The closure of Everest's northeast ridge came after China told tourist agencies in Tibet to cancel all tours until April and stopped issuing entrance permits for Tibet to foreigners.

Tensions in Tibet are running high ahead of the anniversary of the Dalai Lama's flight into exile on March 10. Many Tibetans have chosen not to celebrate Tibetan New Year, or Losar, today (weds) to silently protest Chinese rule.

China's move to close off Tibet will ensure a news black-out in case of any repeat of the violence that broke out last March. Large squads of riot police have already been spotted by reporters in Tibetan areas of the surrounding provinces.

Has former president Bush already grown restless? Starting next month, he will begin an international speaking tour, making ten speeches over the next year across the U.S., Canada, Europe and Asia. The tour is expected to gross him hundreds of thousands of dollars, a modest sum compared to the almost $10 million figure that former president Clinton made in 2006 alone. The tour is aimed at rehabilitating his image, though he seems to not have learned why it was so damaged in the first place: The press will be barred from attending his first speech, slated for March 17 in Calgary Canada, where he will speak to a business audience on his years in office and 21st-century challenges.

After 37 days in office, Obama’s administration continues to be the leader in use of unilateral powers of the presidency (30 actions vs. an average of 14.5 for the comparison group). Obama’s “going public” strategy has also been distinctive. Obama has been among the slowest of our group of “change presidents” to use his “bully pulpit” to address the nation as a whole about his priorities. ...

However, Obama has been very active in participating in public events at which he makes “remarks.” Obama recorded more such events in the first five weeks of his presidency than any presidents in our comparison group. He’s also done more events outside Washington, D.C. than the others.

Barack Obama climbed Capitol Hill last night and staked his presidency on bringing the nation out of its economic crisis.

Not since Franklin Roosevelt delivered his first fireside chat, eight days into his presidency, have Americans been more hungry -- and more desperate -- for economic leadership. And not since FDR has there been an economic agenda as bold or ambitious, or as likely to reshape American capitalism.

Just a month in office, Obama has already pushed through additional fiscal stimulus equal to 5 percent of the country's economic output. His Treasury Department is about to embark on the second phase of a program that will lead to greater government control and ownership of some of the nation's biggest banks. He has assembled a team to pull off what amounts to a bankruptcy reorganization for automakers that will leave taxpayers as one of the industry's biggest creditors. And within months, the president has promised to deliver the blueprint of a new regulatory architecture that will dramatically increase the government's oversight of financial firms.

If all of that weren't enough of a challenge, Obama vowed to move quickly to revamp the health-care system, put the government on a credible path toward a balanced budget, dramatically reduce the country's carbon footprint, rewrite the tax code and reform public schools.

"Action, and action now," is how FDR put it in his time. In Obama's translation, "that day of reckoning has arrived, and the time to take charge of our future is here."

It remains an open question whether by trying to do so much so fast, Obama will be able to create the momentum and sense of urgency necessary to overcome pushback from many Republicans, the inevitable opposition from special interests and the natural tendency of the system to return to the old political equilibrium.

Already there are signs that the demands of the president's ambitious agenda have overwhelmed the economic team that has been assembled at the White House, the Treasury and other federal agencies. And there are some who warn that in asking Congress to consider so many different issues, Obama runs the risk of political gridlock as one initiative is held hostage to another.

But as Obama sees it, his strategy is not to find a way to maneuver a wildly ambitious economic program through the twists and turns of a hostile and byzantine political system, but to use the urgency of the moment and his considerable political capital to reform that system and transform the way politics is done....

A Paris judge yesterday gave the go-ahead to the controversial sale of two Chinese bronzes looted more than a century ago by British and French troops and now part of the collection amassed by the late fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent.

The decision means that the auction planned for Wednesday morning at Christie's in Paris can proceed and the two Ching dynasty sculptures - a rabbit and a rat's head - are expected to fetch between €8m and €10m ($12.7m, £8.8m).

The queues were forming outside the auction house last night for what is being described in the French press as "the sale of the century" with some 700 pieces of art, glassware and sculpture in the collection.

But the ruling will be a blow to the latest attempt by Chinese authorities to stop the sale of historical -artefacts to private -collections. Though the action was brought by a French -archeologist Bernard Gomez, also head of the Association for the Protection of Chinese art in Europe, it received the tacit support of authorities.

