LUXOR, Egypt -- Remains of an ancient Egyptian wall used to prevent the leakage of the Nile flood waters from spreading over the Karnak temple in Luxor were discovered on Thursday at the temple’s eastern side, culture minister Farouk Hosni announced on Sunday.

Hosni revealed that the wall was accidentally found by Egyptian excavators during an archeological inspection of the site undertaken as part of a development project aimed at removing encroachments accumulated over the years on the temple’s different sides.

Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), explained that the newly-discovered wall is only 400 km long and 7m in height [sic].

More excavations will reveal more relevant structures, said Hawass.

The wall was originally built of huge sandstone blocks brought from Al-Selsela area in Aswan to stop the water from reaching the temple during the annual Nile floods.

The principle burial ground for African-Americans in the City of Aiken was recently placed on the National Historic Register as Aiken Colored Cemetery...

The official name is now Pine Lawn Cemetery located on Florence Street and serves as the resting ground of slaves, prominent leaders, educators, doctors and ministers...

The cemetery was founded in 1852 with originally four acres of land that the City of Aiken purchased and later gave to five colored churches in the area, Friendship Baptist Church, Second Baptist Church, Wesley United Methodist, Cumberland A.M.E. Church and Emanuel Presbyterian Church

[Cemetery board member Colleen] Reed said there are a lot of veterans buried there from the Spanish American War, World War I and II, Korean War, Vietnam War and possibly the Civil War...

With 9.5 acres, the cemetery is still being used today. The group in currently in the process of documenting the cemetery to find all persons that are buried there.

A 10-metre section of a shipwreck, possibly from the 19th century, has washed up on the North Shore of Prince Edward Island.

A portion of a ship's timber hull washed up on a beach near Cavendish last week. Jean Ronahan, who lives in nearby French River, suspects it may have broken loose following erosion near a breakwater in Cavendish...

"Right along our whole coastline here there was a lot of shipwrecks; there was the Marco Polo and there was another from the Yankee Gale. It's just part of our marine history" [Ronahan said].

Officials from the Green Park Shipbuilding Museum have inspected the artifact. David Keenlyside, executive director of the P.E.I. Museum and Heritage Foundation, has also looked at the wreck, and is excited by the find.

Keenlyside, an expert in Atlantic archeology, agrees the wreck could have gone down in the Yankee Gale, which was in 1851, but says further investigations are necessary.

The wreck has wooden-peg construction and other evidence of being put together with hand tools.

t's one of the most divisive emblems in American history, yet Carmel resident John Buckner is proud to hang it outside of his house -- even if it means buying a new one every other month.

The emblem? A Confederate battle flag.

Buckner, a 73-year-old Greensboro, N.C., native who moved to Indiana 30 years ago, said he's had the flag stolen from his house eight times since February 2006 and that Carmel police aren't doing enough to catch the culprits. He lives north of 106th Street, between Keystone Avenue and Gray Road.

The University of Virginia’s governing board passed a resolution this month in which it expressed “particular regret” for using slaves during the first half-century of its existence, until the end of the Civil War. The resolution, which passed unanimously, notes that “mostly anonymous laborers,” both slave and free, helped build the university. In the document, the board also “recommits itself to the principles of equal opportunity.” A news release accompanying the resolution states that it “is believed to be” the first of its kind in American higher education.

Related Links

Facing Up to a Role in Slavery (Inside Higher Ed news story)

MOSCOW -- To Western eyes, it was the new, democratic Russia. Boris Yeltsin, the man who had wrested the country from the grip of communism two years earlier, was facing what he described as an armed "mutiny" by communist holdovers in the country's elected parliament. So when Mr. Yeltsin sent troops and tanks to disperse the Supreme Soviet legislature and arrest its leaders, Western leaders cheered his actions.

But many Russians were appalled.

