A medieval Hungarian town full of ritually sacrificed dogs could shed light on mysterious pagan customs not found in written records from the era, a new study suggests.

Roughly 1,300 bones from about 25 dogs were recently discovered in the 10th- to 13th-century town of Kana, which had been accidentally unearthed in 2003 during the construction of residential buildings on the outskirts of Budapest.

Researchers found ten dogs buried in pits and four puppy skeletons in pots buried upside down.

During the Middle Ages it was customary in Hungary to lock sacrificial animals inside new houses or to slaughter the beasts as people moved in.

Previous evidence of animal sacrifices—seen even under churches, in Budapest and elsewhere in Hungary—had been mostly isolated cases, Daróczi-Szabó noted.

But the new findings, described this month in the Journal of Veterinary Behavior, show that "sacrifices were not a rare phenomenon, as one may have thought from isolated finds," she said. "It was practiced regularly in a Christian village."

The fact that pagan customs such as animal sacrifice persisted for centuries side-by-side with the church is surprising, noted University of Edinburgh archaeozoologist László Bartosiewicz.

Precious items are the plunder of looters who had hoped to sell them to private collectors.

Fifteen hundred pieces of this country's history are sitting in crates in the Afghanistan National Museum. Half of the relics date to the time before Islam arrived in Afghanistan in 642 AD. The rest cover the Muslim period up to and including the 20th century. But they did not come directly from archeological sites in Afghanistan.

They came instead from Heathrow Airport in London, where they were confiscated over a period of six years.

British authorities returned the objects to Kabul in a massive shipment that arrived on February 17.

Most of them were shuffled though foreign countries, especially Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates, before being sent to Great Britain, he said. They are the plunder of looters who had hoped to sell them to private collectors. Almost all have been lifted directly from the ground.

The Afghan pieces seized by the British were carefully photographed and catalogued in London before being put on the Red Cross flights that brought them to Kabul. They are now waiting for one of the experts who packed them to help remove them from their crates. In a few weeks, many of them will be on display in Afghanistan for the first time.

Skeletons uncovered at Marischal College.

Archaeologists have uncovered seven skeletons and five additional human skulls in the grounds of historic Marischal College in Aberdeen.

The skeletons, all men, are thought to be Franciscan friars.

The excavations are being carried out by Aberdeen City Council archaeologists in advance of the creation of the council’s new £80.4million headquarters.

One of Aberdeen’s major religious houses, the Franciscan Friary, occupied the site from the late 15th century.

Assistant archeologist Alison Cameron said: “This is quite an unusual find. We have been working at the site for a while now and we knew there was a possibility of finding burials.

“They were all buried with their hands clasped as if in prayer and may have been bound into that posture with cloth, which has since decayed in the soil.

“There is a huge possibility that there are more to be found but there is a lot of area that we won’t be digging so that is a nice possibility for other archaeologists to find.”

Archaeologists have confirmed that the skeletons were all male and at least two of the men were elderly when they died.

One had very worn teeth with many gaps, suggesting a lifetime of chewing and grinding food.

Bones found in the abdomen area of another of the skeletons revealed the man had eaten fish not long before he died. The fish bones will be sent to an expert who will determine the species.

The remains of at least five additional skulls were found, suggesting that at least 12 individuals were buried there.

Walls and cobbled surfaces associated with the friary have also been uncovered, including parts of the early 16th-century friary complex. Elsewhere walls of 17th-19th-century university structures have emerged and been recorded.

Numerous other objects were found, including two complete pottery vessels dating from the 15th or 16th centuries.

The bones have now been lifted and the skeletons will be cleaned and sent to Glasgow University where human bone specialist Paul Duffy will determine the age and stature of the men.

Most Orange County supervisors don't appear any more interested in the latest attempt by preservationists to engage them in a discussion of land use than they were the first time.

Members of the Wilderness Battlefield Coalition sent a letter this week to Board of Supervisors Chairman Lee Frame asking for the county to agree to a "comprehensive planning process for the Wilderness Battlefield/Orange County gateway region."

The letter reiterates an offer made earlier this year that supervisors rejected, but this time includes the signatures of landowners Charles "Chip" King, his sister Jan King Evans, and local businessman Ken Dotson, the Kings' local representative.

"There's nothing new in this letter, and it isn't going to change any votes on the Board of Supervisors," Frame said yesterday.

Lincoln Log Cabin was built on an 86-acre site. It is a replica of the Lincoln home, originally built in 1835. With current budget issues constantly fluctuating, weight is falling on the shoulders of the volunteers to keep up the farm.

