Back in the fall of 2004, the OAH Executive Board voted to require that all future hotel contracts include "labor disputes" in its escape clause [to avoid the situation faced in San Francsico in 2005]. Until that point, our contracts provided that disruptions caused by strikes would annul a hotel contract, but in San Francisco we faced a lockout and then a boycott, neither of them a full-fledged strike. "Labor disputes" in future contract language would allow us to get out of contracts in situations like San Francisco.

During negotiations with Hilton for the contracts required by the settlement, it became clear that Hilton would not sign the final three contracts if they contained the labor disputes clause. This placed the OAH Executive Board between the proverbial rock and a hard place. If we stuck to our guns and refused to budge on the labor disputes clause, the settlement would unravel and we would be facing the $390,000 penalty. If we conceded and removed "labor disputes" from the escape clause, we would be vulnerable to possible San Francisco-like disputes in the future. Several weeks before our deadline for signing the contracts, the board met by conference call and decided that signing the contracts for 2011, 2013, and 2014 without the labor disputes clause was the lesser of two evils.

A major consideration in this decision was that the board felt it could not take actions that would increase further the cost of moving the 2005 meeting. The 2005 fiscal year ended with a substantial deficit, a large portion of which was due to moving the meeting to San José. (Other factors contributing to the deficit included revenue shortfalls for our Magazine of History expansion efforts.) In order to cover these costs, the executive board had to borrow $328,000 from the OAH General Endowment. In our December 2005 conference call, executive board members concluded that we could not jeopardize the settlement and risk having to borrow more funds from the Endowment.

Last month, the consequences of 2005's deficit were evident as the board considered the proposed budget for FY 2007. The board agreed that it would pay back the $328,000 debt to the endowment over a five-year period which means that $66,000 out of each year's budget through FY 2011 will be returned to the Endowment. Also the failure to fully fund the expansion of the OAH Magazine of History with an increase of revenue for that purpose over the last two years will require cutting back its frequency from six to four issues a year. The cost of moving Talking History—OAH's weekly radio program—from Kansas City to Bloomington and producing the program here next year was beyond our means and the executive board decided to suspend production this summer. Finally, two full-time positions whose staff have left or will be leaving will become part-time this summer.

What if the Japanese battleships got past the big guns that were the key coastal defenses around San Francisco and the Golden Gate? What then? The U.S. Army had an answer. On the night of Dec. 7, the Army assigned every available soldier at the Presidio of San Francisco to get to work digging slit trenches and field fortifications to stop a Japanese invasion.

Trenches were dug on the bluffs above the Golden Gate. Machine guns were sited to cover Baker Beach on the western edge of the city. If the Japanese came, we were ready.

Nearly 65 years went by, and the world changed. The Army is gone from the Golden Gate. The Presidio is part of a national park now. The other day, National Park Service crews clearing weeds and making surveys for a hiking trail above Baker Beach found some of the old wartime trenches and machine-gun nests, still there, still ready for the invasion that never came.

The rangers were amazed. "It's hard to describe the experience," said Park Service historian Stephen Haller. "It's peeling back history."

The Park Service doesn't want to reveal the exact location of these trenches until archaeologists can look at them and prepare them for public viewing. There are perhaps a dozen trenches, on the bluffs north of Baker Beach, behind "keep out" signs.

The fear of those dark winter days in 1941 and 1942 seems nearly absurd now. The Japanese had no plans to invade and no fleet ready to mount an invasion _ a good thing, since the West Coast was defenseless. The Navy was out in the Pacific, and the Army was undermanned and unprepared. At one point in early 1942, Boy Scouts were sent to guard the Bay Bridge.

Retired ranger John Martini remembers taking an oral history from an old soldier named Dudley Riggs who had been stationed at the Presidio. "They gave me a World War I Army helmet, some ammunition dated 1920, a 1903 Springfield rifle and told me to shoot anyone coming up the hill," Riggs said.

On the afternoon of Dec. 7, the Army's Western Defense Command received a report of a Japanese fleet 30 miles off the Presidio. On Dec. 8, aircraft carriers were reported off the coast and a submarine off the Golden Gate, and at 6 that night, something suspicious was spotted on radar 100 miles west of San Francisco.

Sirens wailed, that eerie rising and falling sound that still signifies an air raid.

