On the morning of April 15th, a short video entitled “2008 China Stand Up!” appeared on Sina, a Chinese Web site. The video’s origin was a mystery: unlike the usual YouTube-style clips, it had no host, no narrator, and no signature except the initials “CTGZ.”

It was a homespun documentary, and it opened with a Technicolor portrait of Chairman Mao, sunbeams radiating from his head. Out of silence came an orchestral piece, thundering with drums, as a black screen flashed, in both Chinese and English, one of Mao’s mantras: “Imperialism will never abandon its intention to destroy us.” Then a cut to present-day photographs and news footage, and a fevered sprint through conspiracies and betrayals—the “farces, schemes, and disasters” confronting China today. The sinking Chinese stock market (the work of foreign speculators who “wildly manipulated” Chinese stock prices and lured rookie investors to lose their fortunes). Shoppers beset by inflation, a butcher counter where “even pork has become a luxury.” And a warning: this is the dawn of a global “currency war,” and the West intends to “make Chinese people foot the bill” for America’s financial woes. A cut, then, to another front: rioters looting stores and brawling in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. The music crescendos as words flash across the scenes: “So-called peaceful protest!” A montage of foreign press clippings critical of China—nothing but “rumors, all speaking with one distorted voice.” The screen fills with the logos of CNN, the BBC, and other news organizations, which give way to a portrait of Joseph Goebbels. The orchestra and the rhetoric climb toward a final sequence: “Obviously, there is a scheme behind the scenes to encircle China. A new Cold War!”

The music turns triumphant with images of China’s Olympic hurdler Liu Xiang standing in Tiananmen Square, raising the Olympic torch, “a symbol of Peace and Friendship!” But, first, one final act of treachery: in Paris, protesters attempt to wrest the Olympic torch from its official carrier, forcing guards to fend them off—a “long march” for a new era. The film ends with the image of a Chinese flag, aglow in the sunlight, and a solemn promise: “We will stand up and hold together always as one family in harmony!”

Cambodia and Thailand will begin talks Monday aimed at resolving a lingering dispute over territory near an World Heritage Site temple, where more than 4,000 troops from the two sides have been deployed. Cambodia's mission at the United Nations has submitted a letter to the chairman of the Security Council and the chairman of the General Assembly to"draw their attention to the current situation on the Cambodian-Thai border," Information Minister Khieu Kanharith said Sunday."Cambodia is not asking for U.N. intervention. We still stick to Prime Minister Hun Sen's instructions to try to solve the problem peacefully between the two sides," the minister said.

Dinko Sakic, the last known living commander of a World War II concentration camp, died overnight in a Croatian hospital while serving a 20-year sentence for war crimes, officials said Monday. He was 87.

Sakic — a former chief of Croatia's infamous Jasenovac camp — died in a hospital in Zagreb, Justice Ministry spokeswoman Vesna Dovranic told The Associated Press.

Sakic had heart problems and had been receiving treatment at a prison hospital, but he was recently transferred to a better-equipped hospital when his condition deteriorated, Dovranic said.

Sakic fled Croatia at the end of the war, when Croatia's pro-Nazi regime was crushed. He had lived peacefully in Argentina for decades until 1998, when he was extradited to Croatia for a trial.

In 1999, Zagreb district court sentenced him to 20 years in prison — the maximum penalty at the time — for carrying out or condoning the torture and slayings of inmates while in charge of the Jasenovac camp in 1944.

More than 600 people paid their respects yesterday to captain David Harold Kouba, an Iowa man whose dangerous life led him from crop-dusting in Mississippi and Australia to flying missions from 1968 to 1975 during the Central Intelligence Agency's "secret war" in Laos.

It was Kouba who flew general Vang Pao, the CIA's top Hmong leader, out of the agency's embattled headquarters at Long Cheng. A program distributed with services explained:

"On May 14, 1975, among few of the remaining American civilian pilots in south-east Asia, Kouba and chopper pilot Jack Knotts flew the last 'up-country' special assignment to evacuate Jerry Daniels (Hog), who was a CIA case officer, and major general Vang Pao."

[McGuire Gibson is Professor of Mesopotamian Archaeology, Oriental Institute, University of Chicago.]

