Australian teachers have rejected Prime Minister John Howard's push to overhaul the teaching of history, saying his criticisms do not reflect what is happening in Australian schools.

Kate Cameron, the immediate past national president of the History Teachers' Association, said Mr Howard of all people should know the Commonwealth had invested millions of dollars into the teaching of history.

She said the Prime Minister woould soon realise his claims that young people did not have a full understanding of Australian history were unfounded.

"Well, I don't know what he would base that assertion upon – he just said it was obvious to him but he didn't explain what his sources were about how obvious it was," Ms Cameron told ABC Radio.

"I think he's going to be extremely embarrassed when he realises that his own government has poured millions of dollars into providing wonderful teaching resources and professional development opportunities ... to promote the teaching of Australian history."



Mr Howard wants a new approach to the teaching of history, saying it is time students knew the dates of important events such as the Battle of Hastings or when Captain Cook first sighted the Australian mainland.

He also says more should be taught about Australian indigenous history and the importance of British and European history to Australia's national story.

Ms Cameron, a history teacher for more than two decades, rejected the style of teaching the Prime Minister was proposing, saying there was no need for a strong emphasis on the dates of events.

"People of his generation are often hung up on dates," she said.

"The dates are taught, but they are not the centre ... we're not fanatical about dates."

The New South Wales Teachers Federation has accused the Prime Minister of attacking school teachers in his call for students to be taught more about Australian history.

The New South Wales Teachers Federation President Angelo Gavrielatos says history is adequately being taught in schools.

"The Prime Minister's comments were ill-informed and dishonest and aimed at attacking and denigrating Australia's teachers," he said.

The Federal Opposition Leader Kim Beazley supports Mr Howard's call but is wary of the Government using the issue for political gain.

"One thing we don't need in this country is history written by serving politicians," he said.

Meanwhile, the History Teachers' Association of Australia (HTAA) has welcomed Mr Howard's call for greater concentration on the teaching of history in schools, but has questioned his approach.

HTAA president Nick Eubank says the Prime Minister has a very clear view of history and the founding of Australia, but Mr Eubank says any study of history should question it.

"What I'm saying is that we should expose those opinions and those historical documents to scrutiny and we should tool our students with skills whereby they can come to a soundly argued conclusion," he said.

However the South Australian Opposition Leader Rob Kerin supports the Prime Minister's comments and says he too would like to see history taught to more students.

"Obviously students need a very broad education but I think a basic understanding of how Australia got to where it is and what to be an Australian means, I think that is important for our young people," he said.

The new federal Education Minister, Julie Bishop, has also weighed in on the debate, saying she would like to see Australian students echo the American sense of pride in learning about their nation's history.

Ms Bishop says we could learn a lot from the way American history is taught in the United States.

"They celebrate national events, they teach their history at school level, throughout university, throughout life, they are very very proud of their history and I'd like to see some of that pride in Australian schools," she said.

Ms Bishop, who will officially sworn in as Education Minister tomorrow after a cabinet reshuffle, says she also believes that few students are learning about Australian history, and lessons are falling victim to crowded curriculum.

"The history of Australia is full of a richness and excitement and I don't think we've told it well enough, yet," she said.

She says the way history is taught in Australian schools needs to be examined.

"Currently it tends to be in themes, it tends to be fragmented, the narrative of Australian history is so important, the history of this ancient land, the European settlement, the diversity of our nation, it's an important story, a compelling story and one that should be told."

Historians are only cautiously optimistic about healthier job prospects. Over the past few years, the number of graduate students entering doctoral programs in history has been rising again, while the proportion of faculty members approaching retirement age has been falling. Those trends could collide to create more competition for fewer job openings in the future.

A report on the history job market for 2004-5 shows that faculty jobs advertised in the history association's magazine, Perspectives, were up 13 percent last year over the year before — for a total of 966 jobs at all levels. Jobs advertised specifically for new assistant professors of history were up by even more — about 18 percent — for a total of 801 jobs. That is the largest number of junior-faculty jobs advertised through the association in 13 years.

Robert B. Townsend, assistant director of research and publications for the association, says early indications are that job openings will increase again this year. The number of positions that colleges and universities interviewed candidates for at the meeting this month was up by about 15 percent over last year, he says.

At the same time, the number of people earning Ph.D.'s in history is falling. According to the historical association, that number dropped by about 14 percent in the 2004-5 academic year from the year before. From a job candidate's viewpoint, that amounts to a reduction in competition for jobs, which makes his or her chances that much better.

The Bush Administration rejected a Congressional initiative in 2002 that would have lowered the legal threshold for conducting surveillance of non-US persons under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act from "probable cause" that the target is a terrorist or agent of a foreign power to "reasonable suspicion."

Administration officials said at the time that the legislative proposal was unnecessary and possibly unconstitutional.

Yet in a speech this week on the NSA domestic surveillance program, Deputy Director of National Intelligence Gen. Michael V. Hayden indicated that the executive branch had unilaterally adopted a similar "reasonable suspicion" standard.

Instead of FISA's more stringent "probable cause" requirement, the presidentially-directed NSA surveillance operation applied to international calls that "we have a reasonable basis to believe involve al Qaeda or one of its affiliates," Gen. Hayden said on January 23.

The unexplained contradiction between the Administration's public rejection of the "reasonable suspicion" standard for FISA, and its secret adoption of that same standard was noted yesterday by attorney and blogger Glenn Greenwald.

See "The Administration's New FISA Defense is Factually False,"
January 24:

http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/

The 2002 legislative proposed, S. 2659 introduced by Rep. Michael DeWine (R-OH), "raises both significant legal and practical issues [and] the Administration at this time is not prepared to support it," said James A. Baker of the Justice Department.

Among other concerns, Mr. Baker said, "If we err in our analysis and courts were ultimately to find a 'reasonable suspicion' standard unconstitutional, we could potentially put at risk ongoing investigations and prosecutions."

See Mr. Baker's prepared statement from the July 31, 2002 hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee here:

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2002_hr/073102baker.html

The transcript and other prepared statements from that Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on "Proposals to Amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act" are available here:

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2002_hr/index.html#fisa

The website is run by John P. Lesko, an assistant professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University, who is also responsible for a new scholarly journal, Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification.

The webste features brief analyses of all the famous history plagiarism cases from Ambrose to Goodwin to H.G. Wells. A color-coded meter ranks the threat they pose to good scholarship.

A Johns Hopkins University archaeological expedition in Luxor, Egypt, has unearthed a life-sized statue, dating back nearly 3,400 years, of one of the queens of the powerful king Amenhotep III. [The media are calling her Kingt Tut's grandmother.]

The statue, which dates to between 1391 and 1352 B.C.E., was uncovered earlier this month by the expedition’s director, Betsy Bryan, Johns Hopkins professor of Egyptian art and archaeology. Bryan and a graduate student, Fatma Talaat Ismail, were clearing a portion of the platform of the temple of the goddess Mut in Luxor, an area dating to about 700 B.C.E. The statue, which was lying face down in the ground, appeared to have been used as building rubble, Bryan said.

The statue’s back pillar was unearthed first and led Bryan to believe briefly that it dated from a far later period, since an inscription there was clearly made in the 21st Dynasty, about 1000 B.C.E., for a very powerful queen Henuttawy.

"The statue, however, when it was removed, revealed itself as a queen of Amenhotep III, whose name appears repeatedly on the statue’s crown," Bryan said. She said she theorizes that perhaps this statue is of the great Queen Tiy, wife of Amenhotep III and mother of the so-called heretic king Akhenaten, who came to the throne as Amenhotep IV but later changed his name because of his rejection of the god Amen in favor of the sun disk Aten.