Last year Lincoln Log cabin operated with four paid interpreters and two paid maintenance workers, volunteers made up the rest of the staff. Their contract was originally set to run from May 1 through Oct. 31. However, the contract for paid workers was terminated as of July 31 of last year.

"Yet the park remained open due to volunteers being willing to put in 13,227 hours of volunteer work," stated Lance Beever, president of Volunteer Pioneers, "that was significantly more than has been required in past years."

The Sargent Farm Foundation is a fund that was started in 1981. The purpose of the foundation was to raise money to relocate and restore the Stephen Sargent Farm to the Lincoln site. Today the fund is referred to as the Lincoln-Sargent Farm Foundation. The money is now used to preserve the entire site as well as provide funds to continue providing the opportunity for education about life during the mid-1800s....

The Lincoln Log Cabin historic site can be contacted by calling (217)345-1845 or online at www.lincolnlogcabin.org.

Having sat virtually untouched since it was purchased by the Gettysburg Foundation last year, the historic George Spangler Farm has a long way to go before it is ready to join the ranks of Gettysburg's other tourist attractions.
But next week, the public will have one of the first opportunities to explore the farm - if they're willing to do some cleaning in the process.

"Fall Weekend" will be taking the place of the holiday formerly known as "Columbus Day" at Brown University this fall.

The faculty of the Ivy League university voted at a meeting Tuesday to establish a new academic and administrative holiday in October called "Fall Weekend" that coincides with Columbus Day, but that doesn't bear the name of the explorer.

Hundreds of Brown students had asked the Providence, R.I. school to stop observing Columbus Day, saying Christopher Columbus's violent treatment of Native Americans he encountered was inconsistent with Brown's values.

Sites threatened by mining, erosion, commercial and residential development and road widening lead the Civil War Preservation Trust’s 2009 edition of “History Under Siege,” the annual report on the most endangered Civil War battlefields.

In addition to the country’s 10 “most endangered” battlefields, another 15 are cited as “at risk.” They face threats from the usual development, as well as airport expansion, wind energy development, artificial wetland, railroad switching yard and a race track.

The report was released at a March 18 Washington press conference at which actor and history student Richard Dreyfuss and Dr. Libby O’Connell, chief historian at History, formerly The History Channel, spoke.

Washington, DC – The Secular Coalition for America heartily endorses the words spoken by President Barack Obama during a press conference in Turkey this week: “One of the great strengths of the United States is... we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation; we consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.”

Although the President has previously described America as a nation of not only Christians but Jews, Muslims and nonbelievers, his April 6 statement goes beyond an inventory of religious sects to a unifying theme of shared American secular values. “The President has got this one exactly right,” declared Ron Millar, acting director of the Secular Coalition for America. “Not only did he reject the Christian nation canard; he said we are above all a nation of citizens with shared values. This has always been our message. We couldn’t be happier.”

“The insistence that the United States is a Christian nation is one of the Religious Right’s most persistent, dishonest and dangerous ploys,” said Millar. “They’ve been trying to rewrite our history through legislation introduced by their collaborators in Congress. The President delivered an important history lesson in Turkey; we hope he’ll do the same thing here at home.”

As the Secular Coalition and its allies have repeatedly pointed out, the word “God” does not appear in our constitution, and volumes of documents demonstrate that the Founders intentionally drew a bright line between religion and government to guarantee freedom of – and from – religion for every American citizen. With a Constitutional-Scholar-in-Chief now occupying the White House, the Secular Coalition hopes America can once again celebrate its proud secular history and put the myth of a Christian nation behind us.

The Secular Coalition for America is a 501(c)4 advocacy organization consisting of nine member groups which serve atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers and other nontheistic Americans. Its purpose is to amplify the diverse and growing voice of the nontheistic community in the United States. The Coalition works to protect the civil rights of nontheists and lobbies the U.S. Congress on issues of concern to its constituents. The group's website is www.secular.org .

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Is the United States a Christian Country?

The Old North Church in Boston, where two lanterns signaled the departure of British regulars to Lexington, has been immortalized for what happened atop its 277-year-old Medford bricks. But far below, in a dark and dusty crypt where the public rarely visits, the stories of hundreds of early Bostonians have long lay dormant and forgotten.

But now, thanks to the Old North Foundation and the groundbreaking work of a funerary archeologist, those stories are beginning to be resurrected along with a new appreciation of the daily life of young Boston's bustling North End.

