From Elizabeth Taylor to Sophia Loren, there have been many faces of Cleopatra. But this might be the most realistic of them all.

Egyptologist Sally Ann Ashton believes the computer-generated 3D image is the best likeness of the legendary beauty famed for her ability to beguile.

Pieced together from images on ancient artefacts, including a ring dating from Cleopatra's reign 2,000 years ago, it is the culmination of more than a year of painstaking research.

The result is a beautiful young woman of mixed ethnicity - very different to the porcelain-skinned Westernised version portrayed by Elizabeth Taylor in the 1961 movie Cleopatra.

[See story for images]

[Mr. Rothfield teaches at the University of Chicago.]

As readers of this blog already know, in October the State Department issued a fact sheet laying out its support of what was described as “numerous activities relating to the protection and preservation of Iraq’s cultural heritage”:

These include emergency response to the looting of the Iraq National Museum, training of Iraqi museum professionals, support for archaeological site protection, and instituting legal measures to mitigate illicit trafficking in Iraq’s looted cultural property. Since 2003, several million dollars have been applied to these needs resulting in professional and infrastructure improvements to the National Museum as well as other museums and institutions, and improved archaeological site security in Iraq.

As usual, the issue of site protection was lumped together with others, leaving it unclear how much money has been applied to supporting archaeological site protection, for what programs, protecting how many sites, with what results.

Addressing the problem? Not exactly.

In response to my request, Darlene Kirk, a spokesperson from the State Department’s Bureau of Cultural Affairs, has amplified on the fact sheet’s summary, and kindly permitted me to share this information with the public. Kirk admits that “the Department of State has no mechanisms at its disposal to provide ongoing security at archaeological sites and museums in Iraq,” but she goes on to argue that State “has taken steps to address the problem in a variety of ways:

• The Department of State is funding the newly announced Iraq Cultural Heritage Project (ICHP) and the development of a site management plan for Babylon. Together, these initiatives include programs that will focus on, inter alia, building Iraqi professional capacity for conservation, for preservation of sites including archaeological sites, and for museum governance and administration. It is expected that strengthening the ability of responsible entities within the Iraqi government and its citizens to serve as the responsible stewards of their rich heritage will have a positive impact on site and museum security on a sustainable basis.

• In April 2008, the Department of Homeland Security promulgated U.S. import restrictions on all Iraqi cultural property after a decision to do so was made by the Department of State acting under authority delegated by the President. This import restriction is in addition to the ongoing OFAC regulations banning importation of Iraqi cultural property since 1990.

• The Department of State supported two security assessments of the National Museum in Baghdad which resulted in $1 m. in contracts to implement security measures at the Museum.

• In 2004, in response to evidence of serious looting of archaeological sites in southern Iraq, the State Department used funds donated by the Packard Humanities Institute to purchase 20 trucks and communications equipment for site guards in Dhi, Qar, Diwanyah, and Babil provinces. It was determined that these guards needed such tools to monitor the sites and deter the pillage that was being carried out by very well equipped looters. These vehicles and equipment were given to the Iraq State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH) which in turn issued them to the provinces for use by the site guards. According to SBAH officials in the affected provinces, this resulted in a substantial diminution of the looting in those provinces.

• U.S. personnel responsible for the Ministry of Culture during the period of the Coalition Provisional Authority until July 2004 worked closely with the SBAH and with the Department of State to build and train a Facilities Protection Service (FPS) Archaeological Site Protection Force devoted to site protection under the administration of SBAH.

• Throughout the past several years the Department has acted to address the problem of looting in other ways such as promoting coordination within the international law enforcement community and funding the development, publication and distribution of the Red List for Iraqi Antiquities at Risk which is produced by the International Council of Museums in Arabic, English and French. Now in its third printing, this publication helps raise awareness about the problem among law enforcement entities and would be collectors. The US Embassy in Baghdad recently distributed new copies of the Red List throughout the country and in particular at border crossings.

• The State Department has funded satellite imagery acquisition for large areas of Iraq to allow archaeolgists at SUNY Stony Brook to assess site looting. The Department has also funded training programs in satellite imagery analysis for Iraqi archaeologists.

