Archaeologists have discovered pottery bearing inscriptions dating back 4,500 years, which could prove to be China's earliest example of written language.

These pottery fragments, found in the ruins of an ancient city in Huaiyang County of Henan Province, are believed to be parts of a spinning wheel, according to a report released by the county government.

A photo, posted on the local government's website, showed a piece of black pottery bearing white strokes. The fragment formed half of a round spinning wheel, with a diameter of 4.7 centimeters and a thickness of 1.1 centimeters.

In his review of “ ‘All Governments Lie’: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone” (Oct. 1), Paul Berman suggests that Myra MacPherson “accidentally hanged” her man by repeating Oleg Kalugin’s remark that Stone was “willing to perform tasks” for the Soviets. As the first reporter to investigate Kalugin’s charges in the course of researching my own biography of Stone, to be finished later this year, perhaps I can supply some context:

Kalugin originally made reference to an unnamed American “agent” in the spring of 1992, when he was trying — without much luck — to peddle his memoirs. The former K.G.B. general’s remarks were soon circulated by Accuracy in Media and other pressure groups, this time with Stone’s name attached. In June 1992, Kalugin told me, “I did not recruit him [Stone] and I did not pay him money,” and later added that he “just met [Stone] in line with my official duties” as a Soviet press officer. He made the same points to Andrew Brown, who wrote an account of the affair in The New York Review of Books, and to Martin Garbus, an attorney who attended a conference with Kalugin in Moscow in September 1992. Yet Kalugin, who is well aware of the way Soviet intelligence used the word “tasks” for a variety of unsavory activities, now deploys it in conversation with MacPherson.

This controversy is really part of an argument over Venona, the National Security Agency’s program of intercepting and deciphering K.G.B. cable traffic. First declassified in 1996, the Venona decrypts tell us that a K.G.B. agent, working in Washington in 1944, tried to recruit a journalist, codenamed Blin, who might have been Stone. It is far from certain that Blin was Stone. But even if you accept that he was, all we know from Venona, as Ronald Radosh (a historian hardly likely to collude in a left-wing whitewash) told me, is “that one agent in the States says he approached Izzy and that Izzy was interested but was worried about taking the money. Even that could be attributed to [the] agent’s desire to impress his boss.”

Lunching with reporters was Kalugin’s job. Who paid generally depended on who initiated the encounter. Stone knew perfectly well his own lunches would be noticed — indeed, he told Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover’s biographer, that he made a point of meeting the Russian at Harvey’s, the F.B.I. director’s “favorite restaurant.”

I. F. Stone was a mensch, not a Menshevik, and might well have been amused by the spectacle of Paul Berman, who rightly denounces all of Stalin’s works, rushing to endorse the manipulations of one of his secret policemen. Oleg Gordievsky, another ex-K.G.B. hustler, made similar charges about the British politician Michael Foot. But Gordievsky was foolish enough to make them while Foot was still alive, and his publisher had to pay substantial libel damages.

Great historical events can spring from small slights. Kaiser Wilhelm never forgave the French for not treating him to a parade in Paris. "The monarchs of Europe have paid no attention to what I have to say," the German emperor whined before setting the Continent aflame in 1914. By many accounts, North Korea's Kim Jong Il also suffers from a tender ego. For one thing the 5-foot-3 dictator is sensitive about his height (hence, one suspects, his bouffant hairstyle and elevator shoes). After ordering the kidnapping of a South Korean actress, Choe Eun Hee, in 1978 to help him start up a national film industry, the first thing the movie-mad Kim jokingly asked her at a welcoming dinner was: "Well, Madame, what do you think of my physique?" More painfully, he fears that in the eyes of his countrymen and allies, he can never match the achievements of his revered father, the "Great Leader" Kim Il Sung (who was close to six feet tall and who led a guerrilla army against the Japanese occupiers in the 1930s). By many accounts, the young Kim is fed up along with his top aides, who often reflect his views. "What I hear is, Big Brother is telling Little Brother, 'Don't do that'," the North Korean vice minister of Foreign Affairs, Kim Gye Gwan, complained when Beijing urged Kim Jong Il to cancel his planned missile tests in July. "But we are not boys. We are a nuclear power."...

