Tulane University announced Friday and Loyola University on Sunday that they would not open for the fall semester in the wake of the damage of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. The universities’ announcements came as leaders of key higher education groups issued guidelines for colleges to use in helping students unable to attend college in New Orleans.

Other colleges in New Orleans may well be forced to make similar decisions. And academic meetings scheduled to take place in New Orleans during the next few months are being moved or called off. But a number of other colleges that suffered damage from Katrina are announcing plans to re-open for this semester.

Meanwhile, colleges nationwide continue to offer slots to students — and in some cases, faculty members — displaced by Katrina.

The saga of William H. Rehnquist at the US Supreme Court is very much the story of a long-term Republican campaign to conquer an institution that had become a citadel of liberal power in the 1960s.

Now, with the passing of the chief justice on Saturday evening, legal historians and constitutional scholars are assessing the Rehnquist legacy. It is an assessment that began months ago amid speculation of Rehnquist's possible retirement.

He is being called a highly effective chief justice, both in terms of his impact on the law and the efficient and congenial way he managed an institution often at the center of America's white-hot culture wars.

Others say his influence was undercut by the dynamics of a splintered court largely controlled, in high-profile cases at least, by two centrist swing voters - Justices Sandra Day O'Connor (who announced her retirement July 1) and Anthony Kennedy.

In the end, the high court never emerged under Chief Justice Rehnquist as a conservative juggernaut. To some relieved liberals and disappointed conservatives, the Rehnquist era might be remembered as "the counterrevolution that wasn't," says Tinsley Yarbrough, a Supreme Court biographer and historian.

But it was not for lack of presidential effort. Since 1969, 10 of the last 12 justices have been appointed by Republican presidents. And while the court's center has shifted to the right, the so-called Rehnquist court nonetheless retained a penchant for producing major liberal landmarks.

Over Rehnquist dissents, the high court upheld abortion, affirmative action, gay rights, online pornography, and flag burning. It struck down capital punishment for juveniles and the mentally retarded, ordered the all-male Virginia Military Institute to accept female cadets, and struck down state regulation of so-called partial-birth abortions.

This is not exactly the wish list that Republican presidents may have had in mind when selecting their Supreme Court nominees. But such liberal victories should not obscure the broader significance of Rehnquist's legacy, analysts say.

The beginning of the 19th century was a good time if you were ambitious, male and British. There was money to be made in the Empire for those willing to travel in search of opportunity. Two young Scots, William Jardine and James Matheson set up a company that became hugely successful then and is still flourishing today. They also stand accused of starting the Opium Wars.

Born in Dumfriesshire in 1784, Jardine left Scotland after completing his medical degree at the University of Edinburgh to work onboard ship as a surgeon's mate. Realising that there was more money to be made in trade he began importing and exporting goods from India to Britain.

Matheson was born in Sutherland and started out as an employee of the East India Company. When he and Jardine met they both wanted to escape the stronghold of the company. The place to do this was in China.

A great proponent of Adam Smith, Matheson saw in China the obvious necessity for free trade.

"Did not the laws of nature," he asked, "oblige all people to mingle freely with each other?" His conclusion was obvious. China must open and he believed Britain would do it.

So began a process which historian and broadcaster Saul David considers to be one of the most unforgivable acts of empire, saying:

"It was one of the blackest marks in the Imperial story, capitalism and mercantilism at its worst."

The enormous problem facing traders in China was the inequality of trading options. This imbalance was soon to be answered.

While storms such as Hurricane Katrina are sometimes called an act of God or a natural disaster, the devastation they leave behind is not. Some scientists believe even the storms themselves could be at least partly man-made.

In New Orleans, the worst-hit parishes were the lower-income ones. But the city also ignored the power of nature. More than 1 million acres of Louisiana's coastal wetlands, or 1,900 square miles, have been lost since 1930, due to development and the construction of levees and canals. Barrier islands and stands of tupelo and cypress also vanished. All of them absorb some of the energy and water from storm surges, which, more than the rain falling from the sky, caused the current calamity.

The temporary lull in hurricane activity in Florida, from 1969 to 1989, spurred a reckless building boom, for example, putting billions of dollars worth of condos and hotels within reach of storm surges, notes Roger Pielke Jr., of the University of Colorado, Boulder. The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 would have caused an estimated $90 billion damage had it occurred in 2000, he calculated. It caused just over $1 billion, in today's dollars.

It isn't only hurricanes whose destructiveness has been increased by human actions. Tornadoes turn mobile homes into matchsticks (one of Steinberg's first jobs was at a New York brokerage firm, where he followed the trailer-home industry). From 1981 to 1997, he found, more than one-third of all deaths from tornadoes occurred among people living in mobile homes; federal regulations didn't require them to withstand high winds, and a 1974 statute actually pre-empted stricter state standards with more lax federal ones.