£2bn train tunnel linking Europe to Asia faces delays as dig unearths 5th-century port. Lost treasures of Constantinople test Turkey's 21st-century ambition

Deep in the soft black earth beneath the cleared slum tenements of old Istanbul, Metin Gokcay points to neatly stacked and labelled crates heaped with shattered crockery. "That's mostly old mosaics and old ceramics," said the Istanbul city archaeologist. "And over there we found bones and coins."

Looking at huge slabs of limestone emerging from a depth of more than 7 metres (25ft) below ground, he adds: "That's late Roman, this is early Byzantine. This tunnel here is very interesting. Perhaps Constantine's mother had her palace over there."

The archaeologist is making mischief. For more than a millennium this city bore the name of Constantine, but whether the emperor's mother lived at this spot called Yenikapi, a powerful stone's throw from the Sea of Marmara, is a moot point. Mr Gokcay is intrigued and baffled by the subterranean stone tunnel which, measuring 1.8 metres by 1.5 metres, is too big to have been used for sewage or as an aqueduct.

But if Mr Gokcay remains in the dark as to the function of the ancient tunnel, his excavations have led to a stunning discovery that could jeopardise Turkey's most ambitious engineering project - a new rail and underground system traversing the Bosphorus and connecting Europe to Asia via a high-speed railway.

Mr Gokcay has uncovered a 5th-century gem - the original port of Constantinople, a maze of dams, jetties and platforms that once was Byzantium's hub for trade with the near east.

Cemal Pulak, a Turkish-American, from Texas, and one of the world's leading experts in nautical archaeology, said: "The ships from here carried the wine in jars and amphorae from the Sea of Marmara. The cargoes of grain came in from Alexandria. This was the harbour that allowed this city to be."

In a mood of barely suppressed excitement, armies of archaeologists and labourers have been scraping away silt and rubble for the past year and revealed a vast site the size of several football pitches. It is slowly giving up its secrets and its treasures.

Seven sunken ships have already been found buried in mud at Yenikapi, a few hundred metres inland from the Sea of Marmara and a 10-minute stroll from the mass tourist attractions of the Grand Bazaar and the Topkapi Palace.

Mr Pulak is thrilled that one of the ships, a longboat, may be the first Byzantine naval vessel ever found. All of the boats appear to have been wrecked in a storm. There are 1,000-year-old shipping ropes in perfect condition, preserved in silt for centuries. There are huge forged iron anchors, viewed as so valuable in medieval Byzantium they were highly prized items in the dowries of the daughters of the wealthy.

Prime Minister John Howard wants a coalition of the willing to overhaul the teaching of Australian history in the nation's schools. Mr. Howard said there was strong concern throughout the community about the way history was being taught, with a focus on themes rather than on when something happened and why.

Answering questions at the National Press Club, Mr Howard said it was ridiculous to believe history could be taught without knowing when something occurred, such as the Battle of Hastings or Captain Cook's sighting of the Australian east coast.

"What I want is a recognition that you cannot get people to understand the history of a country unless you have some kind of chronological narrative teaching of history," he said.

"I think there is a real case for a lot of people across the political divide to try and tackle this issue.






"I would like to enlist a coalition of the willing ... to bring about a change in attitudes."

Mr Howard said that while theme or issues teaching had a role, that did not overtake the need to know the dates of events.

"You can't learn history by teaching issues," he said.

"You can only learn and understand history by knowing what happened, why it happened and, of course, teaching of issues and influences is clearly part of that."

Mr Howard said understanding Australian history meant knowing more about indigenous history, the history of Britain and events through Europe.

He warned that some people would vigorously oppose changes to history teaching.

"I think it's something we need to enlist teachers in," he said.

"We're going to strike tremendous resistance from some of the education bureaucracies because they have been, some of them, responsible for entrenching this approach that I've condemned.

"I just think we have done very badly with this over the last few decades."

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is a sacred institution in America, certainly in Jewish America, but it is not without controversy. Now its opponents are taking it to task for what they see as its failure to tackle Arab-Muslim anti-Semitism.

The issue has heated up in recent weeks, thanks to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who called for Israel to be wiped off the map, and simultaneously denied the Holocaust and declared a conference to be held in Iran on the subject.

The museum's response to Ahmadinejad was "too late," according to Carol Greenwald, head of Holocaust Museum Watch, an organization that monitors what it sees as the failure of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to expose Arab anti-Semitism.

Greenwald, leading the charge, told the gathering: "The museum has never had a program about Islamic anti-Semitism."

Referring to the Holocaust, she said that people ask what was done at the time. "We say, `What are you doing now?'"

Greenwald also said the museum felt the need to relate to massacres in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur, and did not devote itself only to historical research. In that case, she asked, why shouldn't the museum deal with increasing anti-Semitism among Islamic leaders?

Some of the speakers at Ohev Shalom emphasized the issue of historical research. Among them was Shlomo Alfassa, executive director of the International Society for Sephardic Progress, who focused on Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, whose cooperation with Hitler, he said, was not given proper mention in the Holocaust Museum.

Writer Edwin Black discussed another undermentioned issue in the Holocaust Museum - the pogrom, encouraged by the Nazis, against the Jews of Iraq in 1941. He also contended that the museum's researchers were unwilling to accept outside criticism.

The question of how much research should be devoted to the issue of the Nazis and the Arabs, and how that research should be funded, would be relatively easy to solve. The main issue, and the most politically charged, involves the present. Its most eloquent spokesman is Rabbi Avi Weiss, president of the Amcha Coalition for Jewish Concerns, an organization that has its own critics in the Jewish community.

Weiss slammed the Holocaust Museum with no holds barred, calling it an institution born in politics at the end of the 1970s. (Then-president Jimmy Carter established the committee that recommended creating the museum in order to mollify the Jewish community after he decided to sell F-15 jet fighters to Saudi Arabia.)

There is no doubt that most expressions of anti-Semitism today, and the main basis for Holocaust denial, are in the Arab-Muslim world, according to Walter Reich, former Holocaust Museum director (and Weiss' brother-in-law). Reich left the museum in a clash over a decision to invite Yasser Arafat there in 1998.

In an interview last week, Reich told Haaretz he believed it reasonable for the museum to take seriously the expansion and increased power of anti-Semitism and Holocaust-denial in the Arab world.

Weiss went even further, saying the museum's silence contributes to these phenomena. He believes the museum is not dealing with Arab anti-Semitism because of pressure from the State Department, which does not want to raise further disputes in an arena already full of them.

The Peruvian government is threatening to sue Yale University for the return of all the artifacts found at Machu Picchu. There's no dispute that Peru gave Bingham permission to take the artifacts to Yale for further study. But Peruvian authorities say they have documents specifying that the material had to be returned within 18 months. It has now been more than 90 years. Yale says that Peruvian law in the 1900s "gave Yale title to the artifacts at the time of their excavation and ever since."

Three years of negotiations have not yet resulted in a solution. After Peru's Congress held public hearings in November, Yale offered in a Dec. 8 letter only to return "a substantial number" of the pieces. The National Geographic Society, which helped sponsor Bingham's Machu Picchu expeditions, is clear on where it stands: "The Society's opinion...is that the artifacts excavated from Peru during these joint expeditions were on loan, belong to Peru, and should be returned to Peru," says spokesperson Barbara Moffet.

Around the world, countries that were the source of archaeological treasures that now reside in the world's major museums are clamoring for the return of their cultural patrimony. Mexico is pressuring the Austrian government to return an Aztec headdress made of more than 450 brilliant green Quetzal feathers. The important national symbol is displayed at the Vienna ethnography museum, while a mere replica is shown at Mexico's national anthropological museum.

Mexican President Vicente Fox intends to press Austrian President Heinz Fischer about the headdress at a summit of Latin American and European leaders in Vienna in May -- the second such request he will have made to Fischer in a year. "It is an archaeological piece of incalculable value for the history of our nation," Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez said in a Jan. 12 news conference.