... Last week's half-kiloton explosion was the product of an effort spanning a half century or more. It is difficult to pinpoint the precise moment Kim Il Sung decided he needed the Bomb and a ballistic-missile program to go with it. But the ambition was in keeping with his deep insecurity going back to the dubious origins of his regime.

North Korea, after all, is an invented country, a relic of the cold-war divide. After the World War II defeat of Japan, which had occupied Korea, the regime was created by Stalin in 1945 out of the northern half of the Korean Peninsula, and Moscow propped up Kim Il Sung as a strongman. The Americans, meanwhile, built their client state in the southern half. Both sides never gave up their claims to the whole peninsula, putting them on a permanent war footing. To consolidate power, Kim created a cultlike ideology of self-reliance called juche, a curdled brew of traditional Korean xenophobia and nationalism, Confucian deference to authority and utopian Marxism-Leninism. Some experts argue that Kim decided he needed a nuclear security blanket soon after the 1950-53 Korean War, which he battled to a draw. Then came the early 1970s, when he realized he was losing the economic contest against his blood enemies in Seoul, and after that the Soviet Union disintegrated—a failure that suddenly left Pyongyang without a communist patron or a nuclear umbrella to shield it. An increasingly paranoid Kim Il Sung also sponsored many acts of terrorism against the South, including the alleged sabotaging of a Korean Airlines plane in 1987, killing all 115 passengers and crew, the year before the Seoul Olympic Games. And he taught his son well.

Driven by two men with near-absolute power, North Korea's program was produced by a staggering cast of characters. They included idealistic Korean scientists educated in Imperial Japan and repatriated after World War II, their students educated in the Soviet Union and the thousands of homegrown technicians. Japan, one of the North's hardiest enemies today, gave Pyongyang the man deemed the"first father" of North Korea's nuclear program, the late scientist and inventor Lee Sung Ki, who earned a degree in chemical engineering at Kyoto Imperial University in 1931. In fact, despite its deep isolation, the Hermit Kingdom is known or suspected to have received nuclear assistance from 14 countries: Russia, China, Austria, France, Canada, Romania, Germany, Pakistan, India, Japan, Iran, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

There were privateers, too: defectors, Chinese technology firms, Japanese trading houses and front companies scattered from Thailand to Scandinavia—all provided critical technologies, components or know-how by circumventing a global nonproliferation regime designed to thwart such commerce. Even the International Atomic Energy Agency unwittingly helped: analysts say a single North Korean diplomat, Choi Hak Gun, who was posted to IAEA headquarters in Vienna from 1974 to 1978, scoured the agency's library for nuclear know-how.

The human costs of North Korea's nuclear ambitions on the nation's best and brightest were terrible. Few paid a higher price than Kimchaek University's class of '62, according to a grad who defected from North Korea several years ago and told NEWSWEEK his story. As graduation at the elite college neared more than 40 years ago, the buzz on campus was that Kim Il Sung had ordered construction of an advanced research facility to study atomic energy, and that patriotic young scientists soon would be mobilized to work there."Our professors really pushed the need for nuclear development," he recalls."The rumor circulating among students was that those of us sent there wouldn't have long to live."

The defector, spared the fate of those assigned to nuclear labs, spent his adult life watching unlucky classmates grow sick, weak and despondent. On leave, one confided a Confucian desperation to marry and sire children before radiation rendered him sterile."It was exactly what we feared," the defector says, still saddened by their sacrifice."These guys went bald. Many of them lost their eyebrows. Some of them had constant nosebleeds. They looked so weak it was hard to even face them. The thinking was, 'If one scientist falls there will always be others to take his place'." That logic not only ravaged a generation of scientists sent like worker bees into toxic nuclear labs. It cost billions in hard currency that might have fed starving people and hobbled the national economy by imposing perpetual austerity under slogans like"Military first."

