The spot where US soldiers forced naked Iraqis to form a human pyramid now smells of fresh paint and disinfectant. The prison wing where hundreds more were executed during Saddam Hussein's regime is silent and empty, but for a few desks and documents that stand testament to his sadism.

There are signs of new beginnings at the reborn Abu Ghraib jail as it prepares to open its doors again to prisoners; there are greenhouses under construction, a rehabilitated sports yard, a barber shop - even beehives. But the ghosts of an infamous past are never far away throughout the whitewashed, 10-acre block on the western outskirts of Baghdad. Five years after Abu Ghraib entered the global lexicon it is, to many Iraqis, still a site of degradation and a forbidding reminder of the American occupation.

This month, Abu Ghraib will receive inmates, many from the two US detention centres in Iraq - Camp Cropper and Camp Bucca - that this year are handing over detainees at rates unparalleled in the six years since the invading US army captured its first detainee. In keeping with the spirit of renewal, the jail is to be renamed Baghdad Central Prison.

The Justice Department this week missed the opportunity to bring transparency to the controversy over deleted White House e-mail from the Bush administration by allowing briefing to continue on a motion that had been developed by the Bush Administration.

The motion, filed by the Justice Department on January 21, just after the inauguration, sought to dismiss the White House e-mail litigation even while admitting that a secretive restoration process was still not finished. Today the Archive responded to that motion.

"We had hoped the new administration would give a hard look at whether to allow the defense of the Bush Administration's loss of millions of White House e-mails to proceed on its current course," commented Sheila Shadmand, a Jones Day partner and counsel for the Archive. "This second motion to dismiss is similar to the one the court already denied months ago -- and it admits they have not even completed the restoration project they apparently have been conducting under wraps."

The Archive's Director, Tom Blanton, commented, "President Obama on Day One ordered the government to become more transparent, but the Justice Department apparently never got the message, and that same day tried to dismiss the very litigation that has brought some accountability to the White House e-mail system. Justice could have pulled back from that first misstep but they have not. The White House e-mail presents a high-level test of the new Obama openness policies, and so far, the grade is at best an incomplete."

Bre Hoggans and T'aira Turner could win 200 points. With it, they'll move one step closer to freedom as they travel the Underground Railroad.

But this challenge isn't easy. They must research Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and write two paragraphs on how he used literacy to fight for freedom.

The two start reading a two-page biography aloud.

"He taught other people to read the Bible," says Turner, 13. "He formed a church using literacy."

In her journal, Hoggans, 13, writes, "Church was the place that blacks could have freedom and self-expression."

Each week, about 30 students from several middle schools in Portland gather in a first-floor classroom at Jefferson High School. For an hour and a half, they are South Carolina slaves.

They use a plastic board game to reinforce basic literacy concepts, increase reading comprehension and discover what it was like to live through one of the most tumultuous and divisive parts of American history.

The game -- Journey to Freedom: The Power to Read and Write -- is the creation of Jefferson teacher Karanja Crews.

As an elementary school teacher in Beaverton nearly five years ago, Crews started trying to inspire kids to read, write and learn history by sharing the stories of slaves who learned to read and write even though they faced dire consequences, such as whippings, separation from family members and even death.

He devised the game last year, tried it out on students at Jefferson and last month began working with middle school students in North and Northeast Portland.

The controversy over the validity of Barack Obama's birth certificate is back on a burner with firebrand conservative Alan Keyes making serious new charges.

In a video released Friday Keyes, who lost to Obama in the 2004 U.S. Senate race in Illinois that launched the new president's national political career, calls Obama a communist and usurper and says he refuses to acknowledge the validity of Obama's inauguration over lingering questions in the minds of many conspiracists about the 44th president's birth place.

The U.S. Constitution requires any president be born an American citizen.

In June, the Obama campaign released to The Ticket a copy of the then-senator's Hawaiian birth certificate (see the jump below and also here). But stubbornly persistent critics demand to see the original, which the state has refused to provide, citing personal privacy reasons.

And the critics, including Keyes explaining here, cite Obama relatives in Kenya as saying he was actually born there in his father's native land when his American mother was too young to pass on her U.S. citizenship.

