jfk: lone gunman doubts, marilyn's box & the unspeakable

from dallas morning news: Use the latest scientific techniques to poke a hole or two in official findings on the Kennedy assassination and suddenly you have lots of new friends – and lots of enemies.

Forty-five years after President John F. Kennedy was killed in a Dallas motorcade, the details surrounding his death remain topics of endless debate for those who see conspiracies and those who disagree.

Cliff Spiegelman will testify to that.

The professor of statistics at Texas A&M University organized a six-member team that compared the composition of bullet fragments from the JFK shooting with other bullets from the same manufacturer.

The group found that those fragments weren't nearly as rare as the government's expert witness concluded in 1976, when Dr. Vincent P. Guinn determined that all five fragments came from two bullets fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. A third shot missed.

"The claim was made that those five fragments could only have come from two bullets," Dr. Spiegelman said. "Our research showed it could have been two or more. And if it is more than two, there is an increased likelihood that someone else provided one of them."

letters from jfk to marilyn are in a box
from nypost: Marilyn Monroe's re-resurrection in the current Vanity Fair tells about her private papers stashed in a secret filing cabinet, which had an even more secret drawer. It tells of her never-before-seen superhush-hush treasure trove. It tells of her hidden diary entries, personal belongings, intimate celebrity correspondence, and how some of that - namely the John F. Kennedy letters - appeared to have disappeared. Didn't exactly totally disappear. Could be I know what happened to them.

beyond conspiracy theories to why jfk assassination matters today
from your diocese: A veteran peace activist and author, James W. Douglass is among the few people in the world today qualified to write a book such as "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters." It's not just a rehash of the many conspiracy theories that have floated around literally since President John F. Kennedy was assassinated Nov. 22, 1963, although Douglass did an admirable job of winnowing the wheat from the chaff in that regard, too. Of course, those who advocate for the various conspiracy theories will continue to argue in support of their own theories.

'virtual jfk: vietnam if kennedy had lived'
from nytimes: The title of the documentary “Virtual J F K.: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived” pretty much says it all, though the movie itself says not nearly enough. Directed by Koji Masutani, this speculative, provocative, frustrating and finally unpersuasive historical gloss races quickly and all too lightly over the major political crises that John F. Kennedy faced during his aborted presidency — Laos, Berlin, Cuba, Vietnam — in what may be the most aggressive big-screen shine job since Oliver Stone’s much derided 1991 hagiography, “J F K.”

Hinged partly on the British historian Niall Ferguson’s controversial notion of “virtual,” or “counterfactual,” history — crudely, it didn’t happen, but it could have — the documentary embraces a view of Kennedy as a president more inclined toward peace than toward war. Divided into sections and illustrated with a wealth of archival material, including some of Kennedy’s lively, sometimes combative press conferences, the movie zips through one crisis after another, interspersed with guest appearances by the likes of Fidel Castro, Nikita S. Khrushchev and Robert S. McNamara. Every so often a spectral-looking James G. Blight, a professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, the movie’s sole talking-head authority, pops up against a white backdrop to make the same argument to the camera.

scientist re-examines jfk assassination evidence
from uky: Is it time to reexamine the Kennedy assassination? New scientific evidence indicates that Lee Harvey Oswald did not necessarily act alone. Simon Sheather, professor and chair of the Department of Statistics at Texas A&M has revealed that evidence used to rule out a second assassin has fundamental scientific flaws. Thursday, Sept. 18, he will speak at the University of Kentucky about new compositional analysis of bullets reportedly derived from the same batch as those used in the crime. As the 45th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination approaches, Sheather's research offers to shed new light on this national trauma... "Dr. Sheather's work is an excellent example of the importance of mathematical approaches to real life situations," said Vincent Cassone, chair, UK Department of Biology. Cassone and Sheather were colleagues at Texas A&M.