Like a toy surprise in a box of Cracker Jacks - er, slightly water-logged Cracker Jacks, that is - a Civil War era shipwreck turned up among Hurricane Ike debris.

The discovery, thought to be previously uncharted, was made by crews last week scanning the bays around Galveston to chart debris.

While the find came as a kind of fun surprise to the contractors doing the work, State Marine Archeologist Steve Hoyt was pleased - but not terribly surprised.

Hoyt added it's possible the shipwreck had been buried in mud and Ike's surge might have uncovered it. Or, it could just be that it had simply been overlooked until now.

In the past, smaller areas have been surveyed for different projects, such as pipelines, to ensure that the work won't disturb any significant sites, Hoyt said.

When the Texas Historic Commission finds out about a "new" historic ship wreck site, personnel begin to comb through a database of thousands of shipwrecks known to have occurred in the region.

The next step for the Texas Historic Commission is to assess the site.

The Leoff-Vinot collection, made up of more than 8,100 pre-Columbian pieces bought on the black market, was presented here Tuesday by its new owner, Mexico's National Anthropology and History Institute, or INAH.

Considered to be the most important antiquities collection in Mexico in private hands due to the number and age of the pieces, some of them more than 3,000 years old, the items will be catalogued and researched in the archaeological zone of Xochicalco, located in the central state of Morelos.

Among the pieces in the collection are an offering box with an engraving of the emblem of Aztlan, possibly of Tenochtitlan (modern-day Mexico City), and two Toltec monoliths with the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl emerging from the jaws of a serpent, each of which weighs 500 pounds.

A long-running dispute between two men who both claim to own the "sniper's perch" in the JFK assassination returns to court next month.

They both claim ownership of the sixth-floor window from the Texas School Book Depository where Lee Harvey Oswald hid out to shoot President John F. Kennedy in Dallas.

Caruth Byrd, 67, of Van, Texas, sued 81-year-old Aubrey Mayhew, of Nashville, Tenn. over who owns the "real" window after both had been posted for sale on eBay.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Anybody want some top-secret seagoing vessels? The Navy has a pair it doesn't need anymore. It has been trying to give them away since 2006, and they're headed for the scrap yard if somebody doesn't speak up soon.

One is called Sea Shadow. It's big, black and looks like a cross between a Stealth fighter and a Batmobile. It was made to escape detection on the open sea. The other is known as the Hughes (as in Howard Hughes) Mining Barge. It looks like a floating field house, with an arching roof and a door that is 76 feet wide and 72 feet high. Sea Shadow berths inside the barge, which keeps it safely hidden from spy satellites.

The barge, by the way, is the only fully submersible dry dock ever built, making it very handy -- as it was 35 years ago -- for trying to raise a sunken nuclear-armed Soviet submarine...

But a gift ship from the Navy comes with lots of strings attached to the rigging. A naval museum, the Historic Naval Ships Association warns, is "a bloodthirsty, paperwork ridden, permit-infested, money-sucking hole..." Because the Navy won't pay for anything -- neither rust scraping nor curating -- to keep museums afloat, survival depends on big crowds. That's why many of the 48 ships it has given away over 60 years were vessels known for performing heroically in famous battles.

NEW DELHI -- Indians are expressing outrage over a New York auction that is set to sell some of the most personal belongings of India's great independence leader Mohandas K. Gandhi -- the gaunt, bare-chested man whose ascetic life defied materialism.

The auction is a travesty for many Indians, for whom Gandhi is a godlike figure, and some in India's Parliament have called for the government to either stop the auction or put in the highest bid to get back the nation's iconic mementos.

The bidding for Gandhi's distinctive metal-rimmed round spectacles, his leather sandals, a 1910 sterling Zenith pocket watch, and a brass bowl and plate is scheduled for March 5 and 6 in New York.

[Re: The building of a store adjacent to a major Civil War battlefield in Virginia.]

Walmart representatives announced Monday that based on results of a recent survey, a new Walmart Supercenter will be welcomed by a majority of Orange County residents. Last month’s survey, conducted by an independent market research firm, questioned 300 registered voters in Orange County about shopping preferences and related issues.