The excavation of some Eastern Zhou period tombs that had ancient chariots and horses buried underground has been completed, an official from Luoyang's cultural relics office told Dahe Daily on Tuesday.

This is another latest uncover of ancient tombs following similar discoveries in surrounding areas in 2002.

The excavation site contains 29 tombs, including two imperial wooden chariots and two dead horses.

Field work for this excavation began in August 2008 and took archaeologists three months to finish. Many artifacts such as pottery, bronze weapons and jade were found despite the fact that most of the tombs had already been plundered by grave robbers.

The horses, laying back to back in an orderly arrangement, were evidently killed before the burial. The two wooden chariots had rotted away, leaving only dusts.

According to local archaeologists, this is also the first time a burial chamber with two horses and two chariots has been discovered in the Luoyang region.

Archaeologists in Egypt have uncovered a statue of a pharaoh and a bust of the famous woman pharaoh Hatshepsut in the southern city of Luxor.

The three-meter Amenhotep statue was dug out with only one damage in the nose and one in the teeth, Moustafa el-Waziri, director of the archaeological mission, told the state MENA news agency.

He added that more antiques would be unearthed in the future.

President Obama topped a new Harris interactive poll that asked 2,634 Americans who they admire enough to call a hero.

John Lennon once claimed the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. Now President Obama has evidence that he's more popular than both.

Obama topped a new Harris interactive poll that asked 2,634 Americans who they admire enough to call a hero.

Jesus came in second on a list that includes God, Mahtma Gandhi and George Washington.

Other historic or notable figures making the top 10 were Martin Luther King Jr., Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Abraham Lincoln, John McCain, John F. Kennedy, U.S. Airways pilot Chesley Sullenberger and Mother Teresa.

William Jackson was a slave in the home of Confederate president Jefferson Davis during the Civil War. It turns out he was also a spy for the Union Army, providing key secrets to the North about the Confederacy.

Jackson was Davis' house servant and personal coachman. He learned high-level details about Confederate battle plans and movements because Davis saw him as a "piece of furniture" -- not a human, according to Ken Dagler, author of "Black Dispatches," which explores espionage by America's slaves.

Jackson and other slaves' heroic efforts have been a forgotten legacy of the war -- lost amid the nation's racially charged past and the heaps of information about the war's historic battles. But historians over the last few decades have been taking an interest in the sacrifice of African-Americans during those war years.

Dagler said slaves who served as spies were able to collect incredibly detailed information, in large part because of their tradition of oral history. Because Southern laws prevented blacks from learning how to read and write, he said, the slave spies listened intently to minute details and memorized them.

Whatever happened to William Jackson, the spy in Jefferson Davis's house?

Unfortunately, that remains a great unknown.

If they would just fly in David Horowitz and Dinesh D’Souza, they could stage an awesome tag-team wrestling match …

The two academics that American conservatives most love to hate are scheduled to appear together next month at the University of Colorado at Boulder. According to an article in today’s Colorado Daily, William Ayers will appear on the campus with — and voice support for — Ward Churchill on the night of March 5, just days before Mr. Churchill’s lawsuit challenging his dismissal by the university goes to trial.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder sparked a debate over race relations this week with a speech in which he said the United States was a nation of cowards because most Americans prefer to avoid candid talk about race.

At a Justice Department commemoration of Black History month, Eric Holder, the nation's first African-American attorney general, had some strong words about the state of race relations in the United States.

"Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards. Though race-related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion, and though there remain many unresolved racial issues in this nation, we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race," he said.

Holder said while Americans have largely integrated the workplace during the week, blacks and whites still tend to segregate themselves on weekends.

Related Links

Dayo Olopade: Why Eric Holder’s “race speech” was better than Barack Obama’s

HNN Hot Topics: Obama and Race

Wednesday's Page Six cartoon - caricaturing Monday's police shooting of a chimpanzee in Connecticut - has created considerable controversy.
It shows two police officers standing over the chimp's body: "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill," one officer says.

It was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill.

Period.

But it has been taken as something else - as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism.

This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize.

However, there are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past - and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback.

To them, no apology is due.

Sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon - even as the opportunists seek to make it something else.

