Yektan Turkyilmaz, the Duke doctoral student in cultural anthropology, who was arrested in Armenia, says the government didn't know what to make of him: a Turkish-born scholar studying in the United States who believes that Armenians were indeed slaughtered by Turks in 1915.

In an interview he remarked:"The interrogators’ questioning in the initial few days of my arrest was entirely devoted to my research, my political views and connections with Turkish intelligence and state officials. The concept of 'scholar' is meaningless to them. According to them, as the investigator put it, 'all scholars are spies.'"

(Click on the Source link above to read an interview with Turkyilmaz.)

The decision Tuesday by a U.S. immigration judge in Texas to deny Venezuela's request to extradite Luis Posada Carriles, whom Caracas has dubbed "the Osama bin Laden of Latin America", was greeted with surprise and disappointment by Latin America activists and even some former U.S. officials. Venezuela wants Carriles to stand trial for the October 1976 bombing of a civilian Cubana Airlines flight that killed all 73 people aboard shortly after it took off from Barbados.

Venezuela's ambassador here, Bernardo Alvarez, accused the George W. Bush administration of using a "double standard" on terrorism. He said the White House and U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which represented the administration before the court, "virtually" collaborated with Posada by failing to contest statements by one defence witness that Posada would be tortured if he were returned to Caracas.

"There isn't a shred of evidence that Posada would be tortured in Venezuela," said Alvarez, adding that "if we examine our respective records on torture, a prisoner is more likely to be tortured in the custody of the U.S. government than in the custody of Venezuelan officials".

Some U.S. officials, who declined to speak on the record, also deplored the decision by immigration judge William Abbott not to extradite Posada on the grounds that he could face torture in Venezuela.

"It's bad enough when the world knows that we're rendering suspected Islamic terrorists to countries that routinely use terror," said one State Department official. "But here we have someone who we know is a terrorist, and it's clear that we're actively protecting him from facing justice. We have zero credibility."

The history-making storm, Katrina, may have an impact on history graduate students who rely on subsidized federal loans. A Republican Party subcommitee's proposed plan to finance the relief costs of the storm-wrecked Gulf region includes a provision eliminating all federally subsidized loans to graduate students across the nation according to a copy of the proposal released by the Democratic political action committee MoveON.org .

Entitled "Operation Offset," the plan estimates that $8.6 billion could be saved over ten years if it were put into effect. According to the proposal, "Graduate students make an informed decision to invest in their own futures and should bare the costs of schooling, especially since private interest rates are currently low." In the 2003–04 academic year, 40 percent of all graduate and first-professional students received financial aid through the federal Stafford loan program (http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2005/2005158.pdf).

For centuries, scholars the world over have argued over the whereabouts of the lost kingdom, ruled over by one of the Greek heroes of the Trojan war.After a two-year odyssey of his own, an amateur British historian claims to have located the mythical land of Ithaca - the island homeland of Homer's legendary Greek hero Odysseus. Now thanks to 21st-century computer technology, space photography and the obsession of a management consultant from Surrey, the riddle may have been solved.

Robert Bittlestone, backed up by two classical experts, believes the island described in the epic poem is now part of the Ionian tourist destination of Cephalonia.

Using satellite imagery and 3D global visualisation techniques developed by Nasa to look for clues, Mr Bittlestone, the chairman of the UK management consultancy Metapraxis, came up with his theory after undertaking field trips in western Greece and using his computer to analyse literary, geological and archaeological data.

Amid objections from some Holocaust survivors, a federal judge Monday approved a $25.5 million settlement between the U.S. government and Hungarian Jews who lost jewelry, artwork and other treasures when a Nazi "Gold Train" was commandeered by the U.S. Army during World War II. Despite the objections, Judge Patricia Seitz said the agreement represented a "historic" chance to right a 60-year-old wrong committed by some U.S. troops and never adequately addressed by the federal government.

The settlement came in a lawsuit filed by Hungarian Holocaust survivors over the U.S. capture and pilfering in 1945 of a train loaded with gold, jewels, silver, china, 3,000 Oriental rugs and 1,200 paintings that had been stolen from Hungarian Jews by the Nazis.

The settlement came in a lawsuit filed by Hungarian Holocaust survivors over the U.S. capture and pilfering in 1945 of a train loaded with gold, jewels, silver, china, 3,000 Oriental rugs and 1,200 paintings that had been stolen from Hungarian Jews by the Nazis.

A book published in Italy today is set to reignite a smouldering controversy over how close the Nazis came to manufacturing a nuclear device in the closing stages of the second world war. The 88 year-old author, Luigi Romersa, is the last known witness to what he and some historians believe was the experimental detonation of a rudimentary weapon on an island in the Baltic in 1944.

Hitler's nuclear programme has become a subject of intense dispute in recent months, particularly in Germany. An independent historian, Rainer Karlsch, met with a barrage of hostility when he published a study containing evidence that the Nazis had got much further than previously believed.

