Results from other recent tests on bone samples confirmed that the Jamestown skeleton was an immigrant to America, showing that he ate a diet rich in wheat as opposed to an American corn diet, researchers said.

SIXTY-ONE YEARS ago this spring, the Allies liberated the German concentration camps. Sixty-one years is a long time -- so long that few European leaders have personal experience of the war. Why, then, are the German government and the International Red Cross still conspiring to prevent historians from gaining access to the world's largest Holocaust survivors' archive?

There is no easy answer to this question, particularly since both the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Germany flatly deny they are doing so. Officially known as the International Tracing Service, the archive contains comprehensive documentation from Dachau and Buchenwald, as well as prisoner lists and records from other concentration camps, slave labor camps, displaced-person camps and ghettos. These records, thought to contain more than 17 million names, were deposited in Bad Arolsen, Germany, by the Allied powers after the war and have been managed since 1955 by an international treaty with 11 signatories. The treaty gave the ICRC management of the archive on behalf of survivors and required the German government to fund its operations.

But in recent years it has become clear that this system no longer works. The backlog of victims waiting for information about their lives is now in the hundreds of thousands; evidence that archivists hold back documents is overwhelming; survivors' groups in Germany and elsewhere are protesting; and historians are demanding better access.

In theory, the 11 countries have now agreed to open the archives to historians. But in practice, the longtime director of the archive, Charles Biedermann -- a Swiss employee of the ICRC -- together with the German government has thwarted efforts by the United States, the Netherlands, France and others to make the documents more accessible. Mr. Biedermann, while claiming neutrality, has written letters to German officials in an effort to influence committee deliberations and has recently issued a statement calling wider distribution of the documents "neither morally nor legally justifiable." In conversation, he lists conditions -- his conditions -- that researchers would have to meet before the International Tracing Service could "agree" to open itself up to historians.

The German interior ministry, meanwhile, joins him in pointing out multiple legal issues that prevent them from making the archives more accessible, ranging from the privacy of relatives of camp collaborators to questions about archivists' liability -- despite the fact that similar archives in Belgium and Israel have posed no special problems. Germany, along with Italy, also opposed the creation of a scholarly group to assist the 11-nation commission, which meets once a year and is mostly composed of diplomats without special knowledge of the Holocaust or of archives in general. Perhaps, some suspect, the Germans and the Italians fear a flood of new compensation claims. Or perhaps archive employees simply fear for their jobs.

Both the Germans and the ICRC also claim that any change in the archives' regime requires unanimous approval of all the treaty signatories -- which is not clearly the case and is, of course, impossible, because the Germans object. Yet these are not, and were never intended to be, Germany's archives to control. Clearly it is time to raise this issue's significance, to involve diplomats at a higher level, and to reach a compromise. If possible, the archives should be made completely accessible, with no unusual restrictions, in Bad Arolsen. If legal issues make it impossible to open the archive in Germany, then yes, the documents should be copied and placed in appropriate archives abroad, where they could be managed under the rules of other countries. Sixty-one years later, survivors, historians and the rest of the world have a right to know what happened.

DINOSAURS were most likely killed off because they never got a good night's sleep, scientists have claimed.

Giant meteorites from outer space, fire storms, tidal waves and an ice age have all been suggested by experts to explain the demise of T-Rex and other giant dinosaurs.

However, the latest theory to explain their extinction claims they did not survive because their reptilian sleeping patterns meant their brains did not learn new skills properly.

Unlike mammals and birds, reptiles are unable to experience slow wave sleep, the type of sleep believed to be responsible for boosting memories, especially those connected to performing new tasks.

As a result, reptiles are much more limited in the type of complex behaviour they can experience than other animals such as mammals and birds.

A chance trick of the light has provided proof that the town of Al-Qasr in the Dakhla Oasis was once a Roman fortress. Jenny Jobbins witnessed the evidence.

The town of Al-Qasr, otherwise known as Qasr Dakhla, lies in Dakhla Oasis deep in the Western Desert 450kms due west of Luxor. Despite its remote setting it has had a colourful history: Romans exploited the oasis for agricultural produce; Libyans, including the Sanusi, made conquering raids; and it was not far from the infamous Darb Al-Arbain slave route. In the picturesque mediaeval section of the town narrow, partly covered streets wind past heavy ancient doors topped with elaborate lintels, and here and there through an open doorway can be glimpsed old grinding stones or a staircase leading to a crumbling roof.

