Henry McCabe said it's been more than 30 years since the wreckage of the Acadia, a Confederate side-wheeler, has been visible in the Yazoo River.

Now - with the river's water level so low - this piece of Civil War naval history has once again come into view.

"It was about two and half or three weeks ago when I saw it for the first time. I saw that axle sticking up in the river. Then I started watching the river," said McCabe, a lifelong Civil War buff.

South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, has been forced to defend his description of Nicolas Sarkozy as "a citizen of Africa", for a speech by the French president that was widely condemned elsewhere on the continent as racist.

Mr Mbeki wrote to the rightwing French leader praising an address to a university audience in Senegal last month in which Mr Sarkozy said that Africans had turned their back on progress.

"The tragedy of Africa is that the African has never really entered into history ... They have never really launched themselves into the future," Mr Sarkozy said. "The African peasant, who for thousands of years has lived according to the seasons, whose life ideal was to be in harmony with nature, only knew the eternal renewal of time ... In this imaginary world, where everything starts over and over again, there is room neither for human endeavour, nor for the idea of progress.

"The problem of Africa ... is to be found here. Africa's challenge is to enter to a greater extent into history ... It is to realise that the golden age that Africa is forever recalling will not return, because it has never existed." Mr Sarkozy also defended France's past role in Africa by saying that while it may have made "mistakes", it "did not exploit anybody".

The speech was widely condemned, including by the head of the African Union commission, Alpha Oumar Konare. "This speech was not the kind of break we were hoping for," he told Radio France Internationale. "It reminded us of another age, especially his comments about peasants." Other critics said that while Mr Sarkozy asked younger Africans if they wanted an end to corruption and violence, he failed to acknowledge the role of France in propping up abusive regimes.

The King Tut exhibition has drawn millions of visitors to museums across the country since it opened two years ago. But some African-American scholars believe the exhibition makes King Tut look too white. The debate over Tut's race led the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia, where the show is on display, to sponsor a conference on the subject.

The show, Tutankhamen and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs has drawn a steady stream of protesters since it opened in Los Angeles. But nowhere have they been as persistent or vocal as in Philadelphia.

More than 500 people showed up to hear scholars discuss Tut's race at the Franklin Institute. The auditorium couldn't hold them all, so the museum had to set up big-screen TVs in the lobby. The three speakers said the exhibition on display upstairs gives the false impression that King Tut was white.

The panelists believe the Egyptians of Tut's time had, for the most part, very dark skin, like people from sub-Saharan Africa. Charles Finch is the director of International Health at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta.

"Whenever ancient writers, Hebrew or Greek, make any reference to ancient Egyptians' color, it's always black," Finch said. "There was no issue back then. There was no discussion. There was no debate. It only became a debate in the last 200 years."

[Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to the United Nations, is anguished.] Khalilzad’s anguish centers on May 6, 2003. That’s the day he expected Bush to announce his return to Iraq to convene a grand assembly — something like an Afghan loya jirga — that would fast-forward a provisional Iraqi government.

Instead, the appointment of L. Paul Bremer III to head a Coalition Provisional Authority was announced. Khalilzad, incredulous, went elsewhere. In the place of an Afghan-American Muslim on a mission to empower Iraqis, we got the former ambassador to the Netherlands for a one-year proconsul gig.

“We had cleared both announcements, with Bremer to run things and me to convene the loya jirga, both as presidential envoys,” Khalilzad told me. “We were just playing with a few final words. Then the game plan suddenly changed: we would run the country ourselves.”

Alluding to former Secretary of State Colin Powell and his successor, Condoleezza Rice, who was then national security adviser, Khalilzad continued: “Powell and Condi were incredulous. Powell called me and asked: ‘What happened?’ And I said, ‘You’re secretary of state and you’re asking me what happened!’ "

[According to Cohen, what happened was that Bremer persuaded Bush to follow the MacArthur model.]

Either modern humans were in Israel over 200,000 years ago, or our now-extinct ancestors behaved a lot like us when they hunted and cooked, suggest artifacts and bones from a newly excavated cave.

Together, the remains paint a picture of relatively sophisticated hunting and food preparation at the site, called Misliya Cave, in Mount Carmel, Israel.

