The first century B.C. was one of the most culturally rich in the history of the Roman Empire — the age of Cicero, Caesar and Virgil. But as much as historians know about the great figures of this period of Ancient Rome, they know very little about some basic facts, such as the population size of the late Roman Empire.

Now, a group of historians has used caches of buried coins to provide an answer to this question.

During the Republican period of Rome (about the fifth to the first centuries B.C), adult male citizens of Rome could be taxed and conscribed into the army and were also given the right to vote. To keep track of this section of the population (and their taxable assets), the Roman state conducted periodic censuses...

... To help put an end to the debate, University of Connecticut theoretical biologist Peter Turchin and Stanford University ancient historian Walter Scheidel focused on the region's prevalence of coin hoards, those bundles of buried treasure that people hid to protect their savings during times of great violence and political strife. If the people who hid these bundles were killed or driven off, they wouldn't have been able to retrieve them, leaving them for archaeologists to find.

According to the researchers, mapping out the times when the coins were buried is a good indirect method for measuring the intensity of internal warfare and unrest, and therefore a key indicator of population demographics.

Buenos Aires, Argentina - Prosecutors here in Argentina have framed former Gen. Jorge Olivera Rovere as Argentina's Adolf Eichmann: a mid-level official who dutifully helped execute orders to exterminate opponents of Argentina's last military dictatorship. Yesterday, Rovere's attorneys defended the aging military man, 83, saying that the trial of the former general threatened to disrupt the "social peace" generated by amnesty laws and pardons passed in the 1980's.

Rovere is charged with 120 counts of kidnapping and four homicides for his involvement in Argentina's "Dirty War." After the military coup on March 24, 1976, thousands of people were "disappeared" by Argentina's regime: kidnapped from their homes and offices, taken to clandestine prisons and tortured for information. Many were executed and what happened to their remains is unknown.

During 1976, Rovere was in charge of "anti-subversive" operations for the army in the city of Buenos Aires. The military took power amidst violence between paramilitaries, security forces and leftist guerilla organizations, promising to end violence and fight "subversion." In the army hierarchy, Rovere was two ranks below the ruling general, Jorge Videla.

Rovere was first indicted in 1985, shortly after democracy returned. His case was suspended when former President Carlos Menem pardoned Rovere and other senior officers in 1989 before the trial reached a verdict. In April 2004, however, a federal judge reopened Rovere's case, declaring that the pardon was unconstitutional under international law.

Since February, the court has heard from hundreds of witnesses in the case, meeting twice a week. Beginning in early September, federal prosecutor Felix Crous spent four days summarizing the evidence against Rovere and four of his subordinates who are also charged in the case: Bernardo José Menéndez, Teófilo Saa, Humberto Lobaiza and Felipe Alespeiti. Though no witnesses identified Rovere as their torturer or kidnapper, Crous has argued that Rovere was an essential component of the "anti-subversive" operations in Buenos Aires, coordinating activities of the police, the navy and the army. He has argued that Rovere's rank and circumstantial evidence "convincingly" establish Rovere's guilt. Crous spent two days summarizing more than 200 cases of kidnapping and disappearances that happened in Buenos Aires during Rovere's command.

Yesterday was the defense's turn.

Rovere's lawyers - father and son Norberto and Nicolas Giletta - took turns reading a prepared closing statement for four hours, in a mix of ideological, political, legal and factual arguments. Norberto Giletta, the father, was a judge during the dictatorship and a fierce defender of the military regime. While he was a judge, he ordered the arrest of Robert Cox, the former editor of the English-language Buenos Aires Herald, one of the few papers in Argentina that refused to cave to government threats and censorship. Human rights groups here have accused him of complicity in the violence of the 1970's for his role as a judge.

Norberto Giletta opened the defense with a charged, full frontal assault on victims in the case, telling the court that "we are here today because of leftist forces, national and international." To discredit the testimony against Rovere, he said that the vast majority of witnesses belonged to or had family members in "terrorist" organizations...

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus has asked the Obama administration to “immediately terminate” a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) program that has identified more than 120,000 illegal aliens over the past three years..

“On behalf of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC), we write to ask that you immediately terminate all Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) under the 287(g) program and cease to establish such agreements,” reads the letter to President Obama.

“These agreements are the subject of serious concern as local law enforcement agencies have used the new powers to target communities of color, including a disproportionate number of Latinos, for arrest,” says the letter. “The 287(g) program, which was significantly expanded throughout the Bush Administration, relinquishes the power to enforce federal immigration laws to local law enforcement and corrections agencies. … The misuse of the 287(g) program by its current participants has rendered it ineffective and dangerous to community safety.”

The program, the 287 (g) section added to the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, created a partnership between the Department of Homeland Security’s ICE and state and local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration laws.

The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for the release of thousands of pages of sealed documents concerning sexual abuse by priests in the Catholic diocese of Bridgeport, Conn.

The court's decision Monday effectively lifts a stay that has delayed the release of the documents since 2006, when four newspapers persuaded a Connecticut court to unseal them.

