Walken and the ship's captain, Dennis Davern....
Source: Salon
November 17, 2011
“Saying it’s okay to choose is the same thing as saying it’s okay for Hitler to choose,” says a fresh-faced young man. He’s talking about choosing an abortion in “180,” a 33-minute movie comparing legalized abortion to the Holocaust that has so far gotten over 1.5 million hits on YouTube, thanks in part to heavy distribution by fertilized-eggs-as-people promulgators Personhood USA.That’s precisely the conclusion Ray Comfort, a mustachioed evangelical pastor and sometime Kirk Cameron collaborator, wants from his eight young interview subjects. And with the help of footage of murdered Jews and fully-developed fetuses, it’s what he wants his viewers to conclude, as well. The New Zealand-born Comfort, who says his mother is Jewish, is by no means alone in making the equivalence: Mike Huckabee, who supported Personhood USA’s failed efforts in Mississippi, has often compared the Holocaust and abortion, saying of Nazi extermination, “educated scientists, sophisticated and cultured people looked the other way because they thought it didn’t touch them.”...
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 3, 2011
It was found among possessions belonging to Welsh surgeon Sir John Williams, a chief suspect in the Victorian murders.Sir John, known to his family at the time of the killings as "Uncle Jack" was the surgeon to Queen Victoria who lived in London at the time of the slayings.He fled the capital after the murders and later founded the National Library for Wales in Aberystwyth.One of his distant relatives has now unearthed the old black-handled surgeon's knife, which he used for operations, and believes it could be the murder weapon....
Source: AP
November 17, 2011
NEW YORK — The National Book Awards ceremony, held just blocks from the Occupy Wall Street protests, was a gilded tribute to the 99 percent.Stories of resilience in the face of poverty, displacement and disappearance were awarded Wednesday night as hundreds of writers, editors, publishers and other industry officials gathered under the 70-foot ceilings of the luxury venue Cipriani Wall Street."I thought I should point out, since nobody else has," said poet Ann Lauterbach, who introduced honorary winner John Ashbery, "that we are occupying Wall Street."Jesmyn Ward's "Salvage the Bones," a bleak but determined novel about a black community in Mississippi devastated by Hurricane Katrina, won the fiction prize. Ward's acceptance, the culmination of a night of emotional speeches and tributes to those who had been silenced, noted that the death of her younger brother had inspired her to become a writer. She realized that life was a "feeble, unpredictable thing," but that books were a testament of strength before a punishing world....
Source: AP
November 15, 2011
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A long-lost version of the Air Force One recordings made in the immediate aftermath of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, with more than 30 minutes of additional material not in the official version in the government's archives, has been found and is for sale.There are incidents and code names described on the newly discovered two-plus hour recording, which predates the shorter and newer recording currently housed in the National Archives outside Washington and the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Texas. The shorter recording was thought to be the only surviving version of the tape.The asking price is $500,000 for the reel-to-reel tape, which is inside its original box with a typewritten label showing it was made by the White House Communications Agency for Army Gen. Chester "Ted" Clifton Jr....
Source: AP
November 14, 2011
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — A research team is attempting to discover the origin of a cast bronze artifact excavated from an Inupiat Eskimo home site believed to be about 1,000 years old.The artifact resembles a small buckle, researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder said in an announcement. How it got to Alaska remains a mystery."The object appears to be older than the house we were excavating by at least a few hundred years," research assistant John Hoffecker said in the release. Hoffecker led excavating at Cape Espenberg on Alaska's Seward Peninsula....
Source: IOL SciTech
November 17, 2011
Vienna - Hundreds of skeletons have been exhumed from a Nazi-era graveyard suspected of holding mentally or physically disabled victims of mass killings and many had bones apparently broken by hospital personnel, an anthropologist said on Monday.George McGlynn told reporters that about a third of the 221 skeletons have been examined and half of those - about 35 - had broken ribs. Others had broken noses or collarbones.It had long been suspected that the remains - dug up over the past seven months from a disused hospital cemetery in the Tyrollean city of Hall, east of Innsbruck - were those of people killed by the Nazis because of physical or mental disabilities.McGlynn said it could still not be confirmed whether they were killed, although the fractures were likely the result of violence they suffered while in the hospital. “I doubt they resulted directly in death,” he said....