Al-Qasr is the older of the two towns in Dakhla -- the other being Mut -- and was built on top of a tell, that mound of crumbled debris that marks the site of an ancient structure or settlement and which over time, since any collapsed buildings are composed largely of mud brick, settles into the natural landscape.

Archaeologists have long supposed that beneath the foundations of Al-Qasr are the remains of a Roman citadel. Fred Leemhuis, professor of Islamic Studies at Groningen University and field director of the Qasr Dakhla Project -- part of the Dakhla Oasis Project (DOP) -- told this author two years ago: "Undoubtedly there was a fortress there in Roman times, or even a Ptolemaic one. The Romans probably built a structure to surround the well, and I would be surprised if there was nothing Roman. But we have simply not found any evidence."...

Navy construction crews have unearthed a rare Spanish ship that was buried for centuries under sand on Pensacola's Naval Air Station, archaeologist confirmed Thursday.

The vessel could date to the mid-1500s, when the first Spanish settlement in what is now the United States was founded here, the archaeologists said.

But the exposed portion looks more like ships from a later period because of its iron bolts, said Elizabeth Benchley, director of the Archaeology Institute at the University of West Florida.

The long shadow of East Germany's feared secret service, the Stasi, has once again fallen over Berlin, 16 years after its reign of terror ended.

A discussion in a former Stasi prison last week was disrupted by 200 former Stasi officers who dubbed their one-time victims "liars" and described the former prison, now a museum, as a phony "chamber of horrors".

"I was shaking all over with fury," said Matthias Melster (39), who spent five months in Hohenschönhausen prison in East Berlin for attempting to flee over the Berlin Wall 20 years ago. Now he works in the former prison as a guide.

"These men think they were right and all others are lying. And they feel secure saying that in the current political situation in Berlin."

The city-state of Berlin is governed by a coalition of the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Left Party-PDS, the successor to East Germany's Socialist Unity Party (SED).

The SED established the Stasi in 1950 to protect the socialist German state and soon established a network of 250,000 full-time and part-time informers to spy on fellow East Germans.

With one Stasi informer for every 68 people, the Stasi gathered 17 million files filling 178km of shelves by its end in 1990.

Last week's commotion is part of an increasingly organised campaign by former Stasi officials that could have serious political consequences for Berlin's cultural senator, Thomas Flierl of the Left Party.

Mr Flierl failed to intervene as ex-Stasi officials disrupted the discussion and instead told the appalled audience they were "historical eye-witnesses".

"When you're dealing with history, allowing perpetrators to speak as eye-witnesses is a mockery and derision of the victims of the Stasi," said Astrid Jantz, a local Christian Democrat (CDU) politician who also participated in the discussion.

Opposition politicians and Stasi victims have dismissed as half- hearted an apology Mr Flierl made in the Berlin state assembly on Thursday.

"He's an intelligent person and he knows that these people are his voters," said Mr Melster. "Before the discussion even began, the Stasi men made clear that the local people here in this area vote for the Left Party."

The implied threat, says Mr Melster, was that if Mr Flierl criticised them, they would make sure his party loses votes in the state election later this year.

The row coincides with the release of Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others), a chilling new film about a Stasi official whose spying operation on a dissident East German playwright brings him to question his loyalty to the Stasi, the so-called "sword and shield of the party".

As Germany's first serious Stasi film, it is a timely contribution to the current debate and a welcome relief from the threadbare retellings of the Third Reich and the feel-good East German "ostalgia" films such as Goodbye, Lenin!

"The film shows the harshness in a way that is unsparing but also sober," says actor Ulrich Mühe, who gives a mesmerising performance as the doubting apparatchik.

"It gives Stasi victims the opportunity to confront once again the system so that they can be done with it once and for all. This is a film to finally say farewell to the GDR."

But the new-found confidence of ex-Stasi officers has German historians concerned that mistakes made in the post-war period that allowed Nazi officials live quiet lives are being repeated with Stasi officials.

"A group of high-ranking officers are organising a systematic historical revisionism that we only know from the neo-Nazis," Hubertus Knabe, head of the Stasi prison memorial centre, said to a Berlin newspaper.

"This is revenge for Germany dealing so mildly with the Stasi."