Cars and electric commuter trains were stopped on the Bay Bridge. Traffic stopped in the city, people piled out of buses and streetcars and took shelter. It was the war's first blackout on American soil, and it was a fiasco.

Many neon advertising signs stayed lit. Downtown San Francisco sparkled, one resident said, "like New Orleans at Mardi Gras time." The roadway lights and the rotating red beacon lights on the 4-year-old Golden Gate Bridge blazed away. The bridge, it was learned later, was defended by only three .30-caliber machine guns.

The next day, Lt. Gen. John de Witt, head of the Western Defense Command, came to City Hall to chew out the city fathers. He was in uniform, three silver stars glittering on each shoulder and blood in his eye. He was furious. He was convinced, he said, that Japanese bombers had flown over San Francisco _ and the city had not blacked out.

"No bombs fell, did they?" Mayor Angelo Rossi asked gently.

De Witt told the newspapers it might have been better if the city had been bombed. "I never saw such apathy," he snapped. "It was criminal. ... It was shameful."

There were no planes, but, according to Brian Chin's book "Artillery at the Golden Gate," there really were Japanese submarines off the coast.

They torpedoed a few ships off California and later shelled an oil refinery near Santa Barbara. On Dec. 17, Chin wrote, the submarine I-15 surfaced near the Farallon Islands. Its crew could see the glow of the city lights in the distance.

"If we weren't at war," said Capt. Hiroshi Imazato, "this would be an excellent chance to pass in through the Golden Gate and visit that famous city of San Francisco."

The Japanese officers all laughed.

Scientists said Friday they have confirmed that at least some of Christopher Columbus' remains were buried inside a Spanish cathedral, a discovery that could help end a century-old debate over the explorer's final resting place.

DNA samples from 500-year-old bone slivers could contradict the Dominican Republic's competing claim that the explorer was laid to rest in the New World, said Marcial Castro, a Spanish historian and teacher who devised the study that began in 2002.

However, some of Columbus' remains also could have been buried in the Dominican Republic, he said.

The announcement came a day before the 500th anniversary of Columbus' death in the Spanish city of Valladolid.

A forensic team led by Spanish geneticist Jose Antonio Lorente compared DNA from bones buried in a cathedral in Seville with DNA from remains known to be from Columbus' brother, Diego, who also is buried in the southern Spanish city.

"There is absolute matchup between the mitochondrial DNA we have studied from Columbus' brother and Christopher Columbus," Castro said in a telephone interview.

Mitochondria are cell components rich in the genetic material.

Juan Bautista Mieses, the director of the Columbus Lighthouse — a cross-shaped building several blocks long that the Dominican government built to house the explorer's remains — dismissed the researchers' findings. He insisted that Columbus is buried in the Dominican Republic.

"The remains have never left Dominican territory," Bautista said.

Castro and his colleagues say they had tried in vain for years to persuade the Dominican Republic to open up the monument to compare the remains inside with those of Diego Columbus.

"Now, studying the remains in the Dominican Republic is more necessary and exciting than ever," Castro said.

Although his team is convinced the bones in Seville are from Columbus, he said, that does not necessarily mean the ones in Santo Domingo are not. Columbus' body was moved several times after his death, and the tomb in Santo Domingo might conceivably also hold part of the explorer's body.

"We don't know what is in there," Castro said.

Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World in 1492, landing at the island of Hispaniola, which today comprises the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

Historians have been debating for more than 100 years whether Spain or the Dominican Republic has legitimate bragging rights to the remains of Columbus.

King Tutankhamen's rediscovered penis could make the pharaoh stand out in the shrunken world of male mummies, scientists say.

They've taken a close look at old pictures of the 3300-year-old mummified king.

His sexual organ has been just another puzzle in the story of the best-known pharaoh of ancient Egypt.

Harry Burton (1879-1940) photographed the royal penis intact during Howard Carter's excavation of King Tut's tomb in 1922.

But it was reported missing in 1968, when UK scientist Professor Ronald Harrison took a series of x-rays of the mummy.

There was speculation that the penis had been stolen and sold.

"Instead, it has always been there. I found it during the CT scan last year, when the mummy was lifted. It lay loose in the sand around the king's body. It was mummified," says Professor Zahi Hawass, chief of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.

