An official told RFE/RL’s Radio Free Iraq (RFI) that Iraqi archaeologists will work with a university team from the state of Pennsylvania, which on an earlier visit uncovered statues, baked clay pots, and other artifacts from Ur for the Iraqi National Museum.

Parliament’s cultural committee chairman Mufid al-Jazaeri welcomed the cooperation with the United States but said that international archaeological expertise is needed because there are so many artifacts still buried in the country.

He said most of Iraq's 10,000 historical artifacts remain vulnerable to looting."

And that underscores a key point. The Barbary pirates actually had an ambassador — who met with Jefferson and Adams, no less. The pirates worked for a government. The Barbary rulers commissioned them to rob and pillage and kidnap, and the rulers got a cut. It was all official. And open. It was truly state-sponsored terrorism. And the Western nations’ response was to pay “tribute,” a fancy word for blackmail.

If a country paid tribute, the 18th-century pirates would leave its ships alone. Today, shipping companies fork over as much as $100 million in ransoms to the Somali pirates, a strategy that saves their cargoes but also attracts more underemployed Somali fishermen into the hijacking business.

Eventually, though, Americans felt humiliated paying off a bunch of knife-sucking thugs in blousy pants. That’s what led to the Barbary Wars, first in 1801 when Jefferson became president, and again in 1815, when James Madison sent the United States Navy to shell the Barbary Coast. The battles became the stuff of legend — “the shores of Tripoli” in the Marine Hymn — and were critical in developing the nation’s young Navy.

The Barbary pirates were finally brought to their knees by their encounters with the Americans, and by the French invasion of Algiers in 1830.

Will this happen in Somalia? Last week — even before a French effort to rescue a family in a separate hijacking ended with the death of one hostage — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged the world to “end the scourge of piracy.” But Somali piracy is not an isolated problem. It’s the latest symptom of what afflicts an utterly failed state — a free-for-all on land that has consumed the country since the central government imploded in 1991. As any warlord there can tell you, the violence is almost always about cash. “We just want the money” is their mantra.

The city will tear down Caldwell's old home and develop and maintain the parcel as a public park on the south bank of the New River within the shadow of downtown high-rises.

But first, as required by the city, the site had to undergo archaeological review.

Crews from Carr's Davie-based nonprofit organization, the Archaeological and Historical Conservancy, began digging last fall. They hit pay dirt. Months of excavating, inch by scratched-out inch, revealed thousands of items that gave witness to almost 500 years of Indian occupation, from roughly 800 to 1200 A.D.

Here lived the Tequesta Indians, Fort Lauderdale's first residents, from the age of Charlemagne to the time of the signing of the Magna Carta.

Deer, fish and shark bones, unearthed where the young Caldwell once romped with playmates, spoke to the Tequestas' diet. Oysters, too, though changes in the river's salinity and shape have made the mollusks extinct.

The diggers also brought up bone pins and clay pottery, some with notched decoration around the rim. (Clay deposits, which provided the material for the Tequestas' pottery, have long ago been bulldozed into oblivion by development.)

Even grizzled archaeologists such as Carr, who has been shoveling up South Florida's past for decades, have been impressed by the discoveries. "We still get excited when we realize we're seeing something hundreds of years old," he said.

Their main find is a cache of a half-dozen ax heads formed from the lips of conch shells, bound in leather and buried. "My suspicion is that they're probably deliberately hidden with the idea of simply coming back on a rainy day and having these tools available," he said. "It's sort of like having your toolbox waiting for you."

Virtually unnoticed by the national news media, a Votes for Women History Trail in western New York has been authorized to recognize the suffragists who helped transform this country. The trail will be operated by the National Park Service (NPS) if Congress provides follow-up funding for the bill, which passed Congress in late March and was signed into law by President Obama shortly before his European trip.

A Votes for Women History Trail would create a drivable route that visits up to 20 significant sites in the suffragists' prolonged battle for the vote, from the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged in Auburn, near Syracuse, to the Waterloo and Seneca Falls sites of the first women's rights conventions, to the trail's western anchor in Rochester, the Susan B. Anthony House. Point person for the trail has been Representative Louise Slaughter, D-NY-a former chair of the congressional women's caucus-who has sponsored the bill since 2002.