THE notorious Sandakan track, where more than 1000 Australian and British prisoners of war died during World War II, will be opened to the public as a war tourism site to rival the Kokoda Trail.

Lost behind impenetrable jungle in Borneo for the past 60 years, the 250km Sandakan death march track has been rediscovered through painstaking detective work.

The track was the scene of one of the darkest episodes of World War II.

Of 2438 Australian and British PoWs held at Sandakan after Japan captured Singapore, only six managed to escape and all of them were Australian.

Those who did not die of disease, starvation or maltreatment were executed, either at the Sandakan camp or on the long march to Ranau in Borneo's rugged interior.

Historian Lynette Silver has spent 14 years uncovering the route and a section will be opened to the public through organised trekking expeditions.

''My hope is that the Sandakan track will become as much a part of the nation's ethos as the Kokoda Trail and Gallipoli,'' Ms Silver said.

Good Night, and Good Luck, the story of US TV journalist Edward R Murrow's victorious battle against McCarthyism in the mid-50s, is a cogent reminder of how badly British television subsequently failed to honour the higher principles of news and current affairs broadcasting.

Far from maintaining the courage and intellectual rigour of the campaigning standards then adopted by CBS's legendary news division, first through Ed Murrow's See It Now, (his principal attack vehicle against Senator McCarthy), and later by such reporting/commentary giants as Walter Cronkite and Morley Safer, the BBC has emerged in the 21st century as a sad follower of the dumb-down trend. This, even though, unlike CBS, the once great public service broadcaster has no commercial responsibilities to its shareholders.

George Clooney's film, on limited release in Britain now and up for six Oscars last night, concerns itself less with Murrow's struggle against the junior senator from Wisconsin, than with raising the basic issue of what TV was actually to be for.

Crucially, the nascent network, under its legendary boss William S Paley, had to determine whether editorialising was permissible, or advisable, even if it emanated from Murrow, the man who had editorialised on an unbroken London during the Blitz. After all, McCarthy was a poisonous toad, but he wasn't Heinrich Himmler. Furthermore, as the film points out, editorial courage is all very well until the big advertisers pull out.

But the BBC has never had that problem. Unlike CBS, the BBC has never had the courage to unleash the full power of its Dimblebys. While Cronkite's dispatches from Vietnam showed conclusively that the Americans were embroiled in an unwinnable struggle, and helped bring the war to an end, my efforts from the same front were met with a strict headmasterly reprimand from the BBC. Having watched some American Phantom A4s destroy a small Vietnamese village, killing only the very old, the very young and the farm animals, I cautiously opined on camera: "military historians may question the wisdom of these methods". For which I nearly got the sack.

Next Tuesday, the Federal Register celebrates its 70th year as the country's chronicle of regulatory minutia. True to the publication's reputation as an encyclopedia for policy nerds, the party being thrown by the National Archives and Records Administration and the Government Printing Office starts at 9 a.m. -- scheduled, no doubt, to let federal bureaucrats scurry back to their desks to write more rules.

The celebration marks the evolution of a publication that began as a two-column, 16-page gazette of the burgeoning federal bureaucracy created by the New Deal. It has progressed from a diary of completed rulemakings -- usually about five items a day at first -- to an Internet-based reference that allowed some 208 million documents to be downloaded in 2004.

On March 14, 1936, when the first issue came off the presses, the Federal Register contained items about regulating the handling of milk in the St. Louis area, trade practice rules the Federal Trade Commission issued for button manufacturers, and an excise tax on employers under the Social Security Act.

The readers were few. The cost for a subscription was $10 annually. And some officials worried there would not be enough material to publish daily. Indeed, it took only 1,500 pages to fill the first six months of the publication, compared with the 75,675 pages printed in 2004.

Subscriptions to the print version now cost $749. Circulation plummeted to 2,500 from 20,000 after the register became available for free online in 1994.

Though he had doubts about establishing the register, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote the lead-off rule -- really an executive order -- to enlarge the Cape Romain Migratory Bird Refuge in South Carolina. Roosevelt appointed the first director, retired Army Maj. Bernard R. Kennedy, at a salary "not to exceed" $5,000 a year.