Armed with a flashlight, a notebook, and a determination to ignore the shadows and eerie creaking around her, Jane Lyden Rousseau is spending hundreds of hours analyzing the condition and configuration of the crypt. Above ground, she pores over centuries-old ledgers to determine who is buried beneath Boston's oldest standing church, why they were interred there, and what can be learned about early American burial rites.

UNITED NATIONS -- The United States ambassador to the U.N., during a emotional ceremony here marking the 1994 Rwandan genocide, said that the U.S. government had failed to prevent the mass killings that began 15 years ago on Tuesday.

"Rwanda did not suffer from 'ancient hatreds' between Hutu killers and Tutsi victims," Ambassador Susan Rice said. "It suffered from modern demagogues, from ... those who were willing to kill in the warped name of ethnic difference, from those who saw division and death as a path to power."...

On the National Security Council at the White House at the time of the genocide, Ms. Rice's position was director for International Organizations and Peacekeeping. In 1997, she got a brief on Africa at State as assistant secretary for African Affairs. She said she visited Rwanda in December 1994, six months after the genocide ended.

"I'll never forget the horror of walking through a churchyard and schoolyard where one of the massacres had occurred. ... The decomposing bodies of those who had been so cruelly murdered still lay strewn around what should have been a place of peace," Ms. Rice said.

In 1998, President Bill Clinton traveled to Rwanda and apologized for Washington's failure to act.

In its latest effort to return wayward ancient artworks to their rightful owners, the J. Paul Getty Museum will send a Roman fresco fragment to Italy. The fragmentary panel, a roughly 36-by-32-inch section of a wall painting made in the third quarter of the 1st century BC, joined the museum's collection in 1996 as a gift of New York collectors Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman.

The museum --- which has returned 39 antiquities to Italy since 2007 -- listed the fragment as "at some risk of forfeiture" and stated its appraised value at the time of donation as $150,000 in a 2005 internal assessment, compiled during an investigation of objects that might have been illegally exported.

But Getty officials didn't decide to repatriate the fragment until about a year ago, when an image of it appeared in a catalog published by the Italian Ministry of Culture, said Karol Wight, the Getty's curator of antiquities.

SAN SIMEON, Calif. -- Three 16th century oil paintings that have been hanging in William Randolph Hearst's famous castle at San Simeon belonged to a Jewish couple who were forced to give them up during the Nazi reign in Germany, authorities said Tuesday.

Two of the three paintings, visible to guests and millions of tourists at Hearst Castle since 1935, will be returned Friday to the heirs of the rightful owners, both of whom died during the war, one in the death camp at Auschwitz.

The shocking discovery, made after a lawyer for the heirs filed a claim with the California State Parks, is yet another reminder of the scope of Jewish persecution during World War II.

"Never in a million years did I think anything like this would cross my desk," said Brad Torgan, the former general counsel for the state parks who led the investigation. "It is one of the most interesting things I've ever worked on and, given the outcome, one of the most rewarding things I've worked on at state parks."

Two paintings - "Portrait of Alvise Vendramin," attributed to Jacopo Tintoretto, and a painting known as "Portrait of a Bearded Gentleman," credited to Giovanni Cariani - will be returned Friday to Peter Bloch of Boynton Beach, Fla., and Inge Blackshear of Buenos Aires.

Roadworks have stirred interest among office workers and amateur archaeologists after examples of hewn stone were found in the area where Liverpool Castle once stood.

The sandstone slabs - which appear to have visible chisel marks - were unearthed by contractors laying cables on James Street opposite the Victoria Monument.

Liverpool Castle was demolished in the early 18th Century and its site was last subjected to major historical excavation in the 1920s.

Now sandstone slabs have been unearthed at the side of a four-foot deep trench and some by-standers have suggested they could be part of the foundations of the castle.

Liverpool Museum's Field Archeology Section said the 1920s excavation of the area had shown there was no danger of damaging any valuable artefacts.

"Foot-shaped" structures have been revealed in the Jordan valley and are among the earliest sites that archeologists believe were built by the ancient people of Israel. The structures are thought to be symbolic of the biblical concept of ownership.

"The 'foot' structures that we found in the Jordan valley are the first sites that the People of Israel built upon entering Canaan and they testify to the biblical concept of ownership of the land with the foot," said archaeologist Prof. Adam Zertal of the University of Haifa, who headed the excavating team that exposed five compounds in the shape of an enormous "foot" -- likely to have been used at that time to mark ownership of territory.