When Holocaust survivor Beatrice Karp told her eighth-grade audience that she kicked a Nazi soldier in the shin while imprisoned as a child in a concentration camp, the laughter lightened the mood somewhat in the La Vista Junior High cafeteria.

But her young listeners quickly assumed their former uneasy hush as the charming, well-dressed woman on the platform continued speaking almost effortlessly of the torrent of abuse she witnessed.

Though her delivery of grim memories was well rehearsed, occasionally a caustic edge to her voice, a clenched fist, a wrathful expression slipped free and the audience witnessed a child's rage shoving its way through her retrospection.

"I never knew a world without a Hitler," Karp told the students. "I was born in 1932 in Germany and Hitler came to power in 1933."

VISOKO, Bosnia - An Egyptian geologist said on Wednesday that a hill in central Bosnia appeared to be a primitive human-made pyramid of uncertain age.

Geologist Aly Abd Barakat was sent by Egypt’s government to join the local team researching what Bosnian-born amateur archaeologist Semir Osmanagic says are three 12,000-year-old pyramids — the Bosnian Pyramids of Sun, Moon and Dragon.

“In my opinion, it is a type of pyramid, probably primitive pyramid ... (that) we did not know until now,” Barakat told reporters at the dig on the northeastern side of Visocica hill, where huge stone blocks have been found.

There were cries of protest from left- and right-wing benches when Jean-Louis Debré, the speaker of the French National Assembly, suspended a stormy debate on the Armenian genocide yesterday. Armenian visitors in the public gallery chanted in unison: "Vote! Vote! Vote!" as gendarmes removed them.

When the socialist parliamentary group filed the proposed law last month, few imagined it would be so divisive. The law is an addendum to that of January 2001, which publicly recognised the Armenian genocide of 1915. The new law, which may now never come to a vote, would make denying the Armenian Holocaust an offence punishable by up to one year's imprisonment and a fine of EUR 45,000.

After the national assembly voted the 2001 law, Turkey cancelled contracts with the French groups Thomson, Alcatel and Bouygues. Some French products were boycotted, and taxi-drivers in Istanbul and Ankara refused to take French passengers.

This time the French and Turkish governments did their utmost to prevent the law passing. President Jacques Chirac appealed for a "spirit of responsibility" on this "sensitive question". The French ministry of trade circulated a list of French contracts with Turkey - worth $4.7 billion (EUR 3.7 billion) last year.

The French nuclear power company Areva hopes to build Turkey's first reactors soon, and the French minister for foreign trade will visit Turkey with the heads of 40 companies on June 14th.

The Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, threatened trade sanctions if the law passed, while the Turkish foreign minister warned of "irreparable damage" to relations.

"Dear colleagues, we resisted the United States during the Iraq crisis," the right-wing UMP deputy Roland Blum said. "Surely we can stand up to the Turks!" His outburst was widely applauded.

Western historians are nearly unanimous in recognising that, as the centre-right UDF deputy François Rochebloine recounted yesterday: "From April 1915, the Young Turk government unleashed the horrible process of the extermination of 1.5 million Armenians, through organised massacres . . . which prefigured the Jewish Holocaust two decades later." French deputies who followed their heads - and pocketbooks - opposed the law. Those who followed their hearts supported it. The main parties splintered, and there was plenty of hypocrisy to go around. The right dragged out debates on two other laws, to eat up the socialists' time slot before the Armenian debate.

French opponents of the law do not deny the Armenian genocide happened. But many were burned by a 2005 law praising the alleged benefits of colonialism, which had to be rescinded due to public outrage.

Jean-Marc Ayrault, the leader of the socialist parliamentary group, who accused the right of obstruction, is known to be at best a reluctant supporter of the law, because he wants historians - not politicians - to judge history. Mr Ayrault and fellow group presidents must now decide whether to continue the Armenian debate during the next socialist slot in November.

In the meantime, there is bitter disappointment among many parliamentarians, not to mention the Armenians who demonstrated outside the assembly yesterday.

"They gave [ the law] a third class funeral," said Patrick Devedjian, a UMP deputy of Armenian origin. He alluded to the defacing of memorials to the Armenian Holocaust this spring. "Memorials abroad are the only sepulchres we have, so it felt like a desecration to Armenians," he said.