For Peru, recovering the Machu Picchu artifacts is a matter of pride -- and economics. Tourism is a major source of revenue, bringing in around $1.2 billion last year. Machu Picchu is the country's biggest draw: More than 400,000 foreign tourists visited in 2005, a 68% jump from two years earlier.

"Tourism plays an increasingly important role in the economies of countries like ours," says Luis Guillermo Lumbreras, an archaeologist and director of Peru's National Institute of Culture. For Peruvians, he says, being able to view evidence that their forebears lived in highly developed civilizations "is an important source of national pride."

Kenneth Ames, a Portland State University archaeologist who is currently president of the Society for American Archaeology, says that foreign archaeologists today are generally required to study all artifacts they find in the host country and are not permitted to remove them. "Everyone realizes that what were once standard operating procedures no longer are," he says.

Negotiations are continuing, and Peruvian officials hope to resolve the controversy with Yale amicably before President Alejandro Toledo leaves office July 28. Toledo, the country's first indigenous president, is married to an anthropologist and has taken a special interest in securing the return of the Machu Picchu artifacts. Lumbreras says Peru would like to have a world-class museum completed before 2011, the 100th anniversary of Machu Picchu's "rediscovery."

For Yale, the dispute marks the souring of a relationship that has been quite positive over the years. Professor Richard Burger, Yale's resident expert on Andean archaeology, is co-curator of an exhibit -- Machu Picchu: Unveiling the Mystery of the Incas -- at the university's Peabody Museum of Natural History.

When I visited the exhibit in October, Burger gave a fascinating talk about Bingham's Peruvian expeditions and spoke with pride of Yale's stewardship of the artifacts collection. I contacted him by e-mail for a comment on the current dispute, and he referred me to university officials, but mentioned that "Machu Picchu is still astonishingly beautiful."

Peruvians realize that Yale archaeologists did valuable work, and the Peabody exhibit, which earlier toured several U.S. cities, surely sparked interest among Americans to visit Machu Picchu. In addition to the artifacts displayed, Yale curators recreated the house of an Incan king, complete with life-size figures in typical garb and sound effects including conversations recorded in Quechua, the native language. "It's good for tourism that an exhibit like that has been shown in the U.S.," says Lumbreras. "Still, we'd like the objects back."

It all boils down to whether the few existing artifacts from one of the world's most fascinating archaeological sites should remain at the university that nearly a century ago was granted the rare privilege of excavating and studying them, or whether they should be returned to the proud descendants of the Incas.

The objects' possible return is being watched with some concern by museum directors around the world, who fear a flurry of similar requests from other countries.

As muddy holes go, they don't get much more romantic. Beneath four feet of heavy south London clay, archaeologists have uncovered the remains of Henry VII's lost chapel at Greenwich. The site is where he and a host of his Tudor successors - Henry VIII, Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I - worshipped.

The existence of the chapel, part of the Royal Palace of Placentia, a Tudor favourite but pulled down in the 17th century to be replaced by Greenwich Hospital - now the Old Naval College - has long been known from paintings and records.

But until a bulldozer's bucket scraped against brickwork a month ago, no physical evidence of the chapel had ever been discovered.

Careful scratching away by a team of four archaeologists from the Museum of London has revealed the eastern walls of the chapel, a 10ft by 5ft section of floor made from black and white glazed tiles laid geometrically, and, beneath, a so-far unexplored vault.

The floor, at the eastern end of the chapel, almost certainly supported the altar before which the Tudor monarchs would have prayed.

The archaeologists may also have unearthed the spot where Henry VIII stood during his marriages to Catherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves.

Both weddings took place in the Palace of Placentia - which means pleasant place to live - but records do not show whether they were in the chapel itself or, more probably as some historians believe, in a private room or closet in his quarters overlooking the chapel.

To the east of the chapel, more works have unearthed the foundations and fireplaces of its vestry.

"This is an astonishing survival," declared Simon Thurley, the chief executive of English Heritage and author of a study of Tudor palaces.

"For the first time ever we can see close up and in detail the east end of a Tudor royal chapel. Unlike Hampton Court and St James's Palace, where the chapels have been altered, here we can see what Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth would have seen. These have the potential to throw fresh light on the inner workings of the Tudor court."

The historian Dr David Starkey was equally enthusiastic. He said: "This gives us a real sense of the absolute heart of the palace.

"When Henry was married to Catherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves in the first-floor closet, what he saw through the window was the tiled floor and altar that have now been revealed."

Julian Bowsher, the Museum of London's senior archaeologist, said: "This is the most important find I've made in the past 10 years."

Placentia is the least known of London's Tudor palaces. Formerly a manor called Bellacourt, it passed to Henry VI who named it L'Pleazaunce or Placentia because of its agreeable situation.

It was the favourite residence of Henry VIII during the first half of his reign, and his daughters Mary and Elizabeth were born there.

The final report of East Timor's landmark Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) has found that U.S. "political and military support were fundamental to the Indonesian invasion and occupation" of East Timor from 1975 to 1999, according to the "Responsibility" chapter of the report posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive, which assisted the Commission with extensive documentation.

The Commission report, entitled "Chega!" ("Enough" in Portuguese), estimates that up to 180,000 East Timorese were killed by Indonesian troops or died of enforced starvation and other causes resulting from the occupation between 1975 and 1999. The "Responsibility" chapter details the primary role of the Indonesian military and security forces, as well as the supporting roles played by Australia, Portugal, the United States, the United Nations, the United Kingdom, and France.

The report (p. 92) finds that "U.S. supplied weaponry was crucial to Indonesia's capacity to intensify military operations from 1977 in its massive campaigns to destroy the Resistance in which aircraft supplied by the United States played a crucial role." Moreover, "U.S. Administration officials refused to admit that the primary reason that East Timorese were dying in their thousands was the security policies of the Indonesian military."

The CAVR used more than 1,000 formerly secret U.S. documents provided by the National Security Archive's Indonesia and East Timor Documentation Project, which published on the Web in November 2005 several of the key documents detailing U.S. support for the invasion and occupation of East Timor across five U.S. administrations.

The report (p. 92) notes that "In response to the massive violations that occurred in Timor-Leste in September 1999 President Clinton threw the considerable influence of the United States behind efforts to press the Indonesian Government to accept the deployment of an international force in the territory, demonstrating the considerable leverage that it could have exerted earlier had the will been there."

The National Security Archive obtained a copy of the chapter of the CAVR report titled "Responsibility and Accountability" from copies circulating in the international press, and posted the chapter today because East Timor's government has not yet put the full text of the truth commission report in the public domain or published its contents online, despite having delivered the report to the Timorese parliament in November and to the United Nations on January 20.

The CAVR's final report strongly criticizes the role of the international community in supporting Indonesia's invasion and occupation of East Timor, and recommends reparations from the governments of Indonesia, the U.S. and United Kingdom and from Western arms manufacturers who played crucial roles in supporting Indonesia's actions.

A conservative alumni group at the University of California at Los Angeles on Monday withdrew its offer to pay students $100 to file tapes and notes on what professors say during courses.

A statement from the group’s founder, Andrew Jones, said that debate over the offer had become “a distraction from the real problem, which is classroom indoctrination.” Professors at UCLA and elsewhere have criticized the tactic of paying students as unethical and a violation of professors’ intellectual property rights.

Scientists working with the Naval Historical Center (NHC) to try to solve the mystery of the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley's disappearance in 1864, stumbled onto yet another mystery in December.

A view port on the left front side of the submarine is completely missing, possibly a catastrophic result of the Hunley's historic battle with the Housatonic.

Some have speculated Sailors aboard Housatonic may have shot out the view port, causing the submarine to fill with water. That theory fails to explain why scientists have not found any of the view port's glass inside the submarine. Mysteriously, they have also found no traces of the port itself. There is just a hole where it once was.

