Under the presidential library system, libraries receive operating subsidies from the government but are built through private donations, sometimes with help from state and local governments. The Nixon project marks the first time that Uncle Sam is providing funds for new construction before it pays any operating expenses. As recently as last March, Allen Weinstein, head of the National Archives, told library officials in a letter,"The Nixon Foundation is responsible for securing funds for the archival storage addition." The Rev. John H. Taylor, the foundation's executive director, said in a telephone interview that Archives officials"knew when they wrote that letter that we'd be going after federal funding. We had never envisioned any other approach."

Stanley I. Kutler, a University of Wisconsin historian, said the construction money is a return on an investment the foundation made in some of Washington's most expensive lobbyists three years ago in a bid to acquire Nixon's records and win acceptance into the presidential library system. Senior partners Gerald F. Warburg and Gregg L. Hartley of Cassidy & Associates Inc. led the team of four lobbyists, collecting at least $460,000 in fees for their efforts, according to disclosure reports filed with Congress. Warburg worked for then-Senate Democratic Whip Alan Cranston (Calif.), and Hartley is a former chief of staff to House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.)."This is all lobbyist-driven," Kutler said."The truth is that all presidential libraries have been built with presidentially raised private funds. What is so ironic here is that Richard Nixon bragged that his library was even more different, because not only did he raise the money, but he kept the feds out."

A family of New Mexico Indians is suing the producers of a Steven Spielberg television series, claiming a stylist violated tribal customs by cutting a girl's hair to make her look like a boy.

A lawsuit filed by the girl's father, Danny Ponce, of the Mescalero Apache tribe, seeks $250,000 (£142,000) for emotional distress and $75,000 (£42,000) in damages from an unnamed stylist and Turner Films, the makers of Into the West.

"It's part of our culture not to cut a girl's hair until her coming of age ceremony," said Mr Ponce. "The only ones allowed to do that are the parents. Nobody asked for permission."

According to the lawsuit, Christina, Mr Ponce's daughter, responded last March through her parents to a casting call for the six-episode mini-series, produced by Spielberg. During the three-day shoot the stylist cut the girl's hair, the suit claims, "to make her look more 'Indian' and like a male Indian child because the casting call failed to produce sufficient young males of Indian heritage".

The Mescalero tradition forbids cutting a girl's hair as she approaches puberty.

Cambodia has discovered the remains of a wooden ship and pottery possibly dating back to the seventh century, local media reported on Thursday.

Cambodian naval divers discovered the remains of a sunken sail ship and a range of pottery in late February in 20-to-30-meter- deep waters off the coast of Koh Sdech island in Koh Kong province.

Samples of the pottery were taken to the provincial department of culture and then sent to the National Museum in Phnom Penh for analysis, The Cambodia Daily quoted Chuch Phoeun, secretary of state of Culture Ministry, as saying.

Chuch Phoeun said the pottery may date back to the seventh century and that it appeared similar in style to pottery of the pre-Angkorian Nokor Phnom era, in what is now southern Vietnam.

The Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace, like the president it honors, has always been outside the mainstream. Opened in 1990 in Yorba Linda, Calif., it is the only presidential library with no original presidential papers; a 1974 law kept them in Washington out of concern that Nixon might destroy materials related to the Watergate scandal that forced him to resign. Built for $40 million, the nine-acre complex, which includes a museum and conference space, is alone among presidential libraries in operating entirely with private funds, and is not part of the presidential library system. All of that is expected to change this summer, as the facility joins 11 other presidential libraries operated by the National Archives under a system that began 1939.

Under President Bush's 2007 budget, the library would receive $6.9 million for construction of a 15,766-square-foot addition to house 46 million pages of presidential documents and thousands of hours of tapes and other records held by the National Archives in College Park. Congress gave $2 million to get the project started last year, after a 2004 law lifted the 30-year-old ban on removing Nixon's presidential papers and tapes from the Washington area. Nixon died in 1994.

Some historians are concerned that the records transfer might increase the Nixon family's influence over the important papers and tapes that researchers have had access to in Maryland. Also, they said, asking taxpayers to foot the bill for the construction of the storage facility at the library is unusual.

Under the presidential library system, libraries receive operating subsidies from the government but are built through private donations, sometimes with help from state and local governments. The Nixon project marks the first time that Uncle Sam is providing funds for new construction before it pays any operating expenses.

"The same people who raise money for the presidential campaigns end up raising money for the libraries," said American University history professor Anna K. Nelson, a government documents expert who has done research in six presidential libraries. "To build a new presidential library is truly unprecedented."

Yes and no, said Sharon Fawcett, assistant archivist for presidential libraries at the National Archives. Fawcett agrees that the Nixon arrangement is a departure from the norm -- but not a radical one.

The government has paid for the renovation and expansion of libraries already part of the presidential system, including $8 million for work at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, Calif., and $17.3 million to spiff up the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston. "It's different and it's not different," Fawcett said.

As recently as last March, Allen Weinstein, head of the National Archives, told library officials in a letter, "The Nixon Foundation is responsible for securing funds for the archival storage addition."

The Rev. John H. Taylor, the foundation's executive director, said in a telephone interview that Archives officials "knew when they wrote that letter that we'd be going after federal funding. We had never envisioned any other approach."

Stanley I. Kutler, a University of Wisconsin historian, said the construction money is a return on an investment the foundation made in some of Washington's most expensive lobbyists three years ago in a bid to acquire Nixon's records and win acceptance into the presidential library system.

Senior partners Gerald F. Warburg and Gregg L. Hartley of Cassidy & Associates Inc. led the team of four lobbyists, collecting at least $460,000 in fees for their efforts, according to disclosure reports filed with Congress. Warburg worked for then-Senate Democratic Whip Alan Cranston (Calif.), and Hartley is a former chief of staff to House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.).

"This is all lobbyist-driven," Kutler said. "The truth is that all presidential libraries have been built with presidentially raised private funds. What is so ironic here is that Richard Nixon bragged that his library was even more different, because not only did he raise the money, but he kept the feds out."

Nixon loyalists long touted the library's private status as a badge of independence, but some critics viewed it as a symbol of the length to which Nixon's supporters would go in trying to reshape the legacy of the 37th president, the only man to resign the office. The library has a reputation for pushing the boundaries of hagiography beyond those established by other presidential libraries.

Shortly before the library opened, Hugh Hewitt, then the director, said it would not welcome researchers deemed unfriendly to Nixon, specifically mentioning Bob Woodward, a Washington Post reporter who helped uncover Watergate. Hewitt later changed his mind, and library officials said any qualified researcher was welcome.

Over the years, the museum became known for hosting public figures who polished Nixon's image rather than scholars who might expose his flaws. People such as retired Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North appeared at the library to give speeches and sell books.