Mr Devedjian corrected the foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, when he alluded to "the memory of massacres committed in 1915", emphasising, "The genocide, Monsieur le Ministre".

"The Armenian cause is just," Mr Douste-Blazy continued. "It must be defended and respected. But national representatives must take account of the interest of France . . . The text submitted to you would be considered, like it or not, as a hostile act by the vast majority of Turkish people."

Humanities Advocates:

There is still time to take a few minutes and write or call your Representative.

The U.S. House of Representatives is tentatively scheduled to consider the FY2007 Interior Appropriations bill between Friday, May 19 and Tuesday, May 23. Recently, the Interior Appropriations Committee supported the President's request and recommended funding for the NEH at $142 million. Despite the appearance of level funding, this actually is a proposed cut of $1.3 million to the agency's core programs of research, education, preservation & access, public programs, and challenge grants.

We expect that when the bill comes to the House floor, an amendment will be introduced by the leadership of the Congressional Humanities Caucus [Rep. Jim Leach (IA-2) and Rep. David Price (NC-4)] and the Congressional Arts Caucus [Rep. Louise Slaughter (NY-28) and Rep. Christopher Shays (CT-4)] to increase funding for the NEH and the NEA by $10 million to $15 million, evenly divided between the two endowments. This would mean an increase for the NEH of $5 million to $7.5 million that would help rebuild program lines suffering from budget rescissions and inflation.

We strongly encourage you to send a message to your member of Congress via email or fax, urging them to vote in favor of this amendment.

Beginning text and talking points are provided for you to amplify at . We suggest adding information about your own programs and the importance of humanities funding to the citizens of your member's district (there is no need to ask for the support of the caucus co-chairs).

Many thanks for your help in this important effort to increase funding for the humanities!

As "source nations" put pressure on museums to return antiquities, a new code of conduct for the art world may be in the making.

Back in 1998, with help from prominent local donors, the St. Louis Museum of Art cobbled together $499,000 to buy a beautiful ancient Egyptian burial mask. The piece, one of the gems of the museum's collection, recently became controversial when the Egyptian government demanded its return, contending it had been stolen from a warehouse in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

Some well-preserved murals have been discovered in a tomb of more than 1,500 years old in Datong, North China's Shanxi Province, supplying rich first-hand evidence for the research of early ethnic apparel and rituals.

The tomb was identified to belong to a general's mother who died in AD 435. Taking up an area of 24 square metres, it was found in a cemetery of 12 tombs excavated last summer by local archaeologists.

Lying on a plateau in the rural suburbs of Datong, the cemetery dates back to the Northern Wei Dynasty (AD 386-534).

In the quiet town of Bad Arolsen, in a former Nazi SS barracks, lies probably the most exhaustive record of human misery ever kept. The details, which can be found in more than 47 million files covering 16 miles of shelves, are contained in ordinary hardback writing books that might be found in any school classroom.

Punctiliously noted in the Totenbuch or Death Book kept at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria is the camp commandant's "present" to Hitler on the occasion of the FŸhrer's birthday on 20 April 1942. Three hundred Russian prisoners were specially selected for execution to mark the event.

The death list covers how each prisoner was subjected to a so-called Genickschuss or neck shot - a single bullet fired from a pistol pressed against the base of the skull. The names, inmate numbers, dates and places of birth are meticulously recorded on each line. The slaughter started at 11.20 am, when the word Genickschuss first appears, and is repeated 299 times every two minutes thereafter.

This week files containing details of some 17 million victims of the Nazi death camp and slave labour system have been made public for the first time.

During the past six decades they have been used exclusively by the Red Cross International Tracing Service to establish the fate of the millions who went missing under Nazi rule. The files were kept off limits to the public largely because of German objections about the need to protect victims' privacy. But last Tuesday the 11-nation commission which controls the archive finally agreed to open the files to historians for the first time. The data will provide fresh insights into the workings of the Nazi death and slave labour machine.

Ulrich Herbert, a historian at Freiburg University, said: "These are terrible stories from a terrible time. It is frustrating, even appalling, that these records have been kept off limits to researchers for so long."

The archives spell out the barbarity of Nazi rule inflicted on millions in terse but telling detail. One file records the plight of Katrina, a French woman arrested by the Gestapo for "complaining that she was involuntarily sterilised by the authorities after giving birth to a coloured bastard".