• The State Department has recently allocated funding for meetings of a proposed Iraq archaeological site protection working group, to be composed of SBAH senior officials from Baghdad, and senior archaeologists and FPS commanders from governorates most affected by looting. The possibility of convening an international law enforcement working group on Iraqi cultural property is also under consideration. (Kirk added in a followup message that “$93,000 has been allocated for the site protection working group meetings. The budget for the international law enforcement working group on Iraqi cultural property has not yet been determined, as this meeting is in the early planning stages.”)

• In July 2008, State Department and US Embassy Baghdad personnel arranged a helicopter overflight of 40+ sites in Qadissiya, Dhi Qar, and Wasit governorates to assess current looting. The results of this mission are being analyzed and will be shared with SBAH authorities for followup. (Kirk later added that “the July 2008 overflight of 40+ sites was conducted by a pair of US military helicopters at the request of the US Embassy in Baghdad. The expert participants were the Cultural Heritage Liaison Officer of the US Embassy and the State Department Special Coordinator for Iraqi Cultural Heritage. The sites were extensively photographed from the air by both experts. The data are being analyzed by the expert participants.”)

This list says volumes about the failure of American policy to deal with the problem of site looting. Import restrictions, Red Lists, site management programs, and security efforts at the Iraq Museum do not secure archaeological sites. The funding for trucks by the Packard Foundation in 2004 was never supplemented by any governmental assistance, nor was any effort made to solicit additional support from other foundations. The FPS force was never given the funding and logistical support it needed, and I believe it has now been disbanded. The funding for satellite imagery was not for large areas of Iraq, but only for southern Iraq, and was provided only in part by the State Department; given that the US military certainly has time-series satellite images available for all sites, it remains puzzling why the State Department did not arrange for those images to be provided to archaeologists, rather than paying for a private company to provide images for only a fraction of sites (and not in a coherent time series even for those sites).

A hopeful development

Only the last two of these bullet points deal directly with contemporary site-protection efforts. Most welcome is the news that a working group on site protection has finally been proposed and allocated funding for meetings. It would have been even more welcome if the working group included some experts on securing and protecting sites (not archaeological sites but all kinds of sites) from the military or State Department.

Where's the Report?

The final bullet point raises interesting questions of its own. A similar helicopter tour of eight sites was conducted in June 2008, leaked almost immediately, and published in mid-July. Why is it taking so long to release the findings from the helicopter overflight in July? Could it be because they would contradict the message that both the US and the Iraqi governments want to present, that the looting is over? One hopes not, and it is always possible that the “expert participants” (presumably John Russell and Diane Siebrandt, neither of whom to my knowledge is an expert at analyzing imagery though both are highly competent, dedicated, and indeed heroic individuals putting their lives on the line in Iraq) simply are better at keeping things under wraps than the British Museum, but the delay certainly raises suspicions.

Many, many years ago, the area now known as Zilker Park (Austin, Texas - USA) was a settlement for some of North America's early hunter-gatherers. As many as 10,000 years ago, those people used stone tools to cut meat, chop wood, scrape hides, and fashion spear points. Artifacts of their lives have long been entombed under layers of mud and sediment washed ashore by the flooding Colorado River.

The Austin City Council could decide to pay as much as $700,000 for a three-month dig in Zilker Park to uncover troves of these stone tools. The dig was prompted by a major sewer line upgrade that was completed late last year that touched on an area of known archaeological deposits. The dig, which is expected to begin in February, would expand on a preliminary archaeological investigation in Zilker Park in 2006 that uncovered 887 flint flakes associated with the making of stone tools about 10,000 years ago.

An archaeological team working on the Kelar Tepe believes that they have found a Neolithic settlement on the prehistoric mound located in the Kelaradsht region in Iran's northern province of Mazandaran. However they have said that more tests are needed to determine an accurate date for the site.

"Excavations at the Rashak 3 Cave have uncovered an oven at a depth of 5 meters," team director Hamed Vahdatinasab said."We have also discovered shards in the oven, which are very similar to Neolithic pottery works," he added. Vahdatinasab said that Ezzatollah Negahban, the father of modern Iranian archaeology, had excavated the region about 40 years ago.

DANDONG, China -- Here at the Museum of the War to Resist American Aggression and Aid Korea, it's as if the clock stopped 55 years ago.

"I feel like I am right there on the front lines," said Wang Binyan, a 23-year-old teacher. "I can feel what the Chinese soldiers felt. In this place, Americans are the enemy."

