The Polaroids, seized in a 1995 raid at the warehouse of antiquities dealer Giacomo Medici, show antiquities in pieces, encrusted with dirt and unrestored — proof, the Italians say, that they had been excavated recently, and therefore illegally. Medici was convicted last year in Rome of trafficking in looted art.

The photographs formed the core of Italy's case against Medici and will be used in this month's trial of his two co-defendants, American art dealer Robert E. Hecht Jr. and former J. Paul Getty Museum antiquities curator Marion True.

For instance, Newman, an attorney and labor and community activist, posted this on his blog Nov. 1: "What is striking about Alito is that he is so hostile even to the basic rights of workers to have a day in court, much less interpreting the law in their favor."

Brown's letter merely changed the last clause so the sentence read, "What is striking about Alito is that he is so hostile even to the basic rights of workers to have a day in court, not to mention interpreting the law against them."

From 2000 until August of this year, about 1,000 teaching and research assistants were represented by Local 2110 of the United Automobile Workers. But when their contract expired on August 31st, NYU said it would no longer recognize a graduate student union.

The university's decision followed a policy reversal by the National Labor Relations Board in Washington on private universities allowing graduate student workers to unionize. Michael Palm of the Graduate Students Organizing Committee said the union members will strike.

Several professors said that in solidarity with the strikers they will hold classes off campus. Historian Molly Nolan said her classes will meet in a billiard parlor.

It's especially troubling to residents, ... because it celebrated Baghdad's storied past, not its recent troubles. 'They are destroying Iraqi civilization,' said Ahmed Mustafa, 36, who owns a supermarket near the statue. Why it was destroyed is a mystery.

Several Iraqi newspapers compared the act to the Taliban's destruction of graven images, including Buddhas, in Afghanistan. Others note that any artwork, even one by famous Iraqi sculptor Khaled al Rahal, done during Saddam's reign is a target for Shiite extremists. Some suggest an Iranian hand in the attack. Mustafa blamed 'outsiders.' Nori Abbas, 20, who works near the statue, said he thinks it was destroyed because some believed it symbolized the old Iraq. He bemoaned what he saw as an assault on the heritage of an ancient city. 'Everywhere you go in town, statues are removed or destroyed by explosions,'

"Emerging" is the assessment Robert E. Lang gives to suburban studies on most college campuses. He's the founding director of the Metropolitan Institute on Virginia Tech's satellite campus in Alexandria, Va. The institute is one of a handful of academic think tanks that have sprung up around the country in recent years - including in Maryland - that study suburbia as well as cities.

"Places like Fairfax, that's where the future is made or broken," declares Lang, who calls himself "a student of the suburbs."

The outer Washington suburbs where Lang lives are typical of what he calls "mega" counties that are transforming the American landscape - huge, rapidly growing communities with no towns or cities at their core.

Compared with cities, suburbs still get little respect as a topic for serious study on many campuses, except perhaps as examples of the pathology of American society. Getting a bachelor's degree in suburban studies might be years away - though one can pick up a minor at George Mason University, a commuter-oriented school in Washington's Virginia suburbs.

In an interview with The Daily Princetonian on Monday, Murphy said that Alito's thesis was one of only about a half-dozen he kept over the years because of the quality of its scholarship.

"Sam just had to start from scratch," he said. "I remember [the thesis] was very good. I've used it over the years in my work."

Murphy, who has kept in touch with Alito over the years and has invited him to guest lecture in classes, also offered some impressions of Alito's stances on key judicial questions.

"He is much more an Anti-federalist where state and national authority clash, more libertarian on issues such as gun control, and much tighter on some matters as the rights of the criminally accused than I," Murphy said in an earlier email message.

"We, however, agree on other important issues, such as finding no constitutional barrier to bans on late term abortions and requiring spousal and parental notification of impending abortions."

