“The Quran in its Historical Context,” an international conference addressing the most recent theories, controversies and discoveries in the field of Quranic studies, will be held April 19 to 21 (Sunday to Tuesday) at the University of Notre Dame. The conference is free and open to the public.

The conference, which will provide a unique forum for discussion of the historical circumstances in which the Quran was formed and of its relationship to the Bible, will open with a lecture titled “The Multi-dimensional Quranic Worldview: Tartib al-Tilawa versus Tartib al-Nuzul” by prominent Egyptian Muslim scholar Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd of the University of Humanistics in The Netherlands. Abdolkarim Soroush, a philosopher, innovative interpreter of the Quran and one of the leading opposition figures in Iran, will give a response. Robert Hoyland of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland will deliver a lecture titled “The Earliest Written Evidence of the Arabic Language and Its Importance for the Study of the Quran” on April 20.

Leading scholars from a wide range of countries, including Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Germany and the United Kingdom, will lead panel discussions titled “Quranic Origins: Manuscript Evidence,” “Quranic Origins: Historical Evidence,” “The Quran and Earlier Religious Tradition,” “The Quran as Literature,” and “The Quran and Historical Linguistics.”

All events will be held in McKenna Hall, with the exception of Hoyland’s lecture, which will be held in the Rare Books Room of the Hesburgh Library. Additional information, including a complete schedule and list of speakers, is available at http://quranconference.nd.edu. The conference is sponsored by Notre Dame’s Henkels Lecture Series of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, Graduate School, Medieval Institute, and Kellogg Institute for International Studies.

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Nicholas Kristof Commentary

Without so much as a map or an "X" to mark the spot, a group of William & Mary students recently uncovered some historical "treasure" that is expected to shed new light on the lives of early 20th-century African-Americans, including Maggie L. Walker, the first woman to found a bank in the United States and a black woman who worked tirelessly to improve the lives of other black women.

The students were exploring the attic of a building in Richmond when they came across piles of 1920s and 30s documents from the businesses owned by the Independent Order of St. Luke, an organization that was dedicated to helping improve the lives of African-Americans during the Jim Crow era. The documents include letters from Walker, insurance papers and rare copies of the organization's newspaper, doubling the number known to exist.

"So when you have these all together, it gives you a fabulous film over time of how people were living and dying in this area," said Heather Huyck, an adjunct associate professor at William & Mary. "It's a really fascinating treasure for historians and for the general public. It will help us better understand all American history."

VMI unveiled this plaque Tuesday to commemorate Captain Henry du Pont of the union army, who helped rebuild the college, after destroying it during the civil war.

Historian Colonel Keith Gibson said, “he shelled, burned, and completely destroyed the barracks and at that time the barracks were the institute.“

In the video box there are some pictures of what the college looked like after it was bombarded with cannon-fire. It was Captain du Pont’s efforts 50-years later that they’re celebrating.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning book on a brutal aspect of U.S. history has reignited debate on the country's racial past just as the country's first black president is seen as evidence of racial progress.

"Slavery By Another Name" recounts the little-known story of how in the decades after President Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation to free slaves, hundreds of thousands of black Americans were re-enslaved as convict laborers.

Author Douglas Blackmon said on Tuesday the story was "absolutely essential" to understanding why a U.S. racial divide still exists and why the country's black minority lags behind the rest of the population in terms of economic and social health.

Archaeologists from Bristol’s Museum and Art Gallery, working in advance of redevelopment at the University of Bristol, have uncovered the remains of one of the most significant fortifications from the English Civil War (1642-53): the Royal Fort, located on a hill overlooking the City of Bristol.

For many years, considerable doubt has surrounded the Fort’s exact location, as it was largely destroyed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the few remains that survived were turned into landscape gardens by Humphry Repton in 1804.

The University conducted excavations in 2001 but the Fort’s five main bastions and ditches were not located. Now, as a result of an eight-week excavation on the summit of St Michael’s Hill by the Bristol’s Museum and Art Gallery archaeologists, a defence ditch around two bastions and possibly the foundations for a fortification wall have been found.

Bruce Williams, Manager of Bristol and Region Archaeological Services (BaRAS) who directed the project said: “Bristol played a prominent role in the English Civil War although the legacy of this is not so apparent within the modern cityscape. In addition to the remains of the Royal Fort, it is delightful to find distinguishing objects such as cannonballs that can without doubt be attributed to the Civil War period.”

The Senate Armed Services Committee has just released an exhaustive review of torture under the Bush administration that, among other revelations, torpedoes the notion that the administration only chose torture as a last resort. Bush officials have long argued that they turned to coercive interrogations in 2002 only after captured al-Qaida suspects wouldn't talk, but the report shows the administration set the wheels in motion soon after 9/11. The Bush White House began planning for torture in December 2001, set up a program to develop the interrogation techniques by the next month, and the military and the CIA began training interrogators in coercive practices in early 2002, before they had any high-value al-Qaida suspects or any trouble eliciting information from detainees.