Another records the fate of a German banker sent to Buchenwald concentration camp in 1937 after an informant overheard him criticising the Nazi regime. He was given "25 strokes for laziness" in 1944 and a mouthful of "missing teeth" after interrogation.

There is also the story of a 31-year-old nurse who was forced to wear a black and yellow "Star of David" branding her as a Jewish "race defile". Her file notes: "The woman is a half-Jew who lives with her Aryan boyfriend. She acknowledges they have had sexual relations." The woman disappeared after being dispatched to RavensbrŸck concentration camp.

Since 1945, the Red Cross has relied on the Bad Arolsen files to respond to more than 11 million requests from 62 countries for information about relatives who went missing under Nazi rule. Last year alone the number of queries was more than 150,000. The records have recently been used to help slave labour victims claim compensation. Some have been able to claim simply because camp de-lousing records enabled them to be identified.

Apart from providing galling historical detail about Nazi rule, Jewish groups say that the files will provide a powerful antidote to Holocaust denial.

Israel Singer, of the World Jewish Council, said: "The millions of written documents proving Nazi mass murder against Jews will be open for researchers. It is a strike against all Holocaust deniers."

France's relations with Turkey will come under strain today if the parliament in Paris approves a bill that would make it a crime to deny the killing of Armenians by Ottoman troops in 1915 was genocide.

Turkish academics have warned that if the opposition proposal becomes law, it would be "disastrous" for the democratic movement in Turkey. It could also cause economic disruption, with business leaders warning that French products could be boycotted in Turkey.

Ankara recalled its ambassador to Paris briefly last week "for consultations" in protest at today's vote. It also pulled back its ambassador to Ottawa, following comments by the Canadian prime minister that appeared to express support for Armenia's view that the killings were genocide.

The Armenian issue is particularly sensitive in France because of its 450,000-strong Armenian community.

Armenians claim up to 1.5m people died in 1915-18. Turkey denies genocide, and admits only that hundreds of thousands of both Armenians and Turks died, largely due to civil war and famine.

Halil Berktay, one of the first Turkish historians to break the taboo on Armenia, said in yesterday's Le Monde that the effects of thenew French law would be "disastrous".

He warned that Ankara could retaliate with a law criminalising recognition of the genocide. "There is a strong nationalist, anti-European wave in Turkey at the moment." he said.

The French bill would punish denial of the genocide with one year in prison or a Euros 45,000 fine, matching the penalty for denial of the Jewish Holocaust.

A movie about the Irish civil war is being tipped to carry the day at the Cannes Film Festival. The Wind That Shakes The Barley, directed by Ken Loach, is in the running for the top award.

The Da Vinci Code - set to be one of the biggest movies of the year - will open the festival.

Since his groundbreaking BBC television 1960s plays - like Cathy Come Home - Loach has forged a reputation for intense and often controversial cinema, dealing with historical, social and political topics.

In approximately 1550 B.C., Egypt conquered its southern neighbor, ancient Nubia, and secured control of valuable trade routes. But rather than excluding the colonized people from management of the region, new evidence from an archaeological site on the Nile reveals that Egyptian immigrants shared administrative responsibilities for ruling this large province with native Nubians.

"The study of culture contact in the past has conventionally used ideas of unidirectional change and modification of a subordinate population by a socially dominant group. The idea that authoritarian European powers forced changes in submissive native cultures dominated this work," explains Michele R. Buzon (University of Alberta). "However, more recent research has reevaluated these traditional notions and suggests that this model might not be appropriate for all situations of culture contact."

Rome, May 16 - The Tuscans' proud claim to be the descendants of the ancient Etruscans has taken a knock .

A DNA comparison of Etruscan skeletons and a sample of living Tuscans has thrown up only "tenuous genetic similarities", said lead researcher Guido Barbujani of Ferrara University .

"If the Tuscans were the direct descendants of the Etruscans the DNA should be the same," said Barbujani, a genetecist who coordinated the study with Stanford University in the United States .

NewspaperARCHIVE.com, the largest online newspaper database, has just released RonaldReaganArchive.com.

This free site tells the story of Reagan's life as an actor in Hollywood, his role as governor of California and president of the United States through more than 45,000 original newspaper pages.

