Donny George gave a lecture at the British Museum this evening. He was introduced by Neil MacGregor, and the news is that he will be moving from Damascus to Stony Brook University, New York. Elizabeth Stone, who has done a great deal of work on Iraqi archaeology, teaches there, and will help him continue his work.

Can young people learn anything new by visiting Auschwitz in a world where TV is full of documentaries about history's definitive atrocity, where Holocaust literature is everywhere, and where the curriculum groans under the weight of Nazi Germany and its crimes?

Gordon Brown and the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET) certainly think so. The Chancellor of the Exchequer recently received an award from the trust for his personal commitment to Holocaust education in the UK. >From February 2007, with the help of £1.5m in Treasury funding, the trust is hoping to take two sixth-formers from each school in the UK - more than 6,000 students - to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau within three years.

But not everyone agrees with the idea, arguing that it is an odd use of taxpayers' money - albeit a relatively small amount - and that there are other ways to teach children about atrocities. The critics also complain that it keeps Britain locked in an old-fashioned 60-year-old mindset about Germany and about British relationships with that country when, in reality, they have changed beyond all recognition.

Walking around the camp on a bitter November day with a large group of remarkably composed 16- and 17-year-olds, Kay Andrews, head of education for HET, explains the value of showing students something of the scale of the Holocaust. "Coming to Auschwitz brings home the mechanics of the Nazi death machine, which is what made the Holocaust such a unique event," she says. "Often the students don't become emotional about their experiences while they're here, but by the time of our post-trip seminar, after reflecting on what they've seen and trying to express it to their family and friends, they're more affected."

To gain American citizenship, immigrants must be able to answer such questions as: What was the 49th state added to our Union? What color are the stars on our flag? And who wrote the Star Spangled Banner?

Sound trivial? The US government thinks so, and plans to roll out a new pilot test this winter.

It will continue to be an oral test, conducted in English, and will have 10 questions. Six correct answers will earn a passing grade. But the content, which is tightly under wraps, is expected to shun simple historical facts about America that can be recounted in a few words for more explanation about the principles of American democracy, such as freedom.

The changes raise the bar - critics say too high - for immigrants to show not only that they care enough to study for a test, but also that they understand and share American values. Behind the shift is rising anxiety among Americans about high levels of immigration and European troubles with large, unassimilated communities, say observers.

"Whenever there is a large number of immigrants, people talk about having an assimilation policy," says John Fonte, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a think tank in Washington. "We've always had an Americanization policy of some type [but] we haven't so much in the last 20, 30 years.... I'd see this as continuing that tradition, which Europe did not do."

Andy Warhol's Jackies, Maos, Marilyns and flowers may be the stars of the New York contemporary-art auctions that start tomorrow and could total $500 million. Collectors said the pop artist's icons have become a refuge from uncertainty as prices rise.

``Warhol is like Microsoft,'' said New York private dealer Alberto Mugrabi, who aims to augment his Warhol holdings this week. ``He is an artist who has overachieved, and he is not going to go away if the market goes up and down.'' Mugrabi's fellow collectors include the billionaires Eli Broad and Laurence Graff.

About $80 million of Warhols are on the block at Sotheby's, Christie's International and Phillips de Pury & Co. That's more than all the artist's painted pictures traded in 2006's first six months, said the auction tracker Artnet AG. Warhol's paintings cost 4.2 times as much as in 1997, including a 30 percent jump in the first nine months of 2006, said the data service Artprice.com.

At Christie's on Nov. 15, ``Sixteen Jackies,'' a 1964 group of images of the late U.S. First Lady, has a top estimate of $18 million or more. ``Orange Marilyn,'' a 1962 canvas of the film star colored with polymer and silkscreen inks, has a $15 million top estimate. ``Mao,'' a 1972 portrait of China's late leader, painted partly with a mop, is being sold by Switzerland's Daros Collection at a $12 million high value.

Twenty-five Bay Area historic sites will share $1 million in cash grants as the result of an unusual electronic vote and a review by a panel of experts....