Last year, a group of historians asked Congress to stop the transformation project after library officials canceled a conference on Nixon and Vietnam. The library said too few people had signed up, but the academics suspected the motive was silencing debate. At the direction of the National Archives, the conference was rescheduled for earlier this month at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston.

Federal archivists processing the Nixon materials in Maryland dickered for years with the ex-president's representatives over which records should be categorized as "personal" and returned to Nixon or his estate. A long registry of people had to be given a chance to review any tapes or papers mentioning them that were about to be released.

"Over 20 years or more, they have been obstacles to access in almost every way they can," said Nelson, referring to the Nixon estate and foundation.

Three years ago, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, realizing that her father's library would never be presidential without his White House papers, began urging lawmakers on Capitol Hill to repeal the ban on moving the documents. She and the foundation's lobbyists got a sympathetic hearing from Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), a longtime friend; he is chairman of the Government Reform Committee, which has jurisdiction over the National Archives and the presidential library system.

Davis tucked the repeal into a spending bill that year, placating congressional Democrats with the promise of continuing public access to the records.

"Completing this effort involved building support from several executive branch agencies and key Democrats and Republicans in Congress," Warburg said. "It is a tribute to the persistence of Julie Nixon Eisenhower that this effort has been successful."

Under the agreement, the Nixon Foundation will relinquish control of most of the library, turning it over to a federally appointed director and a staff of archivists and curators, who would be federal employees. The government would spend about $4.5 million a year to run the place. An official ceremony welcoming the library into the presidential library system is expected this summer.

The foundation, which had run the library containing Nixon's pre- and post-presidential papers as well as a neighboring museum, would be left in charge of event space, a museum store and cafe, and the foundation's offices. It also agreed to revise an inaccurate Watergate exhibit.

"The concerns of historians on an emotional basis is completely understandable," Taylor said. "The course of the Nixon White House records since 1974 has been fraught with friction and controversy and litigation on several sides. And one of the virtues of what's about to happen is that we hope and trust that that period is coming to an end. . . . Looking forward, I don't think there's any basis for concern. Indeed, I know there is no basis for concern."

Kutler, who sued to force the public disclosure of more than 200 hours of Nixon's tapes, is not as confident.

"I have great difficulty believing that the guarantees that the Archives will really be running the place will come true," he said. "Look, we've had 30 years of these people dealing from the bottom of the deck. There is one set of rules for everybody else, and there's one set for them. . . . Everything should have been out by now. I just think there are going to be further delays."

The moment Pietro Casasanta came face to face with ancient Rome's most powerful gods, his breath cut short and his knees buckled.

"I almost had a heart attack," says Casasanta, one of Italy's most successful tombaroli, or tomb robbers. "I knew I had discovered something very beautiful and very valuable."

Casasanta, his son and an associate working a small Caterpillar power shovel were digging in broad daylight at an archeological site east of Rome called l'Inviolata. He discovered the temple site in 1970, when he pulled 63 statues, illegally, from the earth. But none compared to his find 22 years later.

The first to emerge from the dirt was the goddess Minerva, followed by Juno and then Jupiter. The most powerful gods of the Roman pantheon sat together in a six-tonne marble sculpture — the only example ever found in which the gods of the Triad, a symbol of state power in ancient Rome, are intact.

Casasanta whisked what is now known as the Capitoline Triad to his antiquities shop in Rome. He cleaned it, crated it, and sold it to a Geneva collector for $3 million (U.S.).

Benedict dropped an ecclesiastical bombshell, proving his merit as a historian and a pastor. He said that sacramental ordination to priesthood was not the only avenue to ministerial service, but "nevertheless, it is right to ask oneself if more space, more positions of responsibility, can be given to women, even in the ministerial services."

He did not elaborate.

Why is this such a bombshell? The priest asked about governance and ministry, each of which is restricted to the clergy. The pope answered that each might be possible for women.

How? Well, the word was not mentioned, but the ancient order of the diaconate is an ordained ministry of the Catholic Church, demonstrably open to women. Two ecumenical councils agreed to by all Christendom - Nicea (325) and Chalcedon (451) - speak to the ordination of women to the diaconate. Copious evidence demonstrates the continuance of that tradition well into the 11th century.

Some churches of the East never wholly abandoned the practice, ordaining monastic women deacons who assisted in liturgy and ministered to ill sisters. Today some churches with which Rome has mutual recognition agreements relative to sacraments and apostolic succession are already well engaged with the question. The Orthodox Church of Greece voted more than a year ago to restore the monastic female diaconate. Synod members asked about a ministerial female diaconate as well, one that would provide for the needs of people outside the monastery. The Armenian Apostolic Church already ordains women deacons who minister in an orphanage.

How probable the restoration of the female diaconate is for the Catholic Church in the near future depends on how quickly Benedict wants to return the church to what he sees as its true mission - the mission of charity. In his first encyclical, "Deus Caritas Est" ("God Is Love"), Benedict called charity the church's primary responsibility. He wrote that this responsibility was decisively determined by the Apostles' early choice of seven to serve as deacons in response to the needs of widows and the poor. Although she is not named as one of the first seven, St. Paul calls Phoebe a "deacon of the church," and history records many others.

Whether called deacons, or even ordained as such, women performed the principal works of Christian charity. Serving the poor, the homeless, the imprisoned and abandoned has largely been the work of women, individually, as members of religious orders and as deacons.

Today Benedict is faced with a largely moribund church, unable to minister effectively to its billion or so members and others. The works of charity critical to his vision of the church need women.

But in developed countries women's religious orders are less and less involved in works of charity, due to the combined forces of attrition and the inability to attract new members. Modern women are well aware of the obvious inequality in the roles of women and men in the church, and choose their paths in life elsewhere, often providing service through other agencies that show greater respect for their equality.

Combined with worldwide scandal - from sexual and financial improprieties in the developed world to predatory behavior on the part of priests and seminarians in less developed countries - the church's refusal to restore women to the dignity of ordained office cancels women's desires to serve in the church.

But Benedict may have opened a door to history and allowed a light to shine on the impasse. If he is to include women in governance and ministry, he may simply return to a tradition abandoned but not forgotten. The technical distinction between "clergy" and "lay" makes women ineligible for numerous positions in church governance and ministry. The ordinary means by which a person enters the clerical state is by ordination to the diaconate.

Benedict has the power and the authority to give women "positions of responsibility ... even in the ministerial services" through restoration of the female diaconate. Whether he has the decisiveness to do so remains to be seen.

Starting in October 2001, about a year and a half before the US and its allies invaded Iraq, dozens of Iraqi exiles and international experts were brought together to figure out how to create a new Iraq should Saddam Hussein somehow be taken out of power. Seventeen working groups were organized to cover Transitional Justice, Public Finance, Public Outreach, Democratic Principles, Water, Agriculture and the Environment, Defense, Local Government, Economy and Infrastructure, Civil Society, Transparency and Anti-Corruption, Education, Refugees, Free Media, Foreign Policy, Oil and Energy, and Cultural Heritage. Meetings began in July 2002 and continued through March/April 2003. Twelve of the groups released reports. These documents were released in paper format by the Department of State on 10 Feb 2006 in response to Freedom of Information Act request 200304121NEA1, filed 18 Oct 2003 by Russ Kick, and are now available on-line.

