The remains of Princess Fatafehi, the daughter of a royal dynasty that ruled Tonga more than 600 years ago, will return home today after 85 years at the Bishop Museum.

Along with the princess, the remains of about 20 other individuals from Tongan burial sites will be escorted home by a delegation of high Tongan officials and Maile Drake, the museum's cultural collections manager, who is also Tongan.

"This is a great and right thing to do," said Drake. "In the Tongan way, they are still people. They are mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, brothers and sisters -- all returning home in dignity."

Archaeologists have discovered an unprecedented large group of 900-year-old tombs in Horinger County in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.

The tombs, dating back to the Liao Dynasty (916-1125), were excavated in the ancient city of Tuchengzi, said Li Qiang, head of the archeology team.

He said it was the largest group of Liao tombs ever discovered at the southern foot of the Yinshan Mountains running west-east through Inner Mongolia.

Turkey has recalled its ambassadors in France and Canada for consultations regarding the Armenian genocide discussions in the two countries, Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman Namik Tan said on Monday.

Tan told reporters that Turkey's Ambassador to France Osman Koruturk and Ambassador to Canada Aydemir Erman have been called back to Ankara for a short time to have consultations on recent "baseless" Armenian genocide allegations in these two countries.

The two ambassadors are expected to return to the two countries where they are assigned to after the consultations, he added.

The Turkish move came after Canadian parliament has adopted a resolution, acknowledging the Armenian claims, while Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper used the expression "Armenian genocide" in his remarks recently.

Meanwhile, French parliament will debate over a bill on May 18,which makes any rejection of the so-called "Armenian genocide" a crime.

Turkey has warned France that bilateral ties could suffer if the French parliament adopts the bill.

Turkey has always rejected the claims that 1.5 million Armenians died as a result of systematic genocide during the Turkish Ottoman period between 1915 and 1923.

However, Turkey does acknowledge that up to 300,000 Armenians and at least the same number of Turks died in civil strifes when the Armenians took up arms for independence in eastern Anatolia and sided with Russian troops invading Ottoman soil.

Ankara has been calling for the formation of a joint research commission between Turkish and Armenian historians to find out the truth of the history.

The current controversy over hordes of Hispanics coming over the border singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" in Spanish is only the latest rise of a tide that ebbs and flows in the United States at regular intervals.

The debate over whether those who come from "out there" to "in here" are to be welcomed or repelled illustrates a paradox at the heart of this national enterprise - at once America is a country of immigrants and a country threatened by immigrants.

"There is nothing new about the issue of immigration becoming a hot political topic," says Gary Gerstle, a historian at the University of Maryland, College Park. "There are points historically when it becomes a major issue and grabs the attention of the polity in a major way.

"From that viewpoint, it is not surprising that something like this is happening today," he says. "The United States has long insisted, on the one hand, with having a relatively open border but, on the other hand, with being concerned about the volume, manner and character of those coming across it."

It is hard to find a point in American history when this was not an issue.

"This goes all the way back to the beginning of the country," says Matthew Crenson, a political scientist at the Johns Hopkins University.

"There was a debate, in fact, between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson in the early part of the 19th century," he says. "Jefferson argued that immigration was a good thing because it would bring people who would contribute to the economy of the new country, while Hamilton argued that it was a bad thing since it would threaten the distinctive Anglo-American culture of the country."

The immigrants Jefferson was backing were the so-called Scotch-Irish, the Protestants who ended up populating much of the South.

But Jefferson also had his problems with immigrants, an early example of the recurring issue of language.

"Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were worried about German speakers," says Aristide Zolberg, director of the International Center for Migration, Ethnicity and Citizenship at the New School University in New York. "They thought the German language was different and would bring with it cultural antagonisms to what they were trying to establish as an American outlook."...