The final decision about how much money each site got was made by a panel of experts who considered historical significance and need along with the number of votes. ...

The online election, which National Trust Vice President David Brown said was inspired by the television show "American Idol," ran from mid-September until Oct. 31.

The archaic human species that dominated Europe until 30,000 years ago is about to emerge from the shadows. With the help of a new DNA sequencing machine that operates with firefly light, the bones of the Neanderthals have begun to tell their story to geneticists.

One million units of Neanderthal DNA have already been analyzed, and a draft version of the entire genome, 3.2 billion units in length, should be ready in two years, said Dr. Svante Paabo, the leader of the research project at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Biologists expect knowledge of the Neanderthal genome to reveal, by its differences with the human genome, many distinctive qualities of what it means to be human. Researchers also hope to resolve such questions as whether the Neanderthals spoke, their hair and skin color, and whether they interbred at all with the modern humans who first arrived on their doorstep 45,000 years ago, or were driven to extinction without leaving any genetic legacy.

Dr. Paabo has shared some of his precious sample of Neanderthal DNA with Edward M. Rubin of the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, Calif., whose team has identified 62,250 units of Neanderthal DNA by a different method. The two teams report their results in this week’s issues of the journals Nature and Science respectively, saying they have independently demonstrated that recovery of the Neanderthal genome is now possible.

Racism and ignorance churn on college campuses as surely as they do in society at large, with a number of high-profile incidents each year serving as a ready reminder lest anyone forget. In fact, experts say, some of the incidents stem from a type of cultural forgetfulness — and a sense among certain students, sometimes willful, sometimes not, that they live in a world wherein it is no longer relevant to remember.

“Some of it is deliberately hostile, from the stories that I’ve read, but some of the incidents are motivated out of a kind of racial ignorance,” said Nina Lerman, chair of the history department and director of the race and ethnic studies program at Whitman College, in Washington, the site of a daylong seminar on race last week after students painted their skin black for a party. “Many white students believe that civil rights kind of fixed things, and that we’re supposed to live in a colorblind society. They don’t understand that there’s this history of offensiveness that still lives.”

“It’s a particular moment. As we live through our multiculturalism, at the same time, we are becoming rather distant and removed from some of the history of how we got to where we are,” said Ben Vinson, director of the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University, the location of another controversial race-related incident this year. “Because you’re distant from the history, there’s a comfort level in expressing images or symbols that can be offensive to one group.”

Three dozen antique maps worth about $1 million are still missing from the Boston Public Library from books and atlases used by a dealer convicted of stealing rare maps from libraries in five cities. Thirty-four of the library's maps have already been recovered.

Library officials released a detailed list of the missing documents to map dealers Wednesday, in case they show up on the market."We'll shine the bright light and see if some of these things out there can find their way home," Bernard Margolis, president of the Boston Public Library, told The Boston Globe.

The books containing the missing maps were used by E. Forbes Smiley III, a rare maps dealer with a home on Martha's Vineyard. In September, Smiley was sentenced in federal court in New Haven, Conn., to three years in prison for stealing nearly 100 rare maps worth about $3 million from libraries in five cities, including Boston, New York and London.

The Chinese and Japanese foreign ministers today agreed to a joint study on the nations' different interpretations of history - particularly the second world war - that have bedevilled bilateral relations.

A Japanese official said Taro Aso and his Chinese counterpart, Li Zhaoxing, had taken the decision at a meeting in the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi.

The two countries will each set up a team of 10 historians to study ancient, wartime and modern history, with the results due in 2008.

History textbooks used in Japan have been a regular source of friction between Tokyo and neighbouring China and South Korea.

Last year, both Beijing and Seoul made diplomatic protests when the Japanese government approved a new edition of a previously criticised history textbook.

The book was condemned for glossing over atrocities committed by Japanese troops in Asia and leaving out the story of women being sexually enslaved by members of the imperial army during the 1930s and 1940s.

The Japanese government's decision to approve the new edition triggered anti-Japanese demonstrations in both China and South Korea.