Throughout the South and Midwest, mobile-home communities and poor neighborhoods are also much more likely to be sited in flood plains.

As the flood waters recede from New Orleans and the city takes up the sad task of counting the dead, historians are trying to account for musical treasures and contemplating whether New Orleans will regain its place as America's pre-eminent city for jazz.

Museum directors are still struggling to calculate the extent of losses. One of the biggest concerns is the state of the collection that was housed at the Old U.S. Mint in the French Quarter. The building's roof was torn off when Hurricane Katrina lashed the city on August 29. The collection includes musical instruments, film, prosters and photographs, news reports said.

But there also was some good news for New Orleans jazz fans when it was announced Sunday that the legendary Preservation Hall in the French Quarter was not affected by the flood. The Association of American Museums said at its website that the 255-year-old building around the corner from Bourbon Street and three blocks from the Mississippi River suffered no serious damage.

Other historic locations that sustained damage in the storm and the ensuing flood that resulted from levee and floodwall breaks include the Louis Armstrong House, the archives of the Jean Lafitte Museum and the National Cemetery, final resting place for soldiers who served in the Civil War.

"History is literally drowning," Chris Lee of the rock band Supagroup told the Dallas Morning News last week. New Orleans has been "a musician's paradise", he said, but he worries that the vibrant scene might be gone if musicians start to leave.

The United Nations this week characterized the cataclysmic storm as one of the world's worst natural disasters in terms of property damage, even outstripping the December tsunami in Asia that killed 180,000 people and caused $10 billion in destruction.

"This is one of the most destructive natural disasters ever measured in the amount of homes destroyed, people affected, people displaced," said Jan Egeland, the United Nations' undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs.

While Katrina certainly has earned her deadly reputation, the storm's destructive catwalk through America's underbelly is not the first time the unfettered fury of nature -- or even mankind's own doings -- has drowned, burned or buried people in their own homes, schools and workplaces, or spawned legions of refugees desperately seeking rescue, shelter or a drink of water.

Aerial shots indicate the city jewel -- the French Quarter -- remains intact and relatively dry, he said. Café du Monde, the home of sugar-dusted beignets -- puffy, rectangular doughnuts -- is still there. Just across the street behind Jackson Square, the Cabildo and Presbytre museums still squat beside St. Louis Cathedral. "By and large, the French Quarter seems to be dry," Foreman noted. "That's important. That's home to Preservation Hall.

His high court rulings affected The Citadel, state death penalty.

U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist grew up in Wisconsin, was educated in Massachusetts and California, and raised a family in Arizona.

But his life’s work has had a particular impact on South Carolina people and institutions.

In 1983 Rehnquist cast the single dissenting vote in a case that determined whether Bob Jones University in Greenville, because it segregated students on the basis of race, should be eligible for tax-exempt status.

The other justices reasoned that the federal government had the right to deny Bob Jones the status because it discriminated.

Rehnquist defended his dissent by arguing that Congress, but not the IRS, was empowered to make that determination.

IN 1994-5 as the justice charged with overseeing S.C. matters before the Supreme Court, Rehnquist lifted the stay that prevented Shannon Faulkner from becoming the first woman to attend classes at The Citadel.

He again ruled in Faulkner’s favor when the school in 1995 tried to prevent her from joining the military college’s corps of cadets.

Lien Chan says that only by looking at history correctly can one correctly look into the future. "We can tolerate our past enemies but can never forget them, therefore we must have a correct understanding of history," Lien said in a recent interview with the "Oriental Horizon" of China Central Television.

The interview was carried out when China marked the 60th anniversary of the Chinese people's war of resistance against Japanese aggression and the world anti-fascist war.

Lien's grandfather moved to the mainland after Taiwan was cededto Japan in 1895. Recalling his childhood during the war of resistance against Japanese aggression in northwest China, he saidthe bombing of Japanese planes was "too fierce and cruel."

"The July 7 Incident in 1937 was a unprompted and self-conscious rebellion of the whole Chinese nation against Japanese aggression. I believe it was a history of struggle of theentire nation, which is of a historical significance to today's Taiwan in particular," he said.

In 1939 Polish intelligence offered to the British the German encoding machine, Enigma, plus the keys to keep decoding Wehrmacht secret messages, 80 per cent of which the Poles could read. The British, obsessed with the Empire not Europe, had focused on trying to read Japanese naval codes and showed little interest in the fact the Poles were cracking German codes before the war started.

