Brit-Am Historical Reports (3 February, 2015, 14 Shevet, 5775)
Contents:
1. List of English words of Yiddish origin
2. Wall Street's famed bronze bull arrived 25 years ago (without permission)
3. How Did Blonde Whites Arrive in Peru Before Columbus? by Ulli Kulke [Celts and Carthaginians?]
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1. List of English words of Yiddish origin
Merlin Houzet <merlinhouzet@gmail.com> wrote:
I have heard many of these words before but I never realized that so many of them are of Yiddish origin!
List of English words of Yiddish origin
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Yiddish_origin
Interesting eh?
Shalom,
Merlin
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2. Wall Street's famed bronze bull arrived 25 years ago (without permission)
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/wall-street-famed-bronze-bull-145353876.html
Extracts:
It was 10 nights before Christmas, and all the way down Wall Street the coast was clear.
A flatbed truck turned the corner and lurched to a stop directly in front of the New York Stock Exchange. Arturo Di Modica and his small band of co-conspirators jumped out of the truck and got right to work, Â the night watchman had just completed his patrol of 11 Wall St., and, having cased the block for several nights, Di Modica and his team knew they had just 4 Â minutes until he returned.
They lowered the bronze beast 'all 3 Â tons of it' right into the middle of Broad Street, and right under the exchange's Christmas tree. The truck zoomed out of sight, but Di Modica stood at the corner, watching and waiting for morning.
It was 25 years ago today that Wall Street's favorite mascot arrived downtown. Di Modica, the Italian artist who spent $350,000 of his own money to cast 'Charging Bull' in his Soho studio as a Christmas gift to the city, relished the reactions of New Yorkers, traders, tourists, cab drivers and hot dog vendors. Unlike in Pamplona, they were running toward the bull, he said.
The police were called in, and, when they proved unwilling or ill-equipped to run an 18-foot-long bull out of town, the exchange hired private contractors to remove him. The beast suffered a fate far less dignified than being slain by a matador in the ring. He was hauled off to Queens.
'Bah, Humbug!' proclaimed the front page of the next morning's New York Post, above a photo of the bull being carted away. 'N.Y. Stock Exchange grinches can't bear Christmas-gift bull.'
Di Modica, who for years plopped his works out on city streets in the middle of the night, should have been used to this sort of thing. But even though his bull seemed menacing, nostrils flared and ready to gore anything or anyone in its path, the sculpture, he said, was intended as a symbol of New York's drive, optimism and willingness to barrel ahead against the odds and in spite of what had come before.
The artist conceived 'Charging Bull' during the city's most bearish hour , Â just days after the stock-market crash of 1987. A Sicilian immigrant who had found success in New York 'enough to buy a Manhattan studio and a Ferrari' Â remained hopeful for his adopted home at a time many were selling the city short, convinced its best days were behind it. Though the market had recovered much of its losses by 1989, the city was stlll a crime-ridden shadow of its former and future self.
Though Grasso could not be reached to corroborate the story, the chairman, according to Di Modica, offered to bring the bull back to the exchange on one condition. 'He wanted me to make a bear, too,' the artist said. 'I told him I was not going to do that, Â the bear means the market goes down, but I wanted to represent the city getting bigger, stronger, faster.' Grasso, recalled Di Modica, hung up.
Di Modica paid to bail 'Charging Bull' out of the outer boroughs, and with the help of community activists, and the city's Parks Department, found a new home for him just a few blocks away from the exchange in Bowling Green. There he has remained the past 25 years, greeting millions of tourists, newcomers and natives as a kind of free-market Statue of Liberty.
The bull's time in New York has been generally bullish. The beast witnessed the city's reversal of fortune, the drop in crime, the rise in real-estate prices, the election of a billionaire mayor. He's also stood firm through the dot-com bust, two terrorist attacks (Sept. 11 left him covered in a thick layer of soot), the Occupy Wall Street protests (during which 'Charging Bull' was used a symbol of greed run amok) and the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.
Di Modica likely recouped the expense of building the bull several times over in the past 25 years, having cast sibling bulls for cities around the world, and having sold many smaller versions to collectors.
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3. How Did Blonde Whites Arrive in Peru Before Columbus? [Celts and Carthaginians?]
http://www.amren.com/news/2013/09/how-did-blonde-whites-arrive-in-peru-before-columbus/
by Ulli Kulke, Die Welt, August 5, 2013
Note: For those who are interested in this subject it is recommended that you go to the link above to read the article in full, see the photos, and especially read the comments below the article.
Extracts:
Those in search of the legacy of the Celts naturally travel to sites in Germany, France, and other countries of Western Europe to find the remnants of settlements, burial grounds, and fortifications. They can now go to South America, to the eastern edge of the Andes, to admire buildings and other cultural achievements of that early European people and their descendants, all from a time many centuries before the first crossing by Christopher Columbus. Celts, in fact, arrived long before Columbus in the New World, together with Carthaginians.
That is the claim now being made by cultural scientist and documentary filmmaker Hans Giffhorn. In his view, there is reliable evidence that the Chachapoya mountain people who were living in eastern Peru at the time of the arrival of the Spaniards in the 16th century, and whose numerous descendants still live there, were closely related to the Celts.
Ever since the first conquistadors, the Chachapoya, because of their appearance, white, red-haired and some with freckles, as well as their lifestyle, have been a big mystery for anthropologists. Now Giffhorn, in his book Was America Discovered in Antiquity? Carthaginians, Celts and the Mystery of the Chachapoya ('Wurde Amerika in der Antike entdeckt? Karthager, Kelten und das Rotsel der Chachapoya'), has come closer to providing an answer, particularly because he is supported by genetic analysis that traces hereditary relationships.
The audacious thesis of the book is this: At the beginning of the second century BC, after the destruction of their capital, a large number of Carthaginians feared that the Romans wanted to finish them off. They escaped, deliberately seeking a new home in another part of the world, as far as possible from their enemies. To this end, they allied themselves with the Celts, probably from Mallorca, who had often served them as mercenaries.
Then as now, when ships venture too far off the West African coast, as Giffhorn thinks the Carthaginians did for fear of the Romans, currents and winds drive them almost inevitably toward South America. Some narrations of journeys from the early days of discovery confirm this.
The Chachapoya culture, characterized by its stately stone buildings, developed approximately between 100 and 400 AD, according to scientific dating methods, long before the Inca made similar achievements. Nowhere, however, is there, as one would normally expect, remnants of preceding cultures. It seems as if the Chachapoya appeared from nowhere. Around this time in history, in the area north and south of the mouth of the Amazon, there suddenly emerged a previously unexplained culture. Ceramics give evidence for this, as does evidence of cremation, which was unknown in all of Latin America, but known in Europe.
A number of parallels presented themselves to Giffhorn during his research. The massive stone rotundas, built without cement, resemble the buildings of the Celts on Mallorca. The type of slingshots they used, as described by the Spanish chroniclers of the conquistador era, resemble weapons that were once used on that Mediterranean island.
The practice of 'trepanation,' and the arrangement of holes drilled in the skull by the Chachapoya for brain surgery are unknown to medical historians in the rest of Latin America, but arguably were known by the Celts in Europe. Their manner of mummification in turn showed significant similarities to that of the Phoenicians.
The most important evidence was found by genetic analysis of Chachapoya descendants. A molecular genetic research laboratory in Rotterdam reported that European blood is clearly detectable in this Andean nation. It appears that male Europeans bred with Indian women a long time ago.