"When I heard [then US President Bill] Clinton describing Yeltsin's actions as 'a triumph for democracy,' I was horrified," says Viktor Kremeniuk, deputy director of the official Institute of USA-Canada Studies in Moscow. "The president shelled parliament, killed lawmakers, and destroyed the only elected branch of government capable of challenging him. That had nothing to do with democracy."

Such contradictory perceptions have been made abundantly clear following the death Monday of Yeltsin –- a man who brought down the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, shaped an independent Russia, and handpicked former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, who has led the country into what many regard as a new era of autocracy. The reflections on Yeltsin's legacy that have poured in from around the world point to a collision of Western and Russian narratives over the place of all three leaders in history. And the most controversial figure is Boris Yeltsin.

BEIRUT -- Downtown Baalbek is getting a contemporary facelift, and unearthing some ancient treasures along the way, as part of a [World Bank] project aimed at increasing the social economy of the historic city. [Baalbek -- Heliopolis in ancient times -- is known for its Roman temple ruins.]

[The project] focuses on restoring 200- to 300-year-old buildings around downtown Baalbek and...includes a third, smaller, contract committed to the restoration of mud brick houses. There are currently five such houses receiving restoration under the contract with hopes of the traditional habitats becoming touristy treasures...

Three large mosaics have been discovered nearly intact, and then recovered until archaeologists figure out how to move them without damaging or exposing the ancient artworks to excess sunlight.

Roman sarcophaguses, bones and pottery pieces have been found, as well as Roman pathways, irrigation systems and old foundations from houses over the last three centuries...

[The World Bank] is also operating development projects in Jbeil, Sidon, Tyre and Tripoli.

There is a common perception that life in the once-thriving Roman city of Pompeii is well-known from the wealth of artefacts that have been uncovered since its accidental discovery in 1748, but this is far from the case, according to findings of University of Leicester archaeologist Dr. Penelope M. Allison.

Until recently archaeologists working on Pompeian artefacts have tended to concentrate on examples of art, some of it erotic, from the town that was suddenly destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in August 79 AD. But Dr Allison's recently published book, The Insula of the Menander in Pompeii, Vol 3: The Finds, a Contextual Study, has changed this emphasis.

"I am looking at pots and pans and how houses actually functioned," she said. "I am interested in revealing the utilitarian side of life rather than its glamorous side; in slaves and servants and how they lived side by side with their masters. We always assume that servants were kept out of sight, but this is a 19th century view.

"If we look at the distribution of domestic material in Pompeii houses, such as the cupboards where pots and pans were kept, we find they were in the main front hall, the atrium where visitors would be received. The same is true of the main household water supply. Slaves would be coming to get these things all the time and would be far from invisible."

Dr. Allison has been working on Pompeii for over 20 years. Her previous study was to look at 30 houses in the light of the everyday objects that had been largely ignored in favour of more exotic finds. She became fascinated by what the actual objects might have been used for and who might have used them.

TEHRAN -- President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad here Monday expressed surprise over the European Union's biased approach to the historical event of holocaust.

The statement was made in an exclusive interview with the Spanish television broadcast, in response to the question about holocaust.

"I just raised two questions on the issue. Does EU consider questions as a crime. Today, anywhere in the world, one can raise questions about God, prophets, existence and any other issue.

"Why historical events should not be clarified?" asked the chief executive.

Turning to his first question, he said, "If a historical event has taken place, why do you not allow research to be conducted on it. What is the mystery behind it, given that even fresh research is conducted on definite rules of mathematics and physics.?"

Ahmadinejad referred to his first question, "If such an event has actually taken place, where did it happen? Why should the Palestinian people become homeless (because of this)?

"Why should Palestinian children, women and mothers be killed on streets every day for 60 years?"

The president said that these innocent people losing their lives had no role in World War II.

"All of them had been killed in Europe and Palestinian people were not involved in it," he added.

WASHINGTON -- Former Pfc. Jessica Lynch and the brother of Army Ranger Pat Tillman told a House panel Tuesday that the U.S. military lied about Tillman's death and Lynch's capture...