An amateur antique collector has formally unveiled a world map which, if authentic, may prove that Chinese explorers circumnavigated the globe well before Columbus ever set sail.

Liu Gang, a prominent intellectual property rights lawyer, says he bought the map in a Shanghai bookshop in 2001.

It appears to be a copy made in 1763 of a map drawn in 1418, recording the explorations of admiral Zheng He, who made several voyages to Africa and possibly beyond during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644).

The map is extraordinarily detailed, showing North and South America, Africa and even Antarctica.

Mr Liu presented a smattering of mostly circumstantial evidence to support his claim. He pointed to a map drawn by Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary who lived in China in the late 15th century.

On this map, which is generally assumed to be the first world map seen by the Chinese, Ricci marked Brazil as "known by the Chinese as Sumu". Mr Liu asked: "If the Chinese did not know that part of the world, how did they have their own name for it?"

Even if the map does date from 1763, it may not be an exact copy of the 1418 original. Asked if the 1763 copyist might have made "improvements", Mr Liu said the copyist had marked his alterations explicitly.

"On the map he refers to himself [in a manner indicating] he was addressing the emperor. Why would he lie to the emperor, and risk being killed along with all his relatives?"

LIU GANG may turn out to be a discerning collector whose lucky find of an ancient map will rewrite history. Or he may be a pawn, nudged along by people whose interests lie in promoting the view that Chinese sailors discovered the Americas before Christopher Columbus landed in the New World in 1492.

Mr Liu isn't fazed by the furore generated by the unveiling his acquisition from an antique dealer in Shanghai. "I am quite sure that this map is real," he says.

Mr Liu's map has rekindled a fierce debate sparked by a similar notion set out in amateur historian Gavin Menzies' book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, which argues that Zheng circumnavigated the world and discovered the Americas.

One of the great online assets for anyone interested in Brooklyn's - and therefore New York's - history is the digitized archives of the Brooklyn Eagle established by the Brooklyn Public Library.

Visit www.brooklynpubliclibrary.org/eagle and you will open the yellowed pages of the great Brooklyn Eagle, offering history's first draft of the most legendary borough of New York. Brooklyn's infancy is available with the click of a mouse, from the early pages edited by Walt Whitman, to the building of the Coney Island amusement parks, to the construction of the Roeblings' Brooklyn Bridge, to the landscaping of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux's Prospect Park, to the creation of our boulevards and rail lines, to the founding of the Brooklyn Public Library system, to the great mistake of '98, when the City of Brooklyn was incorporated into the City of New York.

Since the 147,000 pages were digitized in 2001 with a $239,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, some 45,000 people a month make 15-minute or longer visits to the site. Access to any pertinent event in the past can be gained by entering a date or keyword and there before you like a miraculous digital exhumation appears the corresponding page from the Brooklyn Eagle crypt.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld a lower court ruling revoking the citizenship of a former Nazi concentration camp guard. The U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a federal district judge was correct in revoking the citizenship of John Hansl, 81, who lives in Des Moines.

The U.S. Department of Justice filed a complaint against Hansl in July 2003, claiming he hid his military service when he applied for a visa to come to the United States in 1955. He was granted a visa and became a U.S. citizen in 1960.

Hansl was a guard with the Waffen SS at the Sachsenhausen and Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camps in 1943 and 1944. His duties included guarding prisoners from watch towers, marching prisoners at gunpoint to work sites near the prison, court records show.

He was ordered to shoot any prisoner who tried to escape and helped search for an escaped prisoner who was later shot to death, although Hansl did not pull he trigger, court records show.

Hansl claimed he did not voluntarily join the Waffen SS and that officials knew of his military service before he was granted a visa to emigrate to the United States.

The legal argument in the case revolved around a 1953 law designed to control the flow of immigrants to the U.S. after World War II.

Lawyers for Hansl claimed the law required a person to have ''personally assisted'' in the persecution of others before they could be denied a visa.

U.S. District Judge Robert Pratt revoked Hansl's citizenship in April 2005, ruling that Hansl's conduct as a guard left ''no room for factual dispute whether he personally advocated or assisted in persecution.''

On Tuesday, the St. Louis-based court agreed, ruling that the law is clear.