John Evans is the U.S. ambassador to Armenia, as of this writing. But he probably won't be for long. Evans, a career diplomat who was selected to receive an American Foreign Service Assn. award last year for his frank public speaking, irked his superiors at the State Department by uttering the following words at UC Berkeley in February 2005: "I will today call it the Armenian genocide." For that bit of truth-telling, Evans was forced to issue a clarification, then a correction, then to endure having his award rescinded under pressure from his bosses, and finally to face losing his job altogether.

What happened in Armenia in 1915 is well known. The Ottoman Empire attempted to exterminate the Armenian population through slaughter and mass deportation. It finished half the job, killing about 1.2 million people. Yet the State Department has long avoided the word "genocide," not out of any dispute over history but out of deference to Turkey, whose membership in NATO and location between Europe and Asia make it a strategic ally.

It is time to stop tiptoeing around this issue and to accept settled history. Genocide, according to accepted U.N. definition, means "the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." Armenia is not even a borderline case. Punishing an ambassador for speaking honestly about a 90-year-old crime befits a cynical, double-dealing monarchy, not the leader of the free world.

Turks point out that their Ottoman ancestors considered it treason to side with Russia at the outbreak of World War I, as many Armenians did. But the massacres were also fueled by Muslim animosity toward a Christian minority. When then-U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morganthau protested the bloodletting, he received a telling response from Mehmed Talaat, the interior minister in charge of the anti-Armenian campaign. "Why are you so interested in Armenians anyway? You are a Jew, these people are Christians," Talaat said. "Why can't you let us do with these Christians as we please?"

For Armenians who escaped the killing and came to this country, inadequate recognition of their history is crazy-making. Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), whose district includes the heart of the Armenian diaspora, keeps introducing a bill to officially recognize the genocide, only to see congressional leadership quash it each year, under pressure from the State Department.

Some nations, thankfully, are stepping where Congress fears to tread. The European Parliament last year passed a nonbinding resolution asking that Turkey acknowledge the genocide as a precondition for joining the European Union. The Turkish government, typically, was infuriated, yet it still desperately wants to join the EU.

One day, the country that was founded as a direct repudiation of its Ottoman past will face its history squarely, as part of a long-overdue maturing process. Some day before then, we hope, the State Department will too.

Around 32,000 years ago, caves were prime real estate.

For early humans, the biggest competitors for such prehistoric housing may have been an extinct species of bear larger than the grizzly that lived in Europe during the last glacial period.

Scientists know that Neandertals and cave bears (Ursus spelaeus) once used the same caves in southeastern France during the ice age (1.6 million to 10,000 years ago).

The question has been whether early humans and bears were challenging one another for food and shelter.

Now a new study of ancient bear bones and cave paintings shows that bears and Neandertals were not competing for caves, but instead were trading off with perhaps centuries-long gaps in between.

Without firing a shot, Mother Nature, Father Time and relentless development are taking a toll on battlefields that Union and Confederate armies died defending.

The Washington-based Civil War Preservation Trust has placed two Kentucky sites -- in Cynthiana and Columbus -- on a list of the nation's 20 most endangered historic battlefields.

The Civil War Preservation Trust's recent report, "History Under Siege," states that remnants of battlefields in and around Cynthiana in Harrison County are endangered by development, and the battlefield at Columbus-Belmont State Park in Hickman County is at risk from the Mississippi River and from surface-water erosion of the river bluff on which it is situated.

One of every 10 soldiers wounded in the Civil War was wounded by artillery fire. But Gary Miller says the much larger threat to soldiers was something much smaller.

Bedbugs.

The bugs were torture to wartime soldiers. So were fleas and flies, all smaller and deadlier than any bullet, as Gary says.

"We had 110,000 die in battle-related injuries, 200,000 died of disease."

Gary blames insects for spreading much of the disease. And he should know. He gained his Civil War expertise as an entomologist. When reading those history books, he kept noticing bugs.

On Friday, July 10, 1863, one soldier wrote this to his wife: “The flies are in the millions, they are never off the table, dead and dying in every mouthful you eat."

It's not the stuff of Civil War reenactments, or even real photographs. Gary says he's only found one picture that even hints at the problems of insects. Yet, he says, they probably did more human harm than either North or South.

On the eve of the 30th anniversary of the military coup in Argentina, the National Security Archive posted a series of declassified U.S. documents and, for the first time, secret documents from Southern Cone intelligence agencies, recording detailed evidence of atrocities committed by the military regime in Argentina.