As the report puts it, "The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees." The report undercuts the Obama administration's case for leniency against the CIA, since the agency was pursuing abusive techniques even before Department of Justice lawyers had issued their supposed legal justification for the techniques in August 2002. The report also shows that the administration appears to have attempted to use the abusive techniques to shore up its case for war in Iraq. Interrogators employed the techniques, which are notorious for producing bad intelligence, to get detainees to make statements linking Iraq and al-Qaida.

To hear former President Bush tell it, you would think the United States only turned to the techniques in desperation. When Bush announced the existence of the CIA's interrogation program in September 2006, for example, he argued that suspected al-Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah stopped cooperating with interrogators after his capture on March 28, 2002, forcing the agency to get rough. "We knew that Zubaydah had more information that could save innocent lives," Bush said. "But he stopped talking. As his questioning proceeded, it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation," the president said. "And so, the CIA used an alternative set of procedures."

But that's not how it happened.

UTSA Center for Archaeological Research (CAR) researchers are examining artifacts they recently discovered that date from 3700 B.C. to 600 A.D. The artifacts were discovered during a three-month dig at Miraflores Park, east of Brackenridge Park.

CAR researchers were hired by the San Antonio design firm Rehler Vaughn & Koone to conduct an archaeological site inspection before construction of a pedestrian bridge over the San Antonio River from Brackenridge Park. What was expected to be a one-day observation turned into a three-month project which CAR researchers completed in March.

"We found a lot of Early Archaic materials from approximately 3500 B.C., which are of significant interest, including two Guadalupe tools that were used either for woodworking or the defleshing of hunted game," said Jon Dowling, CAR project archaeologist. "It was a really small area that we expected would be open and shut quickly, but it turned out to be a treasure chest of archaeology."

According to Dowling, the artifacts will be curated and analyzed so CAR researchers can quantify and synthesize the data for better comprehension and understanding.

ARGENTINE police arrested 36 skinheads at an event celebrating the 120th anniversary of the birth of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

The arrests came after a "prolonged and meticulous investigation'', said Daniel Perez, the second in command of the Federal Police unit in charge of investigating hate crimes.

Police broke into the Central Argentine Club, in the town of San Martin, in Buenos Aires province, while a recital was being held by the local chapter of the neo-Nazi group "Blood and Honour''.

Police found Nazi-related material, including flags with swastikas, films and CDs of music with racist and anti-semitic lyrics.

Egyptian archaeologists have discovered a 3,000 year-old fortified city and four ancient temples while working on an ancient military road known as “Way of Horus”. Archaeologists say the discoveries might rewrite the historical and military significance of the Sinai for the ancient Egyptians.

Digging near an old military road in the Sinai, Egyptian archaeologists have discovered an ancient fortified city dating back about 3,000 years. According to Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s top archaeologist, earlier studies suggested the presence of the fortified city which could have been Egypt’s military headquarters from the New Kingdom until the Ptolemaic era. The period between the two ancient historical epochs is about 1,500 years.

Archaeologist Mohammed Abdel-Maqsoud, chief of the excavation team, said that the fortified city corresponds to the inscriptions of the “Way of Horus” found on the walls of a temple in Luxor. The inscriptions illustrated 11 military fortresses strategically placed to defend Egypt’s eastern border. From the 11 fortresses, only 5 have been discovered, writes Stuff.co.nz.

Philip Zelikow, a longtime diplomat who worked as counselor to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and was the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, has been forthright in his opposition to the harsh interrogation techniques used under the Bush administration.

Zelikow disagreed with the legal reasoning employed by Bush's Office of Legal Counsel to justify the use of harsh interrogation techniques such as waterboarding. And he claims that copies of memo he circulated to detail his opposing views were destroyed by the White House.

Writing in Foreign Policy's Shadow Government blog , Zelikow details:

"At the time, in 2005, I circulated an opposing view of the legal reasoning. My bureaucratic position, as counselor to the secretary of state, didn't entitle me to offer a legal opinion. But I felt obliged to put an alternative view in front of my colleagues at other agencies, warning them that other lawyers (and judges) might find the OLC views unsustainable. My colleagues were entitled to ignore my views. They did more than that: The White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo. I expect that one or two are still at least in the State Department's archives."

Tourists flock to see Saddam's digs.

When the mysterious first shot rang out around dawn yesterday, it was just like that fateful day 234 years before on the Lexington Green, except the gray-haired men squaring off looked a lot older than their ancestral combatants. There was also no blood and a lot of fake groaning, as well as sleep-deprived neighbors, history buffs, and members of the news media with cameras to chronicle every drumbeat. The annual reenactment of the Battle of Lexington has spawned its own traditions and veterans, with their own ahistorical gripes.

"A lot of us put considerable money and effort into this, and everybody still forgets about what the meaning of Patriots' Day is all about," said Tom Balcom, 47, of Melrose, whose redcoat paraphernalia cost him more than $1,200 and countless hours of training. "They think they get the day off because of the marathon. Well, it's a lot more than a bunch of people lining up for a run. This is a big deal."

