It looks incongruous across the dank, misty farmland north of Ypres. A large party marquee erected amongst the winter stubble; but it marks one of the most ambitious battlefield archaeology projects ever attempted.

I last visited this farm a year ago, on that occasion soggy from recent rain and swept by chilly easterly winds. Across that landscape a small survey team were mapping what lay below, using ground-penetrating radar.

Ninety years after Flanders was torn apart by war, most of the battlefield has now disappeared. Yet, beneath the soil hidden reminders lie undisturbed.

A proposal from President Nicolas Sarkozy that French 10-year-olds should sponsor the memory of Jewish children who were murdered by the Nazis set off an outcry on Friday among psychologists, parents and the political left.

In an address to Jewish leaders, Sarkozy said that from the start of the next academic year pupils in their last year of primary school should be "entrusted with the memory of one of the 11,000 French children who fell victim to the Holocaust."

"Nothing is more moving for a child than the story of a child his own age, who had the same games, the same joys and the same hopes as him," Sarkozy said.

Education Minister Xavier Darcos explained that every child will be given the name of a Jewish deportee and "carry out a little investigation on their family, surroundings and the circumstances in which the child disappeared."

But an alliance of critics immediately poured scorn on the idea, accusing Sarkozy of usurping history, failing to understand the psychological impact on children, and stirring up resentment among other sectors of society.

Amid a discussion of trade in 1973, Chinese leader Mao Zedong made what U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called a novel proposition: sending tens of thousands, even 10 million, Chinese women to the United States.

"You know, China is a very poor country," Mao said, according to a document released by the State Department's historian office.

"We don't have much. What we have in excess is women. So if you want them we can give a few of those to you, some tens of thousands."

A few minutes later, Mao circled back to the offer. "Do you want our Chinese women?" he asked. "We can give you 10 million."

For decades generations of Cambridge undergraduates have fantasised about a secret stash of Victorian pornography in the university's library tower.

Many have tried to gain access to the chamber to uncover its illicit secrets. So intrigued was Stephen Fry by the collection that he wrote about it in his first novel, The Liar.

Despite the brilliant scientists, spies and politicians that the university has produced, no student is believed to have gained access to the closely-guarded hideaway.

But now it seems all their efforts have been in vain.

Britain's Prince Andrew on Wednesday defended comments he made suggesting the United States might have been better off had its leaders learned from the British experience with colonialism before invading Iraq.

"The fact is that we have learned, sometimes at our expense, in the years when we were a colonial power," he told CNN.

"So there may or may not have been things and ideas that were of valid use to what was going on at that particular time."

The 47-year-old prince, in Atlanta on a 10-day U.S. tour to promote British business, said the two countries are closely allied.

Making some of his most pointed remarks on race relations, President Bush on Tuesday denounced racially charged incidents involving nooses and called the era of lynchings from the 19th to the 20th centuries “a shameful chapter in American history.”

“The noose is not a symbol of prairie justice, but of gross injustice,” Mr. Bush said at a ceremony in the East Room of the White House. “Displaying one is not a harmless prank. And ‘lynching’ is not a word to be mentioned in jest.

“As a civil society, we should be able to agree that noose displays and lynching jokes are deeply offensive. They are wrong. And they have no place in America today.”

At the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Des Moines last November, an annual ritual of backslapping and speechifying that takes on added significance in the months before the Iowa caucuses, the candidates were trying out their slogans. Hillary Clinton went with "Turn Up the Heat" (meaning, she explained, let's attack the Republicans and not each other, a vow she inevitably could not keep). Barack Obama was looking for some way to sharpen the distinction with Clinton and the other candidates. He settled on the word "change." "From my perspective, change was more than just changing parties in the White House," he reflected last week to a NEWSWEEK reporter, as he flew through the night from Omaha to Seattle for the next round of primaries. "What ailed the country went deeper than that. The line in my speech was about not just change as a slogan, but change we can believe in. At that point, we started putting it on our signs."

Many voters did believe in Obama's message, enough to propel him into a dead heat with Clinton on Super Tuesday. People of all kinds, but especially the young and upwardly mobile and African-Americans, have thronged to rallies. Others, however, have been unmoved. Some, particularly older, white, women voters—the kind who turn out in large numbers in Democratic primaries—look at Obama and see someone who appears vaguely alien. They are less interested in ringing calls for change than specific promises to provide health care or child care. Some are just plain skeptical that Obama can deliver change.

They know that presidential candidates have been promising to change the nation's capital as long as they can remember. In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower swept to power promising to clean up the mess created by Harry Truman. Eight years later, in his speech accepting the Democratic Party nomination, John F. Kennedy made essentially the same promise to transform Eisenhower's Washington. "Dry rot, beginning in Washington, is seeping into every corner of America," he said. "It's time for a change." Jimmy Carter promised to sweep Washington clean after Nixon-Ford; Ronald Reagan promised to fix things after Jimmy Carter … and so it has gone in almost every election cycle before and since.

Voters are almost invariably disappointed by candidates promising to straighten out the mess in Washington. Presidents come and go; lobbyists and special-interest groups, it seems, are forever. That doesn't mean, of course, that the presidency is somehow inconsequential or that change does not happen. It's just that the change rarely has much to do with campaign promises, and everything to do with unexpected events, from Pearl Harbor to 9/11.

Presidents can bring great symbolic and tonal changes. Just as JFK brought an aura of youth and vigor to Washington, Obama, by virtue of his skin color if nothing else, will be seen around the world as something new and different from the government of George W. Bush. Occasionally, a president such as Ronald Reagan can change the governing paradigm, from liberal to conservative or back again. But the success of most presidencies depends far less on promises and rhetoric than the way presidents deal with surprises. A look at Obama's record shows that he is far more an incrementalist than a bold change agent. Hillary Clinton scoffs at Obama as weak and untried, and asserts that only she has the experience to bring about real change. Yet her record suggests that she has been rattled by change in the past, and it remains unclear whether she really learned from experience. ("She is a very practical person," says Clinton's policy director Neera Tanden. "Get done what you can. If she's completely lost a battle, then she goes at a problem a different way.")

He was Pol Pot's trusted henchman, the brilliant mathematician who calmly fashioned an efficient apparatus of torture and death out of a Phnom Penh high school and who oversaw, during the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror, the interrogation and cudgelling to death of some 17,000 Cambodians.

In the West he has been called "Cambodia's Heinrich Himmler"; since Pol Pot himself and his lieutenant Ta Mok cheated justice by dying, he is the most vivid symbol of the Khmer Rouge left alive. His name is Kang Khek Ieu, but he is better known by his nom de guerre, Duch (pronounced "Doik"). This spring, 28 years after fleeing Cambodia ahead of the Vietnamese army, his trial for mass murder may finally get under way.

Now, in the first interview he has given since his capture more than eight-and-a-half years ago, he talks freely about how and why he sent 17,000 Cambodians to their deaths in the killing fields.

Russia's government has revealed details of 46,000 artworks missing after Nazi looting.

A new Internet database will help scholars, law enforcement agencies and the art market locate cultural treasures, said the government's Federal Agency for Culture and Cinematography.

A Web site, http://www.lostart.ru , is in Russian with printed editions in English. Thirteen volumes have the 46,000 artworks from 13 museums, and another volume lists 3,541 rare books, manuscripts and letters. There are nearly 1.1 million archive files also missing.