Bikini Atoll, the North Pacific site of US nuclear testing 60 years ago and namesake of the swimsuit, has been submitted for listing as a World Heritage Site.

Locals hope the impact of the 12 years of nuclear testing will aid their bid, and in turn bring tourism back to the atoll, which forms part of the Marshall Islands in Micronesia in the North Pacific.

Jack Niedenthal, a spokesman for the people of the Bikini Islands, told The Times that Bikinians believe the “tremendous amount of history” at their former Pacific island home should validate its entry into the World Heritage list.

If approved, he said that it would be one of only a few 20th-century listings to feature on the World Heritage list, which also features sites such as Hiroshima and Auschwitz.

Original blueprints of the Auschwitz death camp, discovered by chance in a Berlin apartment last year, have gone on display in the German capital. Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, an Auschwitz survivor, said they give a glimpse of "true hell".

Original blueprints showing construction plans for the Auschwitz death camp have gone on display in Berlin in an exhibition opened on Monday evening by a survivor, 86-year-old former Polish Foreign Minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski.

The exhibition is being shown at the Berlin headquarters of German publishing group Axel Springer, publisher of the mass-circulation Bild newspaper, until February 28.

Bartoszewski was imprisoned by the Nazis in Auschwitz in 1940, before it had been converted from a concentration camp into a death camp. He was released after he became seriously ill.

The construction plans are dated 1941 and 1942 and include a gas chamber and a crematorium. More than a million people were murdered in Auschwitz. An estimated 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

This is the first time the blueprints are being displayed. They were found by chance in an apartment in Berlin last year. Historical experts from the German government archive and the Auschwitz memorial site confirmed their authenticity.

The owner's asking price for the blueprints was so high that the Federal Archive refused to purchase them. Bild bought the blueprints instead.

Tuesday marked the 145th anniversary of the night the H.L. Hunley submarine attacked and sank the Union war ship U.S.S Housatonic.

Thirteen men lost their lives that night in 1864: eight from the Hunley and five from the Housatonic.

But their mark had been left; naval warfare had changed.

After a march from Fort Moultrie to the Sunrise Presbyterian Church at Breach Inlet on Sullivans Island was a memorial service and a reading of the names of each of the fallen seamen, each followed by the ringing of a bell.

After the service was a procession to the beach where two wreaths were laid in the water, then 13 flowers carried by 13 cymbolic lady mourners.

Finally, three rounds of musket fire followed by three rounds of cannon fire to remember the ones they called "brave men."

The Hunley remained missing for generations until it was tracked down in Charleston Harbor with modern equipment in 1995.

Divers exploring a southern Florida sinkhole have uncovered clues to what life was like for some of America's first residents.

Led by University of Miami professor John Gifford, underwater archaeologists are exploring Little Salt Spring, 12 miles (19 kilometers) south of Sarasota.

Earlier this year, students working about 30 feet (9 meters) below the surface found the remains of a gourd that probably was used as a canteen by an ancient hunter about 8,000 or 9,000 years ago, according to Gifford.

Archaeologists have been recovering primitive relics from the spring since 1977, when divers found the remains of a large, now extinct tortoise and a sharpened stake that may have been used by a hungry hunter to kill the animal 12,000 years ago.

Gifford and other archaeologists found more from the tortoise this past July, along with the slaughtered remains of a giant ground sloth.

The discovery of the sloth's bones, Gifford said, could indicate that Little Salt Spring was a sort of ancient butcher shop where hunters often killed their prey and prepared meat when this was dry land.

These remains come from the earliest known period of human activity in the Western Hemisphere, said Gifford, who has received funding for his work from the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration.

Easter Island (Rapa Nui) has gained recognition in recent years due in part to a book that used it as a model for societal collapse from bad environmental practices—ringing alarm bells for those concerned about the health of the planet today. But that’s not the whole story, says Dr. Chris Stevenson, an archaeologist who has studied the island—famous for its massive stone statues—with a Rapa Nui scientist, Sonia Haoa, and Earthwatch volunteers for nearly 20 years.