Chinese archaeologists have found two prehistoric settlements, dating back to more than 4,000 years ago, at the Puchengdian ruins in central China's Henan province. The Puchengdian site were designated as the first group provincial-level cultural relic protection units of Henan in 1963. With an area of 150,000 square meters, the site contain relics of the Neolithic age and the Xia, Shang, Zhou and Han dynasties. One of them was confirmed by archaeologists to belong to the late period of the Longshan culture (3000 BCE-1700 BCE), the other belongs to the early period of the Erlitou culture (1900 BCE-1500 BCE).

Amnesty International reports once again about death threats against members of a Guatemalan forensic anthropology team. These teams can be perceived as "protohistorians": they excavate mass graves to find evidence for the genocide and other crimes against humanity committed during the civil war (1960-96) and are therefore of great concern to the historical profession.

URGENT ACTION APPEAL


16 March 2006

UA 238/05 (originally issued 13 January 2006 and re-issued 14 September 2005)

Fear for safety/death threats

GUATEMALA:

**Fredy Peccerelli (m), head of the Fundacion de Antropología Forense de Guatemala (FAFG), Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation.
**Bianka Peccerelli Monterroso (f), sister of Fredy Peccerelli **Omar Giron de Leon (m), FAFG Laboratory Coordinator and husband of Bianka Peccerelli Monterroso **Jeannette Peccerelli (f), former wife of Fredy Peccerelli **Other members of the FAFG, Gianni Peccerelli (m), brother of Fredy Peccerelli


Fredy Peccerelli, head of the Guatemala City-based Fundacion de Antropología Forense Guatemala (FAFG), the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation, his brother Gianni Peccerelli, his sister Bianka Peccerelli Monterroso and his brother-in-law Omar Giron de León continue to be in grave danger following new death threats made in recent days.

On 15 March, Fredy Peccerelli received an SMS text message on his mobile phone which read, "los tenemos bien controlados antropologo hijo de puta vamos a matar a tus hermanos primero..." ("We are watching you anthropologist son of a bitch we will kill your siblings first...").

Fredy Peccerelli has told Amnesty International that the Public Prosecutor's Office has not advanced with the investigation into the death threats made at the beginning of January 2006. On 9 January, he received a death threat by SMS text message aimed at his brother. The following day, a letter was deposited in the mail box at the home of Bianka Peccerelli Monterroso and her husband Omar Giron de Leon, who is the Laboratory oordinator for the FAFG. On 5 January 2006, Jeannette Peccerelli, Fredy Peccerelli's former wife, was shopping with her two children, accompanied by the police officer protecting her, when an unidentified man began following them. In fear for their safety, they were forced to abandon their shopping trip.

Fredy Peccerelli and other members of the FAFG have been subjected to numerous death threats as a result of their work to exhume mass graves of those killed by the Guatemalan military and their civilian adjuncts in the early 1980s. In 2002, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) ordered that Bianka Peccerelli Monterroso, Omar Giron de Leon, Fredy Peccerelli and other members of the FAFG receive precautionary protection measures. However, concerns remain about the level or efficiency of the protection provided. The level of protection had decreased just before the death threats last January. Since then, they have been given the personal protection requested in terms of police presence, however they report that it has been unreliable.


RECOMMENDED ACTION:

Please send appeals to arrive as quickly as possible:

**expressing grave concern for the safety of Bianka Peccerelli, Gianni Peccerelli, Fredy Peccerelli, Omar Giron de Leon and Jeannette Peccerelli; **urging the authorities to take immediate measures to offer all the protection needed to the individuals named above and the offices of FAFG, in accordance with the 2002 order of the IACHR;

**calling for an immediate and thorough investigation into the threats, with the results made public and those responsible brought to justice;

**calling for the authorities to account for their failure to conduct adequate investigations into previous threats against members of the FAFG;

**reminding the authorities of the right of human rights defenders to carry out their activities without any restrictions or fear of reprisals, as set out in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights and Responsibilities of Individuals, Groups and Institutions to Promote and Protect Universally Recognised Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.


APPEALS TO:

Vice-Minister of the Interior:
**Vice-Ministro de Gobernacion
**Julio Cesar Godoy Anleu
**6a.Avenida 4-64, zona 4, nivel 2.Ciudad de Guatemala, **Guatemala
**Fax: 011 502 2361 5914
**Salutation: Senor Ministro/ Dear Minister


Head of the Special Prosecutor's Office on Human Rights:
**Jefa de la Fiscalia de Seccion de Derechos Humanos **Rosa Maria Salazar Marroquin **7a. Avenida 11-20, Zona 1, Segundo nivel **Ciudad de Guatemala, Guatemala
**Fax: 011 502 2230 5296 (if a voice responds, say ''por favor, tono de fax'')
**Salutation: Estimada Fiscal/ Dear Madam


COPIES TO:

Human rights organization:
**Fundacion de Antropologia Forense de Guatemala (FAFG) **Avenida Simon Canas 10-64, Zona 2 **Ciudad de Guatemala, Guatemala
**Fax: 011 502 2254 0882/2288 7297/ 2288 7302 (if a voice responds, say ''por favor, tono de fax'')

Ambassador Jose Guillermo Castillo
**Embassy of Guatemala
**2220 R St. NW Washington DC 20008
**Fax: 1 202 745 1908
**Email: info@guatemala-embassy.org

Please send appeals immediately. Check with the Network of Concerned Historians, if sending appeals after April 28, 2006.

Amnesty International is a worldwide grassroots movement that promotes and defends human rights.

This Urgent Action may be reposted if kept intact, including contact information and stop action date (if applicable). Thank you for your help with this appeal.

Urgent Action Network
Amnesty International USA
Email: uan@aiusa.org
http://www.amnestyusa.org/urgent/
Phone: 303 258 1170
Fax: 303 258 7881

In the cavernous Victory Palace, the home of Romania's government, history is being made in a small two-room office. Here, a staff of just three people under Marius Oprea has embarked on a task that until this year had been blocked by successive governments since the execution of the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in December 1989.

Oprea, 41, is in charge of the Institute for the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism. It was the first time such an institute has been established in a country where the regime had at its disposal one of the most ruthless secret services in the former Communist bloc to quash dissent.

Once he has found new premises, selected his full team of 25 people and been given two official cars, each allowed a monthly 300 liters, or 80 gallons, of gasoline, Oprea will have six years to complete the task of dealing with five decades of tyranny.

Other former Communist countries that collapsed in 1989 have opened their secret service archives, with the Czech Republic and former East Germany going the furthest. Both countries have prevented former secret service officials from holding public office.