The documents include a formerly secret transcript of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's first staff meeting after the coup during which he ordered the immediate support of the U.S. government for the new military regime. Told by his staff that there would be "a good deal of blood in Argentina before too long" and that Washington should delay embracing the new junta, according to the declassified transcript posted today, Kissinger stated: "I do want to encourage them. I don't want to give the sense that they're harassed by the United States."

The Archive also posted actual internal records from the infamous Argentina intelligence unit, Battalion 601, as well as a document from the Chilean secret police agency, known as DINA, which was secretly collaborating with the military in Buenos Aires and which provided an internal military account of the number of dead and disappeared at the hands of the Argentine security forces.

The DINA document, based on secret body count lists put together by Battalion 601, put the number at 22,000 people between 1975 and mid 1978. Other Argentine and declassified U.S. documents illuminated the repression of "Operation Condor" -- a collaborative effort among the Southern Cone secret police services to track down and eliminate opponents of their regimes in the mid and late 1970s. Several documents highlight the case of an Uruguayan couple who were disappeared in September 1976, as part of a Condor operation to wipe out an Uruguayan resistance group known as OPR-33.

The Archive's posting on Argentina coincides with a decision made public today by the Argentine Defense Ministry to open its still secret archives to researchers and victims of repression during the eight year military dictatorship. Carlos Osorio, director of the National Security Archive's Argentina project, hailed the decision as "a major step toward accountability for the past" that would "help clarify massive human rights violations during the dictatorship." But Osorio urged that intelligence documents, such as the one from Battalion 601 included in this posting, be released as well. For this new policy of openness to succeed, according to Marcos Novaro who directs the Political History Project at the University of Buenos Aires, "it is important that the relevant archives of the State Intelligence Secretariat be included."

Chinese archaeologists claim that pottery utensils dating back 7,000 years ago which bear inscriptions of various symbols are probably one of the origins of Chinese characters.

They made the conclusion on the basis of several years' study into the symbols carved on over 600 pottery ware items unearthed from the New Stone Age site in Shuangdun village, Xiaobengbu town of Bengbu, a city in East China's Anhui Province.

A very rare example of surviving pre-Greek settlement in southern Italy is to be excavated and explored. The site, at Molpa in the hills above Palinuro south of Naples, is believed to contain the remains of a large village of the Enotrians, the earliest known inhabitants of Calabria and southern Campania. The Greeks who settled across southern Italy from 700BC to create Magna Graecia had an idealised vision of the Enotrians ("wine lovers") as coming from the Eden-like land of Arcadia .

The Pentagon is arresting old soldiers as thousands of US servicemen are going on the run.

THIRTY-SIX years after he deserted from the US Marines to avoid being sent to Vietnam, Ernest “Buck” McQueen believed that the military had long ago given up looking for him.

But on January 12 his past caught up with him. After his brother-in-law inadvertently tipped off an undercover investigator about his whereabouts, Mr McQueen, 55, was arrested in a burger bar close to his home in Fort Worth and shipped off to a Marine jail in California.



“It wouldn’t have taken a brain surgeon to find me any time,” Mr McQueen, balding and grey, said. “It must be to send a message to the young guys in Iraq not to desert. Why else would they suddenly be chasing down old men?” Mr McQueen, who is now back home, is not the only Vietnam deserter who believes that.

In the past 18 months, after years in which “cold case” absent-without-leave investigations remained effectively closed, the Marine Corps has caught 34 long-time deserters after reopening dozens of files. The latest arrest came last week. Allen Abney, 56, who deserted from the Marines in 1968, was arrested crossing from Canada to the US, a journey he had made hundreds of times in recent years.

The sudden aggressiveness, which resulted last August in Jerry Texiera, a 65-year-old who deserted from the Marines 40 years ago, being arrested and jailed for five months, comes amid growing concerns in the Pentagon over the number of soldiers who have deserted since the Iraq war began. According to Pentagon records released last week, at least 9,000 members of the all-volunteer US military have deserted in the past three years.

With its King Tut crowds still going strong, the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale announced Tuesday its next major exhibit: A cache of rare biblical treasures, including one of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

"Cradle of Christianity," an exhibit created by the Israel Museum, will boast objects that have never before left the Holy Land, museum officials said Tuesday.