Lynch testified that after her vehicle was attacked in Iraq in March 2003, she suffered a mangled spinal column, broken arm, crushed foot, shattered femur and even a sexual assault.

But it only added insult to injury, literally, when she returned to her parents' home in West Virginia, which "was under siege by media all repeating the story of the little girl 'Rambo' from the hills of West Virginia who went down fighting," Lynch said.

"It was not true," she said before gently chiding the military. "The truth is always more heroic than the hype."

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform invited the two to testify on how the Pentagon spread false stories about Tillman and Lynch. The committee chairman, Henry Waxman, D-California, went as far as to say that the military "invented" tales.

"The bare minimum we owe our soldiers and their families is the truth," Waxman said. "That didn't happen for two of the most famous soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars."

An equally blunt Kevin Tillman, Pat Tillman's brother, told the panel that the military tried to spin his brother's 2004 death to deflect attention from emerging failings in the Afghanistan war...

Lynch became a celebrity after U.S. troops filmed what they said was a daring raid on the hospital. Lynch, the Army claimed, was shot and stabbed during a fierce gunbattle with Iraqi troops that left 11 of her comrades dead.

"The American people are capable of determining their own ideals for heroes, and they don't need to be told elaborate lies," she said. "I had the good fortune to come home and to tell the truth. Many soldiers, like Pat Tillman, did not have that opportunity.

"The truth of war is not always easy. The truth is always more heroic than the hype," she said.

Related Links

Jessica Lynch prepared statement

In the 92nd anniversary of the so-called Armenian genocide, Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs have given full page adds on the biggest newspapers of the U.S.

The full page add which said 'Let's reveal together what really happened back in 1915' was published on New York Times, Herald Tribune and Los Angeles Times and Washington Times as well.

The challenging proposal was first made by the Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan in 2005 to Armenian government.

In 2005, Erdoğan had suggested Turkish and Armenian historians to investigate the 1915 events together for a healthy resolution.

Facing calls to compensate the aging victims of its wartime sexual slavery, Japan set up the Asian Women's Fund in 1995. It was a significant concession from Japan, which has always asserted that postwar treaties absolved it of all individual claims from World War II. But the fund only fueled anger in the very countries with which Japan had sought reconciliation. By the time it closed as scheduled last month, only a fraction of the former sex slaves had accepted money from the fund.

Two Asian governments even offered their own money to discourage more women from taking Japan's.

The central problem was that the Japanese government had set up the fund as a private one and made clear that the "atonement" payments came from ordinary citizens. Critics inside and outside Japan saw the fund as another tortured attempt by Tokyo to avoid taking full responsibility for one of the ugliest aspects of the war.

"It was not directly from the Japanese government - that is why I did not accept it," said Ellen van der Ploeg, 84, a Dutchwoman who was taken from a prisoner of war camp in Indonesia and forced to work in a Japanese military brothel for three months in 1944. "If you have made mistakes in life, you must have the courage to say, 'I'm sorry, please forgive me.' But the Japanese government to this day has never taken full responsibility."

"If this were a pure government fund, I could have accepted it," Van der Ploeg said by telephone from Houten, the Netherlands. "Why should I accept money from private Japanese people? They were also victims during the war."

Foreign smugglers and antiques raiders are using sophisticated salvage equipment to steal China's underwater treasures, an investigation by the Cultural Heritage Administration has found.

In China's territorial sea, there are thousands of sunken ships carrying ancient treasures, mostly priceless porcelain.

Shan Jixiang, director of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, told China Daily that the illegal foreign salvage ships were often equipped with the most advanced technology, in contrast with rudimentary ships and equipment used by Chinese archaeologists and conservationists, who are trying to protect China's underwater heritage...

Besides underwater heritage artefacts, cultural items from ethnic minority groups, such as costumes and musical instruments, are also a favorite among international dealers and smugglers, Shan said...