Source: Austrian Times
November 16, 2011
An unidentified visitor to a cemetery in Leonding, Austria, has placed a vase on the grave of Hitler’s parents, engraved with the word "unforgettable" and the letters "SS". According to the state office for protection, the visitor posed as a Viennese artists and "Hitler’s grandson". An increasing number of German skinheads have held vigils around this grave. On Hitler’s 120th birthday, a large wreath was placed on the grave and on all saints day it was also lavishly decorated....
Source: The Hill
November 16, 2011
Members of the House on Wednesday put new pressure on European companies to compensate relatives of Holocaust victims who were denied insurance payments, and whose family members were transported on French trains to concentration camps where they were killed.The House Foreign Affairs Committee held a Wednesday hearing on two bills aimed at forcing these companies to compensate survivors."It pains me to say that survivors of one of the greatest atrocities of the twentieth century continue to feel the pain of the Nazis' brutality and oppression," Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) said in her prepared statement. "These lingering injustices stem from those who sought to profit from the abuse of innocent victims and that took advantage of circumstance to enrich themselves while others suffered."...
Source: CNN.com
November 17, 2011
London (CNN) -- Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" encouraged amateur "symbologists" everywhere to scan their favorite paintings for secret codes -- but the practice has been going on for centuries.From the inscrutable prehistoric cave drawings inside the Chauvet Caves in Southern France to the abstract paintings of Jackson Pollock, artists have kept the intentions and significance of their work close to their chests.Famously opaque paintings include Bronzino's 1545 work "An Allegory with Venus and Cupid," which contains allegorical figures even scholars aren't able to decipher.Still, historians often discover hidden images, symbols and texts in works of art.CNN World's Treasures selects examples of such discoveries -- some reputable, others outlandish....
Source: Fox News
November 13, 2011
SALT LAKE CITY – More than six decades after being freed from a Japanese prisoner of war camp, a Utah veteran was compelled to relive the horrors and triumphs of his World War II experience this month when he received a mysterious package containing seven military medals, including the Distinguished Service Cross and Silver Star.The medals have become a source of pride for retired Army Capt. Tom Harrison, 93, since they arrived in a box with nothing more than a packing slip from a logistics center in Philadelphia on Nov. 4, which happened to be his 65th wedding anniversary. But they have also refreshed painful memories of the Bataan Death March, POW camps and the comrades he lost during the war or in the years since....
Source: Fox News
November 13, 2011
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. – A statue on top of Abraham Lincoln's tomb in Illinois is missing its sword for the second time in over a hundred years after thieves apparently made off with part of the copper sculpture, the State Journal-Register reported.An employee at the Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Ill., noticed last week that the copper sword held by a replica of a Civil War artillery officer was missing.According to the report, the sword was broken off at the handle, with no damage done to the rest of the artillery officer statue or the other statues in the group of four -- representing the Civil War cavalry, infantry and navy -- atop the tomb....
Source: Civil War Librarian (Blog)
November 9, 2011
President Barack Obama Tuesday signed an executive order making Fort Monroe in Hampton, Va., which closed as a military base in September, a National Monument. Fort Monroe "was the site of the first slave ships to land in the New World," Obama said during the Oval Office signing. "But then in the Civil War, almost 250 years later, Fort Monroe also became a refuge for slaves that were escaping from the South, and helped to create the environment in which Abraham Lincoln was able to sign that document up there -- the Emancipation Proclamation."Obama said the National Monument designation would bring millions of dollars to the region and create 3,000 jobs. "There's a strong economic component to this. We think we're going to see additional jobs in Virginia as a consequence of this. But for those members of Congress who are here, I still need some action from Congress on the American Jobs Act and other steps," the president said.
Source: Medievalists.net
November 12, 2011
In one otherwise unremarkable storage box in Connecticut College’s Shain Library, Ben Panciera made a remarkable discovery.Wedged between a set of magazines containing stories for Australian children and a biography of an Episcopalian priest was a book Panciera never thought he’d see with his own eyes – a medieval manuscript presumed stolen more than 50 years earlier.Panciera, the Director of Special Collections in the Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives, said the find was exhilarating. “You could see right away that it wasn’t paper,” Panciera said. “I thought, ‘Ahhhh, this has got to be at least 400 years old.’”...