They will include:

The famed Temple Scroll, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls that rocked the biblical world with their discovery in the Judean desert in 1947.


An inscription stone with the name of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who condemned Jesus to death, according to the New Testament.


The burial box of Caiaphas, the high priest who the Bible records as handing Jesus over to Pilate.

The exhibit, set for Dec. 7 through April 15, will show the roots of Christianity in Judaism, and how the faiths influenced each other, museum officials said.

Georgia lawmakers are expected to pass a bill authorizing a Bible literacy class in public high schools. The class, "History and Literature of the Old and New Testament," will be taught with the Bible as the text. The bill does not require that schools teach the course, or that students take it. Emily Kopp of Georgia Public Broadcasting reports.

Bones found at a subway construction site turned out to be the remains of Chinese railroad workers from the 1800s. Workers made the discovery outside a Los Angeles cemetery. They found skeletal remains of 108 people, some of the 10,000 Chinese who came to America to help build the railroads.

Their bones will now be studied and DNA tests performed.

"It could tell you migration patterns, information that was lost, who came over from where," said archaeologist Anna Naruda.

Their discovery also unearthed Los Angeles' dark history of bigotry. The Chinese workers were not allowed to be buried next to the city's more prominent families but were given a corner of Potter's field.

And now the disturbance of this lost grave has caused controversy.

The bones were first unearthed last summer but it wasn't until September when it was revealed they were bones of Chinese immigrant men buried in a pauper's grave.

Chinese historians are accusing Los Angeles' Metropolitan Transportation Authority of hiding the find so its $898 million project to build a subway extension would not be interrupted.

"We never told them because we didn't know who they were until the lab analyzed the remains," said MTA spokesperson Jose Ubaldo.

Still, the bones were found with Chinese tablets revealing the dead person's name. There were also rice bowls, jade, Chinese coins and opium pipes.

Chinese historians now want an apology and the MTA to give the men a dignified burial.

"Sure there's anger, deep disappointment," said Sue Lee of the San Francisco Chinese Historical Society. "Chinese contributed so much to the building of the West, built railroad, reclaimed the land for agriculture, yet something like this happens."

One Los Angeles County supervisor is calling for an investigation into why the MTA did not detect the grave before starting the subway project.

Rudy Abramson wanted to publish a reference book about Appalachia that went beyond the stereotypical images of hillbillies and poverty and presented a more realistic picture of the area's history and natural diversity. "The place has this reputation of being just a different nation of poor people and strip mines and that sort of thing," said Abramson, co-editor of the newly released "Encyclopedia of Appalachia," a 1,832-page volume that weighs nearly eight pounds.

The authors note that debate continues over exactly where Appalachia is and even how the name is pronounced. They accept the federal definition of Appalachia as comprising all of West Virginia and parts of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and New York, roughly following the spine of the ancient Appalachian Mountains.

Archeologists in Egypt have unearthed two 5,000-year-old wooden statues, complete with gold wrapping paper, believed to be the oldest such artefacts ever found, the team said.

The statues, which depict two nude men with precious stones around their eyes, were found by a Polish team in the northern Nile Delta region of Daqahliya, said a statement by chief archaeologist Krzysztof Cialowicz.

The effigies are believed to date from Egypt's predynastic era (3,700-3,200 BC), before Egypt started to unify under the pharaohs.

A federal appeals court overturned the conviction of two men accused of stealing American Indian artwork Tuesday even though the judges said it was clear the men stole the centuries-old petroglyphs.

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Justice Department failed to prove that the rock art taken from national forest land had market value of more than $1,000.

Half a century ago, Hitler's monumental chancellery in Berlin disappeared completely. Now, though, it has been digitally recreated. A new animated film provides a unique look inside the center of Nazi power.

The camera pans leisurely along the façade before zooming in on secret trap doors set into the road running in front of the monumental structure. Not far away, a truck suddenly disappears below the street riding on a hidden lift. In a different scene, the camera rotates a full 180 degrees around a sumptuous courtyard. If you look closely, you'll see the Adolf Hitler looking out of his office window.

When they were in power, the Nazis were careful not to allow such intimate images of the Reich Chancellery, then located in the heart of Berlin, to reach the public. But now -- some 50 years after the last remnants of the building, designed by Hitler's private architect Albert Speer, were demolished -- a new, animated video has emerged full of sharply focused and detailed images of the ambitious project -- a digital tour through Hitler's grandest building. Christoph Neubauer, 34, spent much of the last three years assembling his virtual visit.