But until now, no Romanian government had addressed the country's Communist past, or for that matter put any senior Communist or Securitate official on trial.

Oprea says previous governments did not want to condemn officially the Communist times.

"It would have meant condemning themselves," he said in an interview.

"Under a different guise, the Communist Party and the Securitate, the secret police, was always in charge here since 1989," said Oprea, who was appointed president of the institute in December by Prime Minister Calin Popescu-Tariceanu.

Tariceanu was elected prime minister in December 2004 after the former Communists led by Adrian Nastase and President Ion Iliescu were defeated by a coalition of center-right parties. Since then, the government has spent most of its time trying to pass and carry out legislation to fight corruption, so that Romania will be ready to join the EU in January 2007.

"Until now, there has been no political will to have such an institute," said Oprea, a soft-spoken man who for many years had campaigned for such an body, partly because of his own experiences.

The former archaeologist-turned historian had organized manifestos against Ceausescu in September 1987, two months before workers in the city of Brasov protested dire economic conditions in demonstrations that the Securitate quashed.

In the mid-1990s, Iliescu made a gesture toward addressing the past by setting up a National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives, to examine the activities of the Communist political police. It went nowhere. The secret services refused to hand over the Securitate archives to that council.

This time, there are large hopes among Romania's nongovernmental organizations that the institute will cast light on the workings of the country's Communist regimes going back to 1948.

Doina Cornea, a former dissident and honorary member of the institute, said it was its duty to reveal the crimes of the Communist era.

"If we do not accept the investigations of the crimes and of those who suffered and the way they suffered for truth and justice, we are, or we become, a nation about to fall," Cornea said.

Oprea, however, acknowledges that there are still-powerful forces trying to obstruct his work.

"It has been immensely difficult gaining access to the archives," he said. Since 1989, he added, no government had put the archives under a central administration.

"During the early 1990s, some of the Securitate archives were transferred to the Justice Ministry," Oprea said. "Others were scattered, some went to the general prosecutor's office. Others were kept by the secret services themselves. It was the same story, too, for the Communist Party archives. They were placed under the control of the army in January 1990. The army claimed it was necessary to protect them. They were classified as secret. My first step is to get access to the archives."

Oprea says failure to centralize the archives and make them accessible was linked to the way the former Communists retained their influence and privileges after 1989.

"After 1989, you had the privatization of communism - in which state property, controlled by the intelligence services, the Securitate and the Communist Party was transferred to private ownership, which were often the same people of the old regime," Oprea said.

"With such funds, they supported the former Communist parties led by Iliescu and Nastase. It was in no one's interests to look into the past."

Hossu Longhin, executive director of the institute, said it should also "study the laws that governed and legitimated the crime."

"There is no individual or group without memory and there cannot be a country without memory," she said last month during the first meeting of the Institute.

Oprea agrees. He says present and future generations should know who gave the orders to introduce strict rationing of meat, who gave the orders to force women to have children, who gave the orders to restrict heat and electricity during the bitterly cold winters of the 1980s.

"This is about putting the political and moral issues in the same house," Oprea said.

"If we want to consolidate our democracy, we need to know how the system worked and to explain to the public how bad it was, otherwise you will keep having this kind of nostalgia for the past and lack of accountability and responsibility for crimes committed by previous regimes."


BUCHAREST In the cavernous Victory Palace, the home of Romania's government, history is being made in a small two-room office.

Here, a staff of just three people under Marius Oprea has embarked on a task that until this year had been blocked by successive governments since the execution of the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in December 1989.

Oprea, 41, is in charge of the Institute for the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism. It was the first time such an institute has been established in a country where the regime had at its disposal one of the most ruthless secret services in the former Communist bloc to quash dissent.

Once he has found new premises, selected his full team of 25 people and been given two official cars, each allowed a monthly 300 liters, or 80 gallons, of gasoline, Oprea will have six years to complete the task of dealing with five decades of tyranny.

Other former Communist countries that collapsed in 1989 have opened their secret service archives, with the Czech Republic and former East Germany going the furthest. Both countries have prevented former secret service officials from holding public office.

But until now, no Romanian government had addressed the country's Communist past, or for that matter put any senior Communist or Securitate official on trial.

Oprea says previous governments did not want to condemn officially the Communist times.

"It would have meant condemning themselves," he said in an interview.

"Under a different guise, the Communist Party and the Securitate, the secret police, was always in charge here since 1989," said Oprea, who was appointed president of the institute in December by Prime Minister Calin Popescu-Tariceanu.

Tariceanu was elected prime minister in December 2004 after the former Communists led by Adrian Nastase and President Ion Iliescu were defeated by a coalition of center-right parties. Since then, the government has spent most of its time trying to pass and carry out legislation to fight corruption, so that Romania will be ready to join the EU in January 2007.

"Until now, there has been no political will to have such an institute," said Oprea, a soft-spoken man who for many years had campaigned for such an body, partly because of his own experiences.

The former archaeologist-turned historian had organized manifestos against Ceausescu in September 1987, two months before workers in the city of Brasov protested dire economic conditions in demonstrations that the Securitate quashed.

In the mid-1990s, Iliescu made a gesture toward addressing the past by setting up a National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives, to examine the activities of the Communist political police. It went nowhere. The secret services refused to hand over the Securitate archives to that council.

This time, there are large hopes among Romania's nongovernmental organizations that the institute will cast light on the workings of the country's Communist regimes going back to 1948.

Doina Cornea, a former dissident and honorary member of the institute, said it was its duty to reveal the crimes of the Communist era.

"If we do not accept the investigations of the crimes and of those who suffered and the way they suffered for truth and justice, we are, or we become, a nation about to fall," Cornea said.

Oprea, however, acknowledges that there are still-powerful forces trying to obstruct his work.

"It has been immensely difficult gaining access to the archives," he said. Since 1989, he added, no government had put the archives under a central administration.

"During the early 1990s, some of the Securitate archives were transferred to the Justice Ministry," Oprea said. "Others were scattered, some went to the general prosecutor's office. Others were kept by the secret services themselves. It was the same story, too, for the Communist Party archives. They were placed under the control of the army in January 1990. The army claimed it was necessary to protect them. They were classified as secret. My first step is to get access to the archives."

Oprea says failure to centralize the archives and make them accessible was linked to the way the former Communists retained their influence and privileges after 1989.

"After 1989, you had the privatization of communism - in which state property, controlled by the intelligence services, the Securitate and the Communist Party was transferred to private ownership, which were often the same people of the old regime," Oprea said.

"With such funds, they supported the former Communist parties led by Iliescu and Nastase. It was in no one's interests to look into the past."

Hossu Longhin, executive director of the institute, said it should also "study the laws that governed and legitimated the crime."

"There is no individual or group without memory and there cannot be a country without memory," she said last month during the first meeting of the Institute.