China's underwater heritage has been pursued by art collectors and dealers since the beginning of 2005, when about 15,000 pieces, mainly blue-and-white porcelain about 300 years old, were found in a 13.5 meter sunken ship off the coast of East China's Fujian Province.

Previously, rock carvings were largely targeted in the illicit heritage goods trade, but activities have been curtailed since the Chinese government took more effective protective measures.

BERWICK-UPON-TWEED, England -- A metal-detecting beginner has spoken of his shock at uncovering a hoard of Bronze Age artefacts.

Among the objects is a Bronze Age razor -- the first to be found in the county -- which suggests men living in the area between about 1000 and 800BC were clean-shaven. Also found were gold lock rings, believed to have been hair decorations, as well as bracelets, rings, pins and axe heads.

John Minns...uncovered the historic find while on holiday near Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland, two years ago. Mr Minns, from Arbroath in Scotland, had only just taken up metal detecting when he went on holiday in April 2005. He was given permission by a local farmer to take the detector on to his land.

"At first I made a couple of small finds, a copper coin and a spindle whorl, just odds and ends," Mr Minns said. "The only reason I found the hoard was that I got a nice signal from the detector, but when I dug away the soil, all I found was a yoghurt pot with a foil lid."

But, keen to follow good metal-detecting practice, Mr Minns re-checked the hole, and to his surprise found half an axe head, followed by another axe. When he spotted the gold rings, Mr Minns sensed immediately that he had stumbled across a major find...

"Hoards from the late Bronze Age containing such a variety of objects in such good condition are very rare in the north of England, so this is an extremely important find," said Lindsay Allason-Jones, director of Archaeological Museums at Newcastle University.

The "Collette Hoard" will be on display at Newcastle University's Museum of Antiquities from now until the end of June. It is intended that it will go on permanent display from 2009 at the forthcoming Great North Museum.

The Church of England appealed to the Government yesterday for substantial funds for its ancient cathedrals so they can be better exploited as tourist attractions during the 2012 Olympic Games.

The appeal came after mounting criticism by members of the public about the "outrageous" entrance fees being charged by a number of cathedrals.

Daily Telegraph readers quoted Jesus's expulsion of the money lenders in support of their objections to the fees, which are now mandatory at four cathedrals, including St Paul's in London and Westminster Abbey.

In a letter to the newspaper yesterday, one reader contrasted the fees at St Paul's, where a family ticket costs £22.50, with the free entry to the Tate Modern nearby. "The cathedral is supposed to be a place of worship, a national masterpiece of architecture, yet my children were denied entry because of a money-making scheme," she said.

"When Jesus expelled the merchants from the Temple, he said, 'My Father's house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves'."

Other cathedrals, such as Salisbury, suggest a sum to be donated, but visitors often say that they feel intimidated by staff near the entrance.

For some time, the United States had had an emergency plan to attack Israel, a plan updated just prior to the 1967 war, aimed at preventing Israel from expanding westward, into Sinai, or eastward, into the West Bank.

In May 1967, one of the U.S. commands was charged with the task of removing the plan from the safe, refreshing it and preparing for an order to go into action.

This unknown aspect of the war was revealed in what was originally a top-secret study conducted by the Institute for Defense Analyses in Washington. The full story is detailed in Haaretz' Independence Day Supplement.

In February 1968, an institute expert, L. Weinstein, wrote an article called "Critical Incident No. 14," about the U.S. involvement in the Middle East crisis of May-June 1967.Only 30 copies of his study were printed for distribution. Years later the material was declassified and can now be read by everyone, although details that are liable to give away sources' identities and operational ideas have remained censored.

RICHMOND, Calif. -- Checking a rumor, retired UC Berkeley Professor Joe Fischer was poking around the cluttered basement of the Richmond Museum of History and uncovered a long-forgotten "gold mine."

