PRESIDENT Nixon was terrified of him. Secret police followed his every move. And he could gather the world's press simply by deciding to stay in bed.

Yesterday, after a 25-year freedom of information battle, an American historian has secured the release of the final surveillance documents held by the FBI on John Lennon.

What we learn from them is what we knew all along - that Lennon was a concerned, left-leaning musician who had ties to leftist and anti-war groups in the early 1970s. He was not a revolutionary. And he was only a threat to the world order insofar as he dared to imagine a world at peace.

So this is a story about the power and efficacy of art. About how those in power will lock their vaults and black out their documents in the face of a lone, visionary voice. The FBI was so worried about keeping Lennon's secrets they overlooked the fact that he didn't have any.

It also testifies to the devotion of an audience - for a quarter of a century a historian refused to relent until all of the secrets were laid bare. Millions more were eager to find out what the files might contain. Lennon was an artist who posed naked for the world. There should be nothing to hide.

The University of Oslo decided Wednesday to move Norway's famed Viking ships to a new museum to be built on Oslo's redeveloped waterfront.

The relocation is planned even though there are fears the move could damage the ancient wooden vessels, Oslo's Aftenposten newspaper reports.

The ships, dating from the eighth to 11th centuries, are to move to the new Museum of Cultural History planned for Bjorvika harbor, where the city's new Opera House is set to open in 2008.

On Wednesday night last week, Belgium's French-speaking public television network created a stir with a surprise 90-minute broadcast that began with a news flash that Flanders had declared independence and that the Belgian state was breaking apart. The broadcast was inspired by Orson Welles's 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells's "War of the Worlds," but touched upon a possibility less fanciful than an invasion from Mars. For the reality is that Belgium's days as a united nation may indeed be numbered.

Belgium only became a nation in 1830 and its union of Dutch-speaking Flemings in the north and French-speaking Walloons in south was never a love match. Instead, it was a marriage arranged by the great powers bent on creating a neutral buffer state.

Although Flemings always outnumbered French- speakers, Francophone Belgians dominated the new country economically, culturally and politically. French was the sole official language. The Francophone Belgian elite (which included the Flemish bourgeoisie) viewed the Flemish majority who could not speak proper French as backward peasants, suited to manual labor but little else. There was rampant social and economic discrimination.

A Flemish movement eventually emerged, pressing for language and cultural rights. In the 1930s, legislation established a regime of dual monolingualism based on a language frontier that divides the country today. In Flanders, Dutch is the only official language; in the Walloon region, French. Only Brussels is officially bilingual.

For most of Belgium's history, Wallonia was much richer than rural Flanders, and the country had a strong unitary parliamentary government that centralized power and authority. Neither is any longer true. Today the per capita gross domestic product of Flanders exceeds those of Germany, France and Britain, while that of the Walloon region is similar to the level of the poorer regions in France and Italy.

There are certain assumptions that American audiences, perhaps without realizing it, are likely to bring to a movie about World War II. The combat picture has been a Hollywood staple for so long — since before the actual combat was over — that it can sometimes seem as if every possible story has already been told. Or else as if each individual story, from G.I. Joe to Private Ryan, is at bottom a variation on familiar themes: victory against the odds, brotherhood under fire, sacrifice for a noble cause.

But of course there are other, contrasting stories, a handful of which form the core of “Letters From Iwo Jima,” Clint Eastwood’s harrowing, contemplative new movie and the companion to his “Flags of Our Fathers,” which was released this fall. That film, partly about the famous photograph of American servicemen raising the flag on the barren volcanic island of Iwo Jima, complicated the standard Hollywood combat narrative in ways both subtle and overt. It exposed the heavy sediment of individual grief, cynicism and frustration beneath the collective high sentiments of glory and heroism but without entirely debunking the value or necessity of those sentiments.

“Letters,” which observes the lives and deaths of Japanese soldiers in the battle for Iwo Jima, similarly adheres to some of the conventions of the genre even as it quietly dismantles them. It is, unapologetically and even humbly, true to the durable tenets of the war-movie tradition, but it is also utterly original, even radical in its methods and insights.