The materials were filed in 23 lawsuits against the Catholic diocese by parishioners during the 1990s, alleging that the church failed to supervise its priests and reassigned those suspected of abusing children. The cases were settled in 2001, as the Catholic abuse scandal grew in national prominence.

The sealed documents are said to include transcripts of depositions of church officials, including Cardinal Edward Egan, and files from the investigation of priests accused of abuse during the 1960s and 1970s. A 2002 article in the Hartford (Conn.) Courant described some of the documents, which the newspaper said it obtained from sources it didn't name.

The other newspaper plaintiffs were the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post.

The Philippine Consulate General in San Francisco, together with the Bay Area Filipino American community, kicked off the celebration of Filipino American History Month in simple ceremonies held at the California Academy of Sciences (CAS).

Philippine Consul General to San Francisco Marciano A. Paynor, Jr. and Fil-Am Board of Education Commissioner Hydra Mendoza, representing San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, cut the ceremonial ribbon officially marking the start of Filipino American History Month.

Earlier in the program, California State Senator Leland Yee spoke on his long years of collaboration and friendship with the Bay Area Filipino American community. Last month, Senator Yee authored and steered in the California State Legislature the passage of a bill that gave recognition to the role played by Filipinos and Filipino Americans in the history and development of the United States.

OLIVE BRANCH - Hundreds of DeSoto County School students got an up close look at life during the famous Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1803-1806 at a living history encampment on the grounds of the Whispering Woods Hotel and Conference Center in Olive Branch Thursday.

Tom Ronk, of Jefferson City, Mo., presided over the 55-foot replica of the keelboat that carried Lewis and Clark as far as they could navigate on river before embarking overland.

The replica was trucked to the site from St. Charles, Mo., where it stays dry-docked for most of the year.

"I've always loved history," Ronk said. "What better way to educate young people than something like this which they can see, feel and touch and hopefully learn about."

If it is information on the health of medieval women or the battle of Trafalgar you require, then the British Library is a pretty good place to look. But those wanting to shed light on more recent events or discoveries recorded online could be in trouble.

Digital literature, online scientific research and internet journalism that should have been saved in the nation's main libraries over the past five years may have been lost because ministers have failed to give them the legal power to copy and archive websites, the Guardian has learned.

Senior executives at the British Library and the National Library of Scotland (NLS) are dismayed that legislation giving them the right to collect online and digital material is still not in force, more than six years after it was passed by parliament.

The omission has meant the libraries – which are legally required to archive books, newspapers and journals – have failed to record online coverage of major events such as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the release of the Lockerbie bomber and the MPs' expenses scandal.

Officially, history began for Porsche in 1950. But the company existed before that as a supplier for Hitler's war machine. New research suggests that the company benefited much more from its Nazi ties than it has admitted to.

Pass the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart and continue across Porsche Square, you'll come to a factory gate. Behind it stands a barrack, its wooden slats still bearing the faded lettering "Reutter" -- a company which once provided Porsche with its first car bodies.

"This is where it all began in 1950," declares company historian Dieter Landenberger. Yet Porsche's history is older -- and bitterer -- than that.

Jan Karolczak, for example, worked for the automobile manufacturer starting in 1942 -- as a forced laborer.

CHICAGO (AFP) – Sucked to her death in a muddy river bed, a baby woolly mammoth spent 40,000 years frozen in the Siberian permafrost where her body was so perfectly preserved traces of her mother's milk remained in her belly.

Three years after her discovery by nomadic reindeer herders, Lyuba will head to Chicago as the star of a mammoths and mastodons exhibit at the world-famous Field Museum.

The exhibition, announced at mid-week, opens March 5 and will run through September 6. The Field Museum is the first US museum to display the prehistoric specimen.

OAKLAND

The message, they said, is simple: Those who broke stereotypes after the Civil War by breaking horses in the West deserve to be honored and remembered.

"Twenty-five to 30 percent of working cowboys were people of color," said Wilbert McAllister, 68. "We know the truth. We're not fake."

McAllister is president of the Oakland Black Cowboys Association, which held its 35th annual parade Saturday in the streets surrounding DeFremery Park. Dozens of horsemen and horsewomen from across the state participated, their steeds clomping along city streets.

"I didn't want to be no damn cowboy when I was a kid," said McAllister, who grew up in Madera County. He went to Western movies on the weekends — no one on the screen looked like him.

"I didn't see the image of the black male," he said. "History got left out."

Now, he stables his horses in Fremont and wants to keep knocking down stereotypes. So does Titus Taylor, an evidence technician for the Oakland Police Department.

Replete in knee-high riding boots and a stunning blue tunic with a sword swinging on his hip, Taylor paid homage Saturday to the famed "Buffalo Soldiers," the all-black regiments formed in 1866.

A number of ancient Roman statues might lie beneath the turquoise waters of the Blue Grotto on the island of Capri in southern Italy, according to an underwater survey of the sea cave.

Dating to the 1st century A.D., the cave was used as a swimming pool by the Emperor Tiberius (42 B.C. - 37 A.D.), and the statues are probably depictions of sea gods.