Friends and family of Cruz Hernandez, believed to be the oldest person in the world, gathered together yesterday to celebrate her 128th birthday. The festivities were attended by more than 200 people some of whom came dressed as figures from Salvadoran mythology. According to the National Birth Registry in El Salvador, Hernandez was born on May 3rd 1878. However, although officials sent her documents and records to the Guinness World Records organisation last year, they are still waiting to hear whether or not her case will be accepted and a formal entry made to the records book, declaring Hernandez the world’s oldest person. That position is currently held by the Ecuadorian, Maria Esther de Capovilla who celebrated her 116th birthday on September 14th 2005.

It was not a public performance — a few dozen students and faculty were the only ones to witness the final presentation of three theater majors at Cornish College of the Arts, in Seattle. But that hasn’t stopped the nature of the performance from becoming the center of a campuswide controversy that has prompted calls from some students for immediate administrative action.

The presentation, which took place March 31, was part of a theater course in which students are asked to perform in clown character. The assignment called on students to portray a historical event. One group, made up of two white men and one white woman, chose to focus on the civil rights movement.

According to Annika Keller, a senior theater major who saw the performance, the actors showed “a dimwitted” Martin Luther King Jr. forgetting his “I Have a Dream” speech and then being shot by another character. In a portrayal of the Greensboro student sit-ins, the performers, playing black students, ordered food such as fried chicken and chitlins, Keller said.

“At that point, nobody was with them anymore,” Keller said. “It had nothing to do with the civil rights movement. It was a blatant stereotypical observation.

France and Germany plan to unveil a new common history book for high-school students, going from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the French and Dutch rejection of the European Constitution last year.

French publisher Nathan released today the French version of the manual's first volume, realizing a project agreed on in 2003 by former German Chancelor Gerhard Schroeder and French President Jacques Chirac.

The manual, the first such project, was unveiled by Gilles de Robien, the French Education and Research minister, at a meeting in Peronne, a World War I battlefield.

``It would be a paradox that peace and friendship between our peoples turn to indifference,'' de Robien said. ``We need to constantly enrich our educational and cultural cooperation. Friendship isn't built only on industrial and commercial exchanges.''

Ten historians, five German and five from France participated in the 11-month project. They started the editorial work in the aftermath of the French and Dutch ``no'' vote on the European Constitution last year.

``We might hope that this manual will pave the way for a European history manual,'' said Guillaume Le Quintrec, the French history professor who directed the editorial staff together with his German counterpart, Peter Geiss.

`Not European Activism'

The rejection of the European Constitution didn't influence the historians' work, Le Quintrec said.

``This manual isn't an act of European activisms,'' Le Quintrec, said in a phone interview.

French school-book publisher Nathan didn't provide a sales outlook for the manual. It is trying to convince high-school teachers to choose the manual for final-year students. The 336- page manual costs 26 euros ($33).

``There is really a commercial risk,'' said Le Quintrec.

Ernst Klett, a German publisher present in 12 countries, will sell the German version by July 2006. The manual is the first of a three-book series. Nathan didn't provide any schedule for the next volumes.

As Barry Bonds chases Babe Ruth's treasured spot in home run history, with only Hank Aaron on the horizon, it's worth wondering where Josh Gibson might fit in this illustrious group. He was the preeminent home-run hitter in the Negro Leagues, a stout catcher whose displays of power rivaled Ruth's.

Neither Ruth nor Gibson competed against players of all ethnicities. Ruth swatted his 714 home runs before the major leagues became integrated. Gibson, widely known as "the black Babe Ruth," never had the chance to play in the majors: He died, at age 35, in January 1947, less than three months before Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier.

But while the homer totals of major leaguers are indisputable -- Aaron 755, Ruth 714, Bonds 712 and counting -- Gibson's numbers will forever remain murky. He hit as many as 962 homers in his 17-year career, including 84 in 1936. But many of those came against semi-pro competition, as Negro Leagues teams traveled the land facing any opponent they could find, and record-keeping was sketchy at best.

Gibson's plaque at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown reflects the uncertainty, declaring he hit "almost 800 home runs in league and independent baseball." Much like Sadaharu Oh, who hit 868 homers in his career in Japan, it is nearly impossible to measure Gibson against the elite power hitters in major-league history.

That doesn't stop Gibson's contemporaries from trying.

