Archaeologists complete exhumation of remains on construction site.

Using shovels, brushes and dirt sifters, the partial skeleton of an unknown Civil War solider was exhumed Monday from his longtime burial plot along Columbia Avenue by a team of archaeologists.

The newly exhumed remains, which included bones from both of the man's legs as well as burial artifacts, will be kept by state environmental officials until a final burial site can be determined.

The man's upper skeleton was initially recovered by crews who discovered the remains about a month ago while digging a trench. The body was found at the Through the Green site on Columbia Avenue where a mixed-use development is being constructed.

Rather than leave the body in the ground, the site's developer, Wolfe Co., got legal permission to have the body excavated.

The mystery about who the man might have been — and why he was buried alone with no apparent markings — deepened Monday. Among the burial artifacts uncovered are nails from the man's shoes, a button and greenish-amber glass bead, said Larry McKee, senior archaeologist with TRC Companies Inc.

Several brass buttons bearing what appeared to be Union insignia, nails and a bullet had earlier been uncovered. Some historians say they believe the man was a Union soldier though no conclusive proof has been discovered.

The construction crews were digging up a patch of land near Northwest 71st Street when they unearthed the unexpected: wrist bones, a human skull, skeletons of two small children. Then came crumbled headstones, nails, buttons and metal coffin handles.

The crew, working on an affordable housing project in the shadow of Interstate 95, had stumbled upon an apparently long-forgotten burial ground -- and a tantalizing puzzle that has stumped Miami's most knowledgeable archaeologists and historians: Who was buried there, and when? How did the graveyard come to be erased from history and memory? And how and where should the remains be re-interred?

So far, answers have proven elusive. An extensive search since the plot came to light in late April has turned up no names, no records, no official documents indicating there was ever a burial ground on the site -- only two commercial maps, from 1925 and 1936, labeling the place a cemetery.

Citing family lore and personal memories, some longtime Miamians recall an informal burial ground for blacks at the site, which sits just east of I-95, sandwiched between 71st Street and the Florida East Coast Railroad tracks.

A preliminary analysis of the bones suggests they may have belonged to black people, but the conclusion is far from definitive, said Bob Carr, a South Florida archaeologist hired by the project's developers to investigate the find. The nails are of a type used in the early 20th Century, a fact that may date the graves to that period.

Rich Remer mined his family's Kensington past for a quarter-century.

He found deeds, wills, letters, newspaper clippings, maps, diaries. The material took him to the first Remer in the colonies, a German butcher who lived on Shackamaxon Street by the Delaware River in the mid-1700s.

Then came unexpected news two weeks ago: Archaeologists for the state had unearthed 25,000 artifacts from a Fishtown property once owned by his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, the butcher Godfrey Remer.

In six pits used as 18th-century Dumpsters, they found such household items as a painted pearlware bowl from England, a chamber pot, a fractured teapot. They dug up a bone button, a domino, a piece of a flute-like recorder.

They unearthed scraps from colonial meals: apple seeds, a peach pit, fish bones. And in undisturbed layers of earth, they chanced upon stone points from spears and arrows, probably wielded by Native American hunters 1,000 years ago.

All federal construction requires historical review of affected areas. In 1959, when work began on the Pennsylvania stretch of I-95, the mandate didn't exist. Now, with the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, it does.

By happenstance, archaeologists picked for their investigation a sliver of land - 10 feet wide and more than 100 feet long - by a highway retaining wall on Shackamaxon Street. They had no clue beforehand that the plot was part of the backyard of a home that Godfrey Remer bought for his shipwright son, Matthew, in 1778 in what was then called Kensington and now Fishtown.

Egypt will soon provide evidence that the 3,400-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti was taken illegally out of the country by Germany, Egyptian antiquities chief Zahi Hawass said on Sunday.

The fabled bust of Nefertiti, renowned as one of history's great beauties, was brought to Berlin in 1913, a year after German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt unearthed it on the banks of the Nile.

Cairo began demanding the statue in the 1930s, but successive German governments, beginning with Adolf Hitler's, have refused its request.

Queen turns down invitation to opening of major new museum in Athens built to house Acropolis treasures.

A bitter new row over ownership of the Elgin marbles has erupted, threatening to eclipse the inauguration this week of a major new museum in Athens designed to house the contested masterpieces.