The ancient Rapanui people did abuse their environment, but they were also developing sustainable practices—innovating, experimenting, trying to adapt to a risky environment—and they would still be here in traditional form if it weren’t for the diseases introduced by European settlers in the 1800s.

While evidence suggests the Rapa Nui people cut down 6,000,000 trees in 300 years, for example, they were also developing new technological and agricultural practices along the way—such as fertilization techniques to restore the health of the soil and rock gardens to protect the plants. As a result, every rock on Easter Island has probably been moved three or four times, Stevenson said.

Other archaeological evidence indicates that the Rapanui people radically changed their societal structure from one dominated by chiefs to one that was much more egalitarian in nature, too, which effectively leveled out their consumption patterns.

Some 1,700 years ago, the people who live in what is known officially as archaeological site “13LA582” west of Oakville, Iowa, were hunter-gatherers who also grew native crops like sunflower seeds.

They lived in a doughnut-shaped village around a communal area and occupied 20 to 25 tree branch and bark wigwams capable of housing up to 10 people each.

The group is believed to be part of the Weaver culture located not far from the confluence of the Iowa and Cedar rivers in Louisa County where fish and game were plentiful, said Dave Benn, a research archaeologist. He was hired to excavate the site as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers sited a new location for a levee to protect the town battered by flooding last year.

A team of archaeologists toiling under a plastic canopy off Louisa County Road H22 are carefully unearthing remnants of the village from a 10-foot-by-213-foot trench cut right through the middle of it. They are hoping to gain a greater insight into the lives of these prehistoric people who once flourished throughout the region.

In eight weeks of meticulous digging and cataloging, the site has yielded 100,000 artifacts, Benn said. Many are unrecognizable bone fragments and pottery shards, but there are also stone arrowheads and spear points, stone axe heads and pits laden with ancient trash that give a glimpse of how the village lived.

Three years ago, archaeologists at Bristol University embarked on a unique research project: the excavation of a 1991 Ford Transit van. After some background research, they carefully collected up all the dog hairs and sweet wrappers before stripping back the layers of carpet, plywood lining, metal and rust. Some of their discoveries were fairly trivial, such as the revelation that the van's roof was badly dented after serving as an impromptu diving board at a riotous Christmas party. But there were also intriguing insights into social history. After fingerprint dusting on the bodywork drew a blank, they learned that the van was one of the first vehicles in the country to be built entirely by robots, which coincided with a wave of redundancies at Ford's Southampton plant. Now the dismantled van has become the flagship project for a booming scholarly area, the archaeology of the "contemporary past".

This is not as great a departure as you might think. The popular image of archaeology may be about romantic quests to uncover lost civilisations, but deep excavation is only one part of a field that begins with the mundane reading of documents, geophysical surveys and surface investigations. There is no reason why any of this needs to be limited to the ancient or exotic. Even Channel 4's Time Team, who generally get excited about Roman bathhouses and Saxon burial grounds, have run programmes about the D-Day landings and warplane crash sites.

Contemporary archaeology is a response to the problem of preserving and recording our disposable, rapidly changing culture. The structures of the postwar era - 1960s tower blocks, mobile-phone masts, distribution warehouses, retail parks - are fairly temporary and likely to disappear quickly. That is why Change and Creation, an archaeological project on the late 20th-century landscape run by English Heritage, is focusing on transient sites such as the code-breaking huts at Bletchley Park or the Greenham Common peace camp. The latter is now slowly turning from airbase concrete to its original grassy state, but is offering up piecemeal evidence of its former life in the form of moss-covered children's toys and anti-American graffiti.

All historians, and not merely archaeologists, are likely to encounter difficulties researching our own era because so much of the material will be ephemeral or intangible. The historian Niall Ferguson recently said that he did not envy future members of his profession, because of the "disappearing decision trail" in the contemporary period. The archival record of the present day is likely to be both too scarce and too abundant. Email databases may not survive, or they will be so full that no scholar will know where to start, or they will be unreadable because of changes to hardware or software. So perhaps we will have to rely on the archaeologists, whose whole training teaches them to make wider deductions from fragmentary material remains - the smudge of black on pottery providing proof of a hearth, for example.