As younger, inexperienced teachers are thrown into classrooms to meet new federal standards, as much as 90 percent of the burden of instruction rests on textbooks, said Frank Wang, a former textbook publisher who left the field to teach mathematics at the University of Oklahoma.

And yet, few if any textbooks are ever subjected to independent field testing of whether they actually help students learn.

“This is where people miss the boat. They don’t realize how important the textbooks are,” Wang said. “We talk about vouchers and more teachers, but education is about the books. That’s where the content is.”

Millions of Nazi files that describe the mechanics of mass murder were a step closer to being opened to researchers following an agreement Tuesday by an 11-nation panel that has kept the archive locked away since World War II, officials said.

But first the draft must be signed by government ministers in Berlin — a date has not been set — and be sent back to the countries for ratification, said Paul Mertz, the Luxembourg Foreign Ministry official who is the chairman of the commission that oversees the archive.

The process is likely to delay the opening of the 50 million files to researchers until at least the end of the year, Mertz said.

The move to unlock the storehouse in the German town of Bad Arolsen came amid pressure from the dying generation of Holocaust survivors and victims' families who feared their histories would be lost forever unless the rules were changed.

With four more hulks spotted, Rhode Island can boast it has the world's "largest fleet of Revolutionary shipwrecks," a maritime expert says.

A recent find brings to six the number of historic sea wrecks dating back to the Revolutionary War found by the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project in its search for relics in Newport Harbor.

Project director D.K. Abbass told the Providence Journal the ships are believed to be part of a private fleet of 13 British transports sunk during the war for independence.

ATLANTIC BEACH, N.C. -- Underwater archaeologists plan to raise a cannon Wednesday from what's presumed to be the pirate Blackbeard's sunken flagship and put it on display -- for an hour.

"If you don't see it then, you won't see it for awhile," said Mark Wilde-Ramsing, project director for the Queen Anne's Revenge Project.

The public can get a glimpse of the cannon from noon to 1 p.m. at Fort Macon State Park.

Tehran, 15 May 2006 (CHN) -- Iran-French joint archeology team at Bolaghi Gorge succeeded in discovering and identifying the remains of a gigantic palace, believed to be from the Achaemenid era (648 BC–330 BC), during their second season of excavations in the area.

“Before the start of this season of excavations, our geophysical tests in area number 33 of Bolaghi Gorge had revealed to us the possible existence of a huge building near the Sivand Dam. Clay artifacts found in this area showed that this building used to be the residential palace of the Achaemenid kings. With the start of the new excavation season, we resumed our excavations in area number 33 with this attitude,” said Mohammad Taghi Ataee, head of the Iran-French joint archeology team at Bolaghi Gorge.

Turkey's self-destructive obsession with denying the Armenian genocide seems to have no limits. The Turks pulled out of a NATO exercise this week because the Canadian prime minister used the term "genocide" in reference to the mass killings of Armenians in Turkey during and after World War I. Before that, the Turkish ambassador to France was temporarily recalled to protest a French bill that would make it illegal to deny that the Armenian genocide occurred. And before that, a leading Turkish novelist, Orhan Pamuk, was charged with "insulting Turkish identity" for referring to the genocide (the charges were dropped after an international outcry).

This summer, it is likely that hordes of gum-chewing, cathedral-exploring, tomb-clambering tourists - usually sent to try the patience of Britain's clergy - will be made suspiciously welcome. Vicars will be monitoring closely as coach parties disgorge fat-walleted adults and their noisy children, interested in nothing but the gift shop.

For as those who run Westminster Abbey have found, one particular best-selling book has set cash registers ringing out like cathedral bells in a number of churches across the country.

Gangs of feverish literary pilgrims are even now padding around the nation's apses looking desperately for clues to confirm the gospel according to Dan Brown - that Jesus Christ married and had children by Mary Magdalene. Now, the imminent release of the film of The Da Vinci Code is expected to turn this dribble of dotty followers into a procession of demanding zealots.

And this cascade of freshly generated cash is putting kindly theologians in a hilarious quandary. These gentlemen may not want to be bothered by believers in Dan Brown's fanciful notions - but also, they don't want to dismiss new spending customers out of hand.