Oprea agrees. He says present and future generations should know who gave the orders to introduce strict rationing of meat, who gave the orders to force women to have children, who gave the orders to restrict heat and electricity during the bitterly cold winters of the 1980s.

"This is about putting the political and moral issues in the same house," Oprea said.

"If we want to consolidate our democracy, we need to know how the system worked and to explain to the public how bad it was, otherwise you will keep having this kind of nostalgia for the past and lack of accountability and responsibility for crimes committed by previous regimes."


BUCHAREST In the cavernous Victory Palace, the home of Romania's government, history is being made in a small two-room office.

Here, a staff of just three people under Marius Oprea has embarked on a task that until this year had been blocked by successive governments since the execution of the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in December 1989.

Oprea, 41, is in charge of the Institute for the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism. It was the first time such an institute has been established in a country where the regime had at its disposal one of the most ruthless secret services in the former Communist bloc to quash dissent.

Once he has found new premises, selected his full team of 25 people and been given two official cars, each allowed a monthly 300 liters, or 80 gallons, of gasoline, Oprea will have six years to complete the task of dealing with five decades of tyranny.

Other former Communist countries that collapsed in 1989 have opened their secret service archives, with the Czech Republic and former East Germany going the furthest. Both countries have prevented former secret service officials from holding public office.

But until now, no Romanian government had addressed the country's Communist past, or for that matter put any senior Communist or Securitate official on trial.

Oprea says previous governments did not want to condemn officially the Communist times.

"It would have meant condemning themselves," he said in an interview.

"Under a different guise, the Communist Party and the Securitate, the secret police, was always in charge here since 1989," said Oprea, who was appointed president of the institute in December by Prime Minister Calin Popescu-Tariceanu.

The Vatican has begun moves to rehabilitate the Crusaders by sponsoring a conference at the weekend that portrays the Crusades as wars fought with the “noble aim” of regaining the Holy Land for Christianity.

The Crusades are seen by many Muslims as acts of violence that have underpinned Western aggression towards the Arab world ever since. Followers of Osama bin Laden claim to be taking part in a latter-day “jihad against the Jews and Crusaders”.

The late Pope John Paul II sought to achieve Muslim- Christian reconciliation by asking “pardon” for the Crusades during the 2000 Millennium celebrations. But John Paul’s apologies for the past “errors of the Church” — including the Inquisition and anti-Semitism — irritated some Vatican conservatives. According to Vatican insiders, the dissenters included Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.

Pope Benedict reached out to Muslims and Jews after his election and called for dialogue. However, the Pope, who is due to visit Turkey in November, has in the past suggested that Turkey’s Muslim culture is at variance with Europe’s Christian roots.

At the conference, held at the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University, Roberto De Mattei, an Italian historian, recalled that the Crusades were “a response to the Muslim invasion of Christian lands and the Muslim devastation of the Holy Places”.

“The debate has been reopened,” La Stampa said. Professor De Mattei noted that the desecration of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem by Muslim forces in 1009 had helped to provoke the First Crusade at the end of the 11th century, called by Pope Urban II.

He said that the Crusaders were “martyrs” who had “sacrificed their lives for the faith”. He was backed by Jonathan Riley-Smith, Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge University, who said that those who sought forgiveness for the Crusades “do not know their history”. Professor Riley-Smith has attacked Sir Ridley Scott’s recent film Kingdom of Heaven, starring Orlando Bloom, as “utter nonsense”.

Professor Riley-Smith said that the script, like much writing on the Crusades, was “historically inaccurate. It depicts the Muslims as civilised and the Crusaders as barbarians. It has nothing to do with reality.” It fuels Islamic fundamentalism by propagating “Osama bin Laden’s version of history”.

He said that the Crusaders were sometimes undisciplined and capable of acts of great cruelty. But the same was true of Muslims and of troops in “all ideological wars”. Some of the Crusaders’ worst excesses were against Orthodox Christians or heretics — as in the sack of Constantinople in 1204.

The American writer Robert Spencer, author of A Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam, told the conference that the mistaken view had taken hold in the West as well as the Arab world that the Crusades were “an unprovoked attack by Europe on the Islamic world”. In reality, however, Christians had been persecuted after the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem.

If the ancient Greeks sold kitschy postcards to tourists 2,000 years ago, they would have depicted much different views of the popular sites that visitors flock to today. Archaeologists say many of the stony ruins looked much different in their prime. Many were brightly painted in hues that have faded with time and, in some cases, with forced removal.

The Parthenon in Athens was once covered in colorful splashes of paint, for example.

It has long been known that the formidable marble temple, which sits atop the capital city’s Acropolis citadel, had been painted. New tests, performed by Greek archaeologist and chemical engineer Evi Papakonstantinou-Zioti, confirm the use of brilliant shades of red, blue and green.

Traces of the colors were found during a laser cleaning done as part of ongoing restorations to the temple, built in 432 B.C.

Simple weathering caused the colors to fade over time, said Sara Orel, associate professor of art history at Missouri’s Truman University.

“Weathering through the bleaching of the sun, blowing of the sand, etc., and more modern pollution-caused damage,” are the major culprits, Orel told LiveScience. She sees this through much of Egypt, where the carved designs on most ancient buildings were painted to make them stand out more prominently against lighter stone. Today those colors are barely visible.

One renowned institution comes under fire for how it may have helped the Parthenon’s aging process along.

Some of the Parthenon’s most intricate carvings now reside in a specially-built wing of the British Museum in London. The Elgin Marbles, as they’re jointly dubbed, may have been stripped of some of their remaining color for aesthetic purposes when they arrived in London in the early 19th-century and again over subsequent cleanings, experts say.

One clean-up in the 1930s was particularly devastating. A historian at Cambridge University claims museum representatives used steel wool and chisels for the task—hardly the stuff of sophisticated conservation efforts employed today. The thinking is that the museum reps were operating under the same assumption held by most of the modern public: that the sculptures were originally a bright white.

“Michelangelo's sculpture wasn't painted, and great classical sculpture was thought not to be either, so they improved the stuff,” Orel explained. “At the time it was not quite the horrific thought that we would make it now.”

Ian Jenkins, writing in a paper released by the British Museum in 2001, stops short of saying the mistakes in the 1930s were responsible for turning the Elgin Marbles from a Technicolor spectacle into the blander grey-white collection currently on display, however.

“I estimate that when the sculptures entered the Museum, less than 20 percent of their overall surface retained its coating, of which in the 1930s about half was removed,” Jenkins writes. “But natural weathering is by far the single most important factor determining the surface and color of the sculptures as we see them today.”

A court case in which two historians accuse Dan Brown of copying their work in his novel ``The Da Vinci Code'' is due to finish on Monday, ending one of the most closely watched copyright claims of recent years.

Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh wrote ``The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail,'' a work of historical conjecture published in 1982, which shares some of the same themes as Brown's best-selling religious thriller.