After all the fireworks and garbled shouting during the mock attack - the real one in 1775 sparked the Revolutionary War and led to the creation of the United States - Balcom left formation and marched toward his car in a wool waistcoat, bearskin hat, and white breeches, the smell of sulfur still spewing from his Brown Bess. The six-year veteran of the reenactments, a history buff who served as staff sergeant in the US Army, said he does not mind playing the enemy, adding that he is considering expanding his portfolio to play a Nazi in an upcoming reenactment of a World War II battle.

The release last week of Bush-era legal memoranda justifying the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of extreme interrogation methods has opened a window on what former Vice President Dick Cheney famously called “the dark side” of the war on terrorism. But despite President Obama’s declaration that releasing the four Justice Department memos disclosed Friday would end “a dark and painful chapter in our history,” at least one other memorandum on CIA interrogations remains undisclosed: a 2007 opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel on what a new interpretation of the Geneva Conventions’ Common Article 3 meant for the agency’s “enhanced interrogation program.”...

“The CIA still seems to want to get authority to interrogate people outside of what would be found to be a violation of the Geneva Conventions and the law,” said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who cautioned that he had not previously known about the 2007 memorandum.

Since [FDR] journalists and political analysts have embraced the 100-day report card for new presidents. But for most leaders since FDR, the first three months have been an unreliable guide to the years that followed.

In 1993, Bill Clinton's 100 days were a chaotic period of trial and error, beginning with a stymied attempt to allow gays to serve openly in the military and ending with the defeat in Congress of a $16-billion stimulus bill (an amount that seemed high at the time). At this point 16 years ago, conventional wisdom held that Clinton would probably limp through a single term in office.

In 2001, George W. Bush's 100 days were proclaimed a solid success, especially for a president who came to the White House on the strength of a Supreme Court ruling after losing the popular vote. In this newspaper, I wrote that Bush was running a careful, well-focused administration, praised by one leading scholar for its "astonishing professionalism."

So much for predictions. In both cases, events -- and the presidents' own decisions -- led to far different presidencies than anyone would have predicted at the outset.

At 11:21 a.m. on April 20, 1999, the first 911 call alerted authorities to the unfathomable: Two students at Columbine High School, 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold, had launched what was then the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history.

With shots fired outside the school, they began a spree that left a dozen classmates and a teacher dead, and many more wounded, before the two committed suicide in the school library. A chilling collection of writings and videos would reveal the darkest side of disaffected youth and a grandiose plan to use an arsenal of guns, pipe bombs and larger explosives to kill and maim.

Ten years later, The Denver Post looks at the legacy of Columbine and visits the Class of '99 and the principal who remains at the school to this day.

For 65 years, Elisabeth Mann has carried with her the pain only a Holocaust survivor can know.

Branded in her mind are the images of, for example, a pile of babies set ablaze, snarling dogs and the laughter of an SS officer pointing to the black smoke of incinerated bodies that filled the sky. And on her heavy heart is the anguish, including the blame she feels for her brother Laci's death.

Given the horrors she's lived and witnessed, one might think Mann, now in her 80s, would be among those demanding that Nazi war criminals be brought to justice. And yet she's uncomfortable with the ongoing attempts to deport to Germany for trial John Demjanjuk, an 89-year-old Cleveland, Ohio, man allegedly linked to mass killings at Sobibor, a death camp in Poland.

Mann doesn't think going after war criminals now is worth the cost and energy, nor does she think the legal process will make a difference to such men who've already lived a full life.

Her argument doesn't work for Efraim Zuroff, who has spent nearly 30 years hunting Nazis responsible for the Holocaust, a systematic effort that wiped out 6 million Jews, or two-thirds of European Jewry.

"It has to be clear to everybody that the Holocaust was not a natural disaster. ... It was created by man, against man," he said from Jerusalem, Israel, where he coordinates Nazi war crimes research for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization. "When responsibility can be determined, people have to be held accountable."

The soaring sales of Mein Kampf in India are somewhat worrying. The claims in the article on the website of The Telegraph that India and Nazi Germany influenced one another and that Gandhi corresponded with Hitler himself are also disturbing and shatter the image of Gandhi in popular imagination as a representative and fervent defender of justice and equality.

Yesterday's article does not, however, provide any details as to what the exchange of letters between Gandhi and the Fuhrer was about, nor how often the two men were in contact with one another.

Over Christmas, I visited Mani Bhavan, Mahatma Gandhi's residence in Mumbai between 1917 and 1934, where one of his original letters to Hitler was displayed. This letter was hugely significant... Written on July 23rd 1939, as Hitler's designs for German expansion in Eastern Europe became increasingly apparent, Gandhi urged Hitler to prevent the advent of the Second World War.

Now that the memos showing the rulings of interrogation techniques have been released, the Obama administration should release additional documents that show what the interrogations yielded, former Vice President Dick Cheney told FOX News on Monday.

In an interview with FOX News' Sean Hannity...Cheney questioned the point of releasing the legal decisions behind the interrogations but not the outcome of them.

"One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn't put out the memos that showed the success of the effort," Cheney said.

Cheney said he's asked that the documents be declassified because he has remained silent on the confidential information, but he knows how successful the interrogation process was and wants the rest of the country to understand.