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Condoleezza Rice will be there. So will Karen Hughes and Dan Bartlett and Michael Gerson. And George W. Bush himself.

The old gang is getting back together next week in Dallas for a reunion of sorts, the Bush team’s first since leaving the White House. On tap is a dinner with the former president and a daylong discussion of the future George W. Bush Policy Institute.

Barely 80 days after turning the Oval Office over to President Obama, a tanned and rested Mr. Bush is emerging from seclusion to begin his postpresidency. He has started giving speeches, joined an off-road bicycle club, thrown out the first pitch at the Texas Rangers’ home opener and scheduled a trip to China to speak at an economic forum.

More important, Mr. Bush is trying to map out what he wants to do with the rest of his life. Relatively young, at 62, and in good health, he plans to build a library, write a memoir and make some money, but he is also eager to use his time to promote the policies he cared about most while in the White House — and to help define his legacy.

The University of Colorado will “vigorously challenge” Ward Churchill’s effort to get his job back in the school’s ethnic studies department, a CU spokesman said Thursday.

Ken McConnellogue, spokesman for the CU system, said the university is relying on its findings that Churchill engaged in repeated and flagrant academic misconduct to support its stance that having the controversial former professor back on the Boulder campus is a “bad idea.”

“CU’s reputation for academic integrity is the foundation for all we do and having him return to the classroom would be an ongoing threat to that reputation,” McConnellogue said. “We expect higher standards from our faculty and our students.”

A Denver jury decided April 2 that CU unlawfully fired Churchill for expressing his political beliefs. The four women and two men on the jury awarded him $1 in damages.

A judge will decide at a yet-to-be-scheduled hearing whether the former professor gets his job back.

Federal-budget worrywarts (myself included) have been fretting for years about the arrival of the Dread Fiscal Year 2017, when Social Security was projected to start becoming a drag on federal finances.

Well, no need to worry about 2017 anymore. Thanks to the worst economic downturn since the 1930s, the moment of reckoning is already almost here: according to both the budget proposed by the White House in February and projections issued by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in March, Social Security benefits ($659 billion, according to the CBO) will exceed payroll taxes ($653 billion) in fiscal 2009 for the first time since 1984. Payroll-tax receipts generally hold up much better in recessions than do income taxes, but job losses have been so severe that the CBO expects them to decline slightly from 2008, while benefits rise almost 9% because of cost-of-living adjustments and the beginnings of the baby-boomer retirement wave. (See five reasons for economic optimism.)

If you count the $17 billion in income taxes expected to be paid on Social Security benefits, the system will still manage to provide a slight surplus for federal coffers in fiscal 2009. But from 2010 through 2012, there are small projected deficits, and after heading back into the black from 2013 to 2015, the program will then become a growing drain on federal finances, projects the CBO.

Back in 1983, when Social Security last faced deficits, Congress approved a set of Social Security reforms that included a graduated hike in the payroll tax and an increase in the retirement age. Thanks to those changes, payroll-tax receipts surpassed benefits in 1985, and the system has been operating at a surplus ever since.

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HNN Hot Topics: Social Security

The Valley Forge area, already bustling with hotels, conference centers, and traffic, learned yesterday that it will be home to Pennsylvania's 12th slots casino.

A group led by real estate titan Ira Lubert won approval for a casino of 500 slot machines in the Valley Forge Convention Center. The license was the first of two resort permits to be issued by the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board, which intends to issue 14 of them. The resort license limits the casino to 500 slot machines.

The investors will spend $107 million on the project. A spokesman for the group estimated the casino could be built and operating within a year.

Scores if not hundreds of anti-spending tea parties are expected to be held across the country on Wednesday. But so far, FOXNews.com has found only two members of Congress -- both Republicans -- who have committed to attending the demonstrations on the day income taxes are due.

If members of Congress are planning to attend the Tax Day Tea Party protests on April 15, they're keeping awfully quiet about it.

The tea party movement has garnered nationwide attention since its launch on Feb. 27, and scores if not hundreds of tea parties are expected to be held across the country on Wednesday.

Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Texas Rep. John Culberson, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, say they will attend the protests to show their opposition to the government's massive spending bill. That leaves roughly 530 senators and congressmen who haven't been heard from.

It's Good Friday, the day that Christians believe Jesus was crucified. Jerusalem's Old City is crowded with the faithful, retracing the steps of Jesus along the Via Dolorosa -- the Way of Suffering -- to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where Christians believe he was crucified.

But they're all taking the wrong route, according to Israeli archaeologist Shimon Gibson. In a new book, titled "The Final Days of Jesus," Gibson says he has found the location of Jesus' trial, where Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, condemned him to death by crucifixion.