Archaeologists in northwest China's Shaanxi Province have discovered a large-scale relic site estimated to be 2,200 years old on the outskirts of the provincial capital Xi'an.

The site is the biggest of its kind that has been excavated in the past three decades within the palace group of Changle Palace, the imperial residence palace of the imperial Western Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-24), archaeologists said.

The unearthed ruins, which lies in the northwest part of the palace group, is 160 meters long east-to-west and 50 meters wide north-to-south, with a rammed earth structure at its center, according to initial excavation.

In the halls of Sacramento, a special commission is rewriting Indian history: debating whether Aryan invaders conquered the subcontinent, whether Brahman priests had more rights than untouchables, and even whether ancient Indians ate beef.

That this seemingly arcane Indian debate has spilled over into California's board of education is a sign of the growing political muscle of Indian immigrants and the rising American interest in Asia.

The foes — who include established historians and Hindu nationalist revisionists — are familiar to each other in India. But America may increasingly become their new battlefield as other U.S. states follow California in rewriting their own textbooks to bone up on Asian history.

At stake, say scholars who include some of the most elite historians on India, may be a truthful picture of one of the world's emerging powers — one arrived at by academic standards of proof rather than assertions of national or religious pride.

"Some of the groups involved here are not qualified to write textbooks, they do not draw lines between myth and history," says Anu Mandavilli, an Indian doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California, and activist against the Hindu right. Speaking of one of the groups, the Vedic Foundation in Austin, Texas, she adds, "On their website, they claim that Hindu civilization started 111.5 trillion years ago. That makes Hinduism billions of years older than the Big Bang." (The assertion has since been pulled from the site.)

"It would be ridiculous if it weren't so dangerous."

Communities use history to define themselves — their core ideals, achievements, and grudges. Small wonder, then, that history is frequently reevaluated as political pendulums shift, or as long-oppressed minority groups finally get their say. History, and efforts to revise it, have touched off recent controversies between Japan and its neighbors over its World War II past, as well as between France and its former colonies over the portrayal of imperialism.

Here in India, Hindu nationalists have pushed forcefully for revisionism after what they see as centuries of cultural domination by the British Raj and Muslim Mogul Empire.

Instigating the California debate were two U.S.-based Hindu groups with long ties to Hindu nationalist parties in India. One, the Vedic Foundation, is a small Hindu sect that aims at simplifying Hinduism to the worship of one god, Vishnu. The other, the Hindu Education Foundation (HEF), was founded in 2004 by a branch of the right-wing Indian group the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

This year, as California's Board of Education commissioned and put up for review textbooks to be used in its 6th-grade classrooms, these two groups came forward with demands for substantial changes.

Archaeologists have discovered a huge medieval cemetery next to a "lost church" in the centre of Leicester, England. About 1,300 skeletons were uncovered in the burial ground of a medieval church torn down centuries ago.

The discovery, thought to be the largest of its kind outside of London, was made during excavations for a £350m shopping centre extension.

The wall trenches of St Peter's Church were also found.

Peter Liddle, Heritage Services, Leicestershire County Council said the discovery would show "a slice of the medieval inhabitants of Leicester".

The church was torn down in the 16th Century and the timber and stone was used to build the grammar school on High Cross Street.


We think, probably outside London, this must be one of the largest parish graveyards ever excavated
Richard Buckley, director of University of Leicester Archaeological Services

"We have known from documents that the church existed - and we knew how big it was - but this confirms all that," he said.

He said the dig was kept under wraps for months to avoid attracting onlookers.

The church was built in the late Saxon era and stood for about 500 years.

University of Leicester archaeologists behind the excavation will start a two-year study of their find.

Communal graves and a high number of child skeletons already provide evidence of high infant mortality and contagious diseases, said Richard Buckley, director of University of Leicester Archaeological Services.

The burial ground had a relatively short history - from the 12th Century to the church's demolition in 1573.

Mr Buckley said: "We think, probably outside London, this must be one of the largest parish graveyards ever excavated.

"It's very rare that we get a look at a population itself. It's quite a tightly dated group."

The excavation will also tell more about a church with a particularly grisly secret.

Mr Buckley added: "In the 14th Century, a bell-ringer turned up late for Christmas Eve and he was murdered by the vicar.

"He stabbed him in the head with a knife and killed him."

The site, which was excavated between April and November last year, will soon be the location for a John Lewis store.

The skeletons will eventually be buried at Gilroes cemetery in Groby Road.

Athens fell because a plague swept the empire. But scientists have debated what illness was responsible. A new DNA analysis of teeth from an ancient Greek burial pit indicates typhoid fever caused the epidemic.

The plague began in Ethiopia and passed through Egypt and Libya to Greece in 430-426 B.C. It changed the balance of power between Athens and Sparta, ending the Golden Age of Pericles and Athenian dominance in the ancient world.

An estimated one-third of Athenians died, including Pericles, their leader.

Knowledge of the epidemic had come largely from an account by the Greek historian Thucydides, who was taken ill with the plague but recovered. Despite Thucydides’ description, researchers could only narrow the possibilities down to a range that included the bubonic plague, smallpox, anthrax and measles.

The new study, led by Manolis Papagrigorakis of the University of Athens, found DNA sequences similar to those of the modern day Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi, the organism that causes typhoid fever. The work is detailed online by the International Journal of Infectious Diseases.

Typhoid fever is transmitted by contaminated food or water. It is most common today in developing countries.

A secret underground military complex abandoned by the Nazis as allied forces stormed Normandy after D-day has been found by an English amateur historian.

Gary Sterne came across the series of bunkers that had lain untouched for more than 60 years after buying a second world war map from an old American soldier. Armed with his map he visited the area near the Normandy beaches of Utah and Omaha, where he found the entrance to the military complex hidden under bramble bushes. He was astonished to discover a labyrinth of bunkers, control rooms and equipment abandoned by the Germans.

Mr Sterne, a collector of military memorabilia, said he had been intrigued by the idea of a hidden complex after buying a 1940s German army map from a former US serviceman. He said he had no real idea what he was looking for when he visited the area detailed in the map around Grandcamp Maisy in Normandy.

"I didn't know where I was going but I started to walk across the field when suddenly I found myself walking on concrete," he told Ouest France newspaper.

"I followed the concrete right up to the edge of some trees and it was there I suddenly found the entrance to the underground block, then a tunnel, an office, a supplies warehouse, general quarters, a radio room, other blocks and, most importantly, a room with supports for 155mm guns," he added. "It even had an underground hospital. The Germans had left behind many personal possessions."

The complex is believed to be the most important of German defences constructed during the second world war.

Historians are now examining the site, which has been bought by Mr Sterne, who intends to turn it into a tourist attraction.

For his movie The New World, which arrives in U.S. theaters nationwide today, director Terrence Malick wanted to accurately recreate the sights and sounds of a 17th-century English colony. The film depicts the clash between the native Algonquian Indians and English settlers at the founding of Jamestown in present-day Virginia. Malick therefore decided to have the Native American characters speak the indigenous language of the time—Virginia Algonquian. There was only one problem: No one had spoken the tongue for about 200 years.

Enter Blair Rudes, a linguist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. As the amount of Virginia Algonquian dialogue spoken in the movie increased from just two scenes to more than a third of the film, Rudes found himself reconstructing an entire language that had long gone extinct.

Archaeologists working in the rugged mountains of southwestern North Carolina are adding new details to the story of a tragedy that took place more than 160 years ago. The scientists are uncovering the remains of farms and homes belonging to the Cherokee Indians before they were forced to abandon their property and move to Oklahoma.

About 16,000 Cherokee and hundreds of other Native Americans were forced out of North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama in the late 1830s. The event came to be known among the Cherokee as the Trail of Tears.