Plans to build the 143,000-square-foot supercenter on a 19-acre portion of a larger property-already zoned for commercial use-were announced last year. Since plans for the project were made public, there has been an almost-constant discussion between those who support the project for the economic benefits it could offer Orange, and those who oppose it because of the proximity to important sites in American culture and history.

Walmart contracted with Voter Consumer Research in January to conduct a public opinion survey of registered voters in Orange, and results were significant: 61 percent of local registered voters said they supported a new Walmart at the proposed site on the north side of the Route 3 and Route 20 intersection. And further, Walmart representatives said, according to their results, 74 percent of those surveyed said Orange County lacked shopping options.

A student at Miami University has discovered what experts say is a fingerprint belonging to Abraham Lincoln from nearly 150 years ago.

Lydia Smith, a first-year psychology major from Granville, Ohio, was transcribing a letter written by Lincoln on Oct. 5, 1863, for a class project when she noticed a smudge that she suspected could be the 16th president’s thumbprint. Lincoln historians have confirmed the print.

The Papers of Abraham Lincoln, a project of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency and Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, reviewed and confirmed the print, making it the second rare fingerprint of the 16th president housed at Miami’s libraries.

The collection at Miami includes the first authenticated fingerprint of Lincoln with a signature known to historians since it was first verified in 1957. Lydia Smith's discovery of the second fingerprint has historians taking notice.

The 1863 letter was among hundreds of miscellaneous letters stored in Miami’s Walter Havighurst Special Collections section of King Library and uncovered this fall. With this find, the university now owns four Lincoln letters, all of which are part of a larger collection of Lincoln-related items donated to Miami in 1967 by alumnus William A. Hammond (’14) who had spent 30 years collecting Lincoln-related items.

Royal seal impressions were discovered in excavations of the Israel Antiquities Authority at Umm Tuba, in the southern hills of Jerusalem.

A large building that dates to the time of the First and Second Temples, in which there was an amazing wealth of inscriptions, was discovered in a salvage excavation conducted by Zubair Adawi, on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, in the village of Umm Tuba in southern Jerusalem (between Zur Baher and the Har Homa quarter), prior to construction work by a private contractor.

Considering the limited area of the excavation and the rural nature of the structure that was revealed, the excavators were surprised to discover in it so many royal seal impressions that date to the reign of Hezekiah, King of Judah (end of the eighth century BCE). Four “LMLK” type impressions were discovered on handles of large jars that were used to store wine and oil in royal administrative centers. These were found together with the seal impressions of two high ranking officials named Ahimelekh ben Amadyahu and Yehokhil ben Shahar, who served in the kingdom’s government. The Yehokhil seal was stamped on one of the LMLK impressions before the jar was fired in a kiln and this is a very rare instance in which two such impressions appear together on a single handle.

Another Hebrew inscription, 600 years later than the seal impressions of the Kingdom of Judah, was discovered on a fragment of a jar neck that dates to the Hasmonean period. An alphabetic sequence was engraved with a thin iron stylus below the vessel’s rim in Hebrew script that is characteristic of the beginning of the Hasmonean period (end of the second century BCE). The letters hay to yod and a small part of the letter kaf were preserved on the shard. Similar inscriptions bearing alphabetic sequences were discovered in the past, usually on ostraca (inscriptions written in ink on pottery shards) or engraved on ossuaries (stone receptacles in which human bones were buried). The alphabetic inscription that was discovered in this instance is unique and the significance of it requires further study: was this a “writing exercise” done by an apprentice scribe or should we ascribe to it some magical importance?

Some three years ago the impressive remains of a monastery from this period were excavated that together with the remains of the current excavation confirm the identification of the place as “Metofa”, which is mentioned in the writings of the church fathers in the Byzantine period. The name of the Arab village, “Umm Tuba” is therefore a derivation of Byzantine “Metofa”, which is Biblical “Netofa” and is mentioned as the place from which two of David’s heroes originated (2 Samuel 23:28-29).

Believed to be among the oldest brick shrines in India, Lucknow University’s department of ancient Indian history and archaeology has unearthed a 2,000-year-old Shiva temple as part of its excavation project recently in Uttar Pradesh’s Unnao district.