''We need not turn to either the immigration officials' testimony or legislative history to determine the meaning of 'personally assisted' because the language (of the law) is unambiguous,'' the court said.

The court also said that it has previously ruled that duties similar to those Hansl performed as a guard constituted personal assistance in persecution.

''Hansl's service in the Waffen SS as an armed guard at Sachsenhausen and Natzweiler concentration camps constituted personal assistance in the persecution that occurred in those camps,'' the court ruled. ''Because his actions constituted personal assistance in persecution, he was ineligible for a visa -- and the issuance of a visa was improper.

''Accordingly, he was not lawfully admitted to the United States, and his subsequent naturalization was illegally procured.''

The court also rejected Hansl's argument that he was forced to join the Waffen SS as irrelevant.

Hansl was born in Yugoslavia and was drafted into the Waffen SS in 1943, two years after Germany invaded the country. Since his father had small children to raise, the Germans drafted Hansl, court records show.

Hansl's lawyer, Lisa Mattson, of St. Louis, said she was surprised by the ruling because the government had recently turned over evidence that would have shown Hansl was eligible for a visa.

''The policies and criteria used by the state department in 1955 were not considered, which is unfortunate,'' Mattson said. ''We believe those factors were an important and relevant aspect of interpreting the law as it was applied at the time.''

Mattson said she would continue to review the case to determine her next step.

''It's not over and I'm determined to continue to fight vigorously for Mr. Hansl,'' she said.

A textbook widely used in Victorian high schools describes the Crusaders who fought in the Holy Land in the Middle Ages as terrorists, akin to those responsible for the September 11 attacks.

The Year 8 textbook Humanities Alive 2 says that the Crusaders, like Muslim terrorists, "believed they were giving their lives for a religious cause".

"Like the Crusaders ... they were told they would go straight to heaven when they died," the book says. "Those who destroyed the World Trade Center (sic) are regarded as terrorists. Might it be fair to say that Crusaders who attacked the Muslim inhabitants of Jerusalem were also terrorists?"

The textbook has been criticised by Melbourne University historian Barry Collett, a specialist in medieval history, for being "historically inaccurate" and "grossly misleading" in its depiction of the Middle Ages.

"The Crusaders felt they were intervening to stop the bloodshed that was already going on," he said. "I would tend to compare them more with Australian troops intervening in East Timor."

The book, used in about 100 schools around Victoria, is a revised edition of a series of textbooks published by John Wiley and Sons since 2003, all of which have included the section on September 11.

The selection of textbooks is at the discretion of individual schools in Victoria and neither the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority nor the state Education Department have any input into the quality or content of textbooks.

A spokesman for state Education Minister Lynne Kosky said schools decided for themselves what was appropriate to be taught and there were no recommended books for the curriculum.

The textbook also portrays the church as a corrupt institution driven by the desire for power and which tortured and killed anyone with opposing beliefs.

"It's very out of date, this view of the church as being fiendishly power-hungry," said Dr Collett, a visiting scholar at Oxford University.

"The church's activities were far more humane and pastoral than you would guess from reading this."

Dr Collett said the textbook presented an oversimplified view of history and the language used suggested a particular point of view rather than asking open-ended questions.

Despite popular perception, Dr Collett said those involved in the Inquisition actually spent most of their time working with divided families rather than torturing heretics.

Rather than working with government to oppress people, Dr Collett said the church was the principal force against the authoritarian excesses of governments.

General manager of the schools division at John Wiley, Peter van Noorden, denied the textbook makes a connection between the Crusades and September 11.

He said the section was intended to encourage discussion and prompt students to think more broadly about history. "It's very specifically put at the end of the section as a challenge for students to consider ... to analyse things from different perspectives," he said.

Dr Collett said the authors of the book included a historian, who worked closely with school teachers in developing the text and activities.

That's what former presidential adviser David Gergen says. "This administration has engaged in secrecy at a level we have not seen in over 30 years," he tells Howard Kurtz. "Unfortunately, I have to bring up the name of Richard Nixon, because we haven't seen it since the days of Nixon. And now what they're doing -- and they're using the war on terror to justify -- is they're starting to target journalists who try to pierce the veil of secrecy and find things and put them in the newspapers. ... This is the first administration that I can remember, including Nixon's, that said ... that we need to think about a law that would put journalists who print national security things to bring them up in front of grand juries and put them in jail if they don't -- in effect, if they don't reveal their sources."