The world has lost Manx in the Isle of Man, Ubykh in Turkey and last year Alaska's last native speaker of Eyak, Marie Smith Jones, died, taking the aboriginal language with her.

Of the 6,900 languages spoken in the world, some 2,500 are endangered, the UN's cultural agency UNESCO said Thursday as it released its latest atlas of world languages.

That represents a multi-fold increase from the last atlas compiled in 2001 which listed 900 languages threatened with extinction.

But experts say this is more the result of better research tools than of an increasingly dire situation for the world's many tongues.

[The book focuses on the family that produced Richard Nixon.]

Fifty years after his parents, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, traveled to India to study Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence, Martin Luther King III is in India to retrace his late father's footsteps.

"It is really a special mountaintop experience to be here," King said. "My parents had often shared with me how moving their experience in India was. My father said he came to many countries as a tourist, but he came to India as a pilgrim."

King Jr. came to India in February 1959, four year after Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott and 11 years after Gandhi was assassinated. He drew powerful lessons about the way the bony, bare-chested Gandhi had deployed the weapon of nonviolence in his fight to free India from more than 200 years of British rule. Gandhi's philosophy of peaceful resistance had a lasting impact on how King Jr. shaped the U.S. civil rights movement.

First Lady Michelle Obama opened the doors of the White House to 180 sixth and seventh graders on Wednesday for a Black History Month celebration that included two pep talks and a rousing musical performance.

The students, who came from three local schools here, heard from Adm. Stephen W. Rochon, the chief usher, who runs the mansion and oversees everything from state dinners to redecorating. He is the first African-American to hold that position.

They also heard from Mrs. Obama, who told the students a little bit about the black history of the White House. She talked about the slaves who helped build the executive mansion, about Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation there and about Marie Seilka, a soprano, who became the first African-American artist to perform in the White House in 1878.

She described President Kennedy’s meeting with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the White House and President Obama, who is the first African-American president to live there. Then – as her daughters, Malia and Sasha, listened along with the students — she urged the students to remember that they would write the next chapters in history.

“So you have to ask yourselves, what will you do in life to help someone else in need?” Mrs. Obama said to the young people who were gathered in the East Room. “You have to ask yourselves, what are you going to do to make your own community stronger? What are you going to do to make sure that this nation is even greater? And what are you doing right now in school and in your neighborhoods to prepare yourselves to assume a level of responsibility and to be good citizens?’’

“Think about, as the Admiral says, getting up every single day and working hard, as hard as you can; putting your best foot forward all the time, not just when somebody is looking, but every single moment; and supporting your family, the folks in your own households; making your beds, putting the dishes up, cleaning your rooms,’’ she said.

“That’s not just a story that Barack Obama is writing, or Admiral Rochon is writing,’’ the first lady said. “Those are the stories that we’re all writing together. And you’re an important part of that.’’
And after that, the five members of the all-female, African American a cappella ensemble, Sweet Honey in the Rock, sang their hearts out.

While Bill Clinton was inside the San Diego Hyatt, gays were outside protesting the owner's support for California Prop 8, the anti-gay marriage amendment to the state constitution.

The hotel is the location of the next annual meeting of the American Historical Association.

In January the AHA was pressed by labor and gay members to join the gay boycott of the hotel. Instead, the AHA decided to sponsor a series of teach-ins on gay history.

Clinton's appearance drew protests from the Huffington Post's Rick Jacobs, the Chair and Founder of the Courage Campaign, a progressive political organization in California:

Bill Clinton happily took a six figure fee to undermine a boycott of Doug Manchester's San Diego Hyatt on Sunday. Mr. Manchester gave $125,000 to the Yes on 8 Campaign, so the LGBT and progressive communities, led by Cleve Jones and our friends at UNITE HERE, have been boycotting the hotel since July. But not Bill Clinton. He spoke yesterday even as we protested outside, trying to present him with the signatures of 30,000 Courage members who, in only forty hours, signed to ask Mr. Clinton not to speak at Mr. Manchester's hotel. Irony of ironies that Bill Clinton would actually support Ken Starr by helping to put money in the pocket of Mr. Starr's funders. But then again, Bill Clinton always had a different view of Fidelity than the rest of us.