Take, for instance, the Dean of Lincoln Cathedral, the Very Rev Alec Knight, who, while cheerfully branding the book ''a load of old tosh'', happily agreed to let the film be shot at the cathedral after the producers made a donation of pounds 100,000. Staff gave out printed apologies to those turned away while Tom Hanks, who plays the heroic Harvard professor with irritating hair and an unchanging gormless expression, performed the ''old tosh'' in question.

And while the "Code'' might be theological drivel, visitor numbers have already increased at the cathedral and so it has proved only sensible for the Lincoln authorities to sell the book and indeed a number of its spin-offs (of the ''Cracking The Da Vinci Code'' type) in its shop.

A hearty selection of Da Vinci Code books can also be found on the shelves of the gift shop in Winchester Cathedral. It featured in two of the film's scenes and accepted a pounds 20,000 location fee after several other churches turned the film makers down. However, to make amends for this bung, it has spent part of the money on a lecture series on the ''good for nothing'' novel which has included a point-by-point demolition of the book by the Bishop of Winchester, the Right Reverend Michael Scott-Joint. Why have a cake if you're not going to eat it?

Meanwhile, the Master of the Temple Church in London - it owes its name to the Order of the Knights Templar which plays a major role in the book - has taken an even more disingenuous approach.

The Rev Robin Griffith-Jones is presiding over a thousand extra visitors a week at his church, all demanding to know about ''the orb'' on the tomb of one of the effigies of crusader knights (no, no, not a word more - no spoilers to be found here).

The Master is charging pounds 4 a head to deliver a weekly, witty, one-hour talk on the subject matter of the thriller - a book that he cheerfully describes as ''historical rubbish''. Furthermore, he has expanded this talk into a short book of his own, The Da Vinci Code and the Secrets of The Temple.

Perhaps the most important church location in the book is the Rosslyn Chapel, near Edinburgh. This beautiful and ornate church has long been associated with the legend of the Holy Grail and stands close to the last Knights Templar stronghold in Britain.

In the novel (oh all right - just one spoiler) Dan Brown claims that the chapel was built on the site of an ancient temple and stands on a ''north-south meridian'' that runs through Glastonbury on a Rose Line - a sort of ley-line - from which the chapel gets its name. (Its name actually comes from Ross, meaning headland, and Lynn, meaning pool.)

Dr Andrew Sinclair, a descendant of the family that founded the chapel and a former Cambridge historian, said that he believed filming would ruin the chapel's reputation and would lead people to believe the ''preposterous'' claims made in the book.

However Stuart Beattie, the director of the Rosslyn Chapel Trust who called the Da Vinci Code an ''airport read'', is more phlegmatic. ''We're an historic building that is used as an Episcopalian church and have always had many visitors,'' he says. ''We stock the book itself and a Da Vinci game but otherwise we haven't changed anything. The Chapel was merely a backdrop to a film.''

In three years, visitor numbers to Rosslyn Chapel have trebled and well over 100,000 should make the trip this year, following the film's release. The chapel has sensibly introduced a new series of Da Vinci-inspired guided tours -and, by good fortune, it also has a pounds 12 million restoration fund on the go. With visitors paying pounds 7 to enter and the film location fee estimated at pounds 100,000, it should be reached within a couple of years.

And now of course, it seems that even Westminster Abbey - which famously turned down pounds 100,000 and refused to allow the film crew access on religious grounds, claiming that the book was "theologically unsound'' - has now given in and will be helping itself to a soupçon of Da Vinci gold. Not only will it be holding two lectures - admission pounds 25 a head - by the Abbey's canon theologian Nicholas Sagovsky and that old hand Rev Robin Griffith-Jones of Temple Church, but the admission also includes ''optional'' evensong, a ''self-guided'' tour and wine and canapés. Meanwhile, the Abbey shop is producing a booklet on the Code and its connection to Westminster Abbey - price pounds 2.99 - as well as selling Griffith-Jones's Da Vinci book.

Now, while it is certainly the case that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, attacked the global obsession with the novel, which he described as ''the stuff of imagination'', it seems that the C of E is taking a much more sanguine view than the Vatican, which is imploring us to give the film a miss.

But hell, if these new seekers after Da Vinci truth are willing to pay good money to pop into church, I am sure no one can quibble with a bit of good old-fashioned English compromise.