Japan said the text did not represent the government's official view, and the book has been widely shunned. Published by the rightwing company Fusosha, it is used in less than 1% of Japanese schools.

China takes particular exception to the book's description of the 1937-38 Nanjing massacre - when Japanese troops killed an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 people - as an "incident".

The book also says Japan's actions during the second world war were motivated by "self-preservation" and a desire to liberate Asia from western control.

Even as China and Japan were seeking to take the sting out of the controversy, Japan's lower house of parliament today passed a contentious bill encouraging teachers to instil patriotism and respect for tradition in their students.

The legislation - which will now go to the upper house - would change the country's education law for the first time since it was enacted in 1947. It calls for "an attitude that respects tradition and culture and love of the national homeland that has fostered them".

Shinzo Abe, the new and hawkish Japanese prime minister, said a revision of the education law would promote patriotism and discipline in schools.

Conservative MPs argue that the current education law has put too much emphasis on respect for individuality and development of individual personality, allowing students and teachers to indulge in too much freedom at schools.

Opponents fear the move could stoke a resurgence of nationalism. They point to Japan's past, when military leaders used patriotism to justify the expansionism that helped bring on the second world war.

President Bush travels to Vietnam this week for a summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. He's the second U.S. president to visitcommunist Vietnam since the war ended in 1975.

In Vietnam, the publication of a wartime diary written by an idealistic young doctor has captured the imagination of readers, and become a runaway best-seller. The diary of Dang Thuy Tram was rescued from destruction by an American soldier.

In December 1969, Frederick Whitehurst was stationed in Quang Ngai province, in what was then South Vietnam. Assigned to the 635th Military Intelligence Detachment near Duc Pho, he was burning captured enemy documents that seemed to have no military value.

Whitehurst and Nguyen Trung Hieu, his South Vietnamese interpreter, were standing by a 55-gallon drum.

"I'm throwing things in there and they're burning, and over my left shoulder, and I remember this, Nguyen Trung Hieu was looking at the diary and said, 'Fred, don't burn this. It has fire in it already,'" Whitehurst says.

The diary was that of 27-year-old Dang Thuy Tram.

"My interpreter was a very loyal soldier to the southern government," Whitehurst says. "The fact that he would put himself at risk by saying 'Don't destroy her words' was very impressive to me. And if you read just very quickly into the diary four and five pages, you can see this is something that needs to be preserved."

Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Philip, will visit Jamestown in May to celebrate the historic settlement's 400th anniversary.

The queen announced the visit in a speech today launching a new session of the British Parliament.

At about the same time, President Bush released a statement welcoming the royal couple "for a state visit to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Jamestown Settlement.

Fox plans to broadcast an interview with O.J. Simpson in which the former football star discusses "how he would have committed" the slayings of his ex-wife and her friend, for which he was acquitted, the network said.

The two-part interview, titled "O.J. Simpson: If I Did It, Here's How It Happened," will air Nov. 27 and Nov. 29, the TV network said.

Simpson has agreed to an "unrestricted" interview with book publisher Judith Regan, Fox said.

"O.J. Simpson, in his own words, tells for the first time how he would have committed the murders if he were the one responsible for the crimes," the network said in a statement. "In the two-part event, Simpson describes how he would have carried out the murders he has vehemently denied committing for over a decade."

A leading Holocaust research institute is challenging a museum's suggestion that paintings created by an Auschwitz prisoner really belong to the infamous Nazi war criminal, Dr. Josef Mengele.

The controversy concerns portraits that Mengele forced Auschwitz prisoner Dina Babbitt to paint of Gypsy prisoners on whom he was performing sadistic medical experiments.  (Mrs. Babbitt, now 83, resides in northern California.)  The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, in Poland, later acquired seven of the paintings from a private source but has refused to return them to Mrs. Babbitt on the grounds that they are a necessary part of the museum's exhibits.