Traditionally it is believed that the trial took place at the Antonia Fortress, outside the Temple Mount, near Lion's Gate. But Gibson believes the trial was actually conducted in an area just outside what is now the western wall of the Old City.

Reenactors and Sons of Confederate Veterans members have done the Rebel Yell for years at Civil War battle reenactments and related events. “There’s only one problem: they’ve been doing it wrong,” according to Museum of the Confederacy Executive Director S. Waite Rawls III.

Rawls seeks to remedy the situation with “The Rebel Yell Lives!” the museum’s recently produced audio CD. He says it reveals the true sound of the famous Southern battle cry.

Many written accounts attest that this remarkable sound would provoke fear in Union troops as they faced a Confederate assault and stir the hearts of the Men in Gray as they summoned their martial spirit in battle.

Although New Market Heights was not one of the grand battles of the Civil War, it was a place of death and valor for the soldiers who fought there. [Christian A.] Fleetwood's medal was one of 14 Medals of Honor earned by black troops in the battle that day.

The scene of their heroism has been listed by the Civil War Preservation Trust as one of the 10 most-endangered battlefields in the country.

The site [near Richmond] has one roadside marker describing the battle. Little of the land on which the fighting occurred is protected from development, officials from the trust said at a news conference last month.

South Korea Thursday protested to Japan's government over its approval of another history textbook seen by Seoul as whitewashing Tokyo's brutal wartime past.

"The government strongly protests that the Japanese government Thursday approved the history textbook which justifies and beautifies past wrongdoings based on false historical perception," the foreign ministry said in a statement.

"The government calls for a fundamental correction to this."

The textbook published by a right-wing group will be available to middle schools from next year until 2011. Seoul officials say it glosses over Japan's invasions of Korea and other Asian states before and during World War II.

[#1] Kidnapping Julius Caesar: 75 B.C.

The small inlets in Cilicia, now part of southern Turkey, were the lairs of pirates who terrorized the eastern Mediterranean in the two centuries before Christ. The abduction of their most famous victim, however, proved to be a miscalculation. A band of Cilician pirates kidnapped a 25-year old Roman nobleman on the way to Rhodes. He charmed them, telling his captors to double their ransom demand and joking about how he would punish them. When the ransom was paid and he was released, Julius Caesar returned at the head of a Roman fleet. The future master of the Mediterranean captured all of his ex-captors and crucified each one....

Mexican archaeologists began this month the recovery of a great Mayan city buried under tons of earth and jungle in the archaeological area of Ichkabal on the Yucatan peninsula, the National Anthropology and History Institute, or INAH, said.

Previous archaeological digs in Ichkabal indicated the existence at this site of a vast Mayan settlement comprising many buildings, of which the biggest is some 200 meters (656 feet) wide at the base and 46 meters (151 feet) high, the institute said Friday in a communique.

“This is a city whose construction began in preclassic times, 250 years before Christ,” INAH said.

The director of the INAH center in Quintana Roo state, Adriana Velazquez, said that while no architectural details are visible on the surface and all that can be seen are mounds covered by “the exuberant vegetation” of the area, their characteristics seem to indicate Peten-style constructions.

We're not finished yet. Even today, scientists say that human beings are continuing to evolve as our genes respond to rapid changes in the world around us.

In fact, the pressures of modern life may be speeding up the pace of human evolution, some anthropologists think.

Their view contradicts the widespread 20th-century assumption that modern medical practice, antibiotics, better diet and other advances would protect people from the perils and stresses that drive evolutionary change.

A robot specially designed for underground exploration is opening up a lost world of historic treasures for Chinese archaeologists.

Scientists are planning its second excursion next week when it will go into an ancient tomb in Xi'an, China's ancient capital in the northwestern Shaanxi Province.

The robot completed a successful trial probe in July last year, when it revealed hidden fresco paintings in a narrow shaft inside a 1,300-year old tomb in Xi'an.

The cylinder-shaped robot, 27 centimeters long and 9 centimeters in diameter, is the first robot ever used by Chinese archaeologists to explore ancient tombs, said Tie Fude, a researcher at the National Museum.

For years, it has been widely accepted that artworks looted by the Nazis should be returned to their rightful owners. But now a prominent British expert has called for a stop to restitution -- and triggered protests in the art world.

The art connoisseur Sir Norman Rosenthal may be a British institution, but the equanimity often attributed to his compatriots is not one of his distinguishing features.

Rosenthal, the son of Jewish refugees from Germany and Slovakia, called for an end to the restitution of so-called Nazi looted art in an article in the journal The Art Newspaper.

The fact that someone who lost members of his own family in the Holocaust is now opposing restitution and is calling for an end to the practice has injected a provocatively dissonant note into an already angry debate -- and has triggered fierce protest. At issue is nothing less than the permanent whereabouts of some of the icons of art history.