The video, called "Albert Speer's Neue Reichskanzlei," hit the shelves of German stores earlier this month and almost immediately triggered a scandal. During one presentation, the video's creator was berated by the audience and accused of having created a video sure to be an instant hit among the neo-Nazis -- a film for the right wing to revere.

"I really have absolutely nothing to do with the neo-Nazis," Neubauer protested, saying he was "totally surprised" by the accusations. Neubauer, the head of a small graphics company, has been living in the South African capital of Pretoria for the past four years. He is dating a black woman -- and he says he was shocked by the xenophobia they encountered recently on a vacation he and his partner took to Neubauer's home in Germany.

Neubauer has received support against his critics by Laurenz Demps, a historian at Humboldt University in Berlin. Neubauer's film, Demps says, is "much too sober and far too complicated" for it to be fetishized in the right-wing scene. Demps himself finds the animation fascinating. Photos, he says, could never "communicate the atmosphere created by such buildings."

That's exactly the effect Neubauer was trying to produce and to do so he recreated even the minutest of historical details when rebuilding the chancellery on his PC. The resulting animation also shows how fixated Speer was on the needs of his Führer to the exclusion of all else; he clearly didn't care how comfortable the rest of the offices in the building were.

The central section of the building, for example, where Hitler's office was located, is roomy and elegant. In the offices reserved for the bureaucrats, on the other hand, the atmosphere is bleak. A number of rooms received hardly any natural light at all and the tar-paper roof ensured that the top floors of the building were unbearably hot in the summer and icy cold in the winter. Because the central part of the building was reserved for Hitler's office and pompous excess, there were also no hallways connecting the upper floors of the building's two wings. Those who wanted to go from one side to the other had to walk all the way down to the cellar.

The film also shows, more clearly than any photo possibly could, just how arduous the journey from the building's entrance to Hitler's office was for foreign guests. "The long journey from the foyer to the reception hall will surely demonstrate something of the greatness and the power of the German Reich," Speer noted in his memoirs in discussing the almost sadistic pleasure Hitler derived from the design. As if the walk itself wasn't enough, Speer also used numerous tricks of light and optics to intensify the building's cool and daunting atmosphere.

Neubauer destroys one myth about the construction of the Reichskanzlei right at the beginning of the video. Speer, so goes the myth, erected the building in the impossibly short time of just one year. Not so intones the narrator. Rather, the myth is a "Nazi propaganda lie that even today is repeated by historians and journalists."

The confusion comes from Speer himself. In his memoirs, published in 1970 under the title "Inside the Third Reich," he says that Hitler sprung the project on him at the end of January 1938 and said he wanted it finished on Jan. 10, 1939. "That was the most careless promise of my life," Speer writes about accepting the challenge. But in 1981, historian Angela Schönberger, in her book "The New Reichs Chancellery of Albert Speer," presented a rather different version of the story. According to her, Speer had already submitted a cost estimate for the first chunk of the building in March 1937. In total, in other words, he had two years to complete the chancellery.

The work of Schönberg, now director of the applied arts museum in Berlin, provided the foundation for Neubauer's film. And he needed the help. Even six months after beginning his project, he had still never even visited the site on Vossstrasse in central Berlin where the Reichskanzlei once stood.

The American Association of University Professors in February postponed an international conference on academic boycotts that was scheduled to take place that month in Italy. Both the participant list for the invitation-only session and the materials distributed for the session had come under fire. AAUP officials defended the invite list (which was criticized as anti-Israel by some) and apologized for including in conference packets an anti-Semitic article published in a magazine affiliated with Holocaust deniers.

With AAUP board members and the foundations that were paying for the conference all urging postponement, the association announced it would do just that, but vowed to regroup and hold the session.

But in a letter sent last week to conference participants, association leaders said that they could not go ahead with the conference.

The organizers wanted to hold the conference with the original invitees, but realized, the letter said, that such a course of action would “reactivate opposition that has proved too severe to enable us to go forward.” So instead, no conference will be held, but written comments prepared by the invitees for the meeting will be published by the AAUP in Academe, its magazine.

On April 6-7, 2006, Students for Academic Freedom will host its First National Academic Freedom Conference featuring a debate between Students for Academic Freedom Chairman David Horowitz and University of Colorado-Boulder Professor Ward Churchill. The topic for debate will be: “Can Politics Be Taken Out Of The Classroom, and Should It Be?”