Brett Riggs, an archaeologist with the University of North Carolina's Research Laboratories of Archaeology, is leading the excavations. He said the relocation of the Indians was a form of ethnic cleansing.

The legendary 1965 DB5 model, complete with a host of high-tech gadgets, went under the hammer in Phoenix, Arizona. Driven by Sean Connery, the car boasts built-in Browning machine guns, tyre slashers, an oil slick ejector and a retractable rear bullet-proof screen. It was bought for $2,090,000 by a European collector. When last sold in 1970, it fetched £5,000.

A drunk man climbed into a Vienna museum, stole possibly the world's most valuable sculpture on an impulse, and kept it hidden for nearly three years, police say. Their revelation today came after the famous Saliera by Benvenuto Cellini, worth $A81.13 million, was sensationally found buried in a snow-covered wood in northern Austria.

Investigators had scoured the world for the statue since it disappeared in May 2003.

The slightly damaged statue was returned to the museum in Vienna.

Head of Vienna's criminal police Ernst Geiger said the suspect, a 50-year-old man, was arrested on Friday.

He turned himself in when investigators published a photo of him.

Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower by William Blum had languished below 200,000 on Amazon's top-seller list but stormed to 21 yesterday, with the online retailer struggling to meet demand.

After issuing new threats to attack the US and calls for President George Bush to withdraw American troops from Iraq, Bin Laden then found time to "plug" Mr Blum's book. "If Bush decides to carry on with his lies and oppression, it would be useful for you to read the book Rogue State," he announced in his message relayed to a potential audience of billions via Arab satellite television.

Oprah Winfrey's book club has boosted the careers of many an author, but in Osama bin Laden she may have an unlikely new rival. A book by an obscure American historian has shot into US best-seller lists after the elusive leader of al-Qa'ida endorsed it in an audio message aired last week.

Mr Blum is a long-standing and fierce critic of the White House, laying scorn on Mr Bush and his predecessor, Bill Clinton. His 320-page book tears to pieces US foreign policy and its opening line reads: "Washington's war on terror is as doomed to failure as its war on drugs has been."

Mr Blum has described the attacks on 11 September as "an understandable retaliation against US foreign policy", stopping short of calling that ajustification.

Once an employee of the State Department until his career was cut short after he led demonstrations against the Vietnam War, Mr Blum, 72, has been taken aback by his sudden celebrity. News networks in the US are clamouring to interview him. "The Washington Post refuses to publish my letters, but now they are coming to my house," he told reporters.

Talking to a New York radio station, he said most interviewers have pressed him to reject Bin Laden's endorsement but he says he has no qualms about being promoted by the world's most wanted man. Mr Blum said: "I happen to share with Osama bin Laden a certain view of US foreign policy, and this is great if more people read my book."

The news that the Ministry of Justice decided yesterday that the trial against the world-famous Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk will not proceed is greeted with relief by International PEN members world wide. Yet it does little to assuage PEN's concerns that the right to freedom of expression in Turkey is severely curtailed by the existence of laws that penalise debate on "taboo" topics.

During the past 12 months, PEN has monitored over 60 cases of writers, journalists and publishers who were brought before the courts or faced with prosecution for their writings. Around 15 of these are currently on trial on charges of "insult" under Article 301, similar charges to those levied against Orhan Pamuk. Some recent notable cases include: the editor of an Armenian magazine, Hrant Dink, accused of insult to the State; five journalists accused of "interfering" with the judiciary for their comments on attempts to ban a conference, and publisher Abdullah Yilmaz who is to go on trial for a novel set in early part of the last century.

On 9 February, there will be another in a series of hearings against Hrant Dink editor of the Armenian language Agos magazine, whose trial opened in April last year, nine months ago. His "crime" was to make comments at a conference in which he expressed his belief that a phrase in the Turkish national anthem was discriminatory. Originally charged under the old penal code before it was amended in June 2005, the court decided to continue with his case, transferring it to the new penal code Article 301. Dink faces up to three years in prison.
In another case that concluded in October, Dink was sentenced to a six months suspended prison sentence for an article that discussed the impact on present day Armenian diaspora of the killings of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by the Ottoman army in 1915-1917.
As a result, new charges were opened against Hrant Dink and three others writing for Agos in December 2005 for an article that challenged Dink's October conviction. The four are accused of attempting to "influence the judiciary" under Article 288 of the Penal Code.

Commentators are surprised to see the emergence of the application of Article 288 of the Penal Code that is designed to protect the courts from outside influence yet is now being used to penalise legitimate comment on the judicial process. A notable case is that of five journalists working for the mainstream press who will appear in a court in Istanbul on 7 February. All are accused for their articles on a conference of Turkish historians on the Armenian tragedy. The conference was postponed after it was banned by a court order, eventually taking place at the end of September. However Ismet Berkan, Erol Katirciolgu, Murat Belge, Haluk Sahin and Hasan Cemal will still be brought before a court in two weeks time. Four of the five are additionally accused under Article 301 for "insult to the state" for the same articles of the same law under which Orhan Pamuk was charged.

In early April, the editor of the Literatür Publishing House, Abdullah Yilmaz, will be brought to trial under Article 301 for the book by the Greek writer Mara Meimaridi entitled The Witches of Smyrna. The book is a novel set in the last years of Ottaman rule in Izmir (known in Greek as Smyrna). Scenes in the book that describe some parts of the Turkish quarter of Izmir as dirty is seen to be "denigrating to Turkish national identity". What is surprising is that the book has already been print for a year, selling 50,000 copies in Turkey, and 100,000 in Greece, with a film adaptation under way.

These are just some of the cases that are currently causing concern in Turkey. Although, to date, the trials have not ended with long prison terms, acquittals are not assured, and the result is often fines and suspended sentences. This is a great improvement to the situation in the 1990s when hundreds of writers and journalists were sent to prison, often for many years. Yet this does not lessen the impact of the present situation where judicial harassment is now used to silence criticism of the Turkish state. These trials take months to complete, involving many hearings, causing extensive disruption to the lives of the defendants, bearing with them emotional as well as financial stress. That eminent writers and publishers, as well as mainstream journalists, are not immune from prosecution serves to send a strong warning to anyone who dares to consider writing on issues considered "taboo". These include comments on the mass killings of the Armenian population in the early 20th century, that suggest that the Turkish state and army has carried out human rights abuses, or even simply reporting frankly on the outcome of trials.

While there are court cases against writers, journalists and publishers who challenge "taboos" and while there exist laws that enable them to be prosecuted, International PEN will continue to call for an end to all trials of those accused solely for having practised their right to freedom of expression. It calls on the Turkish authorities to take note of the international indignation at the court hearings against Orhan Pamuk and to take the opportunity to review Turkish legislation with the aim of the possibility of future trials once and for all.


PLEASE SEND APPEALS:

**Welcoming the decision not to proceed with the trial against Orhan Pamuk;

**Pointing out that there are many other writers, journalists and publishers on trial for similar "offences";

**Noting that these trials are in direct contravention of the United Nations Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the European Convention on Human Rights, to which the Turkish government is a signatory;

**Therefore calling for an end to all prosecutions of those who practice their right to freedom of expression and that there be a further review of Turkish legislation with a view to removing from its remit any possibility for future such trials.


APPEALS TO:

Prime Minister Racep Tayyip Erdogan
**TC Easbaskanlik
**Ankara
**Turkey
**Fax: +90 312 417 0476
**Cemil Cicek
**Minister of Justice
**TC Adalet Bakanligi
**Ankara
**Turkey
**Fax: + 90 312 417 3954

Similar appeals should be sent to the Turkish Embassy in your own country.