"I played with Willie Mays and against Hank Aaron," Hall of Famer Monte Irvin once said. "They were tremendous players, but they were no Josh Gibson."

Asked about this quote during a telephone interview from his Florida home, Irvin, now 87, did not waver, saying, "Oh yeah, Josh was better than those two."

Don Newcombe grew up in Elizabeth, N.J. His father often took him to games in nearby Newark, to watch the hometown Eagles play the Homestead Grays. Newcombe did not have many idols in the era of segregation in America, but he counted Josh Gibson as one.

Newcombe recalled sitting in the bleachers with his dad and marveling as Gibson sent majestic homers sailing over the wall. Gibson and Paige, the charismatic pitcher, were the fabled stars of the Negro Leagues in the 1930s and '40s, magnetic personalities who captivated African American kids such as Newcombe.

"Josh was so young and so strong," Newcombe, now 79, said from his home in Los Angeles. "People would go to see him play the Eagles. He was a drawing card, very well known in the black community."

Newcombe, who later became a four-time All-Star pitcher with the Brooklyn Dodgers, discovered Gibson's talent first-hand in 1944. That was Newcombe's first year with the Newark Eagles, after he dropped out of high school to join them as a wide-eyed 17-year-old.

During one game at Griffith Park in Washington, D.C. -- Gibson and the Grays were based in Pittsburgh, but they also scheduled some "home" games in Washington -- Newcombe found himself peering toward his idol. A teammate had suggested how to pitch Gibson: get two strikes on him and throw a sidearm fastball, a "crossfire." Newcombe jumped ahead in the count and tried it.

He soon whirled to stare at the center fielder's back for what seemed like 15 minutes. Gibson had ripped a triple to the deepest part of the ballpark, more than 450 feet away.

"I never threw a crossfire the rest of my career," Newcombe said.

Some other stories of Gibson's prodigious power straddle the line between fact and fiction, including the homer that supposedly sailed completely out of Yankee Stadium. Negro Leagues historian Phil Dixon could not verify this feat in his research (though Dixon found documentation of Gibson's 460-foot shot at Yankee Stadium in 1930, when he was only 18). Gibson, in another account, playfully dismissed the out-of-the-stadium shot, saying the ball only reached the center-field bullpen.

Then there's the one about Gibson's home run at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, when the ball traveled so far it never came down. The next day, while playing a game in Philadelphia, a ball suddenly fell from the sky and landed in an outfielder's glove. The umpire pointed at Gibson and shouted, "You're out -- yesterday in Pittsburgh!"

Beyond the embellished tales stood a brash, chatty, good-natured (though later brooding) 6-foot-1, 215-pound slugger. Irvin, who played against Gibson in the Negro Leagues and also in winter leagues in Puerto Rico, raved about his gigantic forearms and upper-body strength, long before steroid suspicions swirled around muscular sluggers.

Gibson even inspired other players to stop and watch him take batting practice, a precursor to the modern-day shows of Mark McGwire and Bonds. Gibson also hit for average, a reported .354 in his Negro Leagues career.

"Josh acted like a hitter, talked like a hitter, walked like a hitter," Irvin said. "He's the best hitter I've ever seen. He would come to the plate and you would be in awe."

Bonds, who declined an interview request for this story, learned about Gibson during a visit to the Negro Leagues Museum in June 2003, when the Giants were in Kansas City for an interleague series against the Royals. Bonds came away with renewed respect for what Negro Leaguers accomplished, even if their feats do not reside in baseball's official record book.

Bonds even suggested he doesn't own the single-season standard, despite his 73 home runs in 2001.

"No, in my heart it belongs to Josh Gibson," Bonds said in July 2003, referring to Gibson's 84 homers in 1936. "Why doesn't that count? Why don't any of those statistics count? ... If Josh Gibson is the home run king, recognize it."

That will not happen, for ample reason. The Negro Leagues were haphazard in keeping statistics, and their schedules included many exhibition games and others against semi-pro opponents. Historians such as Dixon and James A. Riley, the Negro Leagues Museum's director of research, say some games were akin to major-league competition and others weren't even close.