Authors warn that should the historians succeed, there would be serious implications for fiction writers who have always incorporated other people's ideas and research into their works.

Legal experts say the claimants face an uphill task to protect general ideas.

``You would hamper artistic creativity if you couldn't write a novel that theorizes about a conspiracy theory,'' said Boston-based intellectual property lawyer Edward Naughton of Holland & Knight.

``That's why courts have been very wary about allowing protection of ideas that are this general.''

Each of the 10 films has been created by a different award-winning documentary filmmaker or filmmaking team and spotlights an event that triggered a seismic shift in America's political, cultural or social landscape. Using a range of storytelling techniques including recreations and even animation as well as interviews, archival footage and historical artifacts, the series offers viewers a fresh perspective on well-known historical incidents while also shining a light on the tremendous impact of less frequently cited events.

Massacre at Mystic - The first time the English settlers engaged in the slaughter of Native Americans after years of relative peaceful coexistence. Known as the Pequot War, this massacre in Mystic, Connecticut set the pattern of the taking of Indian land throughout the country.



Shays' Rebellion: America's First Civil War - A violent protest against debt collection and taxation practices motivated George Washington to come out of retirement to help strengthen the fragile new nation. This was the spark that led to the writing of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.



Gold Rush - The explosive effects of gold being discovered spurred tremendous financial and physical growth throughout the West. For the first time in history, individuals - not kings or sultans - could have gold for the taking, spurring tens of thousands of immigrants to make the arduous journey West.



Antietam - The bloodiest day in American history, both sides paid a terrible price during this Civil War battle that resulted in 23,000 casualties. President Abraham Lincoln needed this victory to insure that no foreign country would support the Confederates, and issue the Emancipation Proclamation.



The Homestead Strike - Harsh working conditions and long hours In Carnegie's Homestead steel mill led to a union strike. The battle fought between management and labor signaled an end to workers believing they had an ownership stake in their jobs, and widen the divide between management and labor.



Murder at the Fair: The Assassination of William McKinley -- Set against the backdrop of the 1901 World's Fair and the dawning of the new century, the assassination of President William McKinley ushered in a new Progressive Era under the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt.



Scopes: The Battle Over America's Soul -- The sensational courtroom battle between two giants - three-time presidential candidate and populist William Jennings Bryan and big city criminal defense lawyer Clarence Darrow - over the teaching of evolution in a small Tennessee town. The trial underscored a deep schism within the American psyche -- religion versus science, church and state, elitism versus populism.



Einstein's Letter - Albert Einstein's letter to FDR that launched the development of the atomic bomb. The result, known as the Manhattan Project, brought government and science together in a project to build the bomb and change the world forever.



When America Was Rocked -- Elvis Presley's appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on September 9, 1956, signified a whole new culture that involved teenage independence, sexuality, race relations and a new form of music.



Freedom Summer -- There was a time when trying to register to vote in Mississippi could get one killed. When two white and one black Civil Rights workers went missing, national attention turned to the violence in Mississippi, which eventually led to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

General Franco and his fellow generals began a revolt in 1936 against the democratically elected socialist Popular Front government of the Spanish Republic. It followed plans to strip the rich, including the Catholic Church, of its power and wealth and improve workers' rights. Fascism was on the rise in Europe and, in the Irish Free State, the sacked chief of police, Eoin O'Duffy, led the right-wing Blueshirt movement.

Irish Republicans attacked their meetings, which frequently descended into riots.

Troops under his command committed atrocities such as the massacre of eight republican prisoners tied to a landmine at Ballyseedy bridge in 1923.

Dan Keating, who is 104 years old, told for the first time about plans to assassinate O'Duffy on his way to a meeting in Kerry in 1933.

"We had a reception party for him in Ballyseedy, to kill him. There was a man sent to Limerick to find out the number of the car O'Duffy was travelling in."

The person who was to give the number, fearful of O'Duffy's fate, got cold feet and gave false information. O'Duffy escaped.

O'Duffy responded to the Irish church's call to send help to Franco and led a brigade of more than 700 to Spain. But this prompted the Irish left to respond.

One of only two surviving Irish Spanish Civil War veterans who fought against Franco, Michael O Riordan, now 89, said he went to "restore Ireland's name".

"We went for two reasons. One was the old trade union slogan, 'An injury to one is the concern of all' , and the Spanish people needed our help as they were really fighting against world fascism.

"The other reason was that Ireland had committed itself, not the people or the government, but O'Duffy who was sending a brigade to fight with Franco.

"For national, patriotic reasons we had to erase that from people's minds, and restore the good name of the country," he said.

In Belfast, people from both Protestant and Catholic backgrounds went to defend the Spanish Republic against Franco.

For Catholics, going against their church was a hard decision.

Peggy Mount from Poleglass, now 93, recalled how her family in the Springfield Road area reacted when her brother Dick O'Neill, a communist and skilled print worker, said he was going to Spain.

"My mother was a devout Catholic and my father a socialist. But they stood by him because he was our lad."

The war in Spain was brutal. O'Duffy's 750 Blueshirts saw little combat and lost 12 men, but according to research by Belfast historian Ciaran Crossey, 85 - about a quarter of those of Irish origin from all around the world who fought on the Republican side - died, including Dick O'Neill and Henry McGrath from the loyalist Shankill area.

Henry McGrath's nephew, Freddie, from Glencairn in Belfast said their family was proud that he went to fight fascism.

Los Angeles was home to an estimated 10,000 Chinese in the late 19th century -- almost all men who came to America to work on the railroads and ended up in desperate straits, crowded into a filthy Chinese ghetto near what is now Union Station. A recent discovery by a new generation of railway workers building the extension of the Gold Line commuter rail line through Boyle Heights has unearthed this dark but largely forgotten period in Los Angeles history.

Last summer, workers found the skeletal remains of 108 people just outside the Evergreen Cemetery, one of the city's oldest and grandest burial sites.

A few weeks ago, the MTA told a community review board, which includes members of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, that the agency's archeological study found that the majority of the remains were from people of Asian descent.

Three-quarters of the remains were adults and most were male. The finding supports the belief among Chinese American historians that the bones belonged to Chinese male sojourners who died a century ago at a time when immigration laws sought to reduce the Chinese population by prohibiting Chinese women from entering the country.

The workers also found rice bowls, jade bracelets, Chinese burial bricks, Asian coins and opium pipes.

Historians have long believed that there was a potter's field for Chinese workers in Boyle Heights but did not know precisely where. The last known public record of the cemetery was from the 1920s.

The discovery has generated excitement within the Chinese American community along with concern about the way the MTA has handled the find.

Irvin Lai, one of the historical society's longest-serving members, said the remains belonged to men who lived at a time when Chinese were relegated to the lowest rung of society.