According to lead author Reuven Yeshurun, the cave exhibits "the full array of modern hunting behavior."

Romanian archeologists have found the Capitol of Sarmizegetusa, a temple in the ancient Roman province of Dacia, Rompres news agency reported Thursday.

"We were glad to confirm the suppositions we have been nourishing for 25 years, about the place where the Capitol lies, one of the most important temples of Roman Dacia," said Ioan Piso, an official of Transylvania National History Museum in central Romania.

"This is the temple of Jupiter and the Triad Capitoline, made of Jupiter, Junona and Minerva," Rompres quoted Piso as saying.

Bulgarian archaeologists discovered a Christian necropolis outside the ruins of the medieval fortress near the rock sanctuary of Perperikon, located in southern Bulgaria near the town of Kardzhali.

The team lead by Nikolay Ovcharov found 15 tombs dating back to the 14th century, most likely the resting place of the fortress' defenders executed following its siege by Turkish emir Orhan in 1362.

A BUSINESS strategy of The New York Times to get its articles to pop up first in Internet searches is creating a perplexing problem: long-buried information about people that is wrong, outdated or incomplete is getting unwelcome new life.

People are coming forward at the rate of roughly one a day to complain that they are being embarrassed, are worried about losing or not getting jobs, or may be losing customers because of the sudden prominence of old news articles that contain errors or were never followed up.

The University of Minnesota Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies has scanned and published a full set of playing cards created in 1945 by an inmate at the Dachau concentration camp. They are the size of normal playing cards.

SAMARKAND, Uzbekistan (Reuters) - Time flies in
Samarkand. This weekend the ancient Silk Road city
marks its 2,750th anniversary in grand style, a mere
11 years after celebrating its official 2,500th
anniversary.

That quirk is due to recent archaeological finds that
caused a revision of its age, but the city of mosques,
madrasahs and tombs listed as a U.N. World Heritage
Site is also ageing faster than it should do in the
present.

Academics fear that a rush by Uzbek officials to
prepare Samarkand for its anniversary has done more
harm than good and a four-lane road built next to its
archaeological heart has drawn criticism from the
United Nations.

The grandiose mansions Adolf Hitler erected in Germany may have vanished, but their vast bunkers remain largely intact..
More than 60 years have passed, but the quaint Bavarian town of Berchtesgaden, nestled amidst a stunning Alpine panorama, still struggles with its heritage of having been Adolf Hitler's favourite hideaway.

The Berchtesgaden Tourism Office is reluctant to actively promote the former Obersalzberg site just above the town and is not particularly eager to answer questions pertaining to the locations of the remains of houses and pleasure grounds of the German dictator and other Nazi key figures.

Nevertheless, Obersalzberg boasts an unassuming, modest documentation centre in the modified, former Nazi Party's guesthouse, where the crowds of daily visitors can educate themselves about the mountain's embarrassing history.

The most surprising thing about the possible closure of the shipyard here may be how little popular outcry there has been thus far.

Poland is instead transfixed by the sudden collapse of its government and preoccupied with the departure of a million workers, most of them young, for jobs in Western Europe.

The Gdansk shipyard could go out of business if it is forced to pay back disputed state subsidies deemed illegal by European Union officials. But while the EU may be threatening the shipyard, it comes bearing much larger gifts for the country as a whole. From 2007 to 2013, Poland is set to receive $91.4 billion in aid from Brussels.

The history of Nigeria's involvement in the slave trade could be used to boost tourism and culture, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and the University of Abuja, said yesterday.

They have also asked that August 23, be designated as a special day of remembrance. It is 200 years since the transatlantic slave trade ended.

ARCHAEOLOGISTS have unearthed the remains of a medieval tower at Edinburgh Castle thought to have been lost forever.

Fragments of Constable's Tower, which was destroyed by Elizabeth I's army during a siege, were found during excavation work for the attraction's new visitor centre.

A team of experts found a drain beneath the surface just inside the Castle's main portcullis gate, where a new timber kiosk selling audio tours is to be built.

They were amazed to find part of the disused drainpipe had been from a three-foot long piece of ornately carved masonry. Archeologists now believe it originally came from the lost Constable's Tower, which stood from the 14th century to the "Lang Siege" of 1581-73.