Mr Romersa, a supporter of Mr Karlsch's thesis, lives today in an elegant flat in the Parioli district of Rome. His study walls are covered with photographs from a career during which he interviewed many of the major figures of the 20th century, from Chiang Kai-shek to Lyndon Johnson. Though he suffers from some ill-health these days, he is still lucid and articulate.

He told the Guardian how, in September 1944, Italy's wartime dictator, Benito Mussolini, had summoned him to the town of Salo to entrust him with a special mission. Mussolini was then leader of the Nazi-installed government of northern Italy and Mr Romersa was a 27 year-old war correspondent for Corriere della Sera.

Mr Romersa said that when Mussolini had met Hitler earlier in the conflict, the Nazi dictator had alluded to Germany's development of weapons capable of reversing the course of the war. "Mussolini said to me: 'I want to know more about these weapons. I asked Hitler but he was unforthcoming'."

Mussolini provided him with letters of introduction to both Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, and Hitler himself. After meeting both men in Germany, he was shown around the Nazis' top-secret weapons plant at Peenemünde and then, on the morning of October 12 1944, taken to what is now the holiday island of Rügen, just off the German coast, where he watched the detonation of what his hosts called a "disintegration bomb".

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, most have naturally focused on the human cost — the many lives, homes and jobs lost to the storm. But CBS News reports that Katrina also destroyed a lot of historical treasures, especially along the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

In the mountains of debris piling up in Mississippi are some of this state's greatest treasures — literally consigned to the ash heap of history.

All along the Gulf Coast, mansion after glorious mansion lies in ruins — like one home that predates the Civil War. All that's left is the palm tree.

Another antebellum gem sits beneath a casino barge.

"The storm was truly a monster. It just ripped off the front porch and scattered it," says Patrick Hotard, the director of Beauvoir, a museum that was the last home of Confederate president Jefferson Davis.

Beauvoir survived the Civil War, but lost the battle of Katrina.

"And I was — just literally my mouth was just hanging open, 'cause I just couldn't believe it," Hotard says.

Jake Staples, the museum's assistant director of facilities, depended on the darkness and labyrinthlike exhibit spaces to hide him during his harried days alone in the museum, when police protection in the Warehouse District evaporated and looters marauded through the museum's ground floor amid the vintage landing craft and tanks.

Before the flood, Staples spent his days seeing to the maintenance of the museum he loves. He understands the workings of the building and exhibits as well as anyone, down to the sounds the structure makes as it expands and contracts with the heat of the day. The stocky, bearded Army veteran chose to stay inside the museum during Hurricane Katrina, fearing only "the wind or a funnel cloud or a lightning strike on the roof," he said. Though "slight, slight tremors shook the building" during the worst of the storm, Staples said, he was utterly confident of his safety. "Those walls are 28 inches thick," he said. "I felt very secure. We could have opened Tuesday morning (after the storm) if we had power and water."

Staples sat tight through Tuesday, eating the provisions the museum had stockpiled before the storm and listening apprehensively to radio reports of the floodwaters that crept across the city following Katrina. He knew his situation was changing for the worse. "By Wednesday evening this area was completely void of police protection, EMTs, anything," he said.

From the vantage point of a raised staircase inside the museum's huge, glass-faced atrium, he watched as groups of young people, who seemed to be simply wandering the streets, streamed past the museum. One group caught his attention because even behind the glass wall of the museum he could hear a young woman berating a group of five young men, alternately cursing them and begging them not to abandon her. "Then one of the men stopped and backhanded her," Staples said. Then he witnessed a gang rape. "Afterwards, she got up, pulled her pants up and kept following them. They were her meal ticket, I guess. ... This area was a jungle."

Now acutely aware of the violence outside, Staples was careful to remain unseen behind the museum's transparent walls, watching from vantage points behind the front desk, on the stairs and even surveying the reflection of the atrium in a polished door.

Wednesday at 8 p.m., Staples heard glass breaking as looters smashed through the door to PJ's, the museum's coffee shop at the corner of Magazine Street and Andrew Higgins Drive. Around 2 a.m. Staples heard intruders break the plate glass double doors into the museum gift shop, where they rummaged through the T-shirts, hats and other souvenirs. At sunrise they smashed through the doors into the atrium. Nothing else stood between Staples and them.

By his estimate 30 to 40 looters at a time scurried beneath the bomber and fighter planes. Some tried to access the cash inside an ATM, chipping futilely at the strong box. Staples retreated to the darkened exhibit, often taking refuge in a tiny theater dedicated to the battle of Leyte Gulf, located in what the museum calls the "serpentine wall." Using his flashlight he positioned benches to create stumbling blocks in the deep darkness as a crude early warning system. Occasionally he ventured out to assess the situation. To his horror, he found that looters had begun venturing to the second floor. "Some went to the second floor, but someone down below yelled in really vulgar language to get back down because they might be seen from outside."

