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: Telegraph (UK)
September 8, 2011
Historians and literary experts have hailed the publication of Lena Mukhina's diary, published in Russian under the title 'Keep my Sad Story', as a sensation in both its vividness and the quality of the writing.Unlike Anne Frank who died in a Nazi concentration camp, Lena Mukhina lived through the Second World War surviving the entire almost 900-day Nazi blockade of Leningrad which started in September 1941.Aged 16 when she started recording her thoughts, she witnessed the death of her mother, suffered starvation, and survived countless bombing raids while cataloguing the normal growing pains of a teenage girl at the same time."In the beginning, the diary reads like a love story," said Marina Rymynskaya, who typed up the original manuscript. "But on June 22 1941 (When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union) the handwriting changed dramatically. At first I thought that somebody else was writing. It was psychologically and physically difficult to work on this project. After typing up two or three pages I often felt physically sick and had to get some air."...
Source: IPS News
September 7, 2011
PARIS, Sept 7, 2011 (Tierramérica) - The latest archeological findings in the Mirador Basin of Guatemala lend further credence to the theory that the Maya civilisation that once flourished there was brought down by environmental causes such as deforestation.A major exhibition at the Musée du Quai Branly in París until Oct. 2, "Maya: From Dawn to Dusk", features over 150 pieces of art and ceramics from El Mirador, in northern Guatemala, and illustrates the scientific and artistic sophistication of this ancient Mesoamerican civilisation.
Source: AP
September 7, 2011
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The USS Iowa — the last surviving World War II battleship without a home — will head to the Port of Los Angeles to stand as a permanent museum and memorial to battleships, the Navy said Tuesday. The nonprofit Pacific Battleship Center, which has been working to bring the ship to Los Angeles, beat out the San Francisco Bay area city of Vallejo. The Navy's decision also comes six years after the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted against making a public display of the ship in that city, citing local opposition to the Iraq war and the military's stance on gays, among other things....
Source: NYT
September 7, 2011
The Museum of the City of New York will take over the beleaguered Seaport Museum New York using a $2 million grant from the corporation in charge of developing Lower Manhattan, according to state, city and museum officials who made the deal public on Wednesday....The Seaport Museum, at 12 Fulton Street and formerly named the South Street Seaport Museum because of the district where it stands, was founded in 1967 and explores the maritime history of New York through artifacts, historic ships and service boats. It has always been a modest operation, catering to tourists and nautical buffs.The City Museum, on Fifth Avenue between 103rd and 104th Streets, explores the city’s history through exhibitions and public programs. It is in a strong financial position for the takeover with a budget that has been in balance since 2003 and with a $90 million renovation that is about 70 percent complete....
Source: NYT
September 8, 2011
If history is a guide, the odds that the American economy is falling into a double-dip recession have risen sharply in recent weeks and may even have reached 50 percent....Over the last 50 years, every time that job growth has been as meager as it has been over the last four months, the economy has been headed toward recession, in a recession or in the immediate aftermath of one. From early 2010 through this spring, by contrast, employment was growing fast enough to make the economy look as if it were in a recovery, albeit a modest one....Perhaps the best sign of how difficult it is to know the economy’s direction is that, as a group, the nation’s professional forecasters have failed to predict all the recessions since the 1970s, according to data kept by the Philadelphia Fed. In the last 30 years, the average probability they put on the economy lapsing into recession has never risen above 50 percent — until the economy was already in a recession.
Source: AFL-CIO Blog
September 6, 2011
Most American children never receive any education about the union movement’s proper place in our country’s history and its many contributions to the nation’s development, according to a new report.“American Labor and U.S. History Textbooks: How Labor’s Story Is Distorted in High School History Textbooks,” sponsored by the Albert Shanker Institute in cooperation with the American Labor Studies Center, surveys four major textbooks that together account for most of the market in U.S. history textbooks. The report found that these textbooks often present labor history in a biased, negative way, focusing on strikes and strike violence while giving little or no attention to the employer abuse and violence that caused the strikes....