I have just been comparing a satellite image from February 2003, when the Antiqutities organization was excavating at Umma, with one taken within the past month, June 2008. In the 2003 image, it is quite clear that looting that had been done in the 1990s and earlier was restricted to a very small part of the site, mainly on a part of the mound across from the front entrance of the Shara temple that the Iraqis were excavating. The looted area at that time cannot have been more than 5 or 10 percent of the site. (We are in process of measuring and estimating the area.) We know for certain that the Iraqi expedition stayed at Umma until a couple of weeks before the war in April 2003; the expedition left 18 guards on the site, who prevented any looting while they were there. Those guards reported to the SBAH in Baghdad that on the day the war started, looters came out in force and drove the guards off the site. When I visited Umma on May 21, 2003 by helicopter with Ambassador Cordone, I counted over 250 looters at work, and the disturbed area was much bigger, my impressiond being that it was perhaps 5 times greater than it had been before the war. The new image, from June 2008, however shows that the ENTIRE site of Umma is riddled with holes. What proportion of the looters' holes are current or very recent we can't say from the image, nor can we know exactly when the looting of the site was stopped, if it has been. We know that because of the efforts of Abdul Amir Hamdani, the Director of the Antiquities office in Nasiriyah, and the Italian carbinieri, looting was lessened on the major sites in Dhi Qar province, including Umma. Their program to stop the sale of stolen antiquities in the small towns near the major sites must have had a chilling effect, but Abdul Amir says that the activity was shfited ot smaller sites. If you look at Google Earth images of Dhi Qar province you can find dozens of small, unidentified sites as well as major ones with differing percentages of looter holes. With Umma, as with other sites, we cannot say exactly when all illegal digging ceased without a series of images, at least yearly,from 2003 to 2008. But clearly the actions of a relatively SMALL military force, cooperating with the local Antiquities official in this one province made a difference and shows that if even a minimum of attention had been paid to antiquities sites in other provinces, much of the looting in the south may have been stopped or reduced substantially.

Elizabeth Stone has been trying to assess damage to sites all over the south of Iraq through comparison of satellite images, and she has reported some of her findings in Antiquity as well as in the catalogue for the Catastrophe exhibition at the Oriental Institute. In the recent trip, she could have directed the team of archaeologists to many sites that would have shown fresh damage, instead of to the eight sites that the group did visit. The point has been made in previous postings on this site that this was an odd set of sites to investigate. It would be surprising to find damage at Ur and Uruk, since there was plenty of evidence that no looting has been going on there. Curtis had visited Ur before, and the German expedition has been keep apprised of the condition of Uruk. It would also be surprising to find that Lagash (Al-Hiba) was being looted because I saw it in 2003 and it was intact and in satellite images as late as 2007, it was still not being dug illegally. I am a bit surprised to hear that the group found no damage at Larsa because an image from 2006 shows that part of the lower part of the mound was being erased by some kind of machine, a grader or front-end loader, leaving long parallel marks on the surface. I await the team's official report to explain what those marks were. The lack of damage at Ubaid and Eridu, as well as Tell al-Lahm, may be the result of the closeness of a large group of American troops and/or to patrolling by the Antiquities police, as is reported for Tell al-Lahm. Donny George has explained the good condition of Tell al-Oueilli by the fact that it is prehistoric and therefore of very little interest to the looters, the dealers, and collectors.

Had the group gone to Qadissiyah province (Diwaniyah) instead of Dhi Qar, they would have seen a lot of fresh holes, where there has been much less of an attempt to stop looting. As far as I can find out, the digging is still going on at Isin and in smaller sites around it. In a recent issue of the TAARII newsletter (available on-line) Carrie Hritz analyzes the progressive extent of looting at Isin and at nearby sites. Fara, Adab, and many other sites near them show clear looting in satellite images. Maybe there is nothing going on right now (which I doubt), but you can track the progressive spread of looter holes from 2003 to 2008 in images. Even without specially-ordered images, anyone can go onto Google Earth and see massive damage on many sites. I was looking at the area around Tell al-Wilayah yesterday. That site itself is in one of those dead zones, where there is poor imagery and you can make out Wilaya only if you know what to look for. But just to the north and east, going towards Kut, there is fine quality coverage, and you can see dozens of small sites with fresh looking holes on them. Nippur was looted for about a month in 2003, but it was stopped by police from Afak. Subsequent posting of Antiquities guards at the site, in a house newly built for them, and the erecting of a perimeter fence in 2005 have secured Nippur proper. There is ample evidence of continued looting of sites away from cultivation in the desert to the north and east of Nippur.