As the global financial downturn continues and pressure for profits increases on corporations across the world, a small group of lawyers in the U.S. Justice Department is pursuing an aggressive crackdown against an international business tactic -- bribery -- which the World Bank says amounts to as much as a trillion dollars a year in payments.

"Over the past two years, the U.S. government has collected almost a billion and a half dollars in fines in foreign bribery cases," says Mark Mendelsohn, the Department of Justice prosecutor in charge of more than 100 ongoing cases, one of which culminated in a record seven-year prison term for the former CEO of a subsidiary of the Halliburton Corp., and another which ended in a record $800 million fine against the German giant Siemens. "There's a whole world of conduct that rarely sees the light of day."

In Black Money, FRONTLINE correspondent Lowell Bergman investigates this shadowy side of international business, shedding light on multinational companies that have routinely made secret payments -- often referred to as "black money" -- to win billions in business.

"The thing about black money is you can claim it's being used for all kinds of things," the British reporter David Leigh tells Bergman. "You get pots of black money that nobody sees, nobody has to account for, ... you can do anything you like with. Mostly what happens with black money is people steal it because they can."

Leigh knows. In his groundbreaking reporting for The Guardian newspaper, he helped uncover one of the biggest and most complicated cases currently under investigation -- a story involving a British aerospace giant, the Saudi royal family, and an $80 billion international arms deal known as Al Yamamah, or "The Dove" in Arabic. "If there was one person who was the main man behind this arms deal, it turned out it was the U.S. ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan," says Leigh.

It all started back in 1985, when the charismatic Prince Bandar was put in charge of acquiring new fighter jets for the Saudi Arabian air force. The Israeli lobby in Congress reportedly stood in the way of the United States making a deal with the Saudis, so President Ronald Reagan sent Bandar to the British. The prince approached a willing Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and they sealed the massive deal between the United Kingdom, BAE Systems (formerly British Aerospace) and the Royal Saudi Air Force.

Rumors swirled that billions in bribes had changed hands to secure the deal, but British officials denied wrongdoing. "Of course there is suspicion, and of course people are entitled to be suspicious," says Lord Timothy Bell, who was involved in the deal from the beginning on behalf of the Thatcher government. "But as far as I'm concerned, if the British government ... and the Saudi government reached a sovereign agreement over an arms contract that resulted in a tremendous number of jobs in Britain, a great deal of wealth creation in Britain, ... and enabled Saudi Arabians to defend themselves, ... I think that's a jolly good contract."

But then, as a growing, international anti-bribery movement -- led by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development -- spread, Britain signed onto a binding treaty. Soon after, a whistleblower came forward with documents and firsthand knowledge of alleged corrupt payments. Peter Gardiner, a high-end travel agent in London, laid bare the details of how he provided luxury services for Saudi Prince Turki and his family -- charter airplanes for massive shopping sprees, the purchase of expensive cars and extravagant honeymoon trips -- all paid for by BAE Systems. "It's the lifestyle that many people would like to have if they could afford it," says Gardiner. "It's a little bit beyond that of a film star, because you've got the diplomatic passport with it."

Gardiner took his allegations first to The Guardian's Leigh, and then to the British agency that investigates white-collar crime, the Serious Fraud Office, which began an investigation. That probe would turn up evidence of huge payments from the Al Yamamah funds to bank accounts controlled by Prince Bandar in Washington, D.C.

As the investigation grew, the Blair government was pressured by the Saudis and by Prince Bandar himself, who went to 10 Downing Street and threatened to end cooperation with the British in the fight against terror if the investigations into Al Yamamah continued. "The expression was, 'You know, there's going to be a lot of people dead on the streets,'" a senior British fraud prosecutor tells Bergman of the Saudi threats that ultimately led to the shutting down of the British BAE investigation. "If we go forward with an investigation into these accounts in Switzerland, we may find we're not going to be able to do what we can do to stop terrorism."

There was widespread frustration among corruption fighters about the British capitulation, and fears that the fledgling international anti-bribery movement would be undermined. Soon thereafter, the U.S. Department of Justice began its own investigation into BAE's worldwide network of suspicious payments. The case is now being watched closely by countries around the world interested in seeing whether the United States is willing, in a depressed economy, to press forward with an investigation and possible legal case against a company like BAE Systems, whose major client is the Pentagon, and which currently employs some 40,000 American workers. For its part, BAE says that it is cooperating with the investigations.

Black Money includes exclusive interviews with current and former prosecutors involved in the cases against BAE Systems, as well as with Prince Bandar's legal representative on this matter, former FBI Director Louis Freeh.