[Eventually, the military showed up and secured the area.]

The European Union's parliament has approved a resolution in which it supports the start of membership talks with Turkey but lays down a series of provisos. The parliament says recognition as genocide of the killing of more than a million
Armenians in 1915 was "a prerequisite for accession". Euro-MPs also postponed a vote on extending Turkey's customs agreement to the ten newest member states, because of Ankara's refusal to recognise
Cyprus. The parliament's decisions do not affect the start of entry talks on 3 October but are seen as a further sign of European reluctance towards Turkey's bid.

The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, described the postponement of an important vote on the trade agreement as 'an own goal'.

The decision was motivated by Turkey's recent declaration that signing the protocol of the Ankara Agreement did not mean any form of
recognition of Cyprus, which became an EU member last May. Euro MPs wanted assurances that this declaration would not be part of Turkey's parliamentary ratification of the protocol. Turkey also refuses to
admit naval vessels and airplanes from Cyprus.

There is a deja vu quality to the nation's post-Katrina interest in race and poverty. It brings to mind the call-to-conscience of the Kerner Commission, named by President Johnson in the wake of the urban riots of the 1960s, and its warning of an America "moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal." But of course, America is not black and white anymore, thanks to another legacy of that era -- the Hart-Cellar Immigration Act, which Johnson signed into law Oct. 3, 1965.

Infused with the civil rights spirit of the day, Hart-Cellar eliminated national origin quotas designed to keep the United States a mostly Northern European nation, ushering in an era of mass immigration, mostly from Latin America and Asia. It would transform America's racial and ethnic makeup more than any legislation in history.
Forty years later, whites are a diminished majority in a far more diverse nation, but still comprise more than two-thirds of its population and a commanding share of its wealth and power.

Blacks, meanwhile, have lost their standing as the dominant minority group, effectively ceding their singular claim on the national conscience, their grievances undermined by the competing demands and relative success of many immigrants of color.

"People are becoming aware that you can't talk about black and white anymore," said Gerald Jaynes, professor of economics and African-American studies at Yale University. In 1989, Jaynes co-edited "A Common Destiny," in its time the definitive study of blacks in American society. By 2000, he was editing another volume, "Immigration and Race."

In 1960, blacks accounted for 69 percent of the U.S. minority population.

By 2004, according to Census Bureau estimates, blacks were only 39 percent of the minority population. Hispanics became the largest minority in 2001.

"What we have is not a black and white situation. It's black and brown, and white and Asian, and black and Asian, and on it goes," said Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a black writer and commentator who presides over the weekly Los Angeles Urban Roundtable.

In Los Angeles, as in California, blacks are now the third-largest minority, behind both Latinos and Asians, their ranks of elected officials thinning year by year. Watts, the definitive black ghetto when it exploded in riots in August 1965, long ago became mostly Latino.

"This is a new world," said Nicolas C. Vaca, a Bay Area lawyer and sociologist, author of last year's "The Presumed Alliance: The Unspoken Conflict Between Latinos and Blacks and What It Means for America."

Controversial historian and publisher Keith Windschuttle has dismissed as a myth claims of an Aboriginal massacre at a Victorian site called Convincing Ground. Mr Windschuttle, whose criticisms of the "black armband" view of Australia's past sparked the "history wars" in 2002, describes the Aboriginal heritage claim on Convincing Ground as doubtful. The Convincing Ground dispute began on January 17 when local Koori Culture heritage officer Denise Lovett stopped earthworks at the site 7km east of Portland on Victoria's west coast.

The local Glenelg Shire Council and three freehold property owners are now fighting a legal battle for the right to proceed with residential subdivision and commercial development.

They have been taken to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal by the Victorian Department of Planning and local Aborigines, who claim oral history and colonial records indicate Convincing Ground was the site where whalers massacred the Kilcarer Gundidj clan in a dispute over a beached whale in 1834.









But Mr Windschuttle has joined fellow conservative historian Michael Connor in labelling Convincing Ground as another Hindmarsh Island affair.

The Hindmarsh Island affair was a dispute about Aboriginal secret women's business which halted the construction of a $6million South Australian bridge project.

"In the Convincing Ground case, we are obviously dealing with myth-making," Mr Windschuttle said. "It is very dubious."

One of those he singles out for criticism is Ian Clark, of the University of Ballarat, whose book Scars On The Landscape includes Convincing Ground among the 19th century battlegrounds where Aborigines fought with settlers in western Victoria.

"Ian Clark's claim is one of the most dubious I have heard about," Mr Windschuttle said.

But Dr Clark argued extreme political ideologies, including Mr Windschuttle's, had for decades skewed the truth about the relationship between early settlers and Aborigines.

The Austrian embassy to the U.S. points out that we erred in our editorial last week on Simon Wiesenthal in describing Kurt Waldheim as a "one-time SS officer" ("Nazi Hunter," September 21). The weight of the evidence indicates that Mr. Waldheim, who also served as U.N. Secretary General and as president of Austria, did not serve in the SS. We regret the error.