The debate will be held Thursday evening on the campus of George Washington University in Washington, DC. Young America’s Foundation and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture are the co-hosts of the debate.

The conference will also feature U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander, House Leader Jack Kingston, and Colorado high school student Sean Allen whose recording of an anti-American rant by his geography teacher, Jay Bennish, created a national furor over classroom indoctrination. The conference (apart from the debate) will take place at the Washington Court Hotel in Washington, DC.

Since its inception in the Summer of 2003, Students for Academic Freedom has led the way in promoting intellectual diversity and academic freedom in higher education. The April event will be the culmination of three years effort in which the organization has built student organizations on over 150 campuses, and moved legislation in 16 states and the U.S. Congress. The efforts of Students for Academic Freedom have brought the issues of intellectual diversity and academic freedom to the attention of a national public, generating more than two thousand press articles over the last year and stimulating debate on tens of thousands of sites across the World Wide Web.

The academic freedom campaign has shaken the complacency of the higher education community. In Colorado and Ohio, the higher education systems have formally adopted academic freedom rules based on the Academic Bill of Rights and are preparing to implement them. Principles of the Academic Bill of Rights have been incorporated into the authorization bill for the Higher Education Act at the federal level. The American Council on Education has issued a statement on Academic Freedom which incorporates key reforms proposed in the Academic Bill of Rights. In Pennsylvania, a special Committee on Academic Freedom was created by the Pennsylvania House to examine the state of academic freedom in public colleges and universities. Even though hearings before the committee are still in progress they have already stimulated proposals for reform. A final report by the committee on academic freedom is due in June.

In addition to its keynote speakers, the April conference will feature a series of panels discussing academic freedom issues and the responses to the academic freedom movement. The panels will include students involved in the academic freedom movement, professors, university trustees, representatives of educational associations and legislative sponsors of the Academic Bill of Rights.

“The purpose of this conference is to raise the awareness of this historic movement,” said SAF Chairman and Founder David Horowitz. “SAF has made great strides in ‘waking up’ the political and educational establishments and the general public to the seriousness of these problems. Now is the time to showcase our achievements, outline our goals to a national audience, and accelerate our efforts to institute these reforms.”

More information including a schedule and a list of confirmed speakers are available at www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org. Registration for the conference is free for students, interns, non-profit and legislative staffers, educators, and the media, and only $75 for the general public. To register for the conference, please contact Elizabeth Ruiz at 800-752-6562, ext. 202 or at Elizabeth@cspc.org.

Students for Academic Freedom is a national movement to promote intellectual diversity and to restore educational values to America’s institutions of higher learning. The organization recommends that colleges and universities adopt an Academic Bill of Rights to ensure that these principles are respected. The Academic Bill of Rights is available on the organization’s website at www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org.

Sara Dogan
National Campus Director
Students for Academic Freedom
1413 K Street NW #1000
Washington, DC 20005
202-393-0123
Sara@studentsforacademicfreedom.org
www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org

After years of delays, legal wrangles and cost overruns, Greece hopes to open its Acropolis Museum by the end of 2007, Culture Minister George Voulgarakis said on Tuesday.

"It is our ambition that by 2007 the museum will be open to visitors," he told journalists after touring the half-finished building near the ancient hilltop temples of the Acropolis.

Greece had hoped to open the museum before the 2004 Olympics to push its claim for the return of the 5th-century BC Parthenon marbles, widely known as the Elgin marbles, from the British Museum.

But after decades on the drawing board, the museum is now three years behind schedule and, at a projected final cost of 129 million euros (89.3 million pounds), 25 percent over budget.

Canada's cultural treasures -- including religious objects from Quebec and aboriginal artifacts -- are "racing out of the country" because government controls are ineffective and Canada's border agency isn't interested in enforcing them, Canadian Heritage has been told.

"It should be pointed out that the recent creation of the (Canada Border Services Agency) as a result of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has resulted in a significant reduction in the priority given to issues not related to health, safety and security," reads an internal evaluation by Canadian Heritage, obtained by the Ottawa Citizen under the Access to Information Act.

"The CBSA has explicitly indicated that ... export controls are outdated and it wishes to get out of the business."