THE remains of a 2000-year-old city have been discovered under Inverness and it is being hailed as one of the most important recent discoveries in Scotland.

The find near Inverness Royal Academy was uncovered by a team who spent almost a year excavating the remains of seven large roundhouses and almost a dozen iron kilns.

Last year The Inverness Courier revealed the team from Headland Archaeology had uncovered the ancient city's "industrial estate" where iron was smelted, bronze was cast and glass was produced.

But at the weekend, at the final event of the Highland Archaeology Fortnight, archaeologist Ross Murray gave further details about what he and his colleagues had discovered so far about the city that once stood at the eastern end of the Great Glen.

The discovery was made during archaeological examinations of the Nordheim Farm, which is near the Hedrum Church in Larvik. The examinations were ordered in connection with the pending expansion of the cemetery around Hedrum Church, which is located a few hours' drive south of Oslo.

Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) reported that archaeologists also found indications that another ship is buried in the same area.

Archaeologist Knut Paasche has been examining the area around Nordheim Farm, near Hedrum, for Vestfold County officials. He called Tuesday's discovery "important and interesting," but said it was too early to say whether the ship could be excavated intact.

PAINTING kept in a church attic and thought to be a copy of a masterpiece by Caravaggio is an unfinished work by the artist, according to Italian experts.

The Crowning with Thorns, now on display at the church of San Bartolomeo della Certosa in Genoa, has been restored by art experts who say they detect Caravaggio’s “unmistakable style” in the figure of Christ.

The cabinet does not think the Swiss anti-racism law should be changed - despite comments by the justice minister, Christoph Blocher, to the contrary. Blocher, a leading light of the rightwing Swiss People's Party, had remarked during his Turkish trip that part of the anti-racism law - which was adopted in 1994 and includes sections aimed at preventing revisionist views about the Holocaust - gave him a "headache".

The law has led to investigations in Switzerland against two Turks, including one historian, for allegedly denying the 1915 Armenian
massacre.

Armenians say around 1.8 million of their people died as a result of a forced mass evacuation by the Turkish government during the Ottoman
Empire. Turkey puts the figure closer to 200,000.
Under Swiss law any act of denying, belittling or justifying genocide is a violation of the country's anti-racism legislation.

However, Blocher said at the time that it was ultimately up to the government, parliament and possibly the population, to decide on any changes.

According to Leuenberger, Blocher has told his cabinet colleagues that a working group at his ministry was already re-examining the law, in particular article 261bis, the cause of Blocher's headache.

The justice minister was ready to include a member of the Federal Commission Against Racism in this work, Leuenberger added, refusing to any further questions on the matter - which caused a media and
political outcry in Switzerland - saying the content of cabinet meetings was confidential.

For his part, Blocher, speaking at a different media conference earlier in the day, said he was simply waiting for the feedback from his working group by the end of the year.

"It's about making the anti-racism law clearer, more secure and unambiguous," he said.

Can scholars build a better version of Wikipedia? Larry Sanger, a co-founder who has since become a critic of the open-source encyclopedia, intends to find out.

This week Mr. Sanger announced the creation of the Citizendium, an online, interactive encyclopedia that will be open to public contributors but guided by academic editors. The site aims to give academics more authorial control -- and a less combative environment -- than they find on Wikipedia, which affords all users the same editing privileges, whether they have any proven expertise or not.

The Citizendium, whose name is derived from "citizen's compendium," will soon start a six-week pilot project to determine many of its basic rules and operating procedures.