Hidden in a metal cabinet against a back wall were 4,000 meticulously preserved children's paintings and collages.

But instead of children's typical renderings of rainbows, cheerful family scenes, animals or make-believe worlds, there were menacing portraits of Hitler, burning airplanes nose-diving into the ocean, a sad-looking girl with long black braids next to a Star of David, empty houses and dozens of intricately detailed battleships -- some with guns blazing, others sinking.

The paintings, done by children in the Kaiser shipyard child care centers, tell the story of World War II with the simplicity and poignancy of a child's perspective...

These were the children who spent 12 hours a day in day care while their parents were fighting the war. Their moms were models for Rosie the Riveter, toiling long hours in the shipyards, while many of their dads were battling German fascism and Japanese imperialism overseas...

In all, 27,000 of the 90,000 Kaiser shipyard workers were women, so organized child care was imperative.

"This is a remarkably vivid part of the home-front story," said Lucy Lawliss, resource director at Rosie the Riveter National Historic Park in Richmond. "These children were seeing the home front and were able to record it from their perspective."

The Bush administration has conceded that Wiccans are entitled to have the pentacle, the symbol of their faith, inscribed on government-issued memorial markers for deceased veterans, Americans United for Separation of Church and State announced today.

Wicca is a nature-based religion grounded in pre-Christian beliefs. Circle Sanctuary says the Wiccan religion honors the Divine as both Mother and Father, encompasses love and respect of Nature, celebrates the cycles of Sun and Moon, and encourages adherents to live in harmony with other humans and the greater Circle of Life.

The settlement agreement, filed today with the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin, brings to a successful conclusion a lawsuit Americans United [for Separation of Church and State] brought against the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in November.

The litigation charged that denying a pentacle to deceased Wiccan service personnel, while granting religious symbols to those of other traditions, violated the U.S. Constitution...

AU noted that the VA's list of 38 approved symbols for government gravestones, markers and plaques includes emblems for Christians, Muslims, Atheists, Hindus, Humanists, and members of the Eckankar, Serbian Orthodox, and United Moravian faiths.

PHILADELPHIA -- A University of Pennsylvania scholar has pinpointed 1616 as the year of the first European voyage up the Delaware River.

Jaap Jacobs, a senior fellow at Penn's McNeil Center for Early American Studies, detailed his findings in a paper, "Truffle Hunting with an Iron Hog: The First Dutch Voyage up the Delaware River," presented to the McNeil Center Seminar Series on April 20...

Historians acknowledge that while earlier European explorers may have sighted the mouth of the Delaware Bay, Henry Hudson became the first European to actually enter it in August 1609. European exploration of the Delaware River had long been presumed to have occurred sometime during 1614-1616. The document Jacobs found now pinpoints the year as 1616.

"The document I found provides the missing link in the early cartography of the Delaware River," Jacobs said. "This document is evidence that the Dutch voyaged to America in 1616 and explored a large section of the coastline, claiming it for the Dutch Republic in the process."...

Sometime between 1993 and 1994 while doing research for his dissertation, Jacobs copied a summary of a document he found at the Gemeentearchief Amsterdam, the Amsterdam notarial archives. He said that the summary didn't indicate that the document was important, so he didn't look at the original until July 2000. At that point it became clear to him that the document referred to the Delaware River rather than the Hudson River, as he had originally thought. Years later, in 2007, while preparing his paper on early Dutch exploration of the Delaware and Hudson rivers, he revisited the historiography and realized that the document pertained to the first voyage up the Delaware by Europeans.

The document he had found was a deposition of the sworn testimony of sailor Jan Jacobsz Bens. At the request of an Amsterdam merchant, Bens had testified about a trip he took on one of the earliest recorded ships built in North America, the Iron Hog. He stated that the trip occurred in 1616.

Iraqi Yazidis are paying a heavy price for their tenacious adherence to their religious practices...

Attacks on Yazidis have surged recently and almost all Yazidi families living outside the autonomous Kurdish region have fled the country...