Throughout history, intelligence agencies and secret agents are the most easily mocked of public servants. Their necessary secrecy gives rise to sinister interpretations. They have to bribe, seduce, blackmail or cajole men and women into betraying their own country or cause. They make mistakes, are venal. But they are necessary. The terror attacks are alerting a public sleepy-eyed after reading too much John le Carre to the real-time importance of intelligence. To understand what needs to be done we need to look at past successes and failures. Luckily there is now a new wave of spy books - fact rather than fiction - which examines in detail achievements and cock-ups. These new volumes are much richer than the unending sequence of spy thrillers, a genre that is running out of steam.

The endless literature on Enigma and Ultra barely mentions the contribution the Poles made in giving Churchill the priceless secret that helped win the war. One reason was the disappearance in 1945 of all the files that recorded the contribution Polish intelligence made to the Allied war efforts. As the Soviet Union rose to world power status, official London placated Sovietism by writing the Poles out of second world war history. Polish airmen and soldiers were not even allowed to march in any of the victory parades at the war's end.

The Writers in Prison Committee of International PEN reported yesterday that author Orhan Pamuk will be brought before an Istanbul court on 16 December 2005 and that he faces up to three years' imprisonment for expressing an opinion about the Armenian genocide of 1915 and the Kurdish insurrection of 1984-2000.

International PEN greets with shock the news that the world-famous Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk, will be brought before an Istanbul court on 16 December and that he faces up to three years in prison for a comment published in a Swiss newspaper earlier this year.

The charges stem from an interview given by Orhan Pamuk to the Swiss newspaper Das Magazin on 6 February 2005 in which he is quoted as saying that "thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it".
Pamuk was referring to the killings by Ottoman Empire forces of thousands of Armenians in 1915-1917.Turkey does not contest the deaths, but denies that it could be called a "genocide". His reference to "30,000" Kurdish deaths refers to those killed since
1984 in the conflict between Turkish forces and Kurdish separatists.
Debate on these issues have been stifled by stringent laws, some leading to lengthy lawsuits, fines and in some cases prison terms.

Article 301/1 of the Turkish Penal Code under which Orhan Pamuk will be tried is a case in point. PEN sees it extraordinary that a state that has ratified both the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the European Convention on Human Rights, both of which see freedom of expression as central, should have a Penal Code that includes a clause that is so clearly contrary to these very same principles. To quote Article 301/1: "A person who explicitly insults being a Turk, the Republic or Turkish Grand National Assembly, shall be imposed to a penalty of imprisonment for a term of six months to three years." To compound matters, Article
301/3 states: "Where insulting being a Turk is committed by a Turkish citizen in a foreign country, the penalty to be imposed shall be increased by one third." So, if Pamuk is found guilty, he faces an additional penalty for having made the statement abroad.

Joanne Leedom Ackerman, International Secretary of International PEN states that "International PEN is deeply concerned by the efforts of the public prosecutor to punish and therefore curb the free expression of Orhan Pamuk, not only in Turkey, but abroad." She adds that "It is a disturbing development when an official of the government brings criminal charges against a writer for a statement made in another country, a country where freedom of expression is allowed and protected by law."

The trial against Orhan Pamuk is likely to follow the pattern of those against other writers, journalists and publishers similarly prosecuted. Karin Clark, Chair of PEN's Writers in Prison Committee points out that "PEN has for years been campaigning for an end to Turkish courts trying and imprisoning writers, journalists and publishers under laws that clearly breach international standards to the Turkish government itself has pledged commitment." Although the numbers of convictions and prison sentences under laws that penalise free speech has declined in the past decade, PEN currently has on its records over 50 writers, journalists and publishers before the courts. This is despite a series of amendments to the Penal Code in recent years which were aimed at meeting demands for human rights improvements as a condition for opening talks into Turkey's application for membership of the European Union. The most recent changes were enacted in June this year. Journalists in Turkey have staged protests against the fact that there remain considerable problems in the revised Penal Code. In April International PEN joined its the International Publisher's Association in a statement to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights which described the newly revised Penal Code as "deeply flawed".

Orhan Pamuk is one of Turkey's most well known authors, whose works have been published world wide in over 20 languages. In 2003 he won the International IMPAC award for "My Name is Red". His 2004 novel "Snow" has met with similar acclaim. His most recent book, "Istanbul", is a personal history of his native city.

In early 2005, news of the interview for which Pamuk will stand trial led to protests and reports that copies of his books were burned. He also suffered death threats from extremists. PEN members world-wide then called on the Turkish government to condemn these attacks.