With the kind of images that are available to scholars, we can't say for sure that the illegal digging is continuing. This can be known only by comparing this years's image with one from a few months or a year ago and some from months to come. It would be great if the looting has stopped, but I doubt that it has. But maybe enough money has been spread around the south to give people jobs that are not as arduous, dangerous (tunnels can collapse), and unrewarding as the work that the local men do as looters. They get very little for the objects that they pass on to the agents of dealers and would not do the work if there were alternatives.

One last remark: It is odd that the people who want to cover up, diminish, or shift the blame for the devastating loss of cultural heritage in Iraq can find all kinds of newspaper articles in which quoted scholars can have their words twisted to serve a view that is exactly the opposite of their position, and they can find Cruikshank's wildly inaccurate and even libelous documentary to cite, but they cannot find the scholars' own articles (in print and on-line) or more responsible journalistic accounts (e.g., Andrew Lawler's August 2003 Science Magazine report on the looting of the Iraq Museum).

It could be seen as the sincerest form of flattery: Ask some activists on the left the kind of Supreme Court justice they would like to see a President Obama appoint, and the name you hear most is the same justice they most often denounce.

They want their own Antonin Scalia. Or rather, an anti-Scalia, an individual who can easily articulate a liberal interpretation of the Constitution, offer a quick sound bite and be prepared to mix it up with conservative activists beyond the marble and red velvet of the Supreme Court.

Some have even mentioned Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for the role, although there is no evidence it would interest her or that Obama would consider his former rival for the Democratic presidential nomination for the court. But as the Supreme Court takes its traditional spot in the background of the presidential campaign, there is a longing on the left for a justice who would energize not only the court's liberal wing, but also the debate over interpreting the Constitution.

Architects are optimists by nature, as Chicago architect Peter Landon demonstrated last week as he took me on a flashlight-guided tour of an abandoned, derelict Chicago Housing Authority building near the fashionable Taylor Street restaurant strip. Paint was peeling off the walls. Thieves had stripped bathtubs of their hardware. Steel stairs were covered with rust.

Landon thinks the 70-year-old, three-story building, empty since 2002, would make a terrific site for a national public housing museum. So does a non-profit headed by CHA resident leader Deverra Beverly and Sunny Fischer, the executive director of the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation and herself a former public housing resident.

"Look at the concrete work," said Landon, of the firm Landon Bone Baker Architects, as he shone a flashlight on an exposed concrete ceiling. "Pretty nice."

The proposal for the public housing museum, which first came to public attention four years ago, is gathering steam, though "not in my backyard" opposition still could thwart it.

A pamphlet warning Britons to leave the Middle East or face death has come to light in a stash of illicit propaganda.

The document does not hail from Basra or Baghdad, nor was it penned by the Islamists of al-Qaeda or the al-Mahdi Army. It was found in Haifa, about 60 years ago, and it was issued by the underground group led by Menachem Begin – the future Prime Minister of Israel and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The document, which surfaced at an auction house this week, is addressed to “the soldiers of the occupation army” and aimed at British soldiers serving in Palestine, then under the British Mandate, preceding the establishment of Israel in 1948. The print has faded and the paper has discoloured since it was unearthed from a grove of trees in Haifa in the summer of 1947. Yet the language and the concerns remain current.

Serbia's war crimes prosecutors are preparing a case against an American who allegedly served in a Nazi unit that killed 17,000 civilians here during World War II, an official said Friday.

Bruno Vekaric, a spokesman for the prosecutors' office, told The Associated Press that it has started gathering information about Peter Egner, 86, a native of Yugoslavia now living in U.S., in order to try him in Serbia.

"We have contacted the Americans, various archives, victims' associations to gather data," Vekaric said. "Once we collect enough material, we will launch a formal investigation and seek his extradition."

Ukraine plans to open a formal investigation into a Soviet-era famine that killed millions of people to see if it can prove the famine was an act of genocide.

The 1932-33 famine was engineered by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to force peasants to give up their private plots of land and join collective farms.

Ukraine, which has rich farmland, suffered the most of all Soviet regions and President Viktor Yushchenko has led efforts to win international recognition of the tragedy as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian nation.

In 2006, the Ukrainian parliament declared the famine a genocide. Vladislav Verstyuk, deputy head of the government's Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance, said Thursday that prosecutors and the state security service will now seek to prove that in court.

Historians are divided on whether "death by hunger" _ or "Holodomor" as it is known here _ was an act of genocide.

Nearly 2,000 years after it was buried and preserved under a volcanic eruption, the ancient Roman town of Pompeii is being steadily worn away by modern woes.