The museum in this provincial city on the North Korean border tells a personal version of the Korean War, one that casts U.S. foreign policy and military tactics in a decidedly negative light. Hundreds of historical photographs and exhibits present a pro-Beijing side of a conflict that saw Chinese forces rush to the aid of North Korea.

There are photos of glum-looking American prisoners of war, accusations of U.S. germ warfare, and maps and pictures that purportedly show evidence of widespread civilian damage from American bombs.

The commentaries with each exhibit are often heated, using phrases such as "American imperialists," "wanton U.S. bombing" and "despise and hate" to describe China's view of the United States.

Villagers, acting as human minesweepers, walked ahead of troops in dangerous areas to keep Americans from being blown up. Prisoners were subjected to a variation on waterboarding and jolted with electricity. Teenage boys fishing on a lake, as well as children tending flocks of ducks, were killed. “There are hundreds of such reports in the war-crime archive, each one dutifully recorded, sometimes with no more than a passing sentence or two, as if the killing were as routine as the activity it interrupted,” Deborah Nelson writes in “The War Behind Me.”

The archive, housed at the University of Michigan, holds documents from Col. Henry Tufts, former chief of the Army’s investigative unit, that reveal widespread killing and abuse by American troops in Vietnam. Most of these actions are not known to the public, even though the military investigated them. The crimes are similar to those committed at My Lai in 1968. Yet, as Nelson contends, most Ameri cans still think the violence was the work of “a few rogue units,” when in fact “every major division that served in Vietnam was represented.” Precisely how many soldiers were involved, and to what extent, is not known, but she shows that the abuse was far more common than is generally believed. Her book helps explain how this misunderstanding came about.

In 1943, a German pilot decided not to shoot down Charlie Brown's damaged plane. Brown died last month, but he lived to finally see his heroism recognized.

When World War II bomber pilot Charlie Brown is laid to rest Saturday, his burial will close a chapter on one of the most remarkable war stories in modern history.

It's a tale of two pilots -- one American, the other German -- and of a bloody, deadly battle in the sky that led to an extraordinary friendship.

Australia, Hungary and Lithuania are failing to investigate and prosecute suspected Nazi war criminals largely due to a lack of political will, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said Thursday.

The Nazi-hunting group said the same holds true for Croatia, Estonia, Latvia and Ukraine, adding all countries in question face no legal obstacles in bringing suspects to justice.

The findings were published in the center's annual report, which graded the investigation and prosecution efforts of countries around the world between April 2007 and March 2008.

It had seemed an appropriate memorial. In August, Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev decided to name a street in Moscow after Alexander Solzhenitsyn, shortly after the writer's death aged 89.

But the residents of Alexander Solzhenitsyn Street - as it is now known - appear to have other ideas. Together with Russia's communists, locals have waged a furious campaign against the change of name - and have demanded that the street get its old name of Big Communist Street back

Communist activists have complained that Medvedev's decision to rename the street after Solzhenitsyn - Russia's greatest literary chronicler of communist repression - is, in fact, illegal. Under Russian law, the authorities are supposed to wait ten years before they can name a street after a dead person.

Locals, meanwhile, have gone one step further. Last Sunday residents tore down the street sign, leaving a gaping space above house number 12.

The authorities have now put the Solzhenitsyn sign up again. Another plaque bearing the writer's name hangs at the end of the avenue next to branch of McDonald's, an outlet the Nobel-prize winning author - no fan of western capitalism - was unlikely to have eaten in.

Changing the name of the street was "not only a gross breach of existing legislation but also a challenge to all people with communist views because Solzhenitsyn always fought with the communists," Sergei Udaltsov, the leader of the communist Left Front youth organisation, told the Moscow Times.

An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag — particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army — the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.

Russia’s Constitutional Court, which recently transferred from Moscow at Vladimir Putin’s command, is lit more brightly than any other building on St Petersburg’s beautiful English Embankment at night.

At the offices of the leading human rights group Memorial, however, a daylight raid by masked men speaks of a darker Soviet tradition of state power. Police confiscated computer hard drives containing 20 years’ work documenting victims of Stalin’s Terror and political persecution in the Soviet Union.

Education programmes, human rights work and research on the still secret graves of an estimated 2.7 million Leningraders were all taken from the research and information centre. So too was material for one of Memorial’s most important and potentially most powerful projects - a “Virtual Museum of the Gulag”.