In 1625, a carpenter named Pieter Fransz built a house on the outskirts of Amsterdam. He was young, ambitious and lucky enough to belong to one of history's greatest generations: his life spanned the course of his country's golden age, when tiny Holland became an empire and Amsterdam grew into Europe's wealthiest city. Fransz walked the streets with Rembrandt; he saw a forest of masts grow in the harbor, as ships returned from the East Indies laden with pepper and nutmeg, a sack of which could make a man wealthy for life. He and his family prospered along with the city; 17 years after building his house, he was rich enough to buy the one next door, into which his daughter and her husband moved. In 1683 he was still listed as the owner of both properties. Happiness isn't registered in municipal archives, but the image of this one not terribly consequential human life that remains on the palimpsest of time speaks of contentment: a man who has lived beyond the normal life span of his era, surrounded by family, financially successful.

Most of us leave no lasting traces that recall our stay on the planet, but through accident and fate, Fransz left something that has endured the centuries. His house — an elegant redbrick step-gable, its facade ornamented with sandstone bands and wooden cross-framed windows, a building that has more of the Renaissance than the Baroque about it — still stands. Napoleon and Hitler conquered Amsterdam in their separate centuries; later, postmodern architects and the sex and soft-drug industries made their marks. Pieter Fransz's house withstood all.

The Dutch have always been meticulous recordkeepers, so it is possible to follow this house, and others nearby it on Amsterdam's famous Herengracht, or Gentlemen's Canal, as they make their way through the centuries: to watch the succession of doctors, diamond cutters, confectioners, merchants and politicians move in and out, to glimpse the births and deaths, to watch careers and families unfold. More to the point, it's possible to follow the successive property transactions in this area of Amsterdam from the time it was developed to the present.

In itself, this isn't exceptional: other European cities have land registers that date to the Middle Ages. What makes Pieter Fransz's neighborhood unique — and uniquely interesting to some economists who are studying today's global real-estate boom and wondering whether the bubble that has been expanding for the past decade and more is in the process of bursting — is what real-estate experts call a constant quality index....

MUAMMAR GADDAFI has demanded that Italy pay millions of dollars in compensation for the death of thousands of Libyans under colonial rule.

The Libyan leader angered Italy after he spoke of his people’s “hatred” of Italians and threatened attacks on Italian interests in Libya unless reparations were agreed.



Two weeks after riots outside the Italian consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi, in which 11 people were killed, Colonel Gaddafi said that Libyans were still simmering with rage over Italy’s 33 years of colonial rule.

The Italian Government sought to play down the remarks. Opposition leaders however, called them unacceptable, government supporters accused him of interfering in Italy’s election campaign and Mussolini’s granddaughter said Libyans should thank Italy they were not “riding on camels with turbans on their heads”.

Italy acquired Libya in 1911 after a brief war with the Ottoman Empire. Fascist Italy, under Mussolini, waged a long, bloody “pacification”. It withdrew in 1943 under Anglo-American pressure but many colonialists stayed on.

Talks between Libya and Italy over a settlement have failed to reach agreement, despite Colonel Gaddafi’s eagerness to settle disputes with other Western nations, including Britain and the US.

The first signs of the destruction wrought by vandals came into view just after dawn. Almost simultaneously, several calls came into the National Park Service office at Gettysburg National Military Park.

That was 12 days ago and the park service since has calculated the cost to repair and restore the monuments at just over $61,000. It was the worst case of vandalism at the park in 93 years.

A coalition of Gettysburg-area groups and individuals has put up a reward totaling $36,000 for the arrest of the perpetrators. Monuments to the 4th New York Independent Battery and 11th Massachusetts and 114th Pennsylvania regiments were damaged.

"It infuriates me, it absolutely infuriates me, and I think I speak for just about everybody," said Charles Kuhn, junior vice-commander-in-chief of the Sons of Union Veterans, a descendant of Civil War veterans who grew up in Gettysburg and lives in nearby East Berlin. "The first feeling I had was a sick feeling. Then all of a sudden that sick feeling becomes anger."