Dana Rohrabacher, a conservative Republican representative in the United States Congress and a long-standing critic of China’s human rights record, has announced he will lead an investigation into what he suspects was the systematic looting of Tibetan art and objects by Chinese authorities since the 1949 Communist revolution. The inquiry has coincided with a high profile auction in Beijing of artefacts that previously belonged to Tibetan monasteries, and which seeped out into international markets sometime last century before being bought by the leading Taiwan-based collector Wang Du.

The auctioneers, Chengming, claim that the 32 items sold on 17 September left China before 1949. “I think these treasures mostly have been taken outside China before the revolution, maybe during the Eight Warlords period”, said Chengming executive Shen Yunxie, referring to the chaotic era in the years after the overthrow of the Qing imperial dynasty in 1911.

The objects include a set of jade carvings known as the “Seven treasures” which were presented to the sixth Panchen Lama by the Emperor Qianlong in 1781, which was knocked down for Rmb 9.02 million ($1.11 million), a jewel-encrusted gold sculpture of a triton shell which went for Rmb 11.22 million ($1.38 million), and a pagoda-shaped three-tier prayer wheel which sold for Rmb 11 million ($1.35 million).

Most of the buyers were mainland Chinese collectors, although the Chinese authorities had already given clearance for the items to be exported if bought by foreigners.

But other experts on Tibet think the objects may well have left their owners after Mao Zedong quelled the Tibetan uprising in 1959, when the Dalai Lama left for exile in India. One US critic of Chinese policy in Tibet, Warren W. Smith, points out that Tibetan monasteries, government institutions and aristocratic homes were then targeted as “Three Pillars of Feudalism”.

"There is now a wide range of employment related to our national heritage," said Ken Boston, the chief executive for the QCA.

However, Alan Smithers, the director of the Center for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said practical, work-related courses are different from watered down courses.

"History introduces people to one of the ways we make sense of the world and sexing it up with inappropriate material, such as how the subject is portrayed in the media, risks throwing the baby out with the bath water," he said.

Not long ago, George did not worry when he traveled back and forth between home and his office in Baghdad. Now when he commutes, there is no guarantee he will reach his destination.


"When I go the office," George told KCBS's Mike Pulsipher, "I tell you the truth. I won't know that I'll reach the office or not. On coming back, I won't know whether I reach home or not. It's like that. You might be in an incident or you might be attacked. Nobody knows."


In those uncertain circumstances, the country's museums are not secure, and even trusted museum officials become suspect as the country's heritage disappears under the fog of war.


"In full darkness, they went through one large room," he said describing how investigators recreated a recent theft.


"They went to the second room, turned right, then at the end turned left, went through some boxes that were there and got the most small and precious material that we have there," said George. "So this is a group that we believe they had some good knowledge from inside."


But Baghdad is his home, and George said no amount of violence can keep him away from his family.

During a war crimes trial in Britain in 1999 Sawoniuk pleaded innocent to involvement in Nazi genocide in Eastern Europe more than 50 years earlier, but witnesses implicated him in a series of murders.

He was found guilty of two charges of murdering Jews in his hometown of Domachevo in 1942 while serving in the local Nazi-backed police force.

John Nutting, the prosecutor in the Sawoniuk's trial at London's Old Bailey court in 1999, said Sawoniuk was "not only prepared to do the Nazi's bidding, but carried out their genocidal policy with enthusiasm."

The hostile investigative climate during the Clinton presidency made those serving in that White House especially cautious. Blanket subpoenas from congressional investigators and an army of independent counsels became so commonplace that most Clinton officials developed coping mechanisms to protect themselves. The simplest was to avoid creating documents, such as meeting notes or diaries, in the first place. One political aide, according to oral history interviews with two of his colleagues,kept each day's essential observations on a single index card, which was ritually deposited in a shredder on the way out the door each night. Others learned that, when internal documents had to be constructed, they should be written only in what is termed "discoverable language," meaning language that will do no harm if unearthed in the discovery phase of a lawsuit or investigation.