Just days before the opening of the €130m (£110m) New Acropolis Museum, officials in Athens and London were this weekend engaging in barbed exchanges over the classical treasures.

The dispute, which has indirectly dragged in the Queen, the Greek-born Duke of Edinburgh, and Gordon Brown, re-erupted when Hannah Boulton, the British Museum's spokeswoman, told an Athens radio station that it would consider a loan request from Greece provided that it acknowledged, as is customary with all borrowing institutions, that London owned the pieces. The sculptures, she said, could be displayed in the New Acropolis Museum for three or four months, "the length of time for an average loan of objects".

Celebrities, royals and heads of state are expected to attend Saturday's inauguration of the museum, built within sight of the Parthenon, at the foot of the Acropolis. However, delegates from Britain, including the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, have been quick to send their regrets. Last week, Gordon Brown declined his invitation. Ben Bradshaw, the new secretary for culture and sport, followed suit, as did Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum. It has been left for two British Museum curators to represent the UK.

Same brashness. Same spontaneity. Same lightning-rod remarks.

If you were thinking the Rev. Jeremiah Wright had been tempered by a national backlash that nearly derailed Barack Obama's trip to the White House, guess again.

In an exclusive interview at the 95th annual Hampton University Ministers' Conference, Wright told the Daily Press that he has not spoken to his former church member since Obama became president, and he implied that the White House won't allow Obama to talk to him.

"Them Jews ain't going to let him talk to me," Wright said. "I told my baby daughter that he'll talk to me in five years when he's a lame duck, or in eight years when he's out of office. ...

From 1961 to 1971, the US military sprayed Vietnam with Agent Orange, which contained large quantities of Dioxin, in order to defoliate the trees for military objectives. Dioxin is one of the most dangerous chemicals known to man. It has been recognized by the World Health Organization as a carcinogen (causes cancer) and by the American Academy of Medicine as a teratogen (causes birth defects).

Between 2.5 and 4.8 million people were exposed to Agent Orange. The spraying covered 1.4 billion hectares of land and forest - approximately 12 percent of the land area of Vietnam.

Vietnamese who were exposed to the chemical have suffered from cancer, liver damage, pulmonary and heart diseases, defects to reproductive capacity, and skin and nervous disorders. Children and grandchildren of those exposed have severe physical deformities, mental and physical disabilities, diseases and shortened life spans. The forests and jungles in large parts of southern Vietnam have been devastated and denuded. They may never grow back and if they do, it will take 50 to 200 years to regenerate. Animals that inhabited the forests and jungles have become extinct, disrupting the communities that depended on them. The rivers and underground water in some areas have also been contaminated. Erosion and desertification will change the environment, contributing to the warming of the planet and dislocation of crop and animal life.

The US government and the chemical companies knew that Agent Orange, when produced rapidly at high temperatures, would contain large quantities of Dioxin. Nevertheless, the chemical companies continued to produce it in this manner. The US government and the chemical companies also knew that the Bionetics Study, commissioned by the government in 1963, showed that even low levels of Dioxin produced significant deformities in unborn offspring of laboratory animals. But they suppressed that study and continued to spray Vietnam with Agent Orange. It wasn't until the study was leaked in 1969 that the spraying of Agent Orange was discontinued.

US soldiers who served in Vietnam have experienced similar illnesses. After they sued the chemical companies, including Dow and Monsanto, that manufactured and sold Agent Orange to the government, the case was settled out of court for $180 million which gave few plaintiffs more than a few thousand dollars each. Later the US veterans won a legislative victory for compensation for exposure to Agent Orange. They receive $1.52 billion per year in benefits.

But when the Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange sued the chemical companies in federal court, US District Judge Jack Weinstein dismissed the lawsuit, concluding that Agent Orange did not constitute a poison weapon prohibited by the Hague Convention of 1907. Weinstein had reportedly told the chemical companies when they settled the US veterans' suit that their liability was over and he was making good on his promise. His dismissal was affirmed by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court refused to hear the case. The chemical companies admitted in their filing in the Supreme Court that the harm alleged by the victims was foreseeable although not intended. How can something that is foreseeable be unintended?

On May 15 and 16 of this year, the International Peoples' Tribunal of Conscience in Support of the Vietnamese Victims of Agent Orange convened in Paris and heard testimony from 27 victims, witnesses and scientific experts. Seven people from three continents served as judges of the Tribunal, which was sponsored by the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL).