The temple site is a mound in Sanchankot in Unnao. The excavations have been going on since 2004, when UGC cleared the project for funding. ‘‘A lot of things have come to fore since we began, but the temple complex has suddenly given impetus to our research,’’ said Prof Tewari.

Spread across an area of 600 acres, the temple is made of baked bricks. In India, most of the brick temples were built in the Gupta period which existed in the fourth century AD. The temple’s architecture is ‘apsidal’ (semi-circular or u-shaped) in nature.

The LU has many artifacts to conclude that Lord Shiva was worshipped in this temple. Prof Tewari said, ‘‘A terracotta seal bearing the legend of ‘Kaalanjar peeth’ in Brahmi script was found from the site in Dec 2008.’’

Murals over two thousand years old still retaining their colors: that's an amazing find in a tomb in the suburbs of Xi'an, capital of northwest China's Shaanxi province.

A ramp leads to the tomb chambers. Murals decorate both the vault and the brick walls.

Cheng Linquan, director, Institute of archeology, said, The upper part is painted with celestial signs and the lower part is painted with life scenes. We see here is a woman carrying a baby, while leading another child. The lines are simple and earthy, reflecting the art style of that era.

Experts speculate the tomb owner might be from a noble family. But more details need to be further verified. Protection of the tomb is in the process.

Abbey Of New Clairvaux Monks Work To Rebuild Structure.

History is being rebuilt in Tehama County as monks piece together stones from an 800-year-old building that will eventually become California's oldest standing structure.

Monks from the Abbey of New Clairvaux have been slowly putting together stones from a pre-Gothic meeting house built in Spain during the Middle Ages.

In 1931, millionaire newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst bought the original building, had it dismantled and shipped to California to be part of Wyntoon, his estate near the McCloud River.

The Great Depression changed that, and for decades, the stones sat moldering in Golden Gate Park.

In the 1990s, San Francisco gave the stones to the monks who started trimming the stones, fixing broken pieces and reinforcing the building with concrete and steel to meet modern earthquake codes.

Some of the stones are now standing once again behind the walls of the Abbey of New Clairvaux, where the monastery monks have been putting them together for the past five years.

The project is being funded entirely through private donations. However, since the recession, those have slowed down considerably. The monks don't know when their building will be complete.

The European Court of Human Rights was established in 1959 to protect civil and political rights when the horrors of previous decades were still fresh in Europe's mind. The aim was to provide a basis of trust and solidarity to burgeoning European unification and provide a safeguard against any erosion of human beings' basic rights and dignity.

It proved so successful that since its inception, the court has seen its case load brought by individuals, organizations and nations grow to some 100,000 cases from 46 countries.

These days, in fact, the court faces a serious backlog. Critics argue that it has become a victim of its own success -- a result of the growing number of states subject to its jurisdiction, a good reputation, expansive interpretations of individual liberties, distrust of domestic judiciaries in some countries and entrenched human rights problems in others.

Nobody at the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad knows exactly how the three stolen Sumerian tablets got all the way to Lima, Peru. All authorities in Lima told Iraqi museum officials was that the three tablets, more than 2,000 years old and each small enough to hold in the palm of one's hand, were found roughly a year ago in the luggage of an American traveling in the country and seized at the airport."I'm not involved in the other details," says Dr. Amira Edan, who heads of the museum's efforts to reclaim lost artifacts and flew to Peru to retrieve the tablets."What was important for me was to take the items back."

Edan finally brought the tablets from Peru to the Baghdad museum about three weeks ago, adding them to more than 4,000 Iraqi artifacts the museum has recovered since the chaos that followed the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Peru appears to be the farthest that purloined Iraqi treasures have traveled. Most other recovered items have come from neighboring countries. More than 2,500 artifacts have returned to Iraq from Jordan, along with more than 760 from Syria. Many stolen items have made it to further west. Thirteen pieces were found in Italy; and at least another dozen have surfaced in the United States, including a large statue of a Sumerian king..."

Quick spending to repair America's infrastructure is the priority for most of the bill's $787 billion. Instead of grand public works, officials seek to fix roads, schools, sewer lines and the like.

Compared with the epic approach of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, President Obama's economic recovery strategy could be summed up as: Think small -- in a huge way.

FDR left a legacy of engineering marvels that still adorn the landscape: the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state, and New York's LaGuardia Airport and Triborough Bridge among them.