The sense of outrage over the deliberate desecration of monuments has deep roots. The last time there was such widespread damage was 1913, when nine Gettysburg monuments were vandalized. At the time, R.B. Reath closed a letter to the park's superintendent with the following:

Civil War submarines known to once be in Shreveport but unseen since that conflict continue to elude searchers.

"The submarines look like they will stay an enigma for a while," said Ralph Wilbanks, the diver who led underwater efforts that found the Confederate submersible Hunley off Charleston Harbor in 1995. "We have looked in the bayou and we didn't see anything we didn't see last time."

Wilbanks, together with fellow Hunley discoverer Harry Pecorelli III and diver Darrell Taylor, spent the last week in February in Shreveport, dragging side-scan sonars and magnetometers in countless lanes on mapped grids on the Red River, Cross Bayou and Cross Lake, looking for nagging mysteries from the Civil War to World War II.

As with Wilbanks' first visit to Shreveport in 1999, the current survey was underwritten by best-selling author Clive Cussler and his nonprofit, volunteer National Underwater and Marine Agency. Cussler said his decision to send Wilbanks and his crew back to Shreveport was based on "new data where the river changed course ... Apparently nothing was found again."

Wilbanks thinks the submarines were abandoned and salvaged after the Civil War.

The Coke-bottle glasses of hindsight can leave even profound historical miseries all blurry with sentimentality. That's one way to explain the Savannah Irish Festival, a two-day celebration of the Great Famine's great contribution to this lovely Southern city — the migration of thousands of starving laborers who toted barges, lifted bales, dug ditches and cellars, and put down roots here in the mid-1800's.

Their descendants crowded the Savannah Civic Center for the festival, eating corned-beef sandwiches, drinking Guinness and applauding the young step dancers who thundered across the stage, tossing their auburn ringlets. Vendors sold teapots and cookbooks and those itchy, kitschy sweaters and scarves that have become the worldwide uniform of warm, fuzzy Irishness.

It is hard to imagine a tubercular immigrant, knee deep in cellar muck, dreaming that his adopted city would one day commemorate his sacrifice with a party. Unskilled Irish immigrants were abused and despised back then, chained to a life of poverty and hard labor that bonded them — at least for a little while — with enslaved African-Americans.

The parallels with the present day are too obvious to ignore. Georgia is undergoing another demographic shift, as Mexican immigrants flock to its farms, mills, processing plants and cities. The Latino immigrant population has soared in the last 10 years and exploded in the last 5, to an estimated 650,000 in a state of nine million. Some experts say the real immigrant number is double that. At least half of the newcomers are illegal, unskilled laborers who, like their Irish predecessors, want "any job, but now."

Anti-immigrant groups have taken to calling the state "Georgiafornia," and have vowed to fight the Latino influx. As Congress takes up immigration legislation in coming weeks, the Republicans who control the Georgia Legislature have been way ahead of them, having already put the issue at the top of their agenda.

If anyone can claim credit for inventing the improvised explosive device, it's Lawrence of Arabia.

When insurgents in Iraq use IEDs to attack armored vehicles and disrupt U.S. supply lines, they are taking a page from the less-advanced tactics of T.E. Lawrence, the British adventurer who pioneered guerrilla warfare during the 1916-18 Arab revolt against Turkish rule. His main lesson for insurgents: If you're facing a bigger and better-armed adversary, don't engage him directly.

Lawrence introduced many innovations to modern guerrilla wars, but perhaps his most effective technique was the use of mines to disrupt Turkish trains and supply convoys. "We had proved that a well-laid mine would fire; and that a well-laid mine was difficult even for its maker to discover," he wrote in his 1922 memoir, "Seven Pillars of Wisdom." "Mines were the best weapon yet discovered to make the regular working of their trains costly and uncertain for our Turkish enemy."

Today, Iraqi insurgents are using more powerful explosives and sophisticated methods to detonate their IEDs, but the basic purpose is the same as it was in Lawrence's time: to inflict casualties and damage the morale of a militarily superior enemy.

IEDs have been the leading cause of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq, accounting for more than half of those killed since February of last year. Overall, 724 U.S. troops have been killed by IEDs since the American invasion in March 2003.