But now, in a surprising twist, the new director of the Auschwitz museum is strongly implying that the paintings belong to Dr. Mengele.  In an email to Maura McDermott of the Newark-Star Ledger, director Piotr Cywinski wrote that the paintings "have never been [Mrs. Babbitt's] property. They were made on the order and for the use of ... Mengele."  (Toronto Star, Nov. 11, 2006)

Cywinski's statement is reminiscent of a letter Mrs. Babbitt received from an official of the Auschwitz Museum in 1973, in which he wrote, "if anyone has a right to these paintings, it's Dr. Mengele, but I doubt he will pick them up." (KLAS-TV, Dec. 3, 2001)

Dr. Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, said:  "The museum's implication is shocking and offensive.  Josef Mengele was an infamous war criminal, not a patron of the arts.  He did not commission the portraits--he ordered her to paint them, and she knew Mengele could murder her if she refused.  A war criminal does not deserve to enjoy the fruits of his crimes.  The paintings do not belong to Mengele or his heirs--they belong to the painter, Dina Babbitt."

In 2002, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution, sponsored by Congresswoman Shelly Berkley (D-NV), urging the museum to return the paintings to Mrs. Babbitt and instructing the State Department to intervene on her behalf.

The Wyman Institute is now organizing an international petition by attorneys and legal scholars, challenging the museum's suggestion that the paintings belong to Mengele.  The petition drive is being spearheaded by Thane Rosenbaum, Professor of Human Rights Law at the Fordham University School of Law, and Harry Reicher,
Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and author of the forthcoming book, 'Holocaust Law: Materials and Commentary.'

The Wyman Institute recently mobilized 450 cartoonists, animators and comic book artists from around the world to sign a petition supporting Mrs. Babbitt.  (It was Mrs. Babbitt's painting of a Snow White mural on the children's barracks at Auschwitz which resulted in Mengele ordering her to paint the Gypsy portraits.  After the war, Mrs. Babbitt worked for many years as an animator for Warner Brothers and other cartoon producers, drawing such famous characters as Tweety Bird, Daffy Duck, Wile E. Coyote, and Cap'n Crunch.)

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- As he descends more than 25 feet below the earth’s surface, Gary Pipes steps into a forgotten world.

Remnants of the Cold War era abound, conjuring up a time of nuclear armament, international unrest and frosty relations with the then Soviet Union.

That’s not what Pipes thinks about as he strolls through this missile silo near Pleasant Hill, Mo., however.

He sees a chance to make a few bucks. He’s not exactly sure how that will happen, but he figures the silo he bought for less than $200,000 was too good a deal to pass up.

Pipes in October purchased a decommissioned missile base once owned by the federal government. The property spans more than 15 acres and includes three enormous underground bunkers, where Nike defense missiles were poised for launching at a moment’s notice.

In the classrooms of the Murambi school are the horrifying reminders of one of the worst acts of genocide in modern times. It was here in 1994, on a hilltop in southern Rwanda, that 50,000 Tutsis took refuge for two weeks without food and water before being massacred by Hutu militias who used guns, grenades and machetes to carry out the slaughter.

At the request of the survivors and the families of the dead, the bodies of thousands of the victims have been preserved in lime and placed where they were killed. One classroom is filled with hundreds of skulls and piles of bones, while another contains the children, some with their petrified arms raised up to fend off the blows that killed them.

This sacred place for relatives and survivors' groups should, by now, also house a genocide memorial centre, created by a British charity and partly funded by the UK government as a monument of international significance.

But the project, which was supposed to have opened two years ago, has remained closed amid criticism from Rwandans that it has completely failed to provide a culturally sensitive memorial to the slaughter of one million people. The British charity, the Aegis Trust, is now attempting to satisfy demands for substantial changes.

The American Historical Association instituted the Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Award in 2003 to honor a person not in academe—a public official or civil servant, for instance—who has made extraordinary contributions to the study, teaching, and understanding of history. At its 121st meeting, the Association will confer the award upon John Lewis, the congressional representative for the 5th District in Georgia. In honoring Representative Lewis, the AHA is recognizing in particular his unstinting efforts to establish a national museum of African American history and culture and for the key support he extended in Congress to history programs in the National Park Service.