For further information please contact Sara Whyatt at the Writers in Prison Committee of International PEN, 9/10 Charterhouse Buildings, London EC1M 7AT, United Kingdom. Tel: +44 (0) 207 253 3226 Fax: +44
(0) 207 253 5711 email: swhyatt@wipcpen.org

All Portsmouth set out to do was dig a manhole on a two-lane street of clapboard homes. Then a city backhoe hit a slat of white pine in the russet mud. It was a coffin, soft, brown, and six-sided, the first remnant of a buried chapter in New England history. About 200 coffins lay under the street near Choozy Shooz and the other shops that lend downtown Portsmouth a cosmopolitan air. No one knew much about this burial ground because the coffins held slaves, their unmarked graves paved over and mostly forgotten to make way for homes.

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. All Portsmouth set out to do was dig a manhole on a two-lane street of clapboard homes. Then a city backhoe hit a slat of white pine in the russet mud. It was a coffin, soft, brown, and six-sided, the first remnant of a buried chapter in New England history.

About 200 coffins lay under the street near Choozy Shooz and the other shops that lend downtown Portsmouth a cosmopolitan air. No one knew much about this burial ground because the coffins held slaves, their unmarked graves paved over and mostly forgotten to make way for homes.

Captured on West Africa's coast 300 years ago, slaves were used as rope-makers, shipwrights, potters, and cooks. Some were owned by the city's founders: William Whipple, a Revolutionary War commander who had a street and school named for him, kept a slave.

Now, as the remains of eight slaves are stored in a locked public works building, this city that prides itself on progressivism is confronting its past.

Several black residents have submitted DNA to determine if the remains are their ancestors, the city has voted to build a memorial, and officials are planning a proper funeral for the eight.

For many, a memorial is a matter of pride. With a black population of about 500, Portsmouth has, per capita, the largest black population in New Hampshire.

Maps made by the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail show docks where black mariners worked in the 1700s, and a church where residents raised money for civil rights in the 1960s.

"It was ignored and just kind of brushed aside as unimportant," said David Sawyer, 56, a dishwasher at Bob's Broiled Chicken, who has followed the burial ground's discovery in the local paper. "They're trying to correct that and give them a proper place in Portsmouth's history."

Portsmouth, 60 miles north of Boston, considers itself harmonious and industrious. Slavery has never fit easily into that picture.

The website for Strawberry Banke Museum, a local tourist destination, said, "This has always been an ordinary neighborhood, inhabited by ordinary people."

The first documented slaves arrived here in 1645, some 22 years after the first settlers, said Valerie Cunningham, president of the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail who has studied black history in the region for decades.

By the mid-1700s, the city had about 200 slaves, roughly 4 percent of its population. About 656 slaves lived in New Hampshire, few compared with the 5,000 in Massachusetts, 3,700 in Rhode Island, and 6,400 in Connecticut...

...Portsmouth's slaves built ships that brought more slaves to the colonies.

Others worked as seamstresses and gardeners, according to Cunningham. Some pressed for the right to farm or travel freely.

When they died, they were buried separately from whites. Some were buried on their owners' land, but many were sent to a plot at what was then the edge of Portsmouth: "The Negro Burying Ground," on Prison Lane, it was called in 18th-century records.

As Portsmouth grew in the 1790s, residents built over the burying ground, erecting houses.

The only records of the burial ground are a few 18th-century maps and a 19th-century newspaper article about another road crew hitting coffins there.

Then on the morning of Oct. 7, 2003, a road crew hit another coffin and someone yelled, "Stop!"...

...Examining bones, archeologists determined that four of the exhumed remains were of men in their 20s, and one was of a woman of about 30.

DNA tests showed they were of African descent, and the woman also bore a telltale cultural marker: Her incisors had been removed, typical of a West African coming-of-age ritual.

Beyond that, archeologists believe there is little hope of learning more about the slaves...

...In 2004, Mayor Evelyn Sirrell named a teacher, lawyer, city councilor, and historians to a Blue Ribbon African Burial Ground Committee to decide the fate of the graveyard.

Last year, after hearing from archeologists and high school students, they recommended closing part of Chestnut Street, where the graveyard is located, and planting a grassy memorial for an estimated $100,000.

The City Council accepted the plan, voting unanimously.

Residents are planning a funeral, with some anticipation.

"We want quite honestly to make amends for the way it had been done then," said John W. Hynes, a city councilor and chairman of the Burial Ground Committee. "We are trying to do justice."

A full-length portrait of George Washington by artist Charles Willson Peale sold for a record $21.3 million on Saturday at Christie's auction house.

The 8-foot-tall oil painting was bought by dealer C.L. Prickett, presumably for a client, a Christie spokeswoman said.

The 1779 canvas depicts a portly and rosy-cheeked Washington as Commander of the Continental Army at Princeton, New Jersey. Washington later became the first U.S. president.

The sale broke the previous record of $8.1 million for an American portrait sold at auction. That portrait, of Washington painted by Gilbert Stuart, was sold in November by Sotheby's auction house.

Adolf Hitler intended to recreate the Vatican's St Peter's Square in the centre of Berlin to honour his ally Benito Mussolini, newly discovered documents have revealed.

Albert Speer, the fuhrer's chief architect, was commissioned to draw up the plans, which have been discovered by historians examining his papers.

They had been stored in a secret room inside Moscow's Museum of Architecture after being taken to Russia at the end of the Second World War.

In total, there were more than 200 boxes of files belonging to Speer, whose grand designs for the rebuilding of Nazi Berlin under Hitler were already well known.

But the plans for a new, Germanic version of St Peter's Square - complete with a giant statue of Mussolini - in Berlin have astonished historians.

Precisely how long is the Great Wall of China? Because historical records and measurements differ, officials in China have decided to survey the length and orientation of the Great Wall, using the latest techniques and a budget of 200 million yuan (approximately US$ 25 million).

While much of the hoopla over Ben Franklin's birthday will focus on his role as an influential American diplomat, a new book suggests that he deserves considerable recognition for his important but overlooked contributions to medicine. "Franklin played a critical role in development of modern medicine," suggests Stanley Finger, Ph.D., a noted medical historian and professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. "With strong interests in bedside and preventative medicine, hospital care, and even medical education, he helped to change medical care in both America and Europe."

In his forthcoming book, "Doctor Franklin's Medicine" (University of Pennsylvania Press, January 2006), Finger presents a colorful and context-rich analysis of Franklin's medical efforts.

Finger has written widely on the history of the brain and behavioral sciences, and his recent books include "Origins of Neuroscience,"
"Trepanation," and "Minds Behind the Brain." He is also senior editor of the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences.

More than a simple listing of Franklin's medical contributions, Finger's latest book reveals what was theorized about health and disease early in the 18th century, and shows how Franklin strove to improve medicine with careful observations, actual experiments and hard data.

"Franklin was a rare bird," Finger says. "His broad contributions are especially remarkable in that he had no medical training and, in fact, only two years of classroom education. What is even more amazing is that he came from the colonies, where life was still a struggle -- not from a major European cultural center."

One of the unique features of Finger's book is that he shows how Franklin's life and medical views were partly shaped by personal events, including the loss of his son Francis to smallpox, and his own visual problems, painful gout and massive bladder stone.

While Franklin is often caricatured as a pudgy, balding and bespectacled old man in short pants and stockings, Finger first presents him as a muscular runaway from Boston, who settled in Philadelphia and made his first voyage to London in his teens.

Careful observations, experiments
He points out that it was Franklin's appetite for books and love of learning, and how he ran his successful printing business and wanted to improve life in the colonies, that led him into medicine.

Like most Americans, Franklin was a pragmatist; he was clearly more interested in whether something worked than why. "He avoided the metaphysics of the ancients and shunned the unanchored speculations of academics," Finger writes. "Not one to be guided by loose medical theorizing, he turned to data based on observations and careful experiments."

A lack of formal medical training was no barrier to practicing medicine in 18th-century America. In fact, only a small percentage of colonial healers had formal medical training and even fewer possessed college degrees.