For more than eight centuries the "Towers of Victory" -- monuments to Afghanistan's greatest empire -- have survived wars and invasions, but now weather and neglect could cause them to come crashing down.

From its base in the Afghan city of Ghazni, the dynasty of Sultan Mahmoud Ghaznavi extended its rule to stretch from the River Tigris in modern day Iraq to the River Ganges in India.

The two toffee-colored minarets, adorned with terra-cotta tiles were raised in the early 12th century as monuments to the victories of the Afghan armies that built the empire.

Since then, Afghanistan has more often been victim of invasion than the perpetrator of them.

The upper portions of the Towers of Victory have eroded away over time, so now only the bases remain -- though they still stand at around 7 meters (24 feet) tall.

A temporary fix to the crumbling seawall adjacent to the famed Miami Circle in Brickell is just about complete, says State Archeologist Ryan Wheeler — but circle supporters will have to wait until at least next summer to see any further movement in securing the site.

Should the Legislature in March grant a $2.5 million request for funds to construct a permanent wall, the money could come in by July, Mr. Wheeler said, with construction to begin later in the year.

Florida's Division of Historical Resources funded the $150,000 in remedial shoring, he said.

Should the state deny the $2.5 million, Mr. Wheeler said he is "not sure" where plans would go from there.
Meanwhile, discussions continue between Florida's archeological bureau and the local Historical Museum of Southern Florida, set to take control of managing the 2,000-year-old site, which probably is a relic of the Tequesta people.

Newly discovered 2000-year-old ruins at the Hill of Tara must be fully preserved because of their unique size and character, a US academic today said.

State archaeologists began excavation work on the prehistoric Lismullen structure earlier this month, claiming it was under threat from adverse weather.

Dr Ronald Hicks of Ball State University, Indiana, argues it is part of a larger ancient ritual complex and must be preserved in situ. He contends Lismullen is comparable to ceremonial enclosures found at Tara and other royal sites in Ireland, but is twice as large as any other.

Dr Hicks previously endorsed the nomination of Tara to the World Monuments Fund List and issued an earlier report about the area's archaeological significance.

Controversy has surrounded the Lismullen site since the ruins were uncovered by workers during construction work on the controversial M3 motorway last April.

State-sponsored divers kicked off an intensive underwater search for booty Wednesday, more than a decade after shipwreck researchers discovered the ruins of Blackbeard's flagship off the N.C. coast.

Mike Daniel, leader of the crew that found Queen Anne's Revenge, said the pace of the excavation is only now picking up despite his years of pressuring the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources to do what he called "serious expeditions."

"It's been 10 years since I've found it, and they've worked about a total of 50 days," he said. "For all the bruises I've taken for being their bad guy, it's finally taking off."

Throughout time, physicians have made their mark on history. Think of such luminaries as Hippocrates, Alexander Fleming and his invention of penicillin, Edward Jenner and small pox vaccination, Louis Pasteur and microbiology, Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis. All of whom arguably had a profound effect on the course of history.

Now Blackwell, in celebration of the opening of its new flagship medical bookstore, is launching a search for unsung medical heroes, those physicians who never received such recognition for their innovations and breakthroughs. For example, did you ever hear of William Brockeden who in 1943 patented the tablet press hence giving us the possibility for the mass production of medicines? A Hungarian doctor, Ignaz Semmelweis, discovered that disease transmission could be prevented through the simple act of washing one’s hands. Surely something we take completely for granted nowadays. Then there is Dr Dilip Mahalanabis who, along with his team, developed oral rehydration therapy (ORT) and in doing so, helped to prevent the death of millions from dehydration from diarrhoea, still the leading cause of death for children in developing countries.

Other nominees include anaesthetists, psychologists and pathologists who have lived and worked throughout the ages....

[You can vote at Blackwell's website.]

... "This was history written by speechwriters without regard to history," said military analyst Anthony Cordesman. "And I think most military historians will find it painful ... because in basic historical terms the president misstated what happened in Vietnam."