Source: Parade Magazine
September 4, 2011
In the spring of 1964, less than six months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. began conducting more than eight hours of interviews with Kennedy’s widow, Jacqueline. At her request, the transcripts and tapes were sealed from the public. Now her daughter, Caroline, is releasing the interviews in a new book, Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, to be published on Sept. 14. On a hot summer morning in Boston, Caroline Kennedy sat down to talk to PARADE about the conversations, which reveal a different side to the glamorous woman the world calls Jackie O but whom Caroline still calls “Mummy.” Inside the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Caroline, 53, wearing a beige summer coat, an off-white blouse, and a light beige skirt, displayed the elegance of her mother and the charm of her father, whose bust stood nearby.
Source: AP
September 3, 2011
WASHINGTON (AP) — The country has moved on. To the presidents who lead it, Sept. 11 never ends.The ramifications of the worst terrorist attack in American history live on, bridging the decade from George W. Bush to Barack Obama.Two wars. Huge debt. The Guantanamo Bay quandary. The evolving threat of terrorism. The end of Osama bin Laden. The hardening of executive power.And the remains of fallen soldiers still coming home in flag-covered cases.Sept. 11, 2001, defined Bush's presidency. It drives Obama's, even if more quietly."I remember President Bush used to warn people that it was going to be a long slog," said Michael Chertoff, Bush's second homeland security secretary. "There wasn't going to be a Battleship Missouri moment. The critical issue for us was to persevere without being overwrought. I think that was an accurate prediction."But persevere for how long?That is perhaps the biggest legacy at the presidential level: a new mindset....
Source: Daily Star
September 2, 2011
BEIRUT: Kamal Salibi, the most respected Lebanese historian of his generation, died in Beirut Thursday morning at the age of 82.Born in Beirut on May 2, 1929, and raised in Bhamdoun, Salibi was educated at International College and the American University of Beirut. He earned his doctorate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His thesis, entitled “Maronite historians and Lebanon’s medieval history,” was supervised by noted Orientalist Bernard Lewis....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
September 4, 2011
Few of the tourists who gaze up to admire one of London's most famous landmarks, Nelson's Column, would realise that its column's topmost point is made from the salvaged remains of an unheralded 18th Century warship.But the HMS Royal George can lay an even greater claim to posterity than providing the foundations of the world-famous statue in honour of perhaps the most celebrated naval hero in British history.According to naval historian Dr John Bevan, the largely forgotten flagship, which sank in the Solent at Spithead in August 1782, helped divers to locate the wreckage of the Mary Rose in the 1830s - a full 150 years before the stricken vessel was raised from the seabed.More than 900 people died when the Royal George sank, including 300 women and 60 children who were visiting the ship which was due to head for Gibraltar with HMS Victory....
Source: Fox News
September 6, 2011
Nuclear physics might soon solve a long-standing Leonardo da Vinci mystery -- the fate of a lost masterpiece known as the "Battle of Anghiari."
Source: The Atlantic
September 6, 2011
Scientists have collected evidence for years that modern humans interbred with our ridge-browed Neanderthal ancestors in Eurasia. But in Africa, where the homo sapien species is said to have emerged, a lack of genetic evidence has left researchers scratching their heads about exactly how we came to beat out not only the Neanderthals, or homo neanderthalis, but other archaic species like homo erectus and homo habilus. A new paper published by Michael Hammer from the University of Arizona, however, provides evidence that homo sapiens not only interbred with Neanderthals in Eurasia, they also had sex with several species of our ancestors across the African continent. And they did it often. "We think there were probably thousands of interbreeding events," said Hammer. "It happened relatively extensively and regularly."
Source: Indian Country Today
August 29, 2011
...Because American Indians lived everywhere in this country, the NPS could tell Native stories at almost every site. After all, it has chosen to tell the stories of settlers at most park units. Unfortunately, the NPS usually leaves out the Native stories in the parks, letting Indians vanish from most park landscapes.