As U.S. casualties mounted, the Pentagon created an IED Task Force in 2004 to find technological solutions and to better protect U.S. troops. Last year, military officials spent about $1.2 billion on counter-IED measures, and this year they plan to spend $3.5 billion.

History 10a, “Western Societies, Politics, and Cultures: From Antiquity to 1650,” could soon be ancient history itself.

An expected change to history concentration requirements would abolish a long-standing pillar of the department, according to a professor who has taught the course in the past. But the decision hasn’t been finalized by the department.

“No one is willing to defend ‘Western Civ’ and lots of people want to abolish it,” said Baird Professor of History Mark A. Kishlansky, who has taught History 10a twice since 2002. “I think the department will vote this change.”

Kishlansky predicted that the department would eliminate History 10a and its counterpart, History 10b, “Western Economies, Societies, and Polities: From 1648 to the Present,” in response to ongoing student and faculty opposition.

Concentrators currently have the option of substituting History 10b with History 10c, “A Global History of Modern Times,” or bypassing History 10b or History 10c with a score of five on the Advanced Placement European History or World History exam.

But concentrators currently must take History 10a.

New “long ago” and “far away” requirements would replace these mandatory survey courses, Kishlansky said.

The “long ago” component would require students to take a premodern course about a “civilization at a different stage of development than the one you know of,” Kishlansky said.

But he said the department has yet to determine the exact dates that this “premodern” period would encompass.

The department also plans to implement a “far away” requirement that would have students take a course on a subject geographically removed from their area of interest, Kishlansky said. ...

They may have been a lot like Kennewick Man, whose hotly disputed bones are helping rewrite our earliest history. An exclusive inside look this week from Time Magazine.

the remains that came to be known as Kennewick Man were almost twice as old as the celebrated Iceman discovered in 1991 in an Alpine glacier, and among the oldest and most complete skeletons ever found in the Americas. Plenty of archaeological sites date back that far, or nearly so, but scientists have found only about 50 skeletons of such antiquity, most of them fragmentary. Any new find can thus add crucial insight into the ongoing mystery of who first colonized the New World—the last corner of the globe to be populated by humans. Kennewick Man could cast some much needed light on the murky questions of when that epochal migration took place, where the first Americans originally came from and how they got here.

U.S. government researchers examined the bones, but it would take almost a decade for independent scientists to get a good look at the skeleton. Although it was found in the summer of 1996, the local Umatilla Indians and four other Columbia Basin tribes almost immediately claimed it as ancestral remains under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (see box), demanding that the skeleton be reburied without the desecration of scientific study. A group of researchers sued, starting a legal tug-of-war and negotiations that ended only last summer, with the scientists getting their first extensive access to the bones. And now, for the first time, we know the results of that examination.

WHAT THE BONES REVEALED
It was clearly worth the wait. the scientific team that examined the skeleton was led by forensic anthropologist Douglas Owsley of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. He has worked with thousands of historic and prehistoric skeletons, including those of Jamestown colonists, Plains Indians and Civil War soldiers. He helped identify remains from the Branch Davidian compound in Texas, the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon and mass graves in Croatia.

In this case, Owsley and his team were able to nail down or make strong guesses about Kennewick Man's physical attributes. He stood about 5 ft. 9 in. tall and was fairly muscular. He was clearly right-handed: the bones of the right arm are markedly larger than those of the left. In fact, says Owsley, "the bones are so robust that they're bent," the result, he speculates, of muscles built up during a lifetime of hunting and spear fishing.

An examination of the joints showed that Kennewick Man had arthritis in the right elbow, both knees and several vertebrae but that it wasn't severe enough to be crippling. He had suffered plenty of trauma as well. "One rib was fractured and healed," says Owsley, "and there is a depression fracture on his forehead and a similar indentation on the left side of the head." None of those fractures were fatal, though, and neither was the spear jab. "The injury looks healed," says Owsley. "It wasn't a weeping abscess." Previous estimates had Kennewick Man's age as 45 to 55 when he died, but Owsley thinks he may have been as young as 38. Nothing in the bones reveals what caused his demise.