Our modest editorial point, we hasten to add, was that Wiesenthal had not accused Mr. Waldheim of war crimes because he only accepted the highest standards of evidence. But this does not mean Mr. Waldheim is entirely innocent of Nazi association. In the first editions of his memoirs, Mr. Waldheim claimed to have spent most of the war as a law student after being wounded in 1941 while serving in the German Army. He denies ever having been a Nazi and insists he merely did his duty as a soldier.

In fact, Mr. Waldheim's involvement with Nazi organizations began in 1938 shortly after the German-Austrian Anschluss, when he enrolled in the Nazi student union of Vienna's Consular Academy. Later that year, Mr. Waldheim enlisted in a mounted unit of the Sturm Abteilung, or SA, the paramilitary brownshirts founded by Adolf Hitler. In 1942, Mr. Waldheim returned to duty as an intelligence officer with the Wehrmacht's Army Group E, which at one point deployed some 400,000 troops throughout the Balkans and in Greece.

After the war, Mr. Waldheim was named a war criminal by the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal on charges of "murder, slaughter, shooting of hostages and ravaging of property by burning of settlements." In 1947, the United Nations War Crimes Commission listed Mr. Waldheim as a class A suspect because it believed there was clear evidence establishing his guilt. Yugoslavia never pressed its extradition request, and the matter was essentially forgotten until Mr. Waldheim ran for the Austrian presidency in 1986. Since then, Mr. Waldheim's name has been on a U.S. government watch list of suspected war criminals and he is banned from traveling here.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association on Wednesday upheld its decision last month to include the University of North Dakota on a list of institutions that face restrictions on participation in NCAA championships because they use nicknames deemed “hostile and abusive” to Native Americans.

Since the NCAA announced the policy August 5, it has granted appeals filed by three other institutions — Central Michigan and Florida State Universities and the University of Utah — that had also been included on the original list of 18 institutions with mascots, names or other imagery deemed offensive. In all three cases, the universities were able to show that the namesake tribes — the Chippewas (Central Michigan), Seminoles (Florida State) and Utes — supported the institutions’ continued use of the name.

Danish archeologists have found the well-preserved skeletal remains of an Iron Age woman while excavating a 1,600-year-old grave in a suburb of Copenhagen. The woman, believed to be between 20 and 40 when she died, probably lived around the year AD 400, Tom Giersing of the Kroppedal Museum in Taastrup said Wednesday in announcing the find.

It happened in secret, details of what was destroyed have not been made public, and the initial reaction of Protestant unionists showed that huge elements of doubt and distrust remain.

But an independent international commission and two clergymen certified Monday that the Irish Republican Army had turned over the bullets, guns, blasting caps, bombs and plastic explosives that kept much of Britain on edge for more than 35 years.

It happened in secret, details of what was destroyed have not been made public, and the initial reaction of Protestant unionists showed that huge elements of doubt and distrust remain.

But an independent international commission and two clergymen certified Monday that the Irish Republican Army had turned over the bullets, guns, blasting caps, bombs and plastic explosives that kept much of Britain on edge for more than 35 years.

The chairman of the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning, retired Canadian Gen. John de Chastelain, said the eight-year process of putting the last of the IRA's weapons "beyond use" was completed Saturday. "This can be the end of the use of the gun in Irish politics," he said at a news conference in Belfast.

The commission considers the file closed on IRA arms, and gave its report containing that conclusion to the governments of Ireland and Britain.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, for whom progress in the Northern Ireland peace process has been one of the top achievements of his eight years in office, hailed the development as "a step of unparalleled magnitude."

Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern called it a "landmark development of historical significance."

Gerry Adams, leader of the IRA-linked political party Sinn Fein, who had urged the IRA to abandon its armed struggle, called the announcement an unprecedented step toward building "a new Ireland."

Urging the unionists to re-form a joint government that collapsed in 2002, Adams said the IRA's move was not a tactical maneuver.

"I understand and appreciate that unionists need space to absorb what all this means," Adams said. "I would ask them to reflect upon the potential which is now created, and to see it as an opportunity."

But the Rev. Ian Paisley, leader of the most popular party in the Protestant unionist community, was having none of it.

Paisley, who supports keeping Northern Ireland in a union with Britain, insisted that neither the commission nor the Roman Catholic and Methodist clergymen who participated in the decommissioning had anything more to go on than the IRA's word.

A First-Temple period seal has been discovered amidst piles of rubble from Jerusalem's Temple Mount, an Israeli archaeologist said Tuesday, in what could prove to be an historic find.

The small - less than 1 cm - seal impression, or bulla, discovered Tuesday by Bar-Ilan University archaeologist Dr. Gabriel Barkay amidst piles of rubble from the Temple Mount would mark the first time that an written artifact was found from the Temple Mount dating back to the First Temple period.