The Prosecutor’s Office in St Petersburg claimed that it was investigating links between Memorial and an article in Novy Peterburg, an obscure anti-semitic newspaper that was shut down a year ago. Staff at Memorial say that they have never had anything to do with this newspaper and are under no illusion that the allegation is simply a pretext to wreck their work.

Russia has no national Gulag Museum. Indeed, there has been no legal assessment of Soviet repression and none of the efforts to understand the past that countries like Germany and South Africa have pursued. The Virtual Gulag was to provide an important alternative to a growing cult of Stalinism, in which the dictator’s methods are gradually being justified again.

The construction of an exact copy of the Taj Mahal has sparked a diplomatic fracas between India and Bangladesh - raising the vexing issue of whether or not it is possible to claim copyright on a building.

The row began after Ahsanullah Moni, a wealthy Bangladeshi film director, gave the first glimpse of his copy of the Taj Mahal this week.

The project has cost about £40 million and is being built about 20 miles northeast of Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital. But the Indians are upset. “You can't just go and copy historical monuments,” an official at the Indian High Commission in Dhaka told a reporter this week.

“Someone will go out there and have a look. This [the original Taj Mahal] is a protected site we are talking about, so we need to find out if it really is the exact size.”

Deepak Mittal, a spokesman for the High Commission, confirmed to The Times that the matter was being investigated. “We have heard about this new Taj. We are checking the details,” he said.

For their part, Bangladeshi officials are incensed by suggestions that the Taj Mahal - which was built by the Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, and completed in 1653 - is protected by some sort of copyright.

[David] Plouffe served as Obama’s campaign manager and is often referred to as the"unsung hero" of the president-elect's White House bid. He was largely responsible for designing the strategy that ultimately dashed Clinton's own ambitions for the Oval office.

Now, the camera-shy Plouffe is revealing what surprised him the most about Clinton’s campaign: the New York senator's strategists willingness to concede a string of caucus states to the Obama camp. In the process Obama won a vast sum of delagates and created a lead in the delegate count that ultimately proved fatal to Clinton's chances.

"We were surprised because at some point it became likely that it was going to be a battle that went on for some time, and delegates that are gained through a caucus are no different than through a primary—so every contest mattered," Plouffe told Portfolio Magazine.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act is a federal law that requires museums and federal agencies to return human remains and other cultural items to their linear descendants. That means it's up to people like U.S. Fish & Wildlife archaeologist Debbie Corbett to locate all of the remains that were taken off of federal lands in Alaska, identify who they belong to, and try to get them home. But Corbett says the process isn't always straight forward for the dozens of remains she handles each year. The archaeologists and others who removed the bones, mostly during the 1930s and 40s, didn't always do it carefully.

"They're grabbing a bag full of bones that may or may not belong to one person," she said."There may be two people mixed in, there may be three people mixed in. They may all belong to one person. So what we did was we got all these fragments together in one place and looked at them as a group to try to see if we could reassemble individuals."

One of the most dramatic episodes in the life of Basil Kelly, a High Court and then appeal judge in NorthernIreland, and indeed in the eventful history of the province's legal system during the recent Troubles, came in August 1983. Presiding over one ofthe biggest IRA cases ever to come before the courts, Kelly was equipped with certain extras, which included a bullet-proof vest and SAS bodyguards. In court he was flanked bytwo vigilant police officers armed with M1 carbines.

It was a huge "supergrass" case, with the one-time IRA member Christopher Black giving evidence against almost 40 alleged former associates. Those who were present recall an atmosphere of almost electric hatred as a packed court room held the judge and the police and, in poisonous proximity, scores of republicans ranged in the dock and public gallery.

No one doubted that Basil Kelly was a marked man: the IRA had already assassinated a number of legal figures, declaring them to be part of what republicans in those days called "the British war machine". Earlier that year they had killed Judge William Doyle, gunning him down as he left church after mass. Some years earlier they had shot and killed one of Kelly's close friends, the magistrate Martin McBirney. A few years later they would use a landmine to kill the senior judge Maurice Gibson and his wife.

On this occasion, Kelly handed down sentences of more than 4,000 years' imprisonment to 22 people after one of the longest trials in UK legal history. He sentenced one leading republican to almost 1,000 years in jail. Years later the majority of those convicted were to be freed on appeal as senior judges registered their view that the "supergrass system" was offensive to human rights and unsuited to Northern Ireland. No one who witnessed the court proceedings of the time was left in any doubt that this was one of the battlefields of Northern Ireland's long undeclared war, and that judges were very much in the front line. Basil Kelly lived to the age of 87: if the IRA had had its way his death would have come many years earlier. Instead, he outlasted them.