But that's just the beginning of an impressive catalog of information that the scientists have added to what was already known—all the more impressive given the limitations placed on the team by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is responsible for the skeleton because the Corps has jurisdiction over the federal land on which it was found. The researchers had to do nearly all their work at the University of Washington's Burke Museum, where Kennewick Man has been housed in a locked room since 1998, under the watchful eyes of representatives of both the Corps and the museum, and according to a strict schedule that had to be submitted in advance. "We only had 10 days to do everything we wanted to do," says Owsley. "It was like a choreographed dance."

Perhaps the most remarkable discovery: Kennewick Man had been buried deliberately. By looking at concentrations of calcium carbonate left behind as underground water collected on the underside of the bones and then evaporated, scientists can tell that he was lying on his back with his feet rolled slightly outward and his arms at his side, the palms facing down—a position that could hardly have come about by accident. And there was no evidence that animal scavengers had been at the body.

DETROIT -- The price to get a spot in Detroit's Woodlawn cemetery has jumped thousands of dollars since civil rights icon Rosa Parks was entombed there last fall, angering some relatives who say it cheapens her legacy.

The spaces in the Rosa L. Parks Freedom Chapel were priced at $17,000 before the cemetery gave spots, for free, to Parks, her husband and her mother. Now, the spaces cost $24,275, and possibly as much as $65,000 for the slots nearest to Parks' crypt.

Some of her relatives worry the prices might cheapen the legacy of the woman who began the civil rights movement by refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man in 1955. Parks died in October.

Parks' closest living relative, nephew William McCauley, said her burial was a"private matter, not a spectacle."

Researchers from Utrecht University believe the medieval great plague caused Europe’s temperatures to fall, making humanity’s impact on climate change earlier than previously thought.

The team from the Netherlands estimated land use changed around 1347, when the Black Death arrived, which would have caused an agricultural crisis; trees then flourished on land no longer being cultivated. Tests on pollen and leaves in the southeast Netherlands suggest these millions of trees would have absorbed carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, producing a cooling effect in the next few centuries. This minor ‘Ice Age’ in European history lasted for around 300 years from 1500. The scientists included Dr Thomas van Hoof, who stated: ‘Between AD 1200 to 1300, we see a decrease in stomata and a sharp rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide, due to deforestation we think.’ The research is published in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology; other scientists suggest oceanic, solar, or volcanic reasons for the lower average temperatures.

The RAF's most northerly station closed this week – under the watchful eye of a Nimrod Maritime Patrol Aircraft from RAF Kinloss.

RAF Saxa Vord on Unst in the Shetlands – the northernmost inhabited island in the UK with a population of about 700 - was a pivotal link providing early warning of air threats to the UK for more than 30 years and as such was a frontline Cold War station.

Its mission was to assist RAF fighters intercept long-range Soviet bombers entering UK airspace, shadowing them as they tested the reactions of our air defences until jets such Lightnings, Phantom F4s and more recently Tornado F3s escorted them "off the premises."

REDEEMED sinner, prostitute, wife of Jesus? Mary Magdalene's image has gone through myriad incarnations, and this Lent she's drawing new attention thanks to the upcoming movie The Da Vinci Code, a slew of books and internet arguments.

But those looking for a salacious side to the biblical figure will be disappointed: Serious religious scholars agree characterisations that stray from faithful disciple and witness to the Resurrection are bogus. Despite stage and screen portrayals, they say, the sinful Mary is a matter of mistaken identity.

The chief culprit was Pope Gregory the Great, who preached a sermon in 591 AD calling Mary a notorious prostitute who repented after encountering Jesus Christ.

The Da Vinci yarn says Christians conspired to conceal the Jesus-Mary marriage and the royal French bloodline their offspring established. But there's no evidence Jesus ever married Mary.

Mary supposedly travelled to France, but the claim is suspect; the first mention of her relics located there dates from the year 745.

The best source of material on Mary is a first century account, the New Testament itself. There she stands out as Jesus' most important female disciple. Mary is named first among the witnesses to Jesus' Crucifixion, entombment and empty tomb. The less valiant male apostles deserted Jesus at the cross and refused at first to believe the women's ''idle tale'' about the empty tomb.

For Christians across the centuries, ''she is the faithful disciple, and consistently portrayed that way,'' says Harvard church historian Karen King.