Gibson's only chance to square off against major leaguers came during barnstorming tours, a series of offseason exhibition games. He hit better than .400 in those games, but they were skewed, as legendary Negro Leaguer Buck O'Neil pointed out, because the Negro Leagues players wanted to prove their ability and the major leaguers mostly sought to avoid injury.

Dixon never has arrived at a definitive home-run total for Gibson's career; in 1931, when Gibson reportedly hit 70 homers, he actually didn't hit nearly that many, Dixon said. Riley contended Gibson probably did hit 962 homers in his career, but the total includes "a lot" of games against semi-pro and independent teams.

This immovable statistical cloud is the lone source of frustration for Sean Gibson, Josh's great-grandson and the caretaker of his legacy since Gibson's son, Josh Jr., died in 2003. Sean Gibson is philosophical about his great-grandfather's career, at peace with the fact Josh never had a chance to compete in the majors.

At least until the enduring home-run debate surfaces.

Three decades of war have devastated Afghanistan's cultural heritage. Warlords bombed and pilfered the national museum in the early 1990s. Looters plowed archaeological sites into moonscapes. And the Taliban committed the most monstrous act by demolishing two colossal ancient Buddhas carved into the cliffs in the Bamiyan valley.

The U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan, still busy fighting Islamic extremists more than four years after the Taliban were expelled, has devoted scant resources to protecting and restoring endangered heritage sites, American and Afghan scholars lamented at a recent conference at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

"With most of the country's attention on Iraq, I thought Afghanistan was in danger of being forgotten altogether," said C. Brian Rose, the Penn archaeology professor who organized the symposium late last month that featured the only public appearance in America by six visiting Afghan scholars.

It's hard to make out, because the video is fuzzy. The copy I obtained was originally recorded off a television using VHS in 1993 and then transferred to a second tape, further degrading the quality. But, once you know what it is, it makes sense. It sits folded on a bookcase of trophies and bric-a-brac behind George Allen, who is seated at a desk in his home office. It's right there next to the fax machine. You can see the red field. You can make out the diagonal blue bar. And you can see what looks like a white star. It is the Confederate flag, and it appears in the very first ad that Allen broadcast in 1993, when he ran for governor.

"The ad ran in the beginning of his campaign, when we were introducing him," says Allen's 1993 media consultant, Greg Stevens, who made the spot. Stevens denies that the flag was purposefully added to the scene, which lasts for ten seconds of the 60-second commercial, to appeal to pro-Confederate voters. "To be honest, this spot helped him enormously, and it had nothing to do with the Confederate flag," Stevens says, adding that any criticism about "a Confederate flag supposedly put there to subtly suggest to people that he is a Confederate" is "horseshit, and you can quote me on that."

TOWAOC - Though wildfires burned more than half of Mesa Verde National Park in the past decade, most of its famed cliff dwellings escaped serious damage, according to the latest results from the first comprehensive survey of those sites.
The southwestern Colorado park, near Cortez, is visited by about 500,000 people each year. Tourists are drawn mainly to the multistory masonry structures built in shady recesses, called alcoves, beneath overhanging sandstone cliffs.

Only a handful of the cliff dwellings are open to the public. But the 52,000-acre park contains nearly 600 of them, and rappelling park researchers are 10 years into an assessment of all of them.

A group of Toledo peace activists will take part tomorrow in ceremonies marking the 36th anniversary of the 1970 shootings at Kent State University.

Members of the Northwest Ohio Peace Coalition, which initially was formed to oppose the blanket bombing of Afghanistan, were to take about 2,700 tombstones to Kent, Ohio, and display them during tomorrow’s events.

The tombstones are to be placed on the Kent State soccer field where four students protesting the Vietnam War were shot to death on May 4, 1970, by Ohio National Guard troops. Another nine protesters were wounded in the incident, which became a defining moment of the anti-war movement.