Source: Fox News
September 2, 2011
It was one small step for man -- and for some astronauts it was a big leap of faith, too.
Source: CNN.com
September 3, 2011
(CNN) -- Before Moammar Gadhafi, there were the Phoenicians. And the Greeks. The Romans. The first Arabs. They're a reminder that no civilization -- and no leader -- is forever.The Libyan transitional leaders have a lot to deal with once they stop being rebels, and begin shaping a new Libya: Keeping law and order, setting up a rudimentary government, dealing with money -- and oil.But what about Libya's other wealth? Its archaeological treasures?They are all over the country.In the south, in Acacus, rock paintings 12,000 years old cross an entire mountain range....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
September 3, 2011
An examination of 340 skeletons from three 18th and 19th century Royal Navy graveyards found that a "surprisingly high" proportion suffered from scurvy and infected wounds.The bones, excavated from sites in Greenwich, Gosport and Plymouth, also found that more than six per cent of sailors in Nelson's navy, were amputees, many of whom died as a result of operations that went wrong.But despite uncovering evidence of syphilis, ulcers, serious tooth infections and possible malaria among the remains of the seamen, researchers said evidence indicated that only a minority came from the lowest rung of the social ladder....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
September 2, 2011
The dark allure of Adolf Hitler has turned his tea house at the top of a Bavarian mountain into one of the most visited sites in Germany.Tourism authorities announced that over 300,000 people visited the retreat on the peak of the Kehlstein mountain which was built for him as a 50th birthday gift by Nazi party secretary Martin Bormann in 1939. This is nearly 30,000 up on last year.Although Hitler's Berghof home on the mountain was destroyed by the Allies in bombing raids and after WW2, the tea house survived to become a tourism magnet in peacetime....
Source: Gettysburg Times
September 2, 2011
The former Gettysburg Country Club has belonged to the National Park Service for just five months, but plans are already underway to restore the land to its Civil War appearance of 1863.However, significant alterations to the property, where the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg was fought in 1863, won't occur until after Gettysburg National Military Park completes a "Cultural Landscape Report."According to GNMP Superintendent Bob Kirby, the park intends to raze four buildings that previously served as maintenance or storage sheds for a nine-hole golf course. The park is in the process of awarding a demolition contract to remove a golf cart barn, a rest-room building made of concrete block, a wooden shelter, and a small masonry structure used as a well-house.They will likely be razed over the next month....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
September 1, 2011
Benito Mussolini was a notorious womaniser, notching up a string of lovers and mistresses while forging an empire in Africa and building a fascist dictatorship.But a newly-discovered letter suggests that Il Duce's sexual conquests reached to the very top of the Italian establishment, to a princess who became the country's last queen.The revelation that Mussolini conducted an affair with Queen Maria Jose of Savoy in the 1930s is all the more surprising because the Belgian-born monarch was a critic of fascism and an important conduit during the war between the Allies and the Axis power.Evidence of the alleged affair between the two has emerged from a letter, published by an Italian magazine for the first time yesterday (wed), which was written by the dictator's youngest, Romano Mussolini, to an Italian journalist in 1971....
Source: The Local (DE)
August 28, 2011
Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich on Sunday rejected demands to compensate Germans who were forced to work in neighbouring countries after World War II.Erika Steinbach, the president of the Bund der Vertriebenen (BdV), which represents Germans who were displaced after the war, wants the government to compensate people who were required to labour in nearby countries following the defeat of the Nazis. But the minister told Steinbach in a letter that what happened after the war was simply fate and cannot be compensated, according to the newspaper Bild am Sonntag. The BdV is widely loathed in eastern Europe for consistently making calls for compensation to those Germans displaced during and after the war. While many Germans had to perform forced labour in neighboring countries, BdV opponents argue the war only took place because Nazi Germany started it....