The notion goes back to 1922, when a bond brokerage in New York City hired Edgar Lawrence Smith to put together a pamphlet explaining why bonds--and certainly not stocks--were the best long-term investment. At the time, this was conventional wisdom on Wall Street. Bonds were for investment, stocks for speculation--and, in those pre-SEC days, for manipulation. But when he investigated the historical record, Smith recounted later, "supporting evidence for this thesis could not be found." Instead, he discovered that over every 20-year span he examined but one, stocks handily beat bonds.

In 1924, Smith published the results as a book called Common Stocks as Long Term Investments. It was a sensation. Smith--a businessman of no great distinction up to that point--launched a mutual-fund company on the strength of his sudden fame and got an invite from John Maynard Keynes to join the Royal Economic Society. His argument was that stocks would continue to beat bonds because they a) were less vulnerable to having their value eaten away by inflation and b) allowed investors to share in the growth of the U.S. economy in a way that bonds and other assets did not. These two tenets were the indispensable theoretical underpinning of the 1920s bull market.

Part of an ancient human skull has been recovered from the North Sea in an area described as a drowned Stone Age hunting ground.

The bone fragment is believed to belong to a late Neanderthal man and has been dated at around 60,000 years old.

It is the first time that an ancient human fossil has been found below the sea. Its discovery is likely to intensify scientific interest in the area, known as the Zeeland Ridges, where the skull was buried.

Previously, stone tools typical of late Neanderthals had been discovered in the North Sea. In 2008, 28 flint axes were found eight miles off the coast of Great Yarmouth.

But until now the fossil record had remained blank. “We’ve been waiting for this for a long time,” said Professor Chris Stringer, a human origins researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, who is involved in the study.

A few months ago we reported that the NYT had adopted a new practice of dating articles. Although you might find an article published in the June 15, 2009 paper version of the Times, the newspaper might consider the official date the day before when the article was posted online.

That change made sense given the realities of online publishing, but it made historians' lives more difficult: Readers following historians' footnotes would have to guess whether it was the paper edition that was being cited or the website, leading possibly to wild goose chases.

Now it turns out that the Times is making things even more confusing.

Four dates are now associated with articles:

(1.) The date of the paper edition.
(2.) The date that appears in the URL
(3.) The date that appears at the top of the website page

And (4.) The date that appears when the reader clicks on the Print Friendly version -- which is different from the date in (3). (This is what's new; at least we think it's new, or perhaps we hadn't noticed until now.)

As an example, Paul Krugman's column in the June 15 paper edition can be found online at this URL:

That would seem to indicate it was published on June 15th.

But at the top of the column readers are told that this article was "Published: June 14, 2009." VIDE:

Click on the PRINT button and you get the date: June 15, 2009 at the top of the article. VIDE:

Chaos!

HNN recommendation: From now on when historians cite the NYT they must indicate clearly whether they are citing the paper edition or the"official" website date. HNN's policy is to cite the NYT's official website pub date.

According to the Federal Reserve's "Flow of Funds" report, released Thursday, the net worth of households in the United States is $50.4 trillion. That's $1.3 trillion less than the total at the beginning of 2009, and $14 trillion less than at the beginning of the recession in December 2007.

Numbers that huge are hard to grapple with, so here's a simple way to think about it. U.S. households are about 25 percent poorer than they were at the end of 2007.

Baghdad,Iraq – In its continuing commitment to the implementation of the Strategic Framework
Agreement, the Gulf Region Division, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers helped return an Iraqi artifact to
the Government of Iraq earlier this month.

The artifact — a 27-year-old bronze tablet built in the era of Saddam Hussein and dedicated to an
Unknown Soldier — was turned over to the Iraqi High Tribunal for storage in its secure document
storage facility in the International Zone. The turn-over was conducted in partnership with the
Cultural Affairs Department of the U.S. Embassy, Baghdad.

The tablet resided outside of the Gulf Region Central District’s Residence Office on Freedom
Compound in the IZ for a number of years. But the history of the tablet is a bit of a mystery.

“We don’t know how it got here, or who put it here,” said Capt. Chad Wendolek, the officer in charge
of the GRC IZ residence office.