The Marine opens with a line from ''Hamlet."
''I could a tale unfold," Matthew Bogdanos tells the 200 people gathered at Concordia College to hear how he stormed across war-torn Iraq with a handpicked band of brothers, all for the sake of stolen art.

As usual, Bogdanos doesn't use a microphone. It's too restrictive. His voice booms through the auditorium, a skill mastered during years as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan. He paces the room, clicking through slides of looted galleries and raided palaces, peppering his talk with quotes from Socrates, Voltaire, and Mark Twain.

The art world and the United Nations failed to respond in 2003, he contends, when fighting in Baghdad led to looting at the Iraq Museum. But don't blame the US military, he adds, punching the air with a finger. They were being shot at by Iraqi soldiers who took over the building, and had no choice but to retreat.

Jim said to David, "My nephew caused the shooting.'' He said Terry Norman was toting a camera on campus May 4th but also a gun. He was working as an FBI informant, taking photographs of student protesters. The students figured this out during the protest as he snapped pictures. They hated him. Some rushed him as he was taking photographs. Terry fired a warning shot into the air. Then the Guardsmen volley erupted.

As David was telling me about his conversation with Jim, I thought it was a plausible assessment of what happened. This is what Terry had been telling his relatives through the years. He's given no interview except one published May 5, 1970, by a Beacon Journal columnist, Mickey Porter. He told Porter he never fired the gun.

The testimony of many faculty, students and Guardsmen suggests that a single shot from a small-caliber weapon was heard just before the Guardsmen fired. Some said as many as four shots rang out; others disagreed. In all his statements to investigators, Terry said he didn't fire his gun.

On Sunday April 16, a gigantic pot was found in Kano city. It is about 129cm in height, 99cm in diameter, with a depth of 139cm, and the size of the flip is 50cm. It is estimated to have been buried over one thousand years ago. It was discovered in Gwammaja quarters of the Dala local government in Kano state. Charcoal, bones, suspected to belong to that of the cat family, clay and pot sherds were found in the pot, when it was excavated, and about 20 people gathered to remove it from the hole in the ground.

The archeologists who handled the excavation of the pot said it was buried at about 210 centimeters below the ground level.

Hunters and collectors are raiding the Lang Vac archaeological site in the central province of Nghe An on the rumor that a valuable bronze statue found there sold for millions of dong.

Over the past two months, hundreds of people in Nghia Hoa commune, Nghia Dan district made their way to Dong Hieu rubber tree plantation located in Lang Vac (Vac Village) to hunt for antiques.

The wave of collectors began after a rumor that a person found a pair of ancient elephant statues there and sold them in Hanoi for hundreds of millions of dong (one US dollar is worth just under VND16,000).

Nearly seven dozen Montana residents convicted of sedition during World War I are finally getting official pardons from the governor, years after their deaths.

In a ceremony Wednesday afternoon, Gov. Brian Schweitzer, the grandson of German-Russian immigrants, planned to sign posthumous pardons for 78 men and women convicted in 1918 and 1919 for criticizing the U.S. government or its war effort.

Relatives of some of those being pardoned were expected to attend.

Montana's Sedition Act, passed in 1918 but since repealed, was one of the harshest in the country and a basis for a national sedition law passed the same year.

Of those convicted, more than 40 were sent to state prison, said Clem Work, a University of Montana journalism professor whose book inspired the pardon effort.

UM law students spent months combing old court records and archives across the state to clear those convicted.

In one case, a 38-year-old traveling liquor salesman was arrested after he called wartime food regulations in the United States a "big joke" while talking with a Montana hotel owner in 1918. Less than a month later, he was in prison.

Another was a German immigrant who ended up serving two years in prison for suggesting that Americans "would have hard times" if Germany's kaiser "didn't get over here and rule this country."

In a letter to Schweitzer in late March, more than three dozen professors, lawyers and historians nationwide urged him to grant the pardons "to affirm Montana's commitment to free expression and to bring a measure of justice and redemption to these people and their living descendants."