Bipartisan legislation introduced in the Senate this week would permit television coverage of open sessions of the U.S. Supreme Court.

"The purpose of this legislation is to open the Supreme Court doors so that more Americans can see the process by which the Court reaches critical decisions of law that affect this country and everyday Americans," said Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

"Justice Felix Frankfurter perhaps anticipated the day when Supreme Court arguments would be televised when he said that he longed for a day when the news media would cover the Supreme Court as thoroughly as it did the World Series," Sen. Specter said in his introductory statement.

"Allowing the public greater access to [Supreme Court] proceedings will allow Americans to evaluate for themselves the quality of justice in this country, and deepen their understanding of the work that goes on in the Court," added Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who cosponsored the bill along with Senators Cornyn, Allen, Grassley, Schumer and Feingold.

See the introduction of S.1768, a bill to permit televising of Supreme Court proceedings, September 26:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/congress/2005/s1768.html

"Justices on the Supreme Court oppose the televising of their proceedings," according to a recent Congressional Research Service report, "in part because the cameras might alter decision making and intrude on the privacy of the justices, making them public celebrities."

Nagase Takashi tortured British POWs during the building of the Thai-Burma railway. He has spent his life since trying to make amends and wants the railway declared a UN World Heritage Site before he dies.

Nagase Takashi still breaks down when he remembers the young British man he helped torture. “I couldn’t bear his pain,” he says, choking back tears. “He was crying Mother! Mother! And I thought: what she would feel if she could see her son like this. I still dream about it.”

Nagase was a military interpreter for the Kempeitai, th special Japanese police, in the prison camp made famous in the movie, Bridge on the River Kwai, when POW Eric Lomax was caught with a concealed radio and map.

Neither man has ever completely recovered from what took place in the following days as Lomax was relentlessly tortured. For the 22-year-old Signals Corps engineer from Edinburgh, it was the beginning of a nightmare that has taken him 60 years to shake off. “The psychological damage stays with you forever,” he says.

For his 21-year-old tormentor, it was the start of one of war’s most remarkable stories of repentance.

Lomax was beaten relentlessly and dragged broken and weak before Nagase and his commanding officer for interrogation. He remembers the officer’s face ‘full of latent and obvious violence.’ But it was that ‘hateful little’ interpreter, for days intoning in a flat inflectionless voice: ‘Lomax you will be killed,’ who he really despised.

Nagase’s voice droned in his ear as he was repeatedly held down and water was hosed into his nose and mouth, filling his lungs and stomach. Lomax survived – barely – to spend the rest of the war in a brutal military prison, and for half a century nursed his hated against his interrogator. ‘I wished to drown him, cage him and beat him,’ he says.

Today, Nagase is a frail 87-year-old retired English teacher who understands the hate directed at him. “People who have been to hell do not forgive easily,” he says. “And we were in hell. But I wanted to help him in some way. I searched my brain for the right English expression and as he was leaving the camp I said to him quietly, ‘Keep your chin up.’ I still remember his astonished face.”

The Thai-Burma Railway was one of the great evil follies of World War II, a 415-km track hewn mostly by hand through rock and tropical jungle that consumed the lives of up to 100,000 men, including an estimated 16,000 slave labourers conscripted from the ranks of the decimated Allied forces.

By the time what became known as ‘Death Railway’ was completed, it was lined with thousands of flimsy wooden crosses marking the bodies of young men from Glasgow, London and Liverpool, who had succumbed to starvation, disease and beatings; 60 years later some are still held in the jungle’s swampy embrace, lost forever.

Nagase, who was chosen as interpreter because he had been taught by US Methodists in a Tokyo college, remembers entering the stinking, malaria-ridden Kanchanaburi prison camp, on the railway’s route to Burma (now Myanmar) in September 1943. “It was surrounded by brazen vultures attracted by the stench of the corpses. I still shudder when I think of it.”

His halting, imperfect English was often the only conduit between the camp commanders and thousands of prisoners, and he helped interrogate many POWs, but it was the memory of Lomax that lingered. “As I watched him being tortured and heard his cries, I felt I was going to lose my mind. I thought he was going to die and I still remember my relief when I felt his pulse.”

When the war ended, Nagase spent seven weeks locating 13,000 abandoned bodies along the line for the Allied war Graves Commission; many now lie in a cemetery in front of Manchanaburi Station. For most, this gruesome work would be penance enough for sins committed under orders during wartime, but Nagase was only beginning his long journey to redemption.

“The work of searching for bodies changed my whole life,” he says. He began to write and lecture in Japan about the horrors he had seen, harshly criticizing, at some personal risk, the Japanese military, and the Emperor system that survived the war. “It should be completely abolished,” he says today. “The Emperor should apologise for what was done in his name.”