The consequences of this behavior for historians will, of course, be tragic. The kinds of written records we have relied on for a millennium to reconstruct the crucial events of the past will be either compromised or in many cases nonexistent, leading to what can rightly be called a vanishing history of the American presidency.

Or so we have thought.

The current administration remains a mystery on this point. Its senior ranks are filled with seasoned Washington hands who have lived through much of the litigious history of the modern presidency -- and who thus know firsthand the perils of the written word. Indeed Cheney himself once informed Bob Woodward that he keeps no diary -- and pointed to his head when Woodward asked where the history of the Bush years could be found.

Yet this is also an administration that has operated in an environment fundamentally different from its predecessors. The independent counsel statute expired in June 1999, before the Bush administration took office. And Congress has been docile and thus not inclined to perform the kind of dogged oversight that generates subpoenaphobia.

Moreover, the wartime climate in the post-9/11 era has created a muscular presidency at the head of a powerful security state, which has given this White House, until quite recently, a kind of impervious standing in Washington.

[Russell Riley is a research professor in the Presidential Oral History Program of the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs.]

If a majority of the public thought the Iraq war were going well, Bush might naturally turn—as second-term presidents often do—to foreign affairs, climbing aboard Air Force One to pursue his aim of expanding democracy throughout the Middle East and the world.

During his last 18 months in office, Eisenhower flew to Asia, Europe and Latin America and deployed his war hero's popularity to seek new friends for America while trying to improve relations with Moscow. By the time Ike left office, most Americans had forgotten their anger over losing the space race to the Soviets.

Truman and Johnson would have loved to use foreign policy to boost their sagging popularity. LBJ was privately desperate to make the first presidential trip to the Soviet Union (even after Nixon's election to succeed him) and show Americans once and for all that he was no warmonger.

But as their second terms ground to a close, Truman and Johnson both sadly realized that the public was focused on the news from the battlefront. And so long as these beleaguered war presidents remained in office, that news never got better.

Historians sometimes view presidents very differently from the way the public did at the time. Sometimes they don't. Hoping for vindication by history, Nixon told Oxford students in 1978, after Watergate drove him out of office, "Let's get on to my achievements. You'll be here in the year 2000 and we'll see how I'm regarded then." As it turned out, not as warmly as Nixon had anticipated.

But in contrast, with a half century's hindsight, most historians consider Harry Truman one of the near greats. That would have surprised almost everybody but Mrs. Truman in March 1952, when her husband's Gallup poll approval rating was 25 percent.

An exhibit at the NY Historical Society tells the poignant story of Priscilla, a 10-year old African girl kidnapped into slavery in 1756, whose exile began in Sierra Leone and ended in Charleston, South Carolina. Using a rare and unbroken document trail that began 249 years ago, scholars have traced Priscilla’s origin in Africa, her exile on the middle passage, and her life in bondage in America, allowing an intimate portrait of an enslaved person’s life to emerge from the pages of history. Scholars have used this document trail to identify one of Priscilla’s modern descendants, an African American woman still living in South Carolina today, who recently made an extraordinary “homecoming” journey back to Sierra Leone.

Finding Priscilla's Children: The Roots and Branches of Slavery, Tuesday, November 15, 11 AM –1 PM.

Google has been working with partner libraries at the University of Michigan; Stanford, Harvard and Oxford universities; plus the New York Public Library since announcing last fall that it planned to digitize the world's libraries.

There are more than 300 items in the Drambuie collection of Jacobite art, ranging from a hand-written letter from Prince Charles Edward Stuart and historic glassware cut with secret codes, to miniature and full-length portraits.

Earlier this year, the Drambuie liqueur company said its collection was safe, even as it prepared to sell off millions of pounds of art on the open market.

But heritage groups feel it may be changing its mind. A Drambuie spokesman would only say yesterday: "No decision has been taken regarding the future of the Jacobite collection."

The uncertainty is alarming Jacobite historians and museum chiefs. While the material has huge symbolic and historic value, experts suggest it might be bought for less than GBP 1 million - the price of two major paintings by the Scottish Colourists, for example.