At a time when President Bush’s public opinion polls are at an all time low, eight in ten history and political science professors rank President George W. Bush “below average” or “failure,” according to a new expert opinion poll by the Siena College Research Institute (SRI) released today. Furthermore, more than two-thirds of those surveyed think the President has no realistic chance of improving his rating.

The findings are the result of an expert opinion poll, in which SRI asked history and political science professors at colleges and universities across the nation to rank George W. Bush on a common scale for ranking American presidents developed by Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., more than half a century ago.



The Siena survey asked the experts –744 professors responded – this question: “George W. Bush has just finished five years as President. If today were the last day of his presidency, how would you rank him? The responses were: Great: 2%; Near Great: 5%; Average: 11%; Below Average: 24%; Failure: 58%.”



The experts were also asked, “In your judgment, do you think he has a realistic chance of improving his rating?” Two-thirds (67%) responded no; less than a quarter (23%) responded yes; and 10% chose no opinion or not applicable.



“While time is needed to fairly and accurately gauge how well any president ranks with his predecessors, George W. Bush starts with a ranking that could hardly be lower,” said Thomas Kelly, professor emeritus of American studies at Siena College.


“President Bush would seem to have small hope for high marks from the current generation of practicing historians and political scientists,” Kelly said. “In this case, current public opinion polls actually seem to cut the President more slack than the experts do.”

In 1982, SRI developed its own methodology for expert opinion ranking of the U.S. Presidents, and has repeated the survey after the first year of a President’s first term. The results have been reported in Presidential Studies Quarterly (a refereed journal published by the Center for the Study of the Presidency) and national, state and local media. SRI has also surveyed historians to rank the First Ladies.

“In our 2002 presidential rating, with a group of experts comparable to this current poll, President Bush ranked 23rd of 42 presidents,” said Dr. Douglas Lonnstrom, Siena College professor of statistics and director of the Siena Research Institute. “That was shortly after 9/11. Clearly, the professors do not think things have gone well for him in the past few years. These are the experts that teach college students today and will write the history of this era tomorrow,” Lonnstrom said.

There was a difference in response to the questions according to the academic discipline of the respondent.

“Two-thirds of history professors rate President Bush a failure while slightly less then half of political science professors do so,” Lonnstrom said. “Bush also scored lower with women and older professors.”

Two-fifths of the respondents provided written comments in addition to completing the survey.

Siena College is a liberal arts college located in Loudonville, New York, outside the state capital of Albany. Now in its 26th year, the Siena Research Institute (SRI) conducts regional, statewide and national surveys on historical, business, economic, political, voter, social, and academic issues. SRI also surveys experts in various fields for their opinions on a variety of topics..

Since it was published three years ago, Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" has become one of the most popular novels of all time, with more than 30 million copies in print worldwide. With a major movie based on the book due out soon, the book seems assured of a place on the bestseller lists for a considerable time to come. What has attracted readers to "The Da Vinci Code" is its central theme, which Dan Brown claims is not fiction but fact — that a mysterious European society, known as the Priory of Sion, has for centuries guarded a momentous secret. That secret, which is the theory at the heart of the novel, is that Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene and today their descendants are living in France. It's not surprising that this has incurred the wrath of many Christians, including the Vatican, while others have wondered if there might not be some truth to all of this.

The Hamilton Project is a group formed earlier this year by a gaggle of center-left economic worthies, including former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, to promote Clintonesque policy alternatives. The adoption of Hamilton's name, and the inclusion of John Snow's infinitely better-regarded predecessor, seems to carry the implicit message that the country would be in better shape if it had a real Treasury secretary.

It was all too much for Snow to bear. He quickly delivered a speech wrapping himself in Hamilton's mantle. "Hamilton, after all, was foremost among the founding fathers in seeing that the new republic's future depended upon the vitality of commerce and the private sector," argued Snow, "while the authors of the Hamilton Project argue for a larger government role."

He then boldly challenged his critics. "For those who criticize the economic policies of President Bush, I simply ask two things: Which of the facts about the current economic picture of growth and job creation do you dispute? And where is your plan for the future?"