Washington, DC, October 16, 2006 - The CIA's reliance on high-level informants including the President and a future President of Mexico for "intelligence" about the student protest movement in 1968 that culminated in the infamous Tlatelolco massacre misled Washington about responsibility for the repression, according to documents obtained by journalist Jefferson Morley and posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

The declassified U.S. documents reveal CIA recruitment of agents within the upper echelons of the Mexican government between 1956 and 1969. The informants used in this secret program included President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and future President Luis Echeverría. The documents detail the relationships cultivated between senior CIA officers, such as chief of station Winston Scott, and Mexican government officials through a secret spy network code-named "LITEMPO." Operating out of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, Scott used the LITEMPO project to provide "an unofficial channel for the exchange of selected sensitive political information which each government wanted the other to receive but not through public protocol exchanges."

This posting also includes the article "The CIA's Eyes on Tlatelolco," written by Morley and published in the October 1, 2006 edition of Proceso magazine. The article uses first-hand accounts from former associates, friends and family of Winston Scott, detailing how Scott relied on his friendships with Díaz Ordaz, Echeverría and other senior Mexican officials to inform Washington about the student movement whose demands challenged the government's monopoly on power.

The newly-declassified U.S. government documents and interviews shed new light on the CIA reporting on the terrible events of 1968. Winston Scott's reliance on powerful government officials for information led to one-sided reporting on the student movement of 1968, ending in the 2 October massacre in Tlatelolco. Scott relied on the government's version of the Tlatelolco killings, reporting as "intelligence information" its fictional accounts of the events.

"When the Tlatelolco crisis exploded, the CIA's Mexico station could not deliver the goods," said Kate Doyle, Director of the Archive's Mexico Project. "Jefferson Morley's important research reveals that instead of independently collecting information and analyzing what happened, the agency served as stenographer for its friends and allies in the Mexican government. As a result, the CIA helped protect Mexico's ruling party from bearing responsibility for the massacre, and delivered a muddled and misleading account of it to Washington."

[Mr. Moore, a political consultant with Gorton Moore International, trained Iraqi researchers for the International Republican Institute from 2003 to 2004 and conducted survey research for the Coalition Forces from 2005 to 2006.]

After doing survey research in Iraq for nearly two years, I was surprised to read that a study by a group from Johns Hopkins University claims that 655,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the war. Don't get me wrong, there have been far too many deaths in Iraq by anyone's measure; some of them have been friends of mine. But the Johns Hopkins tally is wildly at odds with any numbers I have seen in that country. Survey results frequently have a margin of error of plus or minus 3% or 5%--not 1200%.

The group--associated with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health--employed cluster sampling for in-person interviews, which is the methodology that I and most researchers use in developing countries. Here, in the U.S., opinion surveys often use telephone polls, selecting individuals at random. But for a country lacking in telephone penetration, door-to-door interviews are required: Neighborhoods are selected at random, and then individuals are selected at random in "clusters" within each neighborhood for door-to-door interviews. Without cluster sampling, the expense and time associated with travel would make in-person interviewing virtually impossible.

However, the key to the validity of cluster sampling is to use enough cluster points. In their 2006 report, "Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional sample survey," the Johns Hopkins team says it used 47 cluster points for their sample of 1,849 interviews. This is astonishing: I wouldn't survey a junior high school, no less an entire country, using only 47 cluster points.

Neither would anyone else. For its 2004 survey of Iraq, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) used 2,200 cluster points of 10 interviews each for a total sample of 21,688. True, interviews are expensive and not everyone has the U.N.'s bank account. However, even for a similarly sized sample, that is an extraordinarily small number of cluster points. A 2005 survey conducted by ABC News, Time magazine, the BBC, NHK and Der Spiegel used 135 cluster points with a sample size of 1,711--almost three times that of the Johns Hopkins team for 93% of the sample size....

Related Links

Eric Alterman: 655,000 dead: reporting the reporting

The solution to the darkest of all Agatha Christie mysteries may be at hand. What lay behind her extraordinary 11-day disappearance in 1926? Several plausible theories have competed for favour over the years, but biographer Andrew Norman believes he is the first to find one that satisfies every element of the case.