In December 2004, with “Million Dollar Baby,” Mr. Eastwood almost nonchalantly took a tried and true template — the boxing picture — and struck from it the best American movie of the year. To my amazement, though hardly to my surprise, he has done it again; “Letters From Iwo Jima” might just be the best Japanese movie of the year as well....

LONDON -- On the 400th anniversary of the departure of British colonists for America, Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine yesterday opened a Jamestown exhibit at a dockside museum near where their ships set sail.

Surrounded by American and British dignitaries at a museum in London's Docklands area and flanked by a Colonial color guard and Virginia Military Institute cadets, Mr. Kaine said the colonists' ideals and aspirations were born in England.

"The important things [that they brought] were not physical things, but were ideas and passions and experiences and philosophies," he said, crediting the English settlers with introducing the notion of equality before the law, freedom of religion and elected legislative leadership to the New World.
"Though the soil did not seem fertile, the seeds brought by those English settlers were powerful, and they've grown into a very powerful nation, a nation that we're proud to call friends of this great nation today," Mr. Kaine said.

IWO JIMA -- By the time the guns had fallen silent at the end of one of the bloodiest battles in the history of modern warfare, Iwo Jima resembled the surface of the moon. The trees had been turned into scorched stumps and the hillsides flattened by relentless shelling from US gunboats.

Now, almost 62 years after its fall changed the course of the second world war, Iwo Jima's physical scars have healed. Seen from the air, it is a pretty, teardrop-shaped speck in the Pacific Ocean 1,200 miles south of Tokyo, a place of rare insects and wild chilli peppers where the peace is broken only by the roar of Japanese F-15s leaving base.

The base is a reminder of Iwo Jima's vital role in Japan's security. To its Japanese defenders it represented the first line of defence; for the Americans it was the ideal stopping-off point for squadrons of B-29 Superfortresses that would carpet-bomb Tokyo and other Japanese cities into submission in the final months of the war.

When US troops landed on Iwo Jima's south-eastern beaches on February 19 1945, their commanders predicted that the battle would be over in four days. By the time Iwo Jima was secured, five weeks later, 6,800 US soldiers had died and 17,000 were injured. Of the 22,000 Japanese troops defending the island, only 1,080 were captured alive. Those who didn't fight to the death preferred to commit suicide than shame their emperor by falling into enemy hands.

After decades of being treated as an unfortunate episode in a war many would prefer to forget, Iwo Jima has finally penetrated the Japanese consciousness with the release of two films directed by Clint Eastwood.

Flags of Our Fathers, which goes on release in the UK on Friday, flits between graphic fighting scenes and the post-battle lives of three of the six US soldiers who famously raised the Stars and Stripes on the summit of Mt Suribachi on February 23 - a scene immortalised in Joe Rosenthal's iconic black-and-white photograph. Its companion piece is Letters from Iwo Jima, filmed in Japanese and told from the perspective of the island's defenders.

For well over a century, a Christmas staple for children across Britain has been an annual trip to the theater to enter a magical yuletide world of villainous pirates, diaphanous fairies, and dashing heroes. But few have realized that a simple seasonal excursion to see one of Britain's best-loved Christmas plays, J.M. Barrie's "Peter Pan," has for almost 80 years benefited thousands upon thousands of sick children.

Now a sequel, "Peter Pan in Scarlet," is set to continue the good work.

Peter Pan, a lovable, mischievous boy who never ages and flies with the help of fairy dust, is known to generations of children around the world in a number of guises: Some prefer Disney's cute 1953 animated version; others, Robin Williams's disenchanted grown-up Peter in "Hook." Most favor the darker original tale, in which Peter rebels against an adult world as petulant and stubborn as Pan himself. Many also know the story behind Peter Pan's creation through Johnny Depp's 2004 performance as its diminutive, retiring author, James Matthew Barrie, in the movie "Finding Neverland."

But there's another side to the story of Peter Pan, one that, like its acclaimed author, has remained largely hidden from the public view.

Though nowadays almost solely known for "Peter Pan," J.M. Barrie was, in the early 20th century, a major playwright more renowned than such illustrious contemporaries as George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. He also had a profound love for children, and, on befriending a family of five young brothers, created Peter Pan as a story to entertain them.