He used much of his own money to build memorials across Thailand, including a Buddhist peace temple near the Tham Kham Bridge over the Kwoi Noi River – the bridge on the River Kwai -- and to fund education programs in the area. Remarkably, he has returned to Thailand 125 times, the last time in June this year, trips he says ‘calm his soul.’

In 1976, he organized the first of a series of reunions between ex-POWs and Japanese soldiers, a tense affair on the famous bridge which was overseen by Thai riot police, ‘just in case.’ Nagase was criticised by the Japanese press for holding the Thai national flag rather than the Rising Sun that had once fluttered over the camp. “Do they know how many Thai people were slaughtered under that flag”, he asks.

But he had to wait until March 1993 before a reunion on the banks of the Kwai with the tall, blue-eyed Scotsman he had helped interrogate. Although not yet ready to forgive, Lomax had been disarmed by an ‘extraordinarily beautiful’ letter from Nagase. He had gone to Thailand not knowing what to expect and ended up comforting a shaking, crying Nagase who simply kept saying: “I am so sorry, so very, very sorry.”

The formal forgiveness that Nagase craved came later. “I knew he had hated me for fifty years and I wanted to ask him if he forgave me, but I couldn’t find a way,” says Nagase today. So I said: ‘Can we be friends,’ and he said ‘yes.’” And the old soldier who will again travel to Berwick-upon-Tweed next month to see the man he now calls ‘my friend’ is again wracked by sobs.

When they meet, the men swap war stories and share their astonishment at the ‘utter futility’ of the project that scarred their lives so profoundly. Lomax wrote in his biography, The Railway Man: “The Pyramids, that other great engineering disaster, are at least a monument to our love of beauty, as well as to slave labour; the railway is a dead end in the jungle…The line has become literally pointless. It now runs for about 60 miles and then stops.”

Nagase has never got over his bitterness at the waste of lives and believes, controversially, that young Japanese today share responsibility for what happened. In July this year, he astonished a group of British high school students on an Imperial War Museum-sponsored trip in Japan by tearfully apologizing to them and demanding that a Japanese student to do the same. “This is not a problem of our generation,” said the bewildered Japanese, a reply that infuriates Nagase.

“It is not a generational issue,” he says. “The shame belongs to the whole Japanese race.” Needless to say, he is disgusted by attempts by some nationalist scholars and politicians in Japan to rewrite history. “The textbooks they have written contain the same things we were taught in school in the textbooks in the led up to the war. It is unforgivable.”

And he has no tolerance for Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro’s visits to Yasukuni Shrine, the war memorial that he and Lomax visited together when the Scotsman came to Japan. Lomax was astonished to see a monument in the shrine to the Kempeitai, saying “it is like seeing a memorial to the Gestapo in a German cathedral.” Inside they found an ‘immaculate’ C56 steam locomotive from the Thai-Burma railway, with no mention of those who died constructing it; Lomax calls it a ‘monument to barbarism.’

“Koizumi is a fool,” spits Nagase. “I don’t care who I say this to. And why are the newspapers now writing that the war was good. What do they think the Japanese Imperial Army was doing in East Asia for 15 years? Why don’t they listen to what other Asian people are saying? Sometimes this is an odd country.”

But although he says that some Japanese consider him a ‘traitor’, he also frequently criticizes the US. “What the Americans are doing in Iraq is not good,” he says. “In war people identify exclusively with their country. It makes people crazy. There has to be other ways of solving problems.”

At 87, Nagase knows his time is short and desperately wants the railway declared a UN World Heritage Site before he dies. In November, despite a dangerously weak heart, he will cycle with a group of Japanese peace campaigners along the remains of the railway as part of his campaign. He has cultivated good ties with Thai government officials and won the support of several embassies, but the UN designation is controversial.

There is little official support in Japan for a memorial to one of history’s most barbaric episodes, and some veterans are still reluctant to embrace their former captors in a joint campaign; others believe that the railway should be allowed to sink back into the jungle. A 1987 commercial plan to renovate the line was criticised by the former Allied countries and withdrawn.
British Foreign Office spokesman Dan Chugg said the British government had not been formally approached about the move, but said any response “would depend very much on the views of the veterans about the proposal. If it comes up we would talk to veterans groups and take it from there. Because it is not a site in the UK we are simply an interested observer.”

For his part, Lomax is unequivocal. “He has my complete support. This is very important to him.”

After 60 years of campaigning, to make up for less than two years service in the Thai prison camp, those who know Nagase say his relentless search for redemption is humbling, awe-inspiring. “He is so courageous,” says Tamura Keiko, who runs an organisation that helps locate former allied POWs in Japan. “The people who fought in the war forgot their humanity, so it is a long battle to get them to see each other as human beings again. That’s what he does. He is often asked why he continues, and he says it is so we won’t forget those who died.”

This summer, a story in the Style Section of the Washington Post reported on Christa Allen, who was trying to sell two hairs supposedly snipped from the dead George Washington's head. But so far: no sale.