"What distinguished Franklin from the myriad other colonials who practiced or dabbled in medicine was that he approached clinical medicine with the mindset of an experimental natural philosopher," Finger writes.

"He skillfully designed experiments, collected data and compiled tables to determine trends and outcomes. He also read voraciously, contacted authorities to solicit their opinions and searched for historical antecedents. Moreover, Franklin had a remarkable ability to recognize the good ideas of others and the tenacity to move these ideas toward a productive end."

Franklin used his printing presses and social connections to advance good causes, such as building the first major charity hospital in the colonies and the first American medical school. He also informed people about dangerous epidemics, worthy new cures and medical quackery.

"Religious dogma, grandiose formulations and the gripping tentacles of the past did not hold him back, and he was anxious to develop and share medical ideas with anyone, anywhere," Finger writes.

"Physicians all across Europe were clamoring to meet him to learn his views on everything from smallpox inoculations to whether electricity might have a future in medicine."

In fact, Finger argues, "what Franklin achieved on the political front in Europe might not have been possible had he not previously established such a strong following for his work in electrical science and many accomplishments in medicine."

Among Franklin's contributions to the fields of health, fitness and medicine:

- Medical institutions: He was instrumental in founding the first major civilian charity hospital and the first medical school in the colonies. Established at the College of Philadelphia, later renamed the University of Pennsylvania, the first medical school in British North America opened its doors in 1765. His Pennsylvania Hospital provided free care for the injured poor and the mentally ill.

- Small pox: He studied inoculation as a weapon against horrific epidemics of smallpox. By compiling and publishing detailed statistics on high percentages of colonists saved from smallpox through inoculation, he became one of the first people to use statistics in a public health campaign.

- Common cold: He investigated causes of the cold and influenza. While many blamed colds on wet clothing and damp air, he noted no increase in colds among sailors and others exposed to wet conditions. Observing that people often catch colds while confined in close quarters, he concluded that people spread colds, and that they probably have something to do with the transmission of microscopic particles.

- Medical inventions: Bifocal lenses and a "long arm" that extended the user's reach were among his many inventions aimed at making life easier for the aged and afflicted. He was also involved with designing and making what might have been the first flexible urinary catheter in the colonies.

- Lead poisoning: An epidemiologist at heart, Franklin observed that many patients suffering from stomach pains and other symptoms in a Paris hospital were craftsmen in trades exposed to high levels of lead: typesetters, glazers, plumbers, potters and painters. He helped colleagues understand the perils of lead-contaminated rum and other beverages, and warned of lead in household implements, such as pans and even milk storage containers.

- Medical electricity: The world's greatest authority on electricity, Franklin experimented with the use of electrical shocks to treat paralysis, blindness, deafness, hysteria and depression. He observed only short-term improvements in treating stroke victims, but had greater success treating hysteria. After studying effects of several accidental jolts to his head and the heads of others, he and a colleague became the first to propose electroshock treatments for depression.

- Exercise: An accomplished swimmer and a lifetime proponent of regular exercise, Franklin recommended daily swims in an era when bathing was rare. For those unable to take in outdoor exercise, he advocated 15 minutes of brisk stair climbing at intervals throughout the day. He worked out with dumbbell weights, even into his eighties. He surmised that health benefits were not necessarily linked to the length or type of exercise, but hinged instead on the degree of body warmth generated. Noting his heart rate and temperature rose while exercising, he recommended that everyone engage in what we would now refer to as regular cardiovascular exercise.

- Quackery: Franklin lead the commission that debunked the fantastic claims of Franz Mesmer, who believed he could cure people by harnessing and directing an invisible magnetic force that permeated the cosmos. With very clever experiments, Franklin showed that suggestion and patient expectations could account for Mesmer's cures, not his faddish theory of "animal magnetism."

There seems to be some confusion abroad in the profession about the status of graduate study in history at Tulane. Tulane Ph.D. and M.A. programs in history will continue as before, and that there will be some enhancement in the value of the stipends of incoming and continuing doctoral students as soon as fall 2006.

Because of communications difficulties in New Orleans (U. S. mail remains very slow, and applicants were understandably skeptical of our online applications process while the university remained closed), Tulane has extended the departmental deadline for applications for fall 2006 admission to 15 February 2006. For surest communication, applicants should use the online process or send materials by private delivery carrier (e.g., UPS). Students with questions about the program or application process are asked to write to the departmental director of graduate studies, Professor Rosanne Adderley (adderley@tulane.edu). And please send Professor Adderley an email if you have sent or when you send your application, so she can know to expect it.

The confusion about our program likely stems from the news, widely reported in national media, that the university is eliminating the Graduate School. This was reported, for example in the New York Times, without the important qualifier that this is simply an administrative streamlining, and that beginning 1 July 2006 graduate programs will be administered by individual schools within the university (the School of Liberal Arts in the case of history programs). And while admissions to several Ph.D. programs within the university have been suspended, let me reiterate that the Ph.D. and M. A. programs in the Tulane department of history will continue without interruption.

Research commissioned by Germany's Dresdner Bank AG has found that the bank once held a major stake in a company that helped build the Auschwitz death camp, a spokesman said Saturday.

The bank held a 26 percent stake in the company, Huta, spokesman Ulrich Porwollik said, confirming a report by the weekly Der Spiegel.

Historians also found that, starting in 1910, officials from the bank repeatedly headed Huta's supervisory board - "also at the relevant time," he added.

Porwollik said Dresdner Bank, now a unit of insurer Allianz AG, tasked historian Klaus-Dietmar Henke and other experts in 1998 with investigating the company's Nazi-era past. The historians were given wide-ranging access to the bank's archives.

Chief executive Herbert Walter said the research showed the bank's history in "an extremely critical light," Der Spiegel reported. "We must face this responsibility," he added.

Porwollik noted that Dresdner was a state-controlled bank at the time.

According to Der Spiegel, Huta built at least two of the crematoria at Auschwitz, located in Nazi-occupied Poland, as well as buildings for accommodation and delousing.

Dresdner Bank plans to present the full results of the historians' research on February 17.

Heirs of Armenians killed 91 years ago in the Turkish Ottoman Empire sued Deutsche Bank A.G. and Dresdner Bank A.G. on Friday, claiming the German banks owe them millions of dollars and other assets deposited by their ancestors.

The class-action lawsuit was filed in Superior Court on behalf of seven Armenians living in Southern California. It is the latest bid by Armenians in the United States to recover assets they believe belonged to some 1.5 million Armenians who perished in a genocide beginning in 1915.

Litigation brought against New York Life Insurance Co. by Armenian descendants led to a $20 million settlement; French life insurer AXA has agreed to pay $17 million to settle a separate class-action claim. Both lawsuits made similar allegations.

The lawsuit against the German banks seeks to recoup unspecified millions of dollars for assets such as gold, cash and jewelry that the Armenian descendants claim were deposited by thousands of their ancestors at the banks' Turkish branches or otherwise looted by the Ottoman Turkish government and later transferred to European banks.

The banks also are accused of concealing and preventing the funds from being recovered by the account holders' heirs.

"After the genocide, you had two groups of people: You had families completely wiped out and you had families who simply escaped," said Los Angeles attorney Brian Kabateck, who also is an Armenian descendant. "Neither were able to get their assets out of the bank ... and 91 years later, we want to make it right."

A call to a Deutsche Bank spokeswoman in New York was not immediately returned Friday. Calls to European offices of Dresdner Bank rang unanswered.

Kabateck said the suit was brought in California because of the state's progressive rules governing class-action cases and statute of limitations. Southern California also is home to an estimated half-million Armenians.

Attorney Mark Geragos, who also is of Armenian descent, said there are no statute of limitations on claims to recover funds or property deposited in a bank.

The attorneys compared their claim to attempts by Jewish victims of the Holocaust seeking reparations from Swiss banks.