The character soon evolved into a play, first performed to rave reviews in London on Christmas 1904. In the United States, too, it quickly achieved stellar popularity. After an initial run in New York just before Christmas 1905, it embarked on a nationwide tour so highly acclaimed that Mark Twain remarked, "The next best play is a long way behind it." In 1911, Barrie transformed the play into a book, the first editions of which flew off the shelves.

"Then, in 1926," relates Christine DePoortere, director of the Peter Pan project at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London, "Barrie was asked by the Great Ormond Street Hospital to give a series of public lectures to help raise funds."

The hospital, founded in 1852, survived on private fundraising, mostly carried out by middle-class ladies, and was the only children's hospital of its day. "But Barrie was painfully shy, and couldn't speak in public to save his life," says Ms. DePoortere. He therefore promised to "see what else he could do for the hospital," and, in April 1929, donated all the royalties from Peter Pan to Great Ormond Street....

Filmmaker Garin Nugroho has turned to ancient Sanskrit legend and traditional Javanese culture to portray the inequality and violence that have plagued Indonesia's emergence as an independent nation.

Nugroho has previously explored dark episodes in his country's history --"A Poet" was set in 1965 during the massacre of hundreds of thousands of" communists" and government opponents.

But for his new film,"Opera Jawa" ("Requiem From Java"), Nugroho took his inspiration from an ancient epic, the Ramayana.

"The Abduction of Sinta", one of the best-loved tales from the Ramayana, recounts the tragic love triangle between Prince Rama, his Princess Sinta and King Rahwana, who tries to take her by force.

In"Opera Jawa", the episode is recast as a story of everyday life in a Javanese village.

[Jerry Stahl is the author, most recently, of “I, Fatty.”]

GOD bless Mel Gibson.

Of course, the deity doing the blessing is less likely to be Yahweh than Gukumatz, traditional Toltec god of culture, agriculture and opening weekend grosses.

By now the miracles have been quantified. “Apocalypto,” when it opened, promptly took the top box office spot with $15 million. Plus — what are the odds? — his Joseph Campbell-meets-Mesoamerica epic has been nominated for a Golden Globe, and is now being mentioned in the same sentence as Oscar.

It’s the last thing you’d expect for a movie in Mayan — especially one made by a man whose last project was a staging of Hate Crime Theater on a Malibu police-cam. Which begs the question: How low does a human being have to sink before Hollywood shoos him away and he can’t get an Oscar?

Stars have always been bent. Wallace Reid, the silent screen’s first heartthrob — and a full-on dope fiend — needed the studio to slip him morphine to keep production going. (This was the pre-rehab era; Reid died trying to kick his habit in a sanitarium.)

The celebrated Charlie Chaplin? In his 20s, he married a 16-year-old moppet; in his 30s, married another 16-year-old; in his 50s, settled down with a 17-year-old. But his penchant for child brides did not prevent him from receiving the longest standing ovation in Oscar history when he was given an honorary statue in 1972. Of course, Chaplin’s honor also marked his return from exile in Switzerland.

Once, Hollywood required scandal-ridden stars to go away for a while — a penitent hiatus before they could enjoy redemption, their second acts. So after being banished for years for her baby with Roberto Rossellini, Ingrid Bergman was, in 1956, finally welcomed back and given an Oscar.

Roman Polanski waited decades after fleeing a warrant for pedophilia before he finally snagged, in absentia, his best director statue for “The Pianist.” And even Leni Riefenstahl, the Führer’s darling, received a posthumous mention among the notable Hollywood dead at the 2003 Oscars.

But less than five months have passed between Mr. Gibson’s spouting of tequila-fueled bons mots on the dread power of the Hebrews and his basking in the glow of a No. 1 movie. His brief time in the wilderness may represent the fastest about-face since Democrats re-embraced Joseph Lieberman after he bested Ned Lamont in the Connecticut Senate race.

I know what you’re going to say: Fatty Arbuckle. The exception to the rule. Once bigger than Chaplin, he’s now remembered as the gold standard of degraded celebrity, someone who allegedly committed such unforgivable acts that he could never really come back. In 1921, the year he became the first comic actor to make $1 million a year, he was accused of raping and murdering an actress during an orgy at a San Francisco hotel....