Wendolek said both he and his colleagues wanted to find a home for the tablet before they move to
the Victory Base Complex this summer.

“We know that this tablet is significant to the Iraqi people and we wanted to be sure we put it in
the right hands,” Wendolek said.

An ancient Chinese city wall with a history of more than 14 centuries is being eaten away by a kind of mite in Xi'an, capital of northwestern Shaanxi Province, archaeologists have said.

Experts were surprised to find it had been the mites undermining the wall at the Hanguang Entrance Remains Museum during their one-year research for further protection.

"The discovery is the world's first of this kind. The mites had damaged the wall seriously," said Li Yuhu, archaeologist of Shaanxi Normal University.

As President Barack Obama flies Monday to Chicago for a midday speech on health-care reform, the round trip on Air Force One will run about $236,000, according to government estimates of the operating costs for one of the top symbols, and perks, of the presidency.

But that does not include such expenses as Secret Service protection, motorcades and helicopter transports.

In his first interview since taking the job, Panetta tells The New Yorker's Jane Mayer that, when he took over, he "wanted to be damn sure" that no one was on the payroll who could be prosecuted for war crimes. But once the agency was clean, he "didn't want to spend a lot of time dealing with the past and what mistakes were made." Panetta also says that he actually supported a truth commission to investigate the CIA's use of torture, at least until President Obama nipped the idea in the bud.

Sometimes location is everything. Other times, it's just a convenient place to spend the night.

On both sides of the Atlantic, much has been made of Barack Obama's decision to spend Thursday night in Dresden, the German city known primarily as the site of a horrific bombing campaign by U.S. and British forces just months before the end of World War II. The bombing, which lasted 63 minutes, started fires that ultimately claimed the lives of between 18,000 and 25,000 Germans, according to a recent report by historians commissioned by the city.

In Germany, speculation surfaced in the press that Obama's decision to visit Dresden, instead of the capital of Berlin, could be seen as a slight to Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, who faces challenging parliamentary elections in September. In a press conference Friday morning, Obama himself knocked down this idea, saying the choice of Dresden had more to do with his tight schedule, which left scant time between his Egypt visit and his visit Friday afternoon to the Buchenwald Concentration Camp and the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, where he will meet with wounded U.S. soldiers.

"Most of the speculation of my schedule in Germany doesn't take into account simple logistics," Obama said, before jokingly chiding reporters to stop promoting controversies without clear basis."Stop it, all of you," he told the press, in a light tone."We have enough problems out there without having to manufacture problems."

Perhaps your history teachers failed to alert you to these Civil War facts: Jefferson Davis nearly got mugged by an angry female mob; Abraham Lincoln loved the Confederate anthem "Dixie," and Paul Revere was a Civil War casualty.

The Civil War, in addition to being among the defining moments of U.S. history, is also the source of some bizarre and surprisingly cool trivia.

1. Lincoln's first solution to slavery was a fiasco

2. Hungry ladies effectively mugged Jefferson Davis

3. The Union used hot air balloons and submarines

4. "Dixie" was only a northern song

5. Paul Revere was at Gettysburg

The president of the Russian republic of Bashkortostan, who has hung on by his fingernails through repeated periods of friction with the Kremlin, pushed his luck last week when he gave a scathing interview to a Moscow newspaper, charging that Russia’s political institutions were “embarrassing to look at” and that the country “is walking away from the process of democratization.”

Murtaza G. Rakhimov, 75, who has led Bashkortostan, an energy-rich southwestern region, since 1990, complained in Friday’s edition of the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets that leaders in Moscow had recreated the top-down, one-party rule that had prevailed during the Soviet Union.

He went on to attack United Russia, the governing party led by Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, for trying to subjugate homegrown leaders. Mr. Rakhimov was one of United Russia’s founders, and remains a member of its executive council.

The Bosnian war crimes court jailed a Bosnian Serb wartime commander for 25 years on Friday for ordering a mortar attack in 1995 on a northern town that killed 71 people and wounded more than 150. Novak Djukic was found guilty of war crimes against civilians and of violations of international law and the Geneva Conventions, the court council in Sarajevo said. Darko Samardzic, the court council president, read the verdict. He said, “One missile hit the very center of the town, Kapija, killing 71 people and injuring more than 150.” He said that all 221 of them were civilians. Relatives cried as he read the names of those killed and wounded. Most victims were between the ages of 18 and 25. The youngest was a 2-year-old, hit while in his father’s arms. Mr. Djukic was a commander of the Bosnian Serb Army in the Tuzla region during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Tuzla was declared a United Nations safe zone in 1993.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter was honored by the Palestinian government Saturday and pledged to support the Palestinians' campaign for independence to the end of his days.