From perusing the Hamilton Project's website, the answer to those questions is abundantly clear. It points out that although gross domestic product has risen, wages for workers in the middle have barely budged--and, anyway, large deficits eat away at future prosperity. As for the plan, it's laid out in detail on the site. If Snow isn't allowed to surf the Internet at work, I'll gladly print out a copy and mail it to him.

What apparently miffed him the most was the suggestion that Bill Clinton's policies tracked Hamilton more closely than Bush's do. In a subsequent interview, Snow tabbed himself a "lifelong student" of Hamilton. Returning to the subject last week in a cable TV interview, he insisted that "the authors of the Hamilton Project are misappropriating Mr. Hamilton." (Naturally, this argument also ended badly for Snow, as Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow declared that Rubin & Co. were right.)

Of course, it's impossible to definitively classify Hamilton--or his opponent, Thomas Jefferson--on the modern ideological spectrum. Hamilton favored more vigorous government to help spur commerce, winning him favor among the business elite. Jefferson favored smaller government and championed the little guy. That debate, however, took place in an era when government had historically been a tool of the rich. Today, government taxes more from the rich and gives more to the poor, which has flipped the alignments that prevailed in Hamilton's day.

George Westinghouse IV greeted archaeologist Christine Davis with a handshake and a question: "Did you find the grave?"

A startled look flashed over Davis' face. Last fall, she and her crew had done exploratory excavations on his great-grandfather's Point Breeze estate -- now Westinghouse Park -- and found a tantalizing array of artifacts, but no tombstones.

"What grave?" she ventured.

"Thomas Edison is buried in the back yard," Westinghouse said.

At that, the archaeologist and the heir had a good laugh.

The rivalry between Edison and Westinghouse is legendary. For about a decade in the late 19th century, the question of the day was, which of their systems would be the first to electrify the country -- direct current, promoted by Edison, or alternating current, developed by Nikola Tesla, who sold the patent to Westinghouse?

SALAMINA, Greece (Reuters) - On a deserted green hill above the Aegean Sea, archeologists have unearthed what may be the palace of Ajax, one of the greatest heroes in Greek mythology.

From a rocky outcrop among the tranquil ruins, it is easy to imagine the warrior-king of Homer's Iliad setting sail from the island for Troy over 3,300 years ago, as crowds lined the pine-covered slopes to wave farewell.

The idyllic location on Salamina island perfectly matches historical references, a fact which led archeologists to wonder whether the scattered stones here might have formed one the most famous kingdoms of pre-historic Greece.

An international archaeology team has discovered a royal tomb hidden inside a Maya pyramid in Guatemala.

After clearing debris left by looters, project co-director Hector Escobedo of Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, uncovered the collapsed royal tomb last week at the Maya center of Waka, along with a student, Juan Carlos Melendez.

The tomb likely dates from 200 to 400 A.D., says project co-director David Freidel of Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology took down a history course Web page after Chinese students complained about a 19th century wood-print image of Japanese soldiers beheading Chinese prisoners.

The complaints led to an apology from one of the professors teaching "Visualizing Cultures," which uses images from the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895.

The course was created by Pulitzer Prize-winning history professor John Dower and linguistics professor Shigeru Miyagawa, who posted an apology on his Web page.

"I deeply regret that some of the images on the Visualizing Cultures website have offended you," Miyagawa said. "This was never my intention. I am genuinely sorry that this has caused you pain."

The Web site was pulled Tuesday and the school hosted a forum Wednesday for students, particularly those from the Chinese community, to voice concerns.

Related Links

Inside Higher Education

Japan's government is stepping up pressure on North Korea to help resolve the fate of Japanese nationals abducted by North Korean agents three decades ago, a senior Japanese official said yesterday.
Vice Foreign Minister Akiko Yamanaka said the Bush administration is strongly supporting Tokyo's efforts to find out what happened to the missing Japanese.
Mrs. Yamanaka and the mother of one of the abducted Japanese met with President Bush yesterday.
Mr. Bush voiced support for resolving the abduction issue and also for doing more to help defectors from North Korea get out of the reclusive communist state.