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… notheinge was Spared to mainteyne Lyfe and to doe those things which seame incredible, as to digge upp deade corpes outt of graves and to eate them.

From a letter written in 1625 by GEORGE PERCY, president of Jamestown colony in Virginia, on conditions during the winter of 1609.  Archaeologists have found evidence — in the form of a human skull that had been split open to remove the brain, post-mortem — that starving colonists resorted to cannibalism in order to survive during that period.

(via the New York Times)

“(The filmmakers) explained to me why they wanted two young actors to play Rachel and Jack, because they wanted them to be Rachel and Jack. It’s different than when you have a well-known actor playing that part – it’s still about that actor and not about the person he’s playing necessarily. …One of the things I liked about them is that they came to see me well-prepared. They had read a lot and could even refer to what they read, and ask questions about what they read, so they would know what I thought about the notions they were gathering from reading, whether I thought they were correct or not, and if I could add to them.  They were very interested in having me add interesting stories and material so that they could get a fuller understanding of our love, our relationship, our family, our partnership, and the experiences we had.” — RACHEL ROBINSON, widow of baseball great Jackie Robinson, on the casting of relative unknowns Chadwick Boseman and Nicole Beharie to play the couple in the film 42. (Photos and quote via the New York Daily News)
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“(The filmmakers) explained to me why they wanted two young actors to play Rachel and Jack, because they wanted them to be Rachel and Jack. It’s different than when you have a well-known actor playing that part – it’s still about that actor and not about the person he’s playing necessarily. …One of the things I liked about them is that they came to see me well-prepared. They had read a lot and could even refer to what they read, and ask questions about what they read, so they would know what I thought about the notions they were gathering from reading, whether I thought they were correct or not, and if I could add to them.  They were very interested in having me add interesting stories and material so that they could get a fuller understanding of our love, our relationship, our family, our partnership, and the experiences we had.” — RACHEL ROBINSON, widow of baseball great Jackie Robinson, on the casting of relative unknowns Chadwick Boseman and Nicole Beharie to play the couple in the film 42. (Photos and quote via the New York Daily News)
Zoom

“(The filmmakers) explained to me why they wanted two young actors to play Rachel and Jack, because they wanted them to be Rachel and Jack. It’s different than when you have a well-known actor playing that part – it’s still about that actor and not about the person he’s playing necessarily. …One of the things I liked about them is that they came to see me well-prepared. They had read a lot and could even refer to what they read, and ask questions about what they read, so they would know what I thought about the notions they were gathering from reading, whether I thought they were correct or not, and if I could add to them.  They were very interested in having me add interesting stories and material so that they could get a fuller understanding of our love, our relationship, our family, our partnership, and the experiences we had.”

— RACHEL ROBINSON, widow of baseball great Jackie Robinson, on the casting of relative unknowns Chadwick Boseman and Nicole Beharie to play the couple in the film 42.

(Photos and quote via the New York Daily News)

Shalom Aleichem, Yidden. Ihr zint frei!

The late rabbi HERSCHEL SCHACTER, to survivors at the Buchenwald concentration camp on April 11, 1945; Schachter was detached to General George Patton’s Third Army.

“Peace be upon you, Jews.  You are free!”

Rabbi Schachter, a modern Orthodox rabbi, “would remain at Buchenwald for months, tending to survivors, leading religious services in a former Nazi recreation hall and eventually helping to resettle thousands of Jews.”

He died last Thursday at the age of 95.

(via the New York Times)

Hollingsworth v. Perry

  • JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR:

    Outside of the marriage context, can you think of any other rational basis, reason, for a state using sexual orientation as a factor in denying homosexuals benefits, or imposing burdens on them? Is there any other ration decision-making that the government could make denying them a job, not granting them benefits of some sort? Any other decision?

  • CHARLES COOPER (defending Prop 8):

    Your Honor, I cannot. I do not have, uh, any, uh, anything to offer you in that regard. (Crosstalk.)

  • SOTOMAYOR:

    If that is true, then why aren't they a "class"? If they're a class that makes any other discrimination improper, irrational, then why aren't we treating them as a class for this one thing? Are you saying that the interest of marriage is so much more compelling than any other interest they could have?

  • COOPER:

    No, Your Honor, we are certainly not. we are saying that the interest in marriage and the state's interest, society's interest, what we have framed as responsible procreation is vital. But at bottom, with respect to those interests, our submission is that same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples are simply not similarly situated.

CODA  The violin used by Wallace Hartley as he and his band famously played “Nearer My God to Thee” while the Titanic sank more than 100 years ago was thought to have been lost.  But it was recovered — inside a leather bag strapped to Hartley’s body, found days after the tragedy — and was finally authenticated this year, seven years after it had been found stashed away in an attic.  (Photo: Bournemouth News via The Telegraph)
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CODA  The violin used by Wallace Hartley as he and his band famously played “Nearer My God to Thee” while the Titanic sank more than 100 years ago was thought to have been lost.  But it was recovered — inside a leather bag strapped to Hartley’s body, found days after the tragedy — and was finally authenticated this year, seven years after it had been found stashed away in an attic.  (Photo: Bournemouth News via The Telegraph)

(Source: telegraph.co.uk)

AP: "Unlike many other Muslim royalties basking in grand palaces and opulent lifestyles, Sultan Jamalul Kiram III’s kingdom sits in a rundown two-story house in a poor Islamic community in Manila, the only hint of power and glory the title attached to his name. 'I’m the poorest sultan in the world,' the ailing Kiram, 74, told The Associated Press in an interview in his residence in Maharlika village in the Philippine capital. Although largely forgotten and dismissed as a vestige from a bygone era, Kiram’s sultanate, once based in the southern province of Sulu has sparked the biggest security crisis in Malaysia and the Philippines in decades -- early last month, he sent his younger brother with about 200 followers, dozens of them armed, by boat from southern Philippines to a village in Sabah state in neighboring Malaysia to claim the land the sultanate insists belongs to them."

Fascinating read.

THIRTEEN years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.

What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.

The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler’s reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.

The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington.

“The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought,” Hartmut Berghoff, director of the institute, said in an interview after learning of the new data.

“We knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was,” he said, “but the numbers are unbelievable.”

The documented camps include not only “killing centers” but also thousands of forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war camps; sites euphemistically named “care” centers, where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels, where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel.

Auschwitz and a handful of other concentration camps have come to symbolize the Nazi killing machine in the public consciousness. Likewise, the Nazi system for imprisoning Jewish families in hometown ghettos has become associated with a single site — the Warsaw Ghetto, famous for the 1943 uprising. But these sites, infamous though they are, represent only a minuscule fraction of the entire German network, the new research makes painfully clear.

The maps the researchers have created to identify the camps and ghettos turn wide sections of wartime Europe into black clusters of death, torture and slavery — centered in Germany and Poland, but reaching in all directions.

The New York Times, “The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking”
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