But don't look for similar monuments to emerge from the new stimulus plan, despite its $787-billion price tag. Billions in infrastructure spending is likely to go for less-glamorous but widely distributed projects such as repaving battered streets, repairing rundown schools and replacing aging sewer lines.

"Resurfacing, painting, lighting and maintenance programs are not as flashy as building a new bridge, but as projects they are no less important," said Jeff Solsby of the American Road and Transportation Builders Assn. "They provide important benefits and create jobs to grow the economy."

Has America's even-tempered new president already ruffled feathers in the land that spawned Borat and Benny Hill? That's certainly how the spiky British press responded after the White House sent back to the British Embassy a bust of Sir Winston Churchill that had occupied a cherished spot in President Bush's Oval Office. Intended as a symbol of transatlantic solidarity, the bust was a loaner from former British prime minister Tony Blair following the September 11 attacks. A bust of Abraham Lincoln—Obama's historical hero—now sits in its place. A White House spokesperson says the Churchill bust was removed before Obama's inauguration as part of the usual changeover operations, adding that every president puts his own stamp on the Oval Office.

But the British press, as is its wont, smells a snub...

A group of students from Idaho have taken an unusual field trip to Connecticut for a special reunion.

On Saturday, the 14 students will meet in Middletown with the family members of former soldier Anthony J. Malone to return to them the helmet he wore in World War II.

Their mission was to find out the history behind the Army helmet Mansfield’s father had given to him 40 years ago.

Inside the helmet was Malone’s name and a serial number.

After almost a month of research online, the students discovered that Malone had been a medic during World War II.

His company, they say, saw more than its fair share of battle, including D-Day. He'd also been awarded a purple heart.

What they also found out was that Malone passed away eight years ago but he is survived by a wife, here in Connecticut and children who live in New Jersey. So, they called some of Malone's family members to tell them of their find and eventually made plans to return it in person.

IT IS the Queen Mother as she is most fondly remembered. At the races, sitting with her corgis in the garden and, most poignantly, looking the East End in the eye during the London blitz.

The scenes in bronze relief accompany a 9 and a half foot statue of the Queen Mother, seen here for the first time, resplendent in her Order of the Garter robes and with a faint smile.

The memorial, which has been kept secret, will be unveiled by the Queen on Tuesday. It stands in front of – and below – a statue of King George VI, her late husband, off the Mall in central London, a quarter of a mile from her former home at Clarence House.

What may be a hitherto unknown portrait of Leonardo da Vinci in middle age shows that the Renaissance genius had piercing blue eyes, a long nose and long greying hair with a droopy moustache.

The damaged oil-on-panel portrait was discovered by Nicola Barbatelli, a medieval historian, while he was researching the archive and picture collection of an aristocratic family at Acerenza (population 3,000), an ancient village perched on a rock above the river Bradano near Potenza in the southern Italian region of Basilicata. The family has asked to remain anonymous.

At one time thought to portray Galileo Galilei, the great astronomer, it shows a man in three-quarter profile wearing a hat with a feather in it. Mr Barbatelli, who found the painting by chance while researching the history of the Templar Knights and the First Crusade, told The Times that although Leonardo came from Vinci in Tuscany and worked in Florence and Milan, he was known to have visited Basilicata.

Alessandro Vezzosi, director of the Museo Ideale Leonardo da Vinci at Vinci, where the artist was born in 1452, said initial examination of the painting showed it was a Renaissance era original and not a later copy. He said he was investigating whether the painting was by Cristofano dell’Altissimo, who painted the da Vinci portrait in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

The portrait is to go on show at the end of next month as part of an exhibition on Leonardo at a recently opened museum at Vaglio, near Potenza, together with other paintings, drawings and documents loaned from the Museo Ideale.

Under cover of the night, thieves scramble away with Payette’s Civil War-era monument.

The Civil War cannon replica has been snatched from Payette’s Central Park in downtown, and city officials want it back.

The cannon is a replica of a real Civil War cannon that was moved from the park to the Payette County Historical Society museum nearby about four years ago to protect it from being stolen, Platt said. The original is between 5 and 6 feet in length, and the replica a little smaller.

It’s estimated worth is valued at about $3,000, Platt said, making the crime a felony.