The finding is believed to represent the first time that enclosed sites identified with the biblical sites termed in Hebrew "gilgal", which were used for assemblies, preparation for battle, and rituals, have been revealed in the Jordan valley. The Hebrew word "gilgal" (a camp or stone-structure), is mentioned thirty-nine times in the Bible. The stone enclosures were located in the Jordan valley and the hill country west of it. To this day, no archaeological site has been proposed to be identified with the gilgal.

Between the years 1990 and 2008, during the Manasseh Hill-Country Survey that covers Samaria and the Jordan Valley, five such enclosures were found and excavated, all designed in the shape of a human foot. The site are believed to date back to the outset of the Iron Age I (the 13th-12th centuries BCE). Based on their size and shape, it is clear that they were used for human assembly and not for animals.

It's not quite Eleanor Dare's jewelry box, but the artifacts that archaeologists recently dug up at Fort Raleigh National Historic Site might hold some historic dazzle.

"We definitely found a historic site from the Colonial period," said Nick Luccketti, a founding member of the nonprofit First Colony Foundation. "It's a candidate for the first permanent English settlement on Roanoke Island, but I certainly wouldn't want to bet on it at this point."

Luccketti, who i s the principal archaeologist for the James River Institute for Archaeology in Williamsburg, said the bits of bone, fish scales and ceramic, as well as metal buckles and buttons, that were unearthed in a late November excavation appear to date to sometime between 1680 and 1750.

"There's a number of artifacts suggesting that the English were doing something there," he said.

Examination of the pottery pieces reveal that the latest the site was occupied "dates solidly to the first half of the 18th century," Luccketti said, but the earliest date - possibly the late 1600s - still has to be determined.

The excavation was one in a series of digs the foundation, which has a permit with the National Park Service, has conducted since it was established in 2004 to renew long-stalled exploration of Fort Raleigh on Roanoke Island.

Despite the link to national parks and being the purported location of the Lost Colony settlement, no evidence of either has ever been found during at least 33 excavations over decades.

Meanwhile, the foundation also has plans to explore underwater at Broad Creek in Wanchese, where about a half-dozen pieces of copper and European glass beads were found about three years ago.

Critics of Obama's proposed $3.5 trillion federal budget say he's poised to jeopardize the economic gains unleashed by President Reagan.

They say he will make the same mistakes that President Lyndon B. Johnson did when he committed massive amounts of federal money to create a slew of anti-poverty programs dubbed "The Great Society."

"The Great Society created a lot of programs and wasted a lot of money," said Kenneth Khachigian, a former Reagan speechwriter and adviser. "The biggest war on poverty was the economic boom started by Reagan."

But others like Joseph Califano Jr., Johnson's senior domestic adviser, say the notion that the Great Society was a failure is one of the "greatest political scams" in American history.

Republican leaders who have labeled Obama's budget proposals socialist are rehashing the rhetoric their predecessors used to attack Great Society programs like Head Start 40 years ago, Califano says.

President Barack Obama is winning higher marks from Americans than the last three presidents early in their terms as he takes on a global recession, two wars and domestic fights over government spending, health care and taxes.

Obama’s approval rating climbed to a high of 66 percent in an April 1-5 New York Times/CBS News poll released today. The poll follows recent surveys by the Gallup Poll, Quinnipiac University and the Pew Research Center all showing that about six out of 10 Americans approve of the job the president is doing.

A Gallup Poll taken in March showed Obama, a Democrat, with a 64 percent approval rating. That compares with 56 percent for Republican George H.W. Bush, 52 percent for Democrat Bill Clinton and 53 percent for Republican George W. Bush at similar points in their presidencies. The last Bush left office with an approval rating of 34 percent, according to a Jan. 9-11 Gallup Poll....

Former President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, saw his approval rating climb from 51 percent soon after his inauguration to 60 percent in mid-March of 1981. After a failed attempt on his life on March 30 of that year, Reagan’s approval climbed to 67 percent in early April and stayed at that level until June in the Gallup Poll.

Early popularity also doesn’t guarantee success. The approval ratings for former President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, in the Gallup Poll started at 66 percent and climbed as high as 75 percent by March 1977. The Iran hostage crisis, gasoline shortages and double-digit inflation helped push Carter’s approval to 34 percent in December 1980, before he left office after having lost his re-election bid to Reagan.

Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison on Tuesday, the first time a democratically elected Latin American president was found guilty in his own country of human rights crimes.

A three-judge panel convicted him of ordering a military death squad to carry out two massacres that killed 25 people during his 1990-2000 rule, when he was battling guerrillas. Nearly 70,000 people died in two decades of conflict in the Andean country.