"They treated the Chinese just as bad when they were dead. They were treated like animals," said Lai, 78, who grew up in the pre-civil rights era and said the memory of being denied service at barbershops or restaurants because of his ethnicity still stings.

In the late 19th century, racial intolerance toward the Chinese was particularly heightened because some whites believed the Chinese were taking jobs away from them.

Most of the Chinese did not speak English. Politicians and newspapers seized on the anti-Chinese sentiments. The Los Angeles Times described denizens of the Chinese ghetto as "Celestials" and as the "the pig-tainted fraternity."

"While the Chinaman is a natural-born thief and scoundrel, he is also the most superstitious of God's creatures," a Times reporter wrote in a breathless 1887 travelogue of the ghetto.

Members of the historical society say they believe the excavation site is part of a Chinese cemetery that disappeared sometime after the 1920s, when development obscured most of the graves' whereabouts. It dates from 1877, when the owners of the nearby Evergreen Cemetery gave the city five acres in which to bury indigents.

Chinese were not permitted to be buried in Evergreen Cemetery, where some of the city's most prominent early families -- such as the Van Nuyses, Lankershims, Hollenbecks and Workmans -- were laid to rest. Chinese were given a corner of the city potter's field next to the indigents.

But unlike the white indigents, who were buried at no charge, the Chinese had to pay $10 for a burial, a substantial fee for that era, Lai said.

Lai said he found what could be the last official acknowledgment of the Chinese cemetery at the Los Angeles County Hall of Records.

The document, dated June 19, 1923, is from the superintendent of the county Department of Charities, Norman R. Martin, to the secretary of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, Chan Kai Sing.

Martin wrote that the potter's field where the Chinese were buried was badly crowded.

"Recently your people established a new Chinese cemetery on East 1st Street, and it would be highly desirable if the bodies buried in the county cemetery could be transferred to your new location," he said.

Martin said he wanted the chamber to move the remains and offered compensation of $2 per body even after acknowledging that each grave cost the Chinese $10. "The idea being that you would move all of the bodies as fast as practicable," Martin wrote.

The letter said there were 902 Chinese buried in the vicinity of what is now the MTA excavation site, at Lorena and 1st streets.

Lai found a list of some of the dead buried at the old Chinese cemetery. In cursive writing were hundreds of Chinese names, such as Wong Wah Mow, who at 46, was killed after he was "shot in heart" in a homicide. Tom Ping, 51, died from opium poisoning. Wah Lee, 51, committed suicide by hanging.

While historians said they hope the find will broaden their understanding of the sojourners' lives, some expressed anger at the way they learned about it.

The historical society and other Chinese American community leaders have accused the MTA of concealing the fact that the bones were of Chinese immigrants for months so that it would not delay the extension of the Gold Line, a long-anticipated $898-million project that will connect Union Station to East L.A.

"It's a slap in the face," said Ken Chan, president of the historical society. "These men weren't respected when they were buried, and it's like they're not being respected now."

The MTA denies that it held back information. Once it found the bones, officials said they shipped them to an archeologist for study.

They said they found no reason to halt construction after all the remains and artifacts had been removed. Once the archeology firm concluded the bones could be Chinese, they said they immediately informed the historical society.

MTA officials said that if they had known earlier they were dealing with a predominantly Chinese grave site, they would have contacted members of the Chinese community, such as the historical society, and asked for their help.

"Everything would have been directed differently if we knew we were dealing with a preponderance of Chinese remains" earlier, said Carl Ripaldi, the MTA project's environmental specialist. "We realize the sensitivity of the issues here. We have to be very sensitive to all people, all cultures and customs."

In recent weeks, the historical society has been helping with the identification of some artifacts. It is unlikely it will find relatives in the U.S. today because of the prohibition of Chinese women during that era.

"These guys probably had a friend or two bury them," Lai said. "They probably threw wine over the grave, burned some incense and paper money, and if they were lucky, had a eulogy read with some kind words."

Lai wants the MTA to re-inter the bodies at Evergreen Cemetery -- the place where at the time of their death they were not allowed to enter let alone be buried. That decision will ultimately be up to the MTA and the community review board, which includes Lai and Boyle Heights residents.

Lai said: "We need to give them a dignified burial with elected officials" present.

The Latin American Studies Association has announced that it intends to move its future congresses outside the United States, after the Bush administration again prevented all Cuban scholars from attending this year's meeting, which is now under way in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Decrying visa denials as a violation of academic freedom, the group's executive council said in a written statement that it had made the potentially costly decision unanimously.

"As long as the United States government's current visa policy with regard to our Latin American colleagues persists," the statement said, "we can no longer, in good conscience, hold our congress inside the United States."

The association, known as LASA, holds a congress every 18 months. Two weeks ago, the United States informed all 58 Cuban academics who had applied months ago for visas to attend the conference that their applications had been denied.

GRESHAM -- The effort to honor former Gresham Mayor Herbert H. Hughes with a monument is officially over.

The City Council killed the proposal Thursday after learning that Hughes' role in an anti-Japanese group during World War II was larger than first thought.

"It just needs to go away," City Council President Shane Bemis said Thursday. "It would be difficult to honor someone with that background."

Hughes, who served the city from 1941 to 1956, had previously been linked to an anti-Japanese group, Oregon Anti-Japanese Inc., in one local newspaper article in 1944. But a second article, in 1945, was uncovered this week during The Oregonian's review of news reports of the time.

A previous city investigation had wrongly concluded that Hughes had been named only once in print and only as a temporary director in connection with the group, which sought to keep Japanese Americans from returning to their homes after they had been sent to internment camps.

"It is clear that while the original research (into Hughes' background) was well-intentioned, it was not complete," Bemis said Thursday. "This proposal," he added, "should not have come forward to begin with."

Alabama lawmakers are considering pardoning hundreds, possibly thousands, of people who were arrested decades ago for violating Alabama's segregation laws.

The idea of a mass pardon gained traction after the death last year of civil rights icon Rosa Parks, who had refused to give up her bus seat to a white man half a century earlier.

Even though the law allowing segregated seating on city buses was eventually overturned, Parks' conviction is still on the record, said Rep. Thad McClammy.

''This is something that's long overdue. It's something aimed at giving the state a forward look,'' he said.

A federal survey of faculty at U.S. colleges and universities in 2004 found real increases in the number of history faculty employed, as well as proportional increases in the number of historians employed on the tenure track and full time. Unfortunately, even as historians' employment prospects improved, the survey shows that average salaries for historians fell further behind most other academic disciplines and the demographic diversity of the profession was largely unchanged.

On 8 March 2006, by a vote of 409 to 12, the U.S. House of Representatives granted approval to the Secretary of the Interior to designate President Bill Clinton's birthplace in Hope, Arkansas, as a National Historic Site thus making it a unit of the National Park System. The bill is somewhat unusual as it empowers the Secretary of the Interior to designate the home rather than have the site created through the more common process where Congress alone makes the designation.