Key informants from government and private cultural institutions, who were interviewed for the evaluation and warned of the lost treasures, indicate significant numbers of cultural exports bypass controls, and that some institutions ignore temporary permits for travelling exhibitions completely.

A collection of paintings by Gustav Klimt, stolen by the Nazis in 1938, has been restored to its heir in California after an eight-year legal battle. The five works, together worth £170m, now belong to 90-year-old Maria Altmann, who fled the Nazis following the annexation of Austria.

Altmann has lent the paintings to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for a temporary exhibition. She hopes that the exhibition, which opens on April 4, will attract a buyer. "My wish, and the wish of the other heirs, is that they will be bought by people who will have them on public display," she told the Guardian. "I can promise you they won't hang in my living room."

In 1629, colonists landed in Salem bearing the Royal Charter of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, granting permission "for the planting, ruling, ordering, and governing of Newe England in America." Massachusetts, as we know it, was born. And now, that mother of all real estate contracts, not to mention a foundational document in US history, could be up for sale.

The Salem Athenaeum has made preliminary inquiries about selling its copy of the Massachusetts Bay Charter to raise funds for its endowment. Critics fear that the document could end up in private hands or possibly a foreign country.

"I take it very personally when people try to sell off our history," said Bonnie Hurd Smith, executive director of the Ipswich Historical Society and one of many local history buffs steaming at the news. "People are just in shock."

Since the early 1900s, the Salem Athenaeum has kept the four-page charter in the Peabody Essex Museum for safekeeping. The athenaeum's 85 shareholders will meet April 3 to discuss the possible sale.

"It does have a financial value that, turned to investment dollars and utilized for our endowment purposes, could go a long way to helping us meet many of our goals," Salem lawyer Francis Mayo, president of the athenaeum's board of trustees, said last night, adding that he was unhappy with how infrequently the Peabody Essex Museum showed the charter.

He believes that the document may be worth millions of dollars. Representatives from several auction houses have visited Peabody Essex Museum to examine the document, but Mayo said that any deal with an auction house would have to stipulate that the charter be sold to a local institution that could display it publicly.

"Ideally, the document would remain in Salem," said Mayo, though he acknowledged that the athenaeum had no control over the charter once it was sold.

The document was brought here in 1629 by John Endicott, the original chief executive of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The charter was held by the Massachusetts Bay Company, based in England. In addition to securing the company's right to land a parcel starting 3 miles north of the Merrimack River and ending 3 miles south of the Charles River the document provided for governance, including a two-house legislature and an elected governor. It was the New World's first written constitution.

"It becomes the basis of the government of Massachusetts," said Francis Bremer, a history professor at Millersville University in Pennsylvania and editor of the John Winthrop family papers. "It was a very important document."

The copy in Salem was the first to arrive in the New World. A year later, John Winthrop brought over the original copy, with the seal of King Charles I. That one is stored in state archives in Dorchester and is viewed by the state as the original. The first page was stolen in 1984. Police recovered the missing page two years later. There are four other copies of the document in England.

Though less celebrated than the 1620 Mayflower Compact, the charter was far more influential in shaping the government and economy of Massachusetts, historians say. It also influenced the drafting of the US Constitution.

Word of the charter's possible sale leaked Friday in the area's tight-knit historical community. That day, Dan L. Monroe, the Peabody Essex Museum's executive director, sent the Salem Athenaeum a letter opposing the sale.

"A decision to sell the Charter would, in our view, constitute a fundamental ethical breach," the letter said. "All indications are that the library has one primary motive for selling the Charter: to use the funds to help support operations."

Others echoed that sentiment. "They are not being good stewards of our history," Smith said. "How can they possibly think this is an ethical and appropriate decision?"

But Bremer was more sanguine. "If they can do something that enhances their collection, that may not be bad. I'd love to see them sell it to a museum," he said.

He also said that the document's true importance was not paper and ink but its words, which have been preserved in countless books and Internet sites. "We're not going to ever lose the text of the document," he said.

A Seattle-area columnist has drawn the fire of more than a thousand complaining readers upset with her suggestion that African-Americans should be grateful their ancestors were enslaved and brought to America.

The column, by Adele Ferguson, was published in the Kitsap Peninsula Business Journal (KPBJ) on March 13, 2006. In the article Ferguson argued that black Americans should abandon the Democratic Party, claimingf it doesn't have their true interests at heart.