Secured under glass in a gold locket, the hairs were left to her by her father, a Philadelphia lawyer. Unfortunately, he had no proof that the hairs belonged to the father of the country. A desperate search of their ancestral home in Langhorne, Pa, finally produced documentation of sorts -- a letter typed in 1928 with a handwritten list of the previous owners of the locket in the margin. Christie's and other auction houses dismissed this as hearsay evidence but the dogged Ms Allen, a single mom who needs the money, identified the first name on the list as the undertaker who participated in Washington's ceremonial reburial in 1837. She also found evidence that the coffin had been opened at that time and some locks of hair snipped. She persuaded Ted Sunderhaus, an appraiser at Cowan's Cincinnati auction house to support her claim. He called the evidence "fairly conclusive." He thought she could get $100,000 for it. The feisty Ms Allen rejected this proposal and put the hair on eBay for $750,000, combining it with a Revolutionary War map that her father had given her. Alas, she did not get a single bid. A recent check of eBay revealed five samples of Washington's hair, selling for prices that ranged from $200 to $1.00.

Teams of archivists are rushing to the Gulf Coast on an urgent mission to recover priceless records damaged by Katrina.

When two feet of water flooded the basement of the New Orleans courthouse a month ago, archivist Stephen Bruno faced a huge problem. All the books on the bottom shelves were wet. He knew the soggy volumes, containing important public records, must be put in freezers to halt the growth of mold until they could be dried out.

"I made a public plea for help," says Mr. Bruno, custodian of notarial records for Orleans Parish. "Once they finished saving people, I became deeply concerned that we had to save records."

Books, documents, and photographs in public and private collections remain an invisible part of rescue operations in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. From courthouses, libraries, and businesses to lawyers' offices and homes, the need is the same: to dry out papers and save as many documents as possible.

Salvage efforts have been hurt by poor access to storm-ravaged areas and by a lack of electricity.

"Without power, there's no way to control relative humidity," says Sharon Bennett, a conservator from Charleston, S.C., who spent last week in New Orleans assessing the damage to cultural collections. "There's a very short amount of time before the damage becomes irreversible. You can't get the stains out."

Archaeologists in Austria have discovered the bodies of two Ice Age babies, estimated to be 27,000 years old. Buried in 18ft of earth, the preservation of the skeletons is said to be "near perfect". They were buried beneath the shoulder blade of a hairy mammoth on a hillside overlooking the Danube, in northern Austria, near Krems. It is the first time that a grave of babies from the Ice Age has been discovered, according to Christine Neugebauer-Maresch, the dig leader.

The site had previously been identified as a settlement for early man. The grave also contained a necklace made with 31 separate pieces of ivory from mammoth tusk.

The Viennese Institute for Natural Sciences will carbon-date the remains of the children to find out their exact age and how they died.

The perfectly preserved skeletons, measuring 15.8in, bore no signs of violence and there was speculation that the children died of a natural disease.

However, the care and attention taken over their burial indicates that they were the offspring of people of stature in their tribe.

Ms Neugebauer-Maresch said: "They may have been twins, but we have not yet been able to establish that. The bodies were buried high on a hillside.

"The site was well chosen and the artefacts interred with them indicate they were possibly the children of a chief or warriors.

"The act of placing a mammoth shoulder bone over them, as if to protect them in the afterlife, denotes great care and attention at their funeral."

The remains have already been classified as homo sapiens fossilis, who came out of Asia during the Ice Age as Neanderthal man was dying out and mastered stone and wood, but did not discover metal.

Kennedys don't cry -- that was dynasty founder Joe Kennedy's famous dictum. Nor do they spill their guts. For more than four decades, family members have maintained a stoic front through assassinations, scandals, fatal accidents and the other ordeals collectively known as the Kennedy Curse. There was something heroic in the Kennedys' stony embrace of their fate, particularly in this age of compulsive confessionalism. But over the years it has also trapped the family in a bell jar of morbid celebrity. Unable to confront the terrible meaning of the murders of Jack and Bobby -- the two brothers who brought the family to such political heights -- the Kennedys were doomed to live in the shadows of these martyrs. But now comes "Symptoms of Withdrawal," a raw, exposed wound of a memoir by Christopher Kennedy Lawford, one of the baby-boom generation cousins, that tries to liberate the family from its crushing legacy.

Peter Lawford might have belonged to one of the entertainment world's most exclusive clubs, along with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. But Patricia Lawford made it brutally clear to her husband, and even to her own children, that they did not have full membership in an even more restricted clan, the Kennedy family. Christopher Lawford writes that on the climactic summer night that John Kennedy was to climb onto the stage at the Los Angeles Sports Arena to accept his party's presidential nomination, flanked by his telegenic family, his mother tried to stop her husband from joining them, telling him, "Peter, you can't come. You're not a Kennedy." A more levelheaded JFK quickly intervened on his brother-in-law's behalf, telling his sister, "Pat, he's your husband. I'd say that qualifies him. Besides, it doesn't hurt having a good-looking movie star around."