A cottage industry has sprung up around Mary, boosted by The Da Vinci Code novel and the film scheduled for release in May.

All this buzz for a figure whom, prior to Golgotha, appears in the Gospels only in Luke 8 - as one of the women who travelled with Jesus and the apostles and ''provided for them out of their means.'' The phrase indicates Mary was wealthy, making prostitution unlikely.

Pope Gregory mistakenly identified Mary with an unnamed female ''sinner'' in the preceding passage who had a dramatic encounter with Jesus. If Mary had been that sinner, Bible experts surmise, she'd have been named there first - instead of in Luke 8.

THOUSANDS of pieces of archaic legislation - from banning the wearing of armour to outlawing religious practices - are to be abolished, centuries after they were enacted.

The Government last night announced a drive to finally ditch vast amounts of legislation inherited from the years before the foundation of the State. Some of the dusty ordinances date back to the Middle Ages.

The public is being encouraged to comment on the determined effort to update and codify Irish law by abolishing and replacing a total of 45,000 statutes.

They include a primitive form of justice whereby suspected thieves and murderers could be subjected to an ordeal by water. Prisoners would be thrown into deep water tied to a millstone, and those who sank were deemed to be guilty.

A total of 14,500 Acts date from before the Act of Union of 1801.

The impact of the plagiarism lawsuit against Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, could be dramatic for the world of writing and publishing.

In Britain, as in the U.S., ideas are not protected by copyright--it's the way they are expressed that counts. The accusation here is not that Mr. Brown's novel plagiarized the 1982 book's words. Plaintiff authors Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh assert that Mr. Brown wrongfully appropriated the "architecture" of their earlier work. For instance, the "Holy Blood" authors consulted documents in France relating to an alleged "Priory of Scion" organization that since 1099 has allegedly protected the secret of Jesus' marriage. Can, and did, the fruit of their labors turn up in another book?

The case is worrying to publishers and authors in part because it involves the issue of research and the point at which research becomes not just information but protected information. Depending on the judge's reasoning, a decision in favor of the plaintiffs could have a chilling effect on writers. A book (or other publication) need only appear in Britain for anyone, regardless of their nationality, to sue in a British court.

It's all the more depressing because "The Da Vinci Code" is a work of fiction, woven with legend ancient and new. So is the titillating essence of "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail," whatever its authors say or believe. "The "Priory of Scion" documents that figure in both books' conspiracy theorizing were long ago revealed to be grounded in a hoax. One of its principal architects, Pierre Plantard, a French anti-Semite and royal-blood pretender, contributed to a partial account of the conspiracy story in a book published in 1967. So perhaps Random House should pay his heirs.

AZUSA, Calif. - Archaeologists excavating a housing development site found a prehistoric milling area estimated to be 8,000 years old, officials said.

Large arrowheads, hearths and stone slabs used to grind seeds and acorns were among the items found at the site at the base of the Angeles National Forest, according to archeologists from Cogstone Resource Management Inc.

No human or animal bones were discovered, the company said.

The consulting firm was hired by Azusa Land Partners, which is developing 1,250 homes on the 520-acre site. Workers removed and catalogued about 100 tools and implements used by the Gabrielino-Tongva tribe, which lived in the area before Europeans arrived, said Cogstone President Sherri Gust.

Historians, museum directors and state officials are starting to tackle a topic as sensitive as it is significant: what South Carolina should do to mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.

Rodger Stroup, director of the S.C. Department of Archives and History, met with some of them Tuesday after realizing only a few years remain until the first sesquicentennial milestone: the contentious Democratic convention in Charleston in April 1860.

The 150th anniversary of the Civil War's beginning, the firing on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, will be April 12, 2011. "We really need to try to get a handle on what's going on," Stroup said. "One of the things that will come out of this is increased tourism. Let's face it. It started here."

During the centennial anniversary in the 1960s, many viewed the war solely through a military or political lens. Marion Edmonds, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism, said that since then, historians have written much more about how blacks and women contributed during the war.

"We now know so much more about the cultures within our state," Edmonds said. "It's not just a simple view anymore. We also now know the differences between what was happening in the Lowcountry and in the Upstate."