James Irvine Robertson, the author of three books on the Jacobites, said of the collection: "It's the best in the country, and it would be a tragedy if it got dispersed. It should be taken over by, or donated to, one of the big museums."

Details of the sea battle, in which British boats chased and captured the French vessels, appear in the helmsman's log. The document, taken from the French ship Mont Blanc, was discovered by researchers from the British National Archives among the vessel's muster roll, the lists of payments to the crew on board.

Alistair Hanson, a historian at the National Archive, said: 'This discovery is of significance because it provides us with a rare French eyewitness account of the battle. It will also be valuable to French genealogists who will be able to track those seamen who died.'

The incident occurred towards the end of the Battle of Trafalgar as the boats Mont Blanc, Scipion, Duguay-Trouin and Formidable formed part of a vanguard of a combined fleet commanded by Rear Admiral Dumanoir Le Pelley.

Because of a breakdown in communication and a lack of wind, the ships were out of range for most of the battle. By the time they came face to face with the English, the Battle of Trafalgar had all but been won and the French fled. But they were captured and became the only enemy vessels to be brought back to the UK.

Bruno Papparlardo, naval historian at The National Archives, said: 'The log is one of the most exciting finds in recent times for naval historians and anyone interested in the Battle of Trafalgar.

'Together with the muster rolls for the ship and rolls for the Duguay- Trouin, the Scipion and the Formidable, this unique find will allow us to be able to make direct comparisons between the British and the French ships and give us a better insight into their battle plans.'

Meet Joe Enge.

Joe is an award-winning, 15-year veteran history teacher in Carson City who has, among other things, written two history textbooks and served on the 1997 task force which drew up Nevada’s history standards. But according to school district administrators, he’s a “bad” teacher.

You see, Joe has this crazy idea that American history should include our colonial period, as well as the Revolutionary War period. You know, where the Founding Fathers fought for independence from England and wrote the greatest governing document the world has ever known - the United States Constitution. You know, that period of time which gave us patriot heroes such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Tom Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, Sam Adams, Paul Revere, John Paul Jones, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Hancock.

And Joe has REALLY ticked off the local school district bureaucrats and the education establishment.

You see, unbeknownst to most parents in Carson City, the school district believes that high school American history should start with the Civil War era, not the days of America’s Founding. Indeed, the curriculum forced on history teachers at Carson High School ignores pre-Civil War history completely - other than a little optional “refresher” at the beginning of the school year or if you’re in an Advanced Placement class.

Joe Enge has fought the district’s History-Lite curriculum for the past three years by teaching ALL of his students ALL of America’s history, starting with the colonial period (remember the Pilgrims?).

In addition, Joe believes...get this...that the teacher should teach and the students should learn. He embraces and practices the “traditional” teacher-centered method of education, as opposed to the fashionable student-centered “discovery learning” method currently all the rage in San Francisco and Portland. What a trouble-maker.

So the school district wants to get rid of him.

Joe’s supervisors - including Carson High’s principal, Fred Perdomo - have given Joe unsatisfactory evaluations in retaliation for his refusal to teach a Founding-free version of American history. And although Joe’s a “tenured” teacher, three such bad evaluations would be grounds for running this maverick out of town on a rail (students would have to read Revolutionary War-era history to know just what this phrase means). So Joe challenged the administrative evaluations; however, the Carson City School District Superintendent, Mary Pierszynski, sided with the principal. Big surprise there.

Last month as part of a mediation effort, Ms. Pierszynski offered to buy Joe off by paying him one year’s salary if he’d quit. And considering the pure hell this one-man fight has put his family through, Joe actually considered it. But at the last minute, Pierszynski withdrew her offer, and now the dispute is moving to binding arbitration. Which means if Pierszynski’s ruling backing Perdomo’s evaluations stands, this Fulbright Scholar and Madison Fellowship award-winner will likely be tossed out on his kiester - and his Carson High students will finally be taught that American history began when Lincoln freed the slaves.