Once lauded as a hero, Fujimori, 70, could spend the rest of his life in prison. He can appeal the ruling, but the verdict is likely to have far-reaching political implications for Peru.

Scientists blame Italy's tragic history of earth tremors on the fact that the country lies directly over the Eurasian and African faultlines, where the borders of two tectonic plates move together and apart.

This also accounts for Italy's relatively high number of active volcanoes - Etna, the largest active volcano in Europe, Vulcano, Stromboli, and Vesuvius, the only active volcano on the mainland of Europe.

1857 Several towns destroyed and 12,000 people killed in the Basilicata region south of Naples by tremors estimated at around 6.9 on the Richter scale - dubbed the Great Neapolitan Earthquake....

US President Barack Obama called on Turkey to address the killings of Armenians in eastern Anatolia nearly a century ago but gave clear signs that he would stay out of the debate, saying it is up to Turkey and Armenia to deal with history.

"History is often tragic. But if unresolved, it can be a heavy weight. Each country must work through its past," Obama said in an address to the Turkish Parliament, noting that although there are strong views on the issue, Turkey should face its past. He said, however, it was not up to him to resolve the dispute.

Turkey rejects claims of a genocide of 1.5 million Armenians during World War I. The dispute has been one of the key obstacles for the normalization of relations between Turkey and Armenia, which have had no formal ties since 1993. Turkish and Armenian officials are now holding closed-door talks on restoring relations and Obama believes this process could be harmed if the United States intervenes. He is thus expected not to use the word "genocide" in a traditional statement on April 24, the date Armenians mark as the beginning of the genocide campaign.

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Historian Juan Cole critiques Obama's speech

Text of Obama speech

TODAY is an important date in the history of the Internet: the 40th anniversary of what is known as the Request for Comments. Outside the technical community, not many people know about the R.F.C.’s, but these humble documents shape the Internet’s inner workings and have played a significant role in its success....

The early R.F.C.’s ranged from grand visions to mundane details, although the latter quickly became the most common. Less important than the content of those first documents was that they were available free of charge and anyone could write one. Instead of authority-based decision-making, we relied on a process we called “rough consensus and running code.” Everyone was welcome to propose ideas, and if enough people liked it and used it, the design became a standard.

After all, everyone understood there was a practical value in choosing to do the same task in the same way. For example, if we wanted to move a file from one machine to another, and if you were to design the process one way, and I was to design it another, then anyone who wanted to talk to both of us would have to employ two distinct ways of doing the same thing. So there was plenty of natural pressure to avoid such hassles. It probably helped that in those days we avoided patents and other restrictions; without any financial incentive to control the protocols, it was much easier to reach agreement.

President Obama on Monday declined to repeat his claim that the deaths of up to 1.5 million Armenians during World War I was a "genocide," stepping back from his campaign pledge to Armenian Americans that the "widely documented fact" would be fully commemorated during his presidency.

During a joint news conference alongside Turkish President Abdullah Gul, Obama said he did not want to "focus on my views" or in any way interfere with delicate negotiations between Turks and Armenians on what the president called "a whole host of issues."

Obama sidestepped the issue -- a key tension point between Turks and Armenians and a rallying cry among Armenian-Americans -- saying he was trying to be as "encouraging as possible."

"I want to be as encouraging as possible around those negotiations, which are moving forward and could bear fruit very quickly, very soon," Obama said. "What I want to do is not focus on my views right now but focus on the views of the Turkish and Armenian people. What I told the (Turkish) president is I want to be as constructive as possible in moving these issues forward quickly. My sense is that they are moving quickly. I don't want to, as the president of the United States, want to preempt any possible arrangements, announcements that might be made in the near future."

The city struggling to come to terms with the massive destruction of its ancient fabric was founded in 1254 by order of Corrado IV, the son of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. The importance to the city of the emperor's patronage is clear: L'Aquila means "The Eagle", a reference to the emperor's coat of arms.

The emperor had accepted the petitions of local people who wanted a city to protect them from the depredation of local barons, and was formed by bringing together "99 villages", or so the legend claims. As such it was the first and only planned city of medieval Italy. In the eighteenth century, the town's resistance to French occupation led to the town being sacked – but it rose to prominence again a hundred years later, as Italy's unification made it the regional capital. Just 60 miles north-east of Rome, it nestles between four peaks in the Apennine range, in the Aterno-Pescara valley.

Until yesterday much of the ancient core of this city of some 70,000 people remained intact, despite the earthquakes that have repeatedly left their mark over the centuries. But how much will survive the latest one remains to be seen.