Lawford writes that his mother was never happier than she was that night, "standing at the apex between the worlds of politics and Hollywood," where she had the joy, as a California delegate, of voting for her brother as the next president of the United States. And his father, despite his mother's proprietary attitude toward her family, enjoyed an easy and friendly relationship with JFK, with whom he swapped fashion tips and Hollywood dish. Even as his parents' marriage began to hit the rocks and Lawford went to the White House to seek Kennedy's advice, the president reassured him: "Don't worry, Peter. I will always be your friend."

This world ended for young Christopher and the rest of his family on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, when his teacher, Sister Agnes, took him out of class to tell him his uncle had been shot and killed. Jack and Bobby had been the sun and moon of the family, the fulfillment of their father's Olympian ambitions and the celestial lights around whom the others orbited. Now the older brother was gone and everything began spinning off its axis.

"The next morning when I woke up," Lawford writes, "I found my father sitting at the flagpole where I used to raise the presidential flag when Uncle Jack came to visit. He was crying like a baby.
... In public, Bobby Kennedy had stated that he accepted the official version of his brother's public execution in the streets of Dallas. But privately, as I have discovered through research for a book on the Kennedy brothers, RFK nurtured strong suspicions of a high-level plot and recruited several of his closest and most trusted associates to quietly investigate the crime. If he made it back to the White House, RFK confided to these associates, he would reopen his brother's case. However, perhaps out of a desire to protect his family, Bobby did not share his suspicions about Dallas widely among his relatives. Since Bobby publicly accepted the Warren Report, writes Christopher in"Symptoms of Withdrawal," the family was reassured that nothing was rotten in America. After Bobby's murder, this became harder for the family to accept. But the Kennedys chose once more to suffer in silence."I never heard any of the grown-ups vent any anger or hatred toward the murderers," writes Christopher."I never heard anybody question why they did it or how ... We just ate it and tried to be good little Kennedys and demonstrate that stoic grace that everybody seemed to admire so much."

Facing a current deficit of about $400,000, Executive Director Waite Rawls is certain things will only get worse. During his presentation today to a General Assembly subcommittee studying the cost and feasibility of relocating the White House, a national Historic Landmark, and the 108-year-old museum, Rawls spelled out just how bad it is likely to get. And, for the first time, he admitted that the historic institution is out of options.

"You have to face reality," he said. "We either move the White House or consign it to a fate of an alternative use or very few visitors." Look for more on this and other stories in Tuesday's Times-Dispatch.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) special agents recovered and seized 322 pre-Columbian artifacts from Peru after a joint investigation by ICE and the Broward Sheriff's Office (BSO) of Broward County, Florida, according to a September 23 press release issued by ICE. ICE, which is an agency within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said that the recovered Peruvian artifacts "date as far back as 1500 B.C."

The stolen antiquities were discovered by ICE agents and BSO officers during the execution of three federal search warrants at various South Florida locations. Among the items recovered were a clay vessel estimated to be 3,500 years old, a clay statue estimated to be 1,800 years old, a burial shroud linked to ancient Peruvian royalty and gold jewelry. ICE reported that its agents arrested one individual in Miami with alleged links to the smuggling of the priceless artifacts.

"These items are just the latest cultural properties that ICE agents have seized and returned to their rightful owners in recent months," said ICE. "According to a memorandum of understanding signed in 1997, the Peruvian government will be able to claim the archeological artifacts seized by ICE and BSO officials."

This summer and fall, in a rare turn of events, Beijing is commemorating the victims of Japanese war crimes through the eyes of a foreigner: Minnie Vautrin, a missionary educator from Secor, near Bloomington. In a communist country where the United States is often attacked in media and the arts, an official dance drama tells of the massacre in Nanjing as witnessed by the American woman.

When Japanese troops stormed into Nanjing in 1937, murdering 300,000 Chinese and raping thousands of women and girls, Vautrin was among a handful of foreigners who stood against the tide.

She hung an American flag outside her missionary college, declared a safe zone and sheltered 10,000 women and children from death by gunfire, sword and bayonet. She held her ground when imperial troops aimed rifles at her, slapped her face, threatened her with death.

Another former Illinois resident is also at the center of the production "Nanjing 1937." The dance, which opened in Beijing this month and is slated to travel elsewhere in China, portrays Vautrin's ghost guiding the research of author Iris Chang, who is revered in China for writing a best-selling account of the atrocity, "The Rape of Nanking," as the city was then known.

Choreographer Tong Ruirui, 28, said she was moved to learn that both women ended up committing suicide--belated victims, she believes, of the massacre. Vautrin suffered a nervous breakdown and killed herself in 1941 at age 53 in Indianapolis. Chang, who was severely depressed, shot herself in California last November. She was 36.