Of course, the teacher’s union could always ride in and defend this experienced, professional classroom educator. Yeah, right. Fat chance. You see, Joe has chosen not to join the teacher’s union, so these “principled” defenders of teaching professionals are more than happy to see the guy thrown to the wolves.

This entire episode is an outrage. Joe Enge is the kind of teacher we should WANT educating our kids. He loves history. He knows history. And he’s darned good at teaching history. Indeed, Enge’s spirit of resistance to this great injustice would make our Founding Fathers - who the Carson City School District would prefer to pretend never existed - proud. Especially Thomas Jefferson who (not that Carson City high school students would know it) once said, “The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive.”

It’s time for Superintendent Pierszynski, Principal Perdomo and the entire Carson City education establishment to call off the dogs and let professional American history teacher Joe Enge do what he’s been trained to do and has been successfully doing for 15 long years: TEACH AMERICAN HISTORY. The FULL American history, not the district’s “Reader’s Digest” version.

Please help keep American history IN ITS ENTIRETY alive at Carson High School by signing this petition urging the Carson City School District to allow Joe Enge to do what he’s been trained to do: Teach ALL of American history.

Chuck Muth
President
Citizen Outreach

"Apparently, the vault did not hold back water," said Lou Rizzardi, an alderman and historical society member in the town of 6,750. "So it penetrated. Things got damaged because of water."

All up and down the Mississippi Gulf Coast and into New Orleans, archivists and local historians are taking stock. They're worried about the future, but wondering also, what do they have left of their past after Katrina's 145 mph winds and a massive storm surge on August 29 splintered many communities and left others waterlogged.

Many are considering whether it is wise to keep such valuable documents in disaster-prone areas.

Just a few miles west of Pass Christian, the Hancock County Historical Society in Bay St. Louis fared much better with very little water damage and a vault that held, protecting thousands of documents, including family diaries and thousands of local photographs.

Charles Harry Gray, the executive director, was prepared in case disaster struck. Over the years he had been making copies of all of the group's most treasured documents, including 30,000 pictures. Not one single photograph or record was lost.

They are the pieces of Bay St. Louis' 306-year history that made the town of 8,230 what it is today, he said. Many of the copies were on computer disks and hard drives, others were sent to the University of Southern Mississippi, two hours north in Hattiesburg.

"It is imperative that you have copies in other locations because you never know what's going to happen, what the next catastrophe is going to be, and there certainly will be one," Gray said.

There were no copies in Pass Christian. Rizzardi said the hope for the town's past lies with a local plumber, Billy Bourdin, who kept 3,400 vintage pictures on computer disks as a hobby.

The actual photographs and his eight piles of newspaper clippings are gone, Bourdin said, but the disks survived.

In practice, the system has been fading away for more than a decade. An estimated 200 million peasants have left the countryside to live in urban areas, some of them full time. Their access to urban services varies widely depending on local rules and the kind of employment they find.

In today\'s market-oriented economy, the once-comprehensive socialist benefits bestowed on urban residents carry far less weight. Most people rely on their own resources, or those of their employers, to pay for health care, housing and schooling.

\"This is an old-style way of managing a huge country and no longer makes sense with a market economy,\" said Qin Hui, a historian at Qinghua University in Beijing. \"If it\'s really going away, it is a significant turning point.\"

Mr. Qin said he expected that even if the system disappeared, local governments would retain administrative control over their populations. They would still set conditions on registration for urban residents and prevent the growth of slums.

\"The cities will become places where the relatively well off live,\" he said. \"Beijing is not going to look like New Delhi, or even like Bangkok.\"

Economic forces have eroded population controls in recent years. Shenzhen emerged from rice fields in the early 1980\'s to become one of China\'s most prosperous metropolitan areas, and nearly all of its 10 million residents were born elsewhere. Shanghai began the concept of a \"blue card\" for qualified migrant workers in the mid-1990\'s, giving them full access to housing and city services if they met criteria.