Indeed, the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam did not create a domino effect of spreading communism, as was feared. Instead Vietnam went to war against two neighboring communist states, Cambodia and China. Now Vietnam and its two neighbors have embraced some free-trade principles and are trading partners with the U.S.

Presidents often turn to history as a source of comfort in times of war or domestic calamity, and Bush is said to be a serious reader of historical works.

While there still is no national consensus about the lessons of Vietnam, the fault lines that war created continue to shape American politics. But few at the time argued that the threat of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia justified keeping U.S. forces in Vietnam.

Cordesman noted that human tragedies similar to those that occurred in the aftermath of U.S. involvement in Vietnam already have taken place in Iraq.

"We are already talking about a country where the impact of our invasion has driven 2 million people out of the country, will likely drive out 2 million more, has reduced 8 million people to dire poverty, has killed 100,000 people and wounded 100,000 more," he said. "One sits sort of in awe at the lack of historical comparability."

It also struck some historians as odd that the president would try to use a divisive issue like Vietnam to rally the nation behind his policy in Iraq. "If we get into a Vietnam argument, the country is divided, but if you are going to try sell this concept that the blood is on the American people's hands because we left and were weak-kneed in Asia, that is a very tenuous and inane historical argument," said historian Douglas Brinkley.

Brinkley, who wrote a flattering book on Kerry during the 2004 campaign and edited the diaries of President Ronald Reagan, said Reagan was careful to rarely talk about Vietnam because of the passions it inspired.

Brinkley also has written a biography of President Dwight Eisenhower, and found fault with Bush's comparing the current war to the Korean conflict.

"We had a clear objective in Korea, to stop the aggressor," Brinkley said. "It is when we got expansionary in the mission that we ultimately had to withdraw. Eisenhower pulled us out of Korea. This notion that withdrawal is dishonorable is just ludicrous."

The president also likened himself to Harry Truman and his prosecution of the end of World War II and the start of the Korean War. But Bush largely is acting alone in Iraq, while Truman oversaw the beginning of multilateral containment of the Soviet bloc by supporting alliances ranging from the United Nations to NATO to the International Monetary Fund.

And while Bush might have tried to use history to make his point Wednesday, there was at least some risk of causing additional friction today.

Hathaway said Bush's depiction of Japan would likely "cause considerable discomfort it not outright unhappiness" there, particularly given Japan's extraordinary efforts to support the U.S. effort in Iraq.

"And now to find themselves to held up as an analogy to the war in Iraq will have a grating effect on many in Japan," Hathaway said....

History San Jose, Silicon Valley's largest historical organization, is almost out of money - and without a quick subsidy advance from the city, its leaders say, it will be forced next month to cut back or eliminate programs for South Bay students and other functions.

"We're sort of hanging on by our toenails here," History San Jose President Alida Bray said Wednesday after pleading the organization's case for an advance on its quarterly city subsidy of more than $140,000. The city council, which is awaiting an audit of the group's finances, will consider the request, along with a potential takeover of the organization's core programming, at its Sept. 11 meeting.

"I really need that audit before I can reach a decision," Mayor Chuck Reed said....

History San Jose runs the city's 14-acre History Park at Kelley Park along Senter Road, filled with more than two dozen historic and reconstructed buildings, as well as the Peralta Adobe and Fallon House in downtown's San Pedro Square. The park draws more than 100,000 visitors a year, including about 25,000 schoolchildren.

Gettysburg, PA. - In 1863, Abraham Lincoln stood here and gave the speech that was to become his most famous. With brevity and eloquence he spoke of the liberty and equality upon which this country was founded. He looked forward to the Union's salvation, the end of slavery – and "a new birth of freedom."

What he couldn't have foreseen delivering the Gettysburg Address that afternoon was that a Southern colonel would one day claim this hallowed ground in the form of a KFC just beyond its gates. Or that the site of the battle's largest field hospital would be paved over. Today, a sizable chunk of Camp Letterman serves as the parking lot for Giant supermarket – a salmon slab of concrete with a few benches and two small plaques the only reminder of its historical significance.

Last year activists fought off the unthinkable: a 5,000-slot casino within a mile of the battleground. Yet Gettysburg stubbornly remains on a list of "Endangered Battlefields" compiled annually by the nonprofit Civil War Preservation Trust.