Preliminary reports have now been assembled on the condition of many of the museums in the path of Katrina. Beauvoir, Jefferson Davis's home, located in Biloxi, was virtually demolished. The Louisiana State Museum has sustained moderate to severe damage. The Old Capitol Museum of Mississippi History lost a third of its copper roof.

"Over the past five years, a distorted and hostile attitude toward Israel has prevailed at the University of California-Santa Cruz, creating an intimidating environment for members of the campus community, particularly Jewish students. Much of the anti-Israeli bias has been generated by the university's predominantly leftist faculty members, who have injected their personal ideology into course curricula, classroom lectures and discussions, and events and speakers sponsored by departments, research groups, and colleges."

The Australian War Memorial's principal historian Dr Peter Stanley has released a paper that claims Japan never planned to invade Australia and the "myth" was promoted by Prime Minister John Curtin as a "motivational device".

"The invasion myth had remained alive for 60 years, abetted by the seeming need of Australians to dramatise their situation in 1942," he said.

"Why can't we as a nation accept that the war the Allies fought was decided far from Australia - North Africa, north-west Europe and above all on the steppes of European Russia," he said. "Why do we appear to want to believe that Australia really was threatened with invasion, that it was attacked."

He said such a desire was "poignant and rather pathetic". Dr Stanley said the bombing of Darwin, the Japanese advance through Papua New Guinea and other military activities around Australia had nothing to do with any invasion plan.

Hurricane Katrina's rampage across the U.S. Gulf Coast is causing uneasiness among officials in South Florida, where an even stronger hurricane blasted the Florida Keys 70 years ago today. Like the devastating hurricane that tore into Louisiana and Mississippi last Monday, the unnamed storm that struck the Keys on Labor Day 1935 rapidly intensified as it neared landfall. It became the most powerful hurricane ever to strike the United States.

Katrina's rapid intensification from 80 mph winds to 175 mph was similar to the Labor Day hurricane of 1935, which exploded from a tropical storm with winds of about 40 miles an hour (65 kilometers an hour) to a killer hurricane in about 30 hours. The storm's eye struck Long Key, Florida with winds of perhaps 200 miles an hour (320 kilometers an hour) and a storm surge that completely submerged parts of the island chain.

More than 400 people were killed, including about 260 World War I veterans who were working on a highway construction project. The veterans were being housed in flimsy beachfront work camps on the low-lying islands.

Virtually everything in the Latin Quarter and the Garden District suffered some damage. Much of the turquoise-and-white facade of Commander's Palace in the Garden District is gone. So is one wall of Antoine's, famous for Oysters Rockefeller.

The Cafe du Monde, home of smoky chicory coffee, did not appear to suffer extensive damage. Many of the city's oldest neighborhoods, including the Bywater and the 9th Ward on the east side, were lost under the floods. On Burgundy Street, a building that once housed slaves collapsed. At one historic above-ground cemetery, a lot in the Garden District known as Lafayette No. 1, uprooted magnolia trees destroyed part of a 200-year-old wall believed to contain human remains. The stately U.S. Mint in the French Quarter, once seized by the Confederate army, is missing part of its roof. No one knows what has become of the artifacts inside."

"Not even counting the French Quarter, every part of New Orleans has incredible historic resources," said John Hildreth, director of the National Trust for Historic Preservation."It's absolutely gut-wrenching to see this destruction on top of the human suffering."

Cindy Gardner, field services curator of the Old Capitol Museum, reports that the museum had 1/3 of its copper roof blown off. Water has been pouring in to an exhibit area and a storage room. Staff has been working on moving hundreds of wet artifacts and some that are completely ruined.

The museum recently accepted a check for $17,000 from the Sons of Confederate Veterans for restoration work on a flag of the 33rd Mississippi Infantry. Further details on their work and collection, with updates on their status, can be found at their MDAH website.

The State Capitol building during the Civil War. In 1847 its walls saw a gathering of Jefferson Davis and the Mississippi Volunteers on their victorious return from the Mexican War. In 1861 the passage of the Ordinance of Secession took place here, and in 1865 the first Constitutional Convention in the South after the fall of the Confederacy was held here.

Fort Jackson has been flooded. (Click here for a picture.) In his attack upon New Orleans during the Civil War, Admiral Farragut's fleet pounded Fort Jackson for ten days before it surrendered to the Union forces. In the years that followed, Fort Jackson was used as a prison, a training facility, and fortified again during the Spanish-American War. Fort Jackson is located along LA Highway 23, at Plaquemines Bend (about 12 miles above Venice, LA), and is now accessible to the public as a historical tourist and cultural recreation center.