Blazing a Trail Before Brown is a documentary in the works by seniors at Polytechnic Institute. The 10-minute film tells the story of the pioneering integration of their own school, developed primarily through interviews with people who experienced it.

Although many Baltimoreans already know this groundbreaking local history, it also has significance nationally. When Poly admitted black students in September 1952, it was among the first - possibly the first - public high school south of the Mason-Dixon line to integrate its student body.

"We know we were the first in the state," Tolson says. "When I contacted the Library of Congress, they had no knowledge of any schools integrating before we did in 1952. But they also gave me a hint to check Brownsville, Texas." (He did, but it's unclear exactly what date integration might have taken place there.)

The hunt is on for the 'brothers' of a 2,400-year-old bronze satyr fished out of the sea off Sicily seven years ago .

"We are sure there are similar objects down there," said Sicily's maritime culture chief Sebastiano Tusa .

The Sicilian regional government has contacted top Italian fuels group Eni to tap into its experience laying underwater cables .

"They've provided us with special equipment that should enable us to find the satyr's brothers," Tusa said .

The official said Eni's dredging probes had already enabled specialists to locate the wreck of a IV century AD Roman ship that will be raised from the sea floor in the next few weeks .

The Dancing Satyr, retrieved from the waters of the Sicilian Channel in March 1998, was the star attraction at the Italian pavilion at Japan's major cultural and trade event last year, the World Expo 2005 .

Move over Bode. You may have competition you don't know about - among a sturdy skiing clan in northwest China.

They are central Asians, Mongols, and Kazaks, living in the remote Altay mountains of Xinjiang province, where some claim skiing was first conceived.

Using curved planks whose design dates back 2,000 years, the Altaic peoples are formidable skiers. They might not win a medal on perfectly groomed Olympic trails. But they can break their own paths, track elk for days in deep snow, and capture them live.

They don't zig-zag through slalom courses or bump down moguls. But using a single pole, they plunge straight down mountainsides in a blaze of efficiency, and climb hills with a speed and grace that has wowed the few Western experts who have witnessed their prowess.

"These skiers wouldn't do well in the Olympics," says pro skier Nils Larsen. "But the Olympians from Turin couldn't make their skis do what the Altaic skiers can.

A furious debate has erupted in Dallas after a suggestion that the only memorial in the city commemorating John F. Kennedy should be torn down. His assassination in 1963 still evokes deep feelings of guilt.

Despite the fact that the monument — a stark, empty, open-air concrete box — is widely considered a monstrosity, many people are afraid that public criticism would offend the memory of a man whose murder brought so much unwanted attention to the city.

But this month the ice was broken when an editorial in The Dallas Morning Newsasked whether it was time to replace the memorial with one “more beautiful, alive and altogether worthy of the slain President”.

It followed comments by the architect Witold Rybczynski, who compared the memorial’s walls to “mammoth Lego blocks”, adding: “It is all poorly done. Kennedy deserved better than this.” One factor that has suppressed criticism is that the memorial, 200 yards from where Kennedy was shot, was designed by Philip Johnson, a renowned architect who was chosen by Jacqueline Kennedy, the P resident’s widow.

But very few tourists visit the memorial. Instead, they flock to Dealey Plaza and the grassy knoll, where the only acknowledgement that the assassination took place there is a barely visible X on the road. The editorial has been hailed as courageous by many, outrageous by others. Jacquielynn Floyd, a columnist, wrote: “Dallas’s memorial to the President who died in our city is cold, forbidding and not even very good art.” Darwin Payne, an historian, said: “There was a terrible feeling of guilt that lasted a long time. Removing the memorial would reopen all the old wounds.”

President Andrew Jackson gave the order that started the Trail of Tears, the cruel removal of American Indians to west of the Mississippi River. Now Jackson's plantation home near Nashville, the Hermitage, has been named as an official site along the historical trail that commemorates the Trail of Tears.

Hermitage Executive Director Patricia Leach said the recognition Wednesday opens a new chapter in Jacksonian history by acknowledging one the darkest periods in his presidency.

Jackson issued the order in 1830 to forcibly remove more than 16,000 Cherokee from their homes in Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina and Georgia. Hundreds died during the trip west in 1838 to what is now Oklahoma; thousands more died after relocation.

"We need to confront these issues head on, and the Hermitage is a neutral place to do it," Leach said.

While Jackson's position as a forceful proponent of Indian removal has never been a secret, the Hermitage historical site has only recently started to address these issues.

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Representing the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Troy Wayne Poteete said the Hermitage is following a trend of historical sites and museums by paying more attention to negative parts of American history that have traditionally been ignored.

"Having the Hermitage certified as a site on the trail opens up a place for discussions to be had," said Poteete who worked with the Hermitage to secure the official marker.

"We have to be careful not to judge historical events by present day standards," Poteete said. "I think it's possible to look at all sides of the history of Gen. Jackson and not tear down the positive."

Historian Robert V. Remini, whose three-volume biography of Andrew Jackson won a National Book Award, said popular opinion of Jackson has soured as Americans become more aware of past atrocities.

"When I was young, Andrew Jackson was a considered a great hero," Remini said. "Not everyone agrees with that idea anymore. Some people want to see him as an Indian killer."

Remini said Jackson's real concern was national security when he negotiated the sale of the tribes' land in the South in exchange for land in the unoccupied western territories.

"That doesn't excuse him from the horror of the removal, but I don't believe Jackson felt it was a punishment or retaliation," Remini said.

Jackson thought removing the Indians could protect the tribes from being completely decimated by the encroaching American landowners, Remini said.

But Remini isn't concerned about building up or tearing down Jackson's public image. For him, it's more important that visitors leave the Hermitage with a better understanding of American history.

"I hope that it will help everyone come to an understanding of who we are as Americans," Remini said.

[Robert L. Carter's memoir] is dedicated not so much to challenging the great-man theory of history as it is to arguing that history canonized the wrong man.

Instead of fixating on Marshall, Carter contends that historical accounts should highlight his own legal exploits. In these pages Marshall emerges as a puppet, with Carter pulling the strings and providing the voice. By his lights, Carter delivered black emancipation through such legal victories as Brown v. Board of Education, and he should not be forced to share the spotlight with anybody. "Blacks were now equal to whites under law and did not have to rely on the goodwill of some white individual to reach that status," Carter writes. "It was theirs by right. My vision and creative legal skills had produced these landmark race relations gains, and Thurgood had received all the credit without any complaint by me." But by negating Marshall's influence, Carter undermines his own considerable achievements. His account of Marshall's ineffectuality clashes with the recollections of many civil rights lawyers, including those previously written by Carter himself. Worse, Carter's efforts to label Brown a black-owned historical artifact constitute a particularly vulgar form of identity politics. With A Matter of Law, Carter has appended a troubling coda to an otherwise honorable career.