Decades of neglect, millions of trampling visitors and the ravages of sunlight and rain are threatening to wipe out for good one of the world's most famous archaeological sites and Italy's top tourist attraction.

Archaeologists and art historians have long complained about the poor upkeep of the Pompeii treasures, warning that its fading frescoes, leaky roofs and crumbling walls would not survive the test of time.

The 66-hectare site, of which two thirds have been uncovered since excavations began 250 years ago, offers a unique glimpse into everyday life in an ancient Roman town, frozen in time by the Mount Vesuvius eruption in AD 79.

But little has been done over the years to stop the decay, and many of the site's once glorious artifacts -- visited by 2.5 million tourists every year -- are simply disintegrating.

There was a time, not all that long ago, when he was the invisible man whose name was a battle cry, his appearance known to most people only from an out-of-date photograph, a hidden hero on a prison island off the coast of Africa.

But as he celebrated his 90th birthday Friday, Nelson Mandela was anything but invisible, a figure of reverence whose nine decades have been marked and observed at a huge rock concert in Hyde Park in London, a gala dinner for his children's charity in the august, chandeliered Long Room at Lord's cricket ground, and a host of tributes.

His birthday celebration was supposed to be a quiet affair in his ancestral village, Qunu, in the southeast of his country - with a mere 500 of his closest friends in attendance, as well as a touch of wry self-deprecation:

Disemboweled and decorated with scarlet paint, metal eye plates, and a tattoo, an exquisitely preserved, thousand-year-old mummy has been discovered in Peru. (See photos.)

As anthropologists gingerly removed the layers of ancient textiles swaddling the thirtysomething elite male last month at a Lima lab, offerings both strange and familiar came to light—slingshots, corn, a figurine in identical dress.

Taken together, the artifacts, the mummy, and the excavation site suggest that the mysterious, little-studied Chancay civilization held a surprisingly tight grip on the fertile north-central Pacific coast of Peru during the culture's heyday, between A.D. 1000 and 1500, when it finally fell to the unstoppable Inca Empire, experts say.

Thursday night, a moving monument to the Vietnam war comes home to Indiana. The Moving Wall is a scaled-down replica of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington.

Over 58,000 names have come to represent one of America's most costly and divisive wars. Those are the names of the military men and women who fought and died in Vietnam. The Vietnam Veterans memorial in Washington is the permanent monument.

There is also the Moving Wall - a half-size replica that has been touring the country for more than 20 years. After a six-year absence, it is now back at Lawrence's Ft. Harrison. No matter where the wall travels, there is a universal reaction from veterans and civilians.

Three out of five Americans think the U.S. Constitution is fine as is, but 39% fear it doesn't place enough restrictions on the government, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.
As the nation's July 4 birthday nears, 91% say they would vote for the Constitution as the fundamental law of the United States. Just 2% would vote against it.

Fifty-nine percent (59%) of voters say the 219-year-old "living document" should be left alone, while another 34% think it needs only unspecified minor changes. Just 5% suggest major changes, with 1% saying the United States should scrap it and start all over again.

Seventy-nine percent (79%) of voters rate the Constitution as good or excellent. That general level of support cuts across all partisan and demographic lines. However, there are significant gaps of enthusiasm. Only 39% of women view the document as excellent, compared to 57% of men. Forty-nine percent of white voters give it an excellent rating versus 28% of blacks.

SLOVAKIA’S heritage received a welcome boost when eight rare wooden churches were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List on July 7. The churches join six other Slovak sites already on the list.

The World Heritage Committee added two Roman Catholic churches, three Protestant churches, and three Greek Catholic churches built between the 16th and 18th centuries.

The Roman Catholic churches are in Hervartov and Tvrdošín; the Protestant churches are in Kežmarok, Hronsek and Leštiny; and the Greek Catholic churches are in Bodružal, Ladomirová and Ruská Bystrá. They all present good examples of a rich local tradition of religious architecture, marked by the meeting of Latin and Byzantine cultures, according to UNESCO.

The churches, towns, and Slovak heritage protection officials called the decision a sign of great appreciation for Slovakia’s historical treasures and a move that could attract more international attention to the sites.

“Inscribing the wooden churches onto the list acknowledges the exceptional value of the wooden sacred architecture located in Slovakia in this part of the Carpathian Mountain Area,” Katarína Kosová, the general director of the Slovakia’s Monuments Board, told The Slovak Spectator. “The move will put Slovakia on the cultural world map.”