John Lewis, who was born the son of sharecroppers on February 21, 1940, grew up on his family’s farm and attended segregated public schools in Pike County, Alabama. He was inspired by the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and the activism surrounding the Montgomery Bus Boycott, to become a part of the civil rights movement.

It's settled. Basketball really did evolve from a childhood game called "Duck on a Rock." Such are the revelations contained in a newly unearthed trove of personal documents, photographs and mementos from basketball's founder, James Naismith.

The items, including handwritten diaries and typed notes, were discovered last spring, when Naismith's granddaughter, Hellen Carpenter, went down to her basement to look for an old family photograph.

Instead, she found journals, keepsakes and typewritten rule sheets that open a new window on the birth of one of the world's most popular sports.

Carpenter is auctioning off the documents in December. She said they settle details about her grandfather's invention, such as the "Eureka" moment when he remembered rules from Duck on a Rock, a Canadian game he played as a child, and applied them to his new game.

The items include the first rules of basketball; photos of the first basketball team and court, and Naismith's description of the very first game; a whistle Naismith used as the first basketball coach at Kansas; and the passport he used to attend the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics, the first to feature basketball as a medal sport.

The five boxes of documents, photos and items were handed down to Carpenter from her mother Hellen Naismith Dodd, Carpenter said. She kept them around for decades without looking through them.

"My mother told me for years that there was nothing of real value there," the 74-year-old Carpenter said.

Chris Ivy disagreed. As director of sports auctions for Heritage Auction Galleries in Dallas, he was stunned when Carpenter called him and described the documents casually stored in her home in the St. Louis suburb of Chesterfield.

Documents autographed by Naismith only surface two or three times a year, he said. Carpenter's boxes were an especially rare find, he said.

"It almost crosses into history _ it's not just sports collectibles," he said.

Naismith carefully recorded basketball's birth in 1891.

At the time, Naismith, a native of Canada, was teaching at a school in Springfield, Mass., that trained young men to become instructors at the newly formed YMCA centers that were opening around the country, Carpenter said.

The students got bored during the winter months when they couldn't play outdoor soccer and football. Naismith needed to invent a strenuous game that could be played on small indoor courts.

He tried to adapt lacrosse and football to be played inside. He even introduced his students to a slew of invented games like Hylo Ball, Scruggy Ball and Association Football. None of them took.

Handwritten diaries show Naismith was nervous the students wouldn't like his newest invention _ Basket Ball, as he called it.

Before the first basketball game was played, Naismith prepared the gym by nailing two baskets to balconies on either end of a court and posting 13 rules of the game on a bulletin board.

"I busied myself arranging the apparatus all the time watching the boys as they arrived to observe their attitude that day," Naismith wrote in cursive script.

"I felt this was a crucial moment in my life as it meant success or failure of my attempt to hold the interest of the class and devise a new game," he wrote.

He seems to have gotten mixed reviews. He wrote that Frank Mahan, a Southerner, was the first student to walk on to the court. Mahan looked at the baskets and the rules.

"Huh. Another new game," Mahan said, according to the diary.

Still, basketball caught on. But there were glitches. Naismith eventually added a backboard behind the basket so students couldn't stand in the balcony and knock away good shots from the opposing team, Carpenter said.

Naismith also noted in his journal that it took a lot of reminding to keep students from tackling a player when he got possession of the ball.

The game became more popular as Naismith's students went on to teach at YMCAs around the country, Carpenter said.

Naismith knew before his death in 1939 that he had created a lasting game when basketball became an Olympic sport.

"Up until then, he'd just thought of it as a little game," she said.

Following directions in the Dead Sea Scrolls, archeologists have found the latrines used by the sect that produced the scrolls, discovering that efforts to achieve ritual purity inadvertently exposed members to intestinal parasites that shortened their lives. The young male zealots who established their sect at Qumran chose a life of austerity and isolation, but they could not have foreseen the hardships created by their religiously imposed toilet practices, researchers said Monday.