In his study of the writer's life published this autumn, Norman uses medical case studies to show that Christie was in the grip of a rare but increasingly acknowledged mental condition known as a 'fugue state', or a period of out-of-body amnesia induced by stress. In effect, the writer was in a kind of trance for several days, he claims.

The mystery, which has puzzled both the police and Christie fans for 80 years, is a why-dunnit, rather than a who-dunnit. It began on the evening of Friday 3 December at Styles, the Berkshire home of the crime writer, by then already an established name, with a sixth novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, selling well. Around 9.45pm, without warning, she drove away from the house, having first gone upstairs to kiss her sleeping daughter, Rosalind. Her abandoned Morris Cowley was later found down a slope at Newlands Corner near Guildford. There was no sign of her.

Nine Neolithic-era buildings have been excavated in the Stonehenge world heritage site, according to a report in the journal British Archaeology.

The structures, which appear to have been homes, date to 2,600-2,500 B.C. and were contemporary with the earliest stone settings at the site's famous megalith. They are the first house-like structures discovered there.

Julian Thomas, who worked on the project and is chair of the archaeology department at Manchester University in England, said Stonehenge could have been a key gathering place at the Neolithic era's version of a housing development.

Excavations in the Harran district of Şanlıurfa have uncovered a stamp dating back to 4,000-5,000 B.C., said the excavation leader on Saturday, reported the Anatolia news agency.

Harran excavation team leader Nurettin Yardımcı said the excavations have been ongoing since 1983 and that recent work in the area has focused on the Harran tumulus and Ulu Cami as well as the Neolithic settlement of Tellidris.

“Our work has indicated that the first inhabitants of Harran lived in Tellidris, dating back to around 8,000 B.C. We found some stamps with different shapes and motifs as well as a bull figure dating back to 6,000 B.C. in last year's excavations. The findings showed that the people of Harran and Tellidris lived together around 9,000-10,000 years ago and that the people in Tellidris abandoned it and moved to the Harran tumulus area in later years,” he said.

A letter documenting the famous Christmas Day truce of 1914 when guns fell silent along the Western Front, and feuding German and British soldiers engaged in a friendly soccer match in the icy mud of No Man's Land in France, has been found 92 years after it was first written.

The letter, written in the British trenches by a British private, details the truce when the Kaiser's soldiers and British Tommies exchanged pleasantries and celebrated Christmas together, and engaged in what was to become famous as the world's only friendly football match between enemy soldiers during a war.

Written in pencil on five pages of paper torn from an Army-issue notebook, the private he tells his "dear Mater" how on a frosty, moonlit Christmas Eve the Germans began placing "lights all along the edge of their trenches and coming over to us - wishing us Happy Christmas etc".

He says it is "the most memorable Christmas" he has ever spent or is likely to spend: "since about teatime yesterday, not a shot has been fired on either side up to now".

"They also gave us a few songs so we had quite a social party...Some of our chaps went over to their lines. I think they've all come back bar one from E Co. They no doubt kept him as a souvenir," the letter goes on to say.

"After breakfast we had a game of football at the back of our trenches! We've had a few Germans over to see us this morning. They also sent a party over to bury a sniper we shot in the week. He was about 100 yds from our trench. A few of our fellows went out and helped to bury him.

"About 10.30 we had a short church parade, held in the trench. How we did sing. O come all ye faithful".

The private identified only as a boy, further says that at night German and British soldiers had a joint Christmas dinner comprising "fried bacon and dip-bread followed by hot Xmas pudding, then muscatels and almonds, oranges, bananas, chocolate, cocoa and smokes".

"You can guess we thought of the dinners at home. Just before dinner I had the pleasure of shaking hands with several Germans: a party of them came halfway over to us. So several of us went out to them. O exchanged one of my balaclavas for a hat. I've also got a button off one of their tunics. We also exchanged smokes etc and had a decent chat. They say they won't fire tomorrow if we don't, so I suppose we shall get a bit of a holiday - perhaps," the letter says.