In 2004, archaeologists announced they had found a cave where they believe John the Baptist anointed many of his disciples, offering extraordinary proof of a central New Testament figure and his theology.

The cave includes a huge cistern with 28 steps that lead to an underground pool of water. Some 250,000 pottery shards were also found and are presumed to be remnants of small water jugs used in the Christian baptismal ritual performed by the fiery New Testament preacher. Wall carvings etched into the cave tell John's life story; they were likely made by monks in the fourth or fifth century. In addition, a stone was found in the cave that researchers believe was used for ceremonial foot washing.

Now new secrets and mysteries have emerged from this cave, known as the Suba Cave.

HANOI - Vietnam, which is bidding for World Trade Organization membership and is already signatory to a trade deal with its former nemesis in Washington, is still grappling with the huge social and economic consequences of its military conflict with the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.

The legacy of the United States' use of Agent Orange tops that list. From 1962 to 1971, the US military dumped an estimated 83 million liters of highly toxic herbicides, including Agent Orange, mostly over Vietnam but also Laos and Cambodia, in an attempt to flush out jungle-covered guerrilla fighters. Agent Orange contained trace amounts of dioxin, a toxic substance known to cause cancer in humans at high doses.

A group of alleged Vietnamese victims are the first to seek legal redress and compensation from the US companies, namely Dow Chemical and Monsanto Corp, that then manufactured the chemical. In their complaint filed in New York, they claimed the defoliant had caused widespread birth defects, miscarriages, diabetes and cancer, and should be considered a war crime against millions of Vietnamese.
The chemical companies, for their part, have maintained that no such scientific link has ever been proved, and that the US government, not the companies, should be held responsible for how the chemical was deployed.

COMMENTARY FROM JAPAN FOCUS:

The American war in Southeast Asia featured the most widespread use of chemical warfare since World War I. Earlier, the British had resorted to chemicals in their colonies, Italy did so in Ethiopia, and Japan in China in the 1930s and 1940s. These were lethal chemicals where the Americans thought theirs were not. Iraq in the 1980s made the largest-scale known use of lethal chemical weapons in its Iran war and against its Kurdish minority. But two elements distinguished the U.S. effort in Vietnam. First, massive quantities of these chemicals were used, as the below article makes clear. The amounts cited are equivalent to roughly 60,000 tons of chemical agent. By comparison, in the 1972 Christmas Bombing of North Vietnam, which some hold to be the decisive air campaign of the war, and including both B-52 bombers and tactical aircraft, the Nixon administration loosed some 36,000 tons of munitions over Hanoi and its environs.

Second, the Americans resorted to chemicals with poorly understood effects. The main defoliants utilized by the U.S. in the Vietnam War, Agents Purple, Blue—and, best known—Agent Orange, contained ingredients found to be carcinogenic in studies by the U.S. National Cancer Institute in 1969 and subsequently banned from use in the United States.

There were two main propagating methods for the defoliant chemicals used in the Vietnam War. Operation Ranch Hand, which has garnered the most attention, was an aerial spraying initiative begun on an experimental basis in January 1962 and continued until January 7, 1971, though in its last years on a greatly reduced basis. In 1967, its peak year, Ranch Hand defoliated 1.2 million acres of land and dispensed 4.8 million gallons of chemicals. The other technique used vehicles and manual dispensers to defoliate land surrounding military bases, villages, and roads.

I had been told that only very special Civil War historians – the ones with personal contacts – were allowed to see the archival holdings of the Army’s Military History Institute in Carlisle, Pa. When talking about the institute, some of these historians spoke in a whisper, as though it were an elite private club, and said that just mentioning the treasure-trove of Civil War photographs there could mean a loss of privileges.

Then, in March, I met Steve Perry, executive director of the Army Heritage Center Foundation, at the awards dinner for the Lincoln Prize in New York. The foundation is the institute’s fundraising arm. Perry assured me that I was welcome to visit, as was anyone else who wanted to see the collection.

Well, it turns out Perry was right. If the institute’s reputation for exclusive access was once valid, it is no longer. The staff appeared dedicated to making sure that I, and a dozen other visitors, got to see what we came for. I stayed for the day and left reluctantly just before it closed, having filled a folder full of copies of files on a regiment I am researching.