Over ten years ago Congress called on the National Park Service to investigate Revolutionary War sites and War of 1812 sites, evaluate their significance, and identify any threats to them. The resulting report, the Revolutionary War and War of 1812 Historic Preservation Study, is now available online ....

Within this report the National Park Service looks at 243 battlefields and 434 historic properties. Of those, 170 are considered threatened (often by development nearby).

Tucked away into the lush hillsides in the north of the Kingdom, Tal Ziraa is quietly becoming one of the most important archaeological sites in the Kingdom.

The hill is located in Wadi Al Arab, an archaeologically rich area some 5km southwest of Um Qais where the borders of Jordan, Syria and Israel meet and where over 100 sites boast a treasure trove of diverse artefacts, telling a complex story mirroring the rise and decline of different cultures and rulers in the region.

“We have 5,000 years of cultural layers - this is really great for the region. You can’t find a site like this anywhere else in the Kingdom,” Dr Jutta Haser, director of the German Protestant Institute of Archaeology (GIPA) told The Jordan Times on Thursday.

According to the German archaeologist, the most important site is Tal Ziraa, which lies where Wadi Al Arab and Wadi Zahar meet, rising some 40 metres above the surrounding countryside areas.

The GIPA, alongside the biblical Archaeological Institute in Wuppertal and experts from nearby Um Qais, has been excavating the area every Spring and Fall of each year since 2003, as part of the organisations’ greater “Gadara-region project”.

The area was chosen because of its strategic location, leading experts to believe that the site could yield significant archaeological finds.

Instead, the hill has yielded an overwhelming wealth of historical and cultural finds, Haser said.

It was a sort of official crack in the Berlin Wall, one of the few places where East Germans could meet West Germans. Now it's doomed to demolition. The Michendorf rest stop on the outskirts of Berlin is to be knocked down next Monday to make way for an expanded highway.

During the Cold War it had been a place where West Berliners driving through East Germany could grab a cheap bite or share a beer with some East Germans before crossing the border into the US sector of the divided city.

The rest stop, with its gas station and restaurant, became a popular spot for East and West Germans to meet up with friends and family who lived on the other side of the Berlin Wall. Another attraction for West Berliners was the prices: a pork steak with herb butter, peas and fries only cost 3.95 in both deutsche marks and East German marks. (In deutsche marks, by 1989, that was about two dollars.)

Bärbel Grossmann of the local historical society in Michendorf told SPIEGEL ONLINE that they had tried to have the rest stop turned into a museum in 2000, but "it was too late." Plans to expand the A10 highway had been approved, and it was now impossible to list the site as a protected building. Local conservationists had only realized the importance of the rest stop in 1998. Marie-Luise Buchinger of the Brandenburg Protection of Historical Monuments Office told the Märkische Allgemeine newspaper that by then, "demolition plans were so far ahead that they couldn’t be revoked."

The Battle of Hastings is over. More than a century after her death, the young English woman accused of vandalising the most famous cartoon strip in the world, the Bayeux tapestry, recording the downfall of Harold and the triumph of William the Conqueror in 1066, has been cleared.

As a major international conference on the tapestry opens at the British Museum, archaeologist Michael Lewis has named the real villain who snipped a souvenir fragment from the border of the priceless textile: the 19th-century artist and antiquarian Charles Stothard, not his wronged wife Anna Eliza.

Although the outrage occurred almost 200 years ago, sharp-sighted visitors to the museum in the small French town of Bayeux - where visitors were once assured that Eliza, bored while her husband worked, attacked the town's greatest treasure - can still see the repair where a tiny patch of new fabric was stitched.

Some 40-50 artifacts were recovered July 12 near the Stones River Battlefield on the first day of the Harding House Civil War History Survey, a geospatial/archaeological project that is being conducted this month on land slated for development this summer.

Dr. Tom Nolan, director of MTSU’s Laboratory for Spatial Technology, along with archaeologist Zada Law, led the all-volunteer team on its first day of the survey, which yielded Civil War-era artifact finds such as lead shot, a minie ball and a canister shot, among other battle-related discoveries.

Some 25 selected volunteers, including MTSU anthropology and history students, as well as members of Middle Tennessee Metal Detectors, used metal detectors and GPS equipment to survey and map the area around the Harding House site, where Brig. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan’s Union division held up the Confederate advance during the first day of the Battle of Stones River on Dec. 31, 1862.