For more than half a century, Rachel Kane kept the memories at bay.

There were her daughters to think of, twins born in a displaced persons camp in the aftermath of the second World War. Kane didn't want to burden them with tales of the Holocaust, of a husband shot to death by the Nazis, a baby who starved to death in the forest, an extended family wiped out in a mass execution....

[But then dementia set in after her second husband passed away.] Lying in her room at the Los Angeles Jewish Home for the Aging in Reseda, the elderly woman with the soft white hair and bright blue eyes "was seeing Nazis," recounted daughter Esther Kane Meyers. "She was hearing things. I came and sat with her every day. It was the most painful thing I'd ever seen. It was all happening, right there."

Watching 50 years of strength crumble under the weight of a long-buried trauma made Kane's family sad and angry. What they did not know at the time was that her experience was not uncommon among aging victims of Nazi brutality.

In recent years, a body of research has sprung from the lives of Holocaust survivors like Kane as caregivers and mental health professionals work to understand and alleviate the pain of old age and remembered trauma. But when she first began to relive her past, the territory was largely uncharted.

The chief spokesman of the Russian Air Force, Col. Aleksandr V. Drobyshevsky, has confirmed in writing for the first time that it was Soviet pilots, in the USSR's most-advanced MiG-25 "Foxbat" aircraft, who flew highly-provocative sorties over Israel's nuclear facility at Dimona in May 1967, just prior to the Six Day War.

Gideon Remez and Isabello Ginor, who co-wrote the recent book Foxbats over Dimona, which asserts that the Soviet Union deliberately engineered the war to create the conditions in which Israel's nuclear program could be destroyed, on Thursday described this "extraordinary disclosure" as "official confirmation of the book's exhibit A and the source of its title."

Published in June by Yale University Press, the Israeli duo's book asserted that the Soviets flew sorties over Dimona in the still-experimental and top-secret Foxbats both to bolster a deliberate Soviet effort to encourage Israel to launch a war, and to ensure that the nuclear target could be effectively destroyed once Israel, branded an aggressor for its preemption, came under a planned joint Arab-Soviet counterattack.

Related Links

Isabella Ginor & Gideon Remez: Fresh evidence confirms their thesis, they say

The Middlebury College Julian W. Abernethy Collection of American Literature has acquired the Ernest Hemingway and Hemingway Family Collection. The archive includes family correspondence, journals, more than 1400 original letters and 151 scans of Hemingway's letters. The material dates from the mid-19th century to the author's death in 1961.

Items of special interest include several diaries dating from the 1850s; Civil War letters belonging to the author's grandfather, Anson Hemingway; and love letters of his parents, Clarence and Grace Hall Hemingway, prior to and after their marriage. A literary highlight of the collection is a carbon copy of a unique version of the first chapter of "The Sun Also Rises." The chapter was eventually deleted by Hemingway at the suggestion of his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald.

An exhibit of the collection is planned to coincide with the opening of the Donald Everett Axinn '51 Center for Literary and Cultural Studies at Starr Library, which is scheduled for completion in the fall of 2008.

According to Middlebury College Special Collections and Archives Curator Andrew Wentink, one important aspect of this collection is the span of time - more than a century - that the materials cover. While a number of the original pieces are available in other collections around the country, this archive provides a broad familial context for the writer's personal life and published works in a single location. The Middlebury collection will be a valuable and coherent body of information that can be used for research by students, faculty, and Hemingway scholars. "This is perhaps the single most important acquisition for the college's Abernethy Collection of American Literature since the purchase of Henry David Thoreau's personal copy of the first edition of 'Walden' in 1940," said Wentink.

Other major Hemingway archives exist in more than 75 private and institutional collections, the most distinguished of which is housed at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.

The collection was offered to the college by Anne Hemingway Feuer and Hilary Hemingway, daughters of Ernest Hemingway's now deceased younger brother Leicester Hemingway, who used many of the collected materials to write his biography of the author, "My Brother Ernest Hemingway," in 1962. The daughters currently live in Florida and wanted to find an appropriate location to archive the collection for public access. Hilary Hemingway is the wife of Jeffrey P. Freundlich, a member of the Middlebury College class of 1975.