In his acceptance speech, Carter urged the Palestinians to end their internal divisions and stop persecuting their rivals.

He was referring to the growing rift between the Islamic militant Hamas group, which controls Gaza, and Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, in charge of the West Bank. Each side has been cracking down on the other's supporters, particularly since Hamas violently overran Gaza two years ago.

Carter met with Hamas' exiled leadership in Syria on Thursday and is to head to Gaza on Sunday, after meeting with Israeli officials. Carter has said peace between Israel and the Palestinians is impossible without involving Hamas, but reiterated in Syria that he was not representing the Obama administration.

In Russia it is not only the future that is unpredictable; often the past is equally in doubt. One minute Leon Trotsky was a hero of the Revolution, the father of the Red Army and a strong contender to succeed Lenin; the next minute he never existed. Until the late 1980s, the 1917 Revolution was the pinnacle of human achievement; suddenly in the 1990s it was seen as an utter failure.

And today again history in the region is turning into an ideological battlefield. When the Red Army poured into the Baltic states at the end of the Second World War, it liberated them from Nazi tyranny – but from the perspective of the subsequent decades of Soviet domination, was it liberation or merely another invasion?

The Russians, of course, have no doubt on the matter: for them it was an heroic national achievement. But for the states which less than two decades ago managed to crawl out from under the Soviet boot, things are not so simple. The Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, an imposing black box of a building in the heart of Riga, tells the story of Latvia's time inside the Soviet Union. The Soviet soldiers, glorified as heroes in Moscow, are portrayed as criminals and occupiers, no better than the Germans they defeated.

But now, slamming shut a stable door through which its former subject states long ago bolted, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has ordered the creation of a body with the Orwellian title of the Commission to Counteract the Falsification of History to the Detriment of Russian Interests. A linked law is also likely to be passed that will outlaw the "rehabilitation of Nazism" on the territory of former Soviet republics.

It was a standoff that could easily have erupted into World War III. In late October, 1961, American tanks stood face to face with Soviet tanks at Checkpoint Charlie in the heart of Berlin, a single wrong move could have been enough to start yet another eruption of continent-wide violence -- or worse.

The Soviets, though, had an advantage. Among the West German police on hand at Friedrichstrasse that day was a man named Karl-Heinz Kurras. But in addition to being a highly respected West Berlin officer, Kurras -- as recent revelations have made clear -- was also a spy for the East German secret police, the Stasi. And he spent the standoff passing valuable information on American positions across the border.

"The headquarters of the Americans is on the first floor of a building on Friedrichstrasse," Kurras reported, according to a story in Thursday's edition of the German tabloid Bild, citing documents from the Stasi archive in Berlin. "A wall of sandbags is in front of the building." He also reported on the US troops manning the tanks and, once the crisis ended, gave information on US tank positions nearby.

Following the unveiling of a plaque just a month ago in the Fuencarral Cemetery, in the northern outskirts of Madrid, a further step was taken, yesterday, to honour the British members of the International Brigades who fought on the side of the republican government during the Spanish Civil War.

Seven surviving British veterans who joined the International Brigades were granted dual Spanish citizenship, yesterday, June 10th, at the Spanish embassy in London. The eldest veteran, Lou Kenton is 101 years old. Joseph Khan, aged 94, was the youngest survivor to be granted a Spanish passport. Carles Casajuana, Spain’s ambassador to the UK also awarded Spanish citizenship to Penny Feiwel, aged 100, Paddy Cochrane, 96, Thomas Watters, 96, Sam Lesser, 95, and Jack Edwards, aged 95.

An eighth veteran, Les Gibson, aged 96, was forced to decline the offer due to ill health. The offer also came too late for two other former members of the International Brigades, Jack Jones and Bob Doyle. Jack Jones, the general secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union, from 1969 to 1978, died just over a month ago, on April 21st, but his son picked up his passport on his behalf. Bob Doyle died at the beginning of the year, on January 22nd.