As the Bush administration comes to an end, the federal government is not functioning as it should. Just how bad is this government dysfunction? In an effort to answer that question, the Center for Public Integrity embarked on Broken Government, an examination of the worst systematic failures of the executive branch over the past eight years.

Broken Government documents more than 125 examples of government breakdown in areas as diverse as education, energy, the environment, justice and security, the military and veterans affairs, health care, transportation, financial management, consumer and worker safety, and more — failures which adversely affected ordinary people and made the nation a less open or less secure place to live.

A deluge that swept the Land of Israel more than 7,000 years ago, submerging six Neolithic villages opposite the Carmel Mountains, is the origin of the biblical flood of Noah, a British marine archeologist said Tuesday.

The new theory about the source of the great flood detailed in the Book of Genesis comes amid continuing controversy among scholars over whether the inundation of the Black Sea more than seven millennia ago was the biblical flood.

In the theory posited by British marine archeologist Dr. Sean Kingsley and published in the Bulletin of the Anglo-Israeli Archaeological Society, the drowning of the Carmel Mountains villages - which include houses, temples, graves, water wells, workshops and stone tools - is by far "the most compelling" archeological evidence exposed to date for Noah's flood.

Contrary to much reporting -- including some of our own - the U.S. Senate probably lacks the Constitutional authority to refuse to seat an appointment made by indicated Governor Rod Blagojevich. As a law school friend writes:

FYI. If the Supreme Court took the case, It isn't clear that the Senate has the Constitutional authority to refuse to seat a senator who has been validly appointed under the Constitution.

Art I Section 5 says that"Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members..."

In Powell v McCormack, the Court held that the House of Reps couldn't refuse to seat Adam Clayton Powell as long as he met the Constitution's qualifications for membership (age, residency, citizenship.).

I guess, theoretically, the Senate could seat the appointee and then expel him with a 2/3rds vote. The Court wouldn't interfere on Political Question grounds: the Constitution doesn't specify the standard for expulsion so it is properly at the discretion of the Senate.

The tricky part here is that Article 1 of the Constitution stipulates that the Senate is the"Judge of Elections, Returns and Qualifications" of its own members. The Senate actually has fairly broad latitude on questions of"Elections and Returns", which is why it could intervene, say, in the Minnesota recount (as it has done in similar cases in the past). An appointment, however, is not an election, which means the only vehicle open to the Senate is challenging the appointee's qualifications, and the Powell v McCormack precedent stipulates that such a review would be limited to his age, residency or citizenship. What the Senate would have to do instead is actually expel the member they just admitted to the chamber, which requires a 2/3 majority and would be much stickier in terms of precedent -- the Senate has not expelled a member since the Civil War.

This places even more pressure on the Illinois Legislature to impeach Blagojevich, who in all likelihood is too delusional and/or too stupid to resign his seat. Impeachments have been a rarity in Illinois, and the state's Constitution does not establish specific grounds for a conviction on impeachment proceedings (that is, there's nothing analogous to"treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors" as stated in the US Constitution). But nobody stands anything to gain by defending Blagojevich and he'd seem like a longshot to survive an impeachment trial, even if the legislature is somewhat making up the precedents as it goes along.

EDIT: Short of impeaching Blagojevich, the Illinois Legislature could also rewrite its appointments law in conjunction with establishing a special elections procedure, removing the governor's power to make an appointment, as some states like Oregon have done. See Adam B's legal explainer for more.

FURTHER UPDATE: Crain's Chicago Business suggests this is exactly what the state legislature will try and do.

The decline of the Roman and Byzantine Empires in the Eastern Mediterranean more than 1,400 years ago may have been driven by unfavorable climate changes.

Based on chemical signatures in a piece of calcite from a cave near Jerusalem, a team of American and Israeli geologists pieced together a detailed record of the area's climate from roughly 200 B.C. to 1100 A.D.

Their analysis, to be reported in an upcoming issue of the journal Quaternary Research, reveals increasingly dry weather from 100 A.D. to 700 A.D. that coincided with the fall of both Roman and Byzantine rule in the region.