"After exchanging autographs and them wishing us a Happy New Year we departed and came back and had our dinner. We can hardly believe we've been firing at them for the last week or two - it all seems so strange. At present it is freezing hard and everything is covered in ice...

"There must be something in the spirit of Christmas as today we are all on top of our trenches running about. Whereas other days we have to keep out heads well down...I had a parcel from B G's Lace Dept containing a sweater, smokes, under clothes etc. We also had a card from the Queen, which I am sending back to you to look after please," he further says.

Near the end of the well-thumbed letter, he tells his mother: "As I can't explain to everyone how I spent my 25th, you might hand this round please...I never expected to shake hands with Germans between the firing lines on Christmas Day and I don't suppose you thought of us doing so".

"So after a fashion we've enjoyed? our Christmas. Hoping you spend a happy time with George Boy as well. How we thought of England during the day. Kind regards to all the neighbours. With much love from Boy," the letter concludes.

Historian Felix Pryor, manuscripts consultant to auctioneers Bonhams, who is offering the letter for sale on November 7, has termed it as "a desperately poignant - almost surreal - document".

"I have never in my career seen anything like it. To find a letter written home on the actual day of one of the most famous incidents in military history is amazing," The Times quoted him as saying.

"The envelope is missing and the intensely moving letter has long since been separated from the sender's family. It is therefore, quite literally, the work of an Unknown Soldier," Pryor added.

In the historic and unique truce, firing stopped along the entire 500 miles of the Western front. The Germans sang "Stille nacht, heilige nach" (Silent night, holy night), while the British responded with as rendition of 'O Come all ye Faithful'.

In one sector, the Germans produced a Christmas tree and staged the famous football match. In some areas, the truce lasted only one day; in others in continued until close to the New Year.

The letter was discovered in a box of otherwise undistinguished manuscripts, and is expected to fetch around 500 - 1000 pounds at auction.

In late August, just over a week before Princess Kiko gave birth, Newsweek Japan commissioned this freelance journalist to contribute an article on the succession issue. With most of the country expecting a baby boy, the remit was to write a ‘very outspoken, opinionated’ piece on how ‘foreign experts’ viewed the latest developments in Japan’s imperial drama, with the emphasis on a single rhetorical question: wouldn’t a girl be better?

In November 2005, as the debate on changing the Imperial Household Law to allow a female monarch raged, we had written a cover story titled “Does Japan Need its Imperial Family” (in Japanese: Koshitsu wa hontou ni hitsuyou), which explored among other things why Japan appeared to be unique among the world’s remaining monarchies in forbidding female rule. That article criticized Japan’s Big Media for stifling debate.

It is ironic then that during the translation process for the latest article, which was also projected to be a cover story, Newsweek declined to publish. The chief editor explained in an e-mail that he couldn’t run the piece as planned on September 6th, the scheduled date of Princess Kiko’s Cesarean birth. That effectively meant it would never see the light of day because after the birth it would lose all news value.
Was the chief editor surprised by the content? I had sent a detailed proposal to Newsweek before starting, and later a list of interviewees and a full copy of the article’s introduction. Throughout the week, e-mails from the commissioning editor had told me to move ahead, with specific instructions to shorten the introduction or seek out more quotes. On final delivery, she said she was very happy with the piece.

The problem, as the chief editor explained later, is that the article would have been sharply at odds with the mood of the country on the very day the new heir arrived. Yet as he also said, hinting at pressure from above, this was exactly the sort of independent niche role Newsweek had carved for itself. Moreover, support for a male heir was far from universal, as anyone who dragged his or her eyes away from the fawning TV coverage to talk to ordinary Japanese people quickly discovered. Indeed, given that one survey carried out before the Kiko pregnancy reported that 84 percent of the country supported a female emperor it is quite possible that ours was the majority view....