Vicksburg: Numerous trees, some over 50 years old, fell during the storm. The canopy covering the USS Cairo ripped in several places. Shingles blew off the cemetery maintenance shop roof and a tree penetrated the ranger cache roof. Cooper caps blew off the cemetery gazebo.

The park visitor center is open. Staff cleared trees and limbs in order to partially re-open the tour road to Pemberton Avenue and the South Loop.

 

A leading Holocaust research institute has criticized actress Jodie Foster for her comments defending Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, whom Foster intends to play in an upcoming film. Foster said in a just-released interview that Riefenstahl has been "libeled so many times" by people accusing her of membership in the Nazi Party or of having a romance with Adolf Hitler.

But according to Dr. Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies: “It's irrelevant if Leni Riefenstahl wasn't a member of the Nazi Party or wasn't Hitler's girlfriend. She was the leading artist making propaganda for the most evil regime in human history. Instead of defending Riefenstahl as an alleged victim of 'libel', Jodie Foster should frankly confront the reality that Riefenstahl is an example of how art can be perverted to promote fascism, racism, and genocide. Sadly, it appears from Ms. Foster's statements that her intention is to defend Riefenstahl.”

Riefenstahl was Hitler's hand-picked filmmaker and directed such films as "Triumph of the Will" (1934), which Who’s Who in Nazi Germany characterizes as “perhaps the most effective visual propaganda for Nazism ever made.” The then-president of the Motion Picture Association of America, Jack Valenti, has written: "Young German girls and boys in 1941 were mesmerized by Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, in which Adolf Hitler is pictured as a new-born God." The Oscar-winning British filmmaker Arnold Schwartzman has noted, “Riefenstahl was probably the best propaganda tool that Hitler had and a lot of the terrible things that happened were as a consequence of what she did. There is no doubt she was a brilliant woman and a great documentarian, but she used her skills to rouse the German people into going along with Hitler.”

Riefenstahl even used Gypsy prisoners from German concentration camps as extras in one of her films. Although Riefenstahl later claimed she did not support the Nazis, the historical record shows that when Hitler conquered Paris in 1940, she sent him a telegram declaring: “Your deeds exceed the power of human imagination. They are without equal in the history of mankind. How can we [the German people] ever thank you?”

In an interview in the latest issue of Premiere magazine (September 2005), Ms. Foster was asked: "For years, you've been planning a biopic about Leni Riefenstahl, who directed the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will and who died two years ago. Are you still going to make it?"

Foster replied: "Yeah, we're still working on the script, and I'm still going to play her. I met her a couple of times ... She wrote a biography that's almost all lies, but it's interesting. I wanted her archives, but I didn't want her involvement [in the film]--and that's something she really wanted, because she'd been libeled so many times. She was not a member of the Nazi Party, and she was not Hitler's girlfriend--that's just stupid. But she's a complex morality tale.”

Dr. Medoff said: “Foster is wrong. There’s nothing morally complex about what Riefenstahl did as Hitler’s favorite filmmaker. The only thing complex is Foster’s confusion on this issue.”

Last year, the Wyman Institute publicly criticized the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for including Riefenstahl in a memorial tribute to recently-deceased movie industry figures during the annual Academy Awards ceremony.

"If New Orleans is to be pumped out, its soffits re-replastered, its live oaks replanted before I'm gone, I'll be happily surprised," writes 62-year-old former NYT executive editor Howell Raines. "For now, we wait and ponder this question: If it's gone or permanently altered, what memorial would be fitting? Surely it would not be some monument of stone, but perhaps a political memorial to the city of Huey P. Long and his fictional iteration Willie Stark, or a spiritual remembrance of the City That Care Forgot."

Their bags are packed with safety glasses, gloves, masks, boots and suits. As soon as they hit the ground in New Orleans, they plan to set up triage tents and long tables. Then the emergency team from the National Park Service will begin its work: blotting, washing, drying, straightening and preserving centuries of historical artifacts that tell the story of one of the oldest U.S. cities.

Their biggest enemy is mildew.

"When we do retrieved artifacts, we're dealing in extreme mold," West said. "Anytime 48 hours pass, you get mold. You have to fight mold. We've seen it turn the most amazing colors -- bubble-gum pink once."

The preservationists dried and blotted a million artifacts from colonial Jamestown in Virginia after Hurricane Isabel hit in 2003. Last year, they used boats to get to 300,000 artifacts in the Fort Pickens museum near Pensacola, Fla., after Hurricane Ivan.

Once it gets the all-clear in the coming days, the preservation team will head to the Crescent City to retrieve documents, photographs, furniture and other pieces of history that have marked the rich life of a city founded in 1718 and occupied by the French, Spanish, Creoles, Americans, Confederates, fire, disease and water -- again and again.