Most of the killings were perpetrated on religious grounds as fundamentalist and Islamist groups see them as infidels who either have to convert or be killed.

The Yazidi religion is a conglomeration of different faiths and includes traces of Christianity, Islam and Zorastrianism. They worship the fallen Angel abhorred by Muslims, Christians and Jews.

They have their main sanctuaries in Iraq close to the northern city of Mosul but currently are situated within the semi-independent territory Iraqi Kurds have carved up for themselves.

There are nearly half a million Yazidis in Iraq and most of them live in two major localities –- in Shaikhan north of Mosul and Sinjar to the west.

PEABODY, Mass. --Four Revolutionary War heroes finally have proper grave markers even though their actual graves were lost to the march of progress when a portion of a cemetery was paved over for a roadway.

The four minutemen -- Samuel Cook Jr., Benjamin Deland Jr., Ebenezer Goldthwaite and George Southwick Jr. -- grabbed their muskets and marched toward Concord, only to be killed by the retreating British troops on the first day of the war, April 19, 1775. On Saturday, they were honored in a headstone dedication ceremony at the Old South Burying Ground in Peabody.
"I was really proud," said Janet Briggs Lettich, 55, who attended the ceremony to honor her ancestor, Goldthwaite. "They walked away from their families and their plows and did what they had to do."

WASHINGTON DC -- The small, white porcelain button lay just inches below the asphalt.

It was found three years ago when Alexandria archaeologists started digging beneath the surface of a gas station that had been sitting for decades at the busy intersection of South Washington and Church streets.

The button, from a dead person's clothing, was evidence of what lay there more than a century ago: Freedmen's Cemetery, a burial ground that opened in 1864 to accommodate the flood of former slaves who lived -- and died -- in Alexandria during the Civil War.

The discovery in 2004, along with other evidence of graves, was part of an $8 million project that has been 10 years in the making: to rededicate the site and commemorate the 1,800 people buried on the 1.5-acre plot.

When a deranged gunman began his shooting rampage at Virginia Tech's Norris Hall on Monday, most of the dozens of students in the vicinity cowered under desks or fled, according to witness accounts. But, before being fatally shot himself, 76-year-old Professor Liviu Librescu thrust himself against his classroom door and held off Cho Seunghui long enough to allow many of his students to jump to safety. The professor's heroism gives rise to some awkward questions: How could a single gunman kill 30 people in one building without being overpowered? Why are acts of courage like Prof. Librescu's so uncommon?... When considering a tragedy like Virginia Tech, people naturally wonder whether they would be"perfect in courage" if confronted with similar circumstances. Would they have reacted like Mr. Librescu? Would they have risked their lives to save others?

William I. Miller, author of an acclaimed book on the topic, The Mystery of Courage, believes that for most of us, the answer to those questions is no."That's just classic grand, heroic behaviour," Prof. Miller, a historian and law professor at the University of Michigan, said of Mr. Librescu's deeds. Such heroic acts are"pretty rare," he said.

He wonders whether such acts will be come only rarer, whether Western society has become so risk-averse that we are increasingly incapable of heroism. He despairs when he sees kids in his Michigan neighbourhood wearing"armour at the level of a medieval knight" as they learn to ride a bicycle and hears that touch football has been banned at the local elementary school because the ball is pointed.

"We so shield our children and ourselves from any encounter where we're called on to deliver," he said.

His research into courage led him to study soldiers' memoirs, particularly from the U.S. Civil War, and what he found is that it is difficult to predict who will behave courageously under fire."One of the things that features very prominently in these memoirs is that people are always sizing up everyone else in the unit: 'Who's the courageous guy, and who's the coward?' There are some tendencies but they can never quite predict. The little nerdy accountant turns out to be a great soldier and the barroom brawler turns out to just crack when he hears gunfire."

Related Links

Students recount the minutes of terror in Norris Hall