'They paid a high price for their holiness,' said archeologist James D. Tabor of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, one of the coauthors of a paper appearing in the international journal Revue de Qumran. 'Some people might laugh, but it is terribly sad,' he said. 'They were so dedicated and had such a strenuous lifestyle, but they were probably lowering their life expectancy and ruining their health in an effort to do what is right.' The discovery of the unique toilet area provides further evidence linking the scrolls to Qumran - an association that has recently been called into question by a small but vociferous group of archeologists who have argued that the settlement was a pottery factory, a country villa or a Roman fortress, but not a monastery.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, the revisionists claim, were actually hidden in the caves of Qumran by Jews fleeing the devastation of Jerusalem during the Roman suppression beginning in AD 66. The majority of archeologists, in contrast, argue that the scrolls were copies produced by a small sect, generally called the Essenes, who lived at Qumran. Because the location of the latrine was specified in two of the most important scrolls found at the site, its discovery provides strong evidence associating the settlement with the scrolls, Tabor said. Tabor and his colleagues 'make a pretty good case,' said Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archeology Review. Nonetheless, he added, 'the argument about whether it is an Essene community will go on for many years and maybe never be settled.' Interest in Qumran dates back to 1947, when Bedouin tribesmen discovered three ancient manuscripts in a cave on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, about 10 miles south of the West Bank city of Jericho. Subsequent searches yielded about 900 manuscripts and fragments dating from about 250 BC to AD 68. Some of the manuscripts are copies of books of the Old Testament, while others are related to more mundane aspects of life.

The Catholic priest Roland de Vaux excavated part of Qumran in the 1950s and concluded that it had been inhabited by an apocalyptic Jewish sect that copied the manuscripts and eventually hid them from the invading Romans. That conclusion is still widely accepted. The Essenes are one of very few ancient groups whose toilet practices were documented. The 1st century Jewish historian Josephus noted that members of the group normally dug holes and buried their waste outside the city. The group was not allowed to defecate on the Sabbath, he said, because its members were prohibited from leaving the city. Two of the Dead Sea Scrolls note that the latrines should be situated northwest of the settlement, at a distance of 1,000 to 3,000 cubits - about 450 to 1,350 yards - and out of sight of the settlement. Mulling these guidelines, Tabor noted that there is a natural bluff about 1,000 yards northwest of Qumran, blocking the view of the area behind it. The soil there, he said, 'looked different' from that around it. Eventually, Tabor and Joe E. Zias of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an expert on ancient latrines, went to the site and took samples from the area and from other areas. 'The earth was so nice and soft, while the rest of the desert was very hard,' Zias said. 'In fact, I broke my pick collecting control samples from the other areas.' Zias sent samples to Stephanie Harter-Lailheugue of the CNRS Laboratory for Anthropology in Marseille, France. She found preserved eggs and other remnants of roundworms, tapeworms, whipworms and pinworms, all human intestinal parasites.

Samples from the surrounding areas contained no parasites, while a sample from the stable area of the settlement contained a species of animal worms. 'The evidence shows conclusively that the area was a toilet,' Zias said. Had the waste been dumped on the surface, as is the practice of Bedouins in the area, the parasites would have quickly been killed by sunlight. Buried, they could persist for a year or longer, infecting anyone who walked through the soil. The situation was made worse by the fact that the Essenes had to pass through an immersion cistern, or miqvot , before returning to the settlement. The water would have served as a breeding ground for the parasites. The ritual cleansing 'is a total immersion, which means that it gets in your ears, in your eyes and in your mouth,' Zias said. 'It is not hard to imagine how sick everyone must have been.' The sickness is reflected in the Qumran cemetery, which had been partially excavated previously.

'The graveyard at Qumran is the unhealthiest group I have ever studied in over 30 years,' Zias said.

Fewer than 6% of the men buried there survived to age 40, he said. In contrast, cemeteries from the same period excavated at Jericho show that half the men lived beyond age 40.