Turkey rejects the claim there was an Armenian genocide, instead saying they were killed in civil unrest during the collapse of the empire.

France, Russia and many other countries have declared the killings genocide. Turkish allies including the United States and neighboring Azerbaijan have not.

Turkey, which has no diplomatic ties with Armenia, is facing increasing international pressure to fully acknowledge the event as it seeks membership in the European Union.

The proud lineage of Abraham Lincoln has helped researchers at the University of Minnesota identify a genetic origin of ataxia, a disease that robs people of mobility and coordination.

The discovery, announced Sunday, means that genetic screening can be used to identify people at risk for at least one form of this neurological disease. Perhaps a gene-specific treatment can be designed as well.

Genetics professor Laura Ranum started the hunt for the responsible gene in the early 1990s with one patient who had a family history of ataxia. She then contacted the patient's relatives, hoping that a DNA analysis of the family would expose the origin of a disease that is often passed among generations.

It soon became clear, Ranum said, that this family had a famous ancestor: President Lincoln. It was good fortune. Many relatives had kept detailed family histories because of their famed heritage.

"That was ideal for a genetic mapping study," she said. "What all of the family members seemed to know was how they were related to President Lincoln, not necessarily how they were related to all of the other people."

In one case, a newspaper story in Louisville, Ky., prematurely stated that Ranum's team had traced ataxia back to Lincoln's paternal grandparents, when Ranum had only verified the genetic link to one of Lincoln's uncles. That was fortuitous, though, because descendants of the grandparents then called Ranum and said that ataxia was common on their side of the family.

In the end, Ranum's team interviewed 299 descendants of Lincoln's paternal grandparents, Capt. Abraham Lincoln and Bathsheba Herring. Of that group, 99 had ataxia, according to Ranum's study, which is being published in next month's issue of Nature Genetics. A defect of a single gene was common to all those with the disease.

Children have a 50 percent chance of having the genetic mutation that causes this form of ataxia when one parent has it, Ranum explained. People with the mutation will almost certainly develop ataxia sometime in their lives.

The form of ataxia in the Lincoln descendants is milder but nonetheless can disrupt walking, moving, writing and talking. The disease results when the mutated gene creates abnormal proteins that damage nerve cells in the spinal cord or cerebellum.

The research simply put a name to something that Lincoln descendants already knew: They were more prone to a mysterious ailment. One branch of the family had previously called it the "dreaded Lincoln disease," said Laurie Crary, 50, who is Lincoln's sixth cousin.

Crary, of Prescott, Ariz., isn't as affected as her father, but she and her sister experience vertigo and lose their sense of balance in the dark.

She traveled to the University of Minnesota twice for the research and participated in a battery of dizzying and sometimes nauseating tests. Her great hope is the research will identify treatments in the lifetimes of her daughter and son, who are 21 and 18, respectively. At least, she hopes a definitive screening test will alert her kids to their risk.

She remembered how awareness of ataxia brought her family some comfort.

"It's kind of nice knowing why you stumble in the dark, why you drop things, why you just do really klutzy kind of things," she said.

The university efforts were conducted in coordination with research in Baltimore, Germany and France. Two other families were studied, and while their DNA showed slightly different mutations of the same gene, the end results were the same.

Without genetic testing, researchers don't know whether Lincoln suffered ataxia. He showed symptoms, according to Ranum's study, and also may have suffered from Marfan syndrome, a disorder characterized by long limbs.

For several years Lieutenant General William E. Odom (ret.), formerly Director of the NSA (1985-88), has expressed the remarkable view that the US invasion of Iraq is "the greatest strategic mistake" in US history. In a podcast interview recorded on January 4, he elaborated on that proposition, and contended that an extended US debacle in Iraq could trigger the collapse of the current international system.

He talks about a loosening of constraints upon rivalries within Europe, a breakdown in the current peaceful balance in Northeast Asia, Russian meddling, Iranian meddling, arms races, and indeed the possibility of an international economic crisis along the lines of the 1930s. He clearly points out many new unevaluated risks which add up to "the greatest strategic mistake" in US history. Asked to explain why the US attacked Iraq Odom squarely puts responsibility on the neocons. He expresses concern that the President has put himself above the law, that on a wide range of fronts the President is undercutting the foundations of a liberal constitutional system, substituting for it executive rule. He also explains in colorful detail how the US military has understood international affairs over the past fifty years, how institutionally it has changed to deal with larger issues, and ways in which organizationally it is in jeopardy today.

Odom is now a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington D.C. and an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Yale University.

It has been revealed that Turkey informed Italian officials about Mehmet Ali Agca's plan to assassinate Pope II Jean Paul one year before the incident.

Turkish Interpol warned member countries by issuing a red bulletin after Agca escaped from prison in 1979 where he was sentenced to life for murdering Abdi Ipekci, editor of the moderate left-wing newspaper Milliyet; however, the countries did not pay much heed to "the red bulletin" at first. After Agca's assassination attempt, Interpol’s Secretariat General thanked the Turkish Security Directorate and held Turkey as an example for other countries.


Retired Security Director Selahattin Gultepe who worked at the Security Directorate Interpol Office during 1977-1986, said they informed all the Interpol members including Italy about Agca's assassination plan one year before the incident by issuing a red bulletin. Gultepe brought tens of outlaws back to Turkey, including Cevher Ozden (known as Banker Castello) who was extradited to Turkey from abroad following agreements signed between the countries.

Gultepe, who still leads Eastern Security Services, said that Agca's attempt on the pope’s life occurred on a Sunday. He explained the situation of the Security Office as follows: "There were many political assassination attempts during that period. We were on alert about names such as Abdullah Catli, Oral Celik, Musa Serdar Celebi, Mehmet Sener and Haluk Kirci. Agca was a murderer wanted by us as well. Agca's assassination attempt took place on a Sunday. Since it was a weekend, we were called in to the office in a hurry where we examined Agca's dossier. We were supposed to present the information about him to the General Security Directorate, Internal Ministry and to the Prime Minister. We began by taking notes, there was a thin dossier about Agca for Interpol at first. Then, it turned into 40 files including correspondence, informants' letters etc."

What color are the stars on our flag? How many representatives are in Congress? Who becomes president if the president and the vice president should die? Who wrote ''The Star-Spangled Banner?" The federal government has decided that these questions -- five of the 100 that could appear on the US citizenship test -- are trivial. They say the exam, which is supposed to gauge how well immigrants understand and embrace US institutions, instead tests only their ability to memorize answers. So the Office of Citizenship is designing a new test, to be administered starting in 2008.

It will ask aspiring citizens about what it means to be American, rather than quiz them on picayune facts. Officials say it is more important to ask immigrants about such principles as freedom of speech and religion, than for them to know trivia quiz items like how many amendments there are to the Constitution.

The proposed change is already triggering debate over what should be expected of immigrants who want to become citizens.

But the goal, says Alfonso Aguilar, chief of the Office of Citizenship at the Department of Homeland Security, is to design a process that will ultimately produce citizens who are more involved, more aware of their rights and responsibilities, and more American. ''We don't think the current test encourages civil learning and attachment to the country," he said.

''We want to celebrate diversity and encourage the common values that link every American," Aguilar said in an interview. ''Immigrants who embrace those values become fully American. . . . You're going to have an immigrant population more integrated and more involved in civic culture."

Immigrant advocates agree that having prospective citizens identify closely with American values is good for both new arrivals and their adopted country. But some advocates worry that making the exam more sophisticated will also make it too difficult for many immigrants who already live and work in the United States with green cards, the documents carried by legal permanent residents.

They are also concerned that a new test, with questions on concepts such as the federal system and the rule of law, will require better English skills than the basic level required by the current test. Despite rising naturalization rates, millions of eligible immigrants, particularly those who are poorer and lack English language skills, opt to not seek citizenship.