Carried out in collaboration with the archaeological superintendency of Pompeii, the Marevivo project aims at returning the Blue Grotto to its ancient glory by placing identical copies of Tiberius' statues where they originally stood.

Unemployment under President Barack Obama is at a 26-year-high. The last time the economy had 9.7 percent or higher unemployment was under President Ronald Reagan. But despite similar periods of rising unemployment, Obama and Reagan received almost exactly opposite treatment from the network news media.

Under Obama reporters have gone to great lengths to spin rising unemployment by finding “positive trends” in the job losses, even focusing on as few as 25 jobs being “saved” by the economic stimulus package. But when Reagan was president journalists showed unemployed families living out of their cars under a bridge in Texas and quoted Democrats or union leaders’ attacks on the president’s “wicked” and “sadistic” fiscal policies.

ABC’s George Stephanopoulos looked on the bright side for Obama Sept. 4, 2009, telling viewers, “the unemployment rate nears 10 percent, but the numbers aren’t all bad.” Rewind to May 7, 1982, when unemployment hit 9.4 percent – three-tenths of a percentage point lower than it would be in August 2009. That night, NBC found people in Seattle in dire straights.

“The lines for free food at food banks are four times what they were six months ago,” NBC’s Don Oliver told “Nightly News” viewers. Oliver’s report focused on the “new poor” and the emotional effects of unemployment, including suicide and battering.

CHICAGO - By all appearances, the four finalists for the 2016 Summer Olympic Games desperately want to win. The question is why.

The 1976 Olympics left Montreal with a $1 billion debt, which the province of Quebec fully paid off only in 2006. Australian taxpayers pay $32 million a year to maintain Sydney Olympic venues that now go largely unused. The projected budget for London 2012 was $3.9 billion; it's now $15.1 billion and climbing.

The bid cities of Chicago, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, and Madrid had many hopes going into the International Olympic Committee meeting Friday in Copenhagen, Denmark, at which the IOC will choose the 2016 host city. Chicago is hoping for international prestige to pip New York and Los Angeles. Rio hopes it will boost commerce and industry in the city. Yet Olympic historians say the cities can be certain of only one thing: a massive jolt to the municipal ego.

"It's civic pride," says Ed Hula, publisher of Around the Rings, a newsletter that follows the Olympic bid process."It's the idea that 'we can do this' – that it's important and part of the city's history."

From pride to promotion

This notion of civic pride has often veered toward global promotion. Salt Lake City was eager to prove the falsity of stereotypes that portrayed Utah's Mormon community as insular and odd. Turin sought the Olympic spotlight to reinvent itself, saying it was more than the"Detroit of Italy" – it was an equal of Rome, Milan, or Florence. And Beijing's Olympics were nothing less than an astounding attempt to announce China's arrival as a world power.

At least two of the bid cities have had similar motivations: South America has never held an Olympics, and Chicago has always been America's so-called"second city."

"You don't realize the importance, the global importance that Chicago will receive," Mayor Richard Daley told the Chicago Sun-Times."

Chicago's bid is unusual because of the high-profile involvement of Mayor Daley, who is"a far more powerful and engaging figure than any other person on the US Olympic Committee," says Mr. Hula.

Though President Obama and the first lady are part of an 11th-hour show of official support, Chicago's bid is most intertwined with Daley's will and legacy."He's the only one who got the Olympics bug," Hula says."You can't do anything in that city without his support or his involvement. He has been the person out front politically all along."

But history has proved that prestige comes with a significant cost to the public, says Jeffrey Segrave, an Olympic historian at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. The economics of the Games are"extraordinarily elusive" because they involve "indirect expenses that are always difficult and cantankerous to deal with."

Some expenses can be leveraged to bring more permanent gains. Salt Lake City used the Olympics to expedite federal funding for the reconstruction and widening of a key stretch of Interstate 15.

But many expenses are largely sunk costs. Beijing spent $423 million on its national stadium but has had little use for it since."The history and tradition of these facilities is that they lie unused and the public is paying the bill for [them]," says Mr. Segrave.

In Chicago, public opinion has fractured in the weeks leading up to the Copenhagen IOC summit. Fears about budget overruns and corruption loom, particularly in a recession. Wary Chicagoans need only look at Vancouver, British Columbia, host of February's Winter Games, to confirm their worries. The city had its credit lowered after experiencing difficulties funding its $800 million housing facility for athletes.

Windy City, cold feet

A poll conducted by the Chicago Tribune and WGN-TV in late August reported that 45 percent of Chicagoans do not want the Games in Chicago, with 47 percent supporting them. The results are a reversal of the results from February, when 64 percent wanted the Games and 28 percent did not.

Tom Tresser, a Chicago college professor, cofounded No Games Chicago, a citizen advocacy group. He is in Copenhagen to lobby the IOC against choosing his city. He cites public concerns about corruption and incompetence.<

"We're trying to tell them it's very unstable here, and the people don't want this," Mr. Tresser said in the days before his departure."The mayor has one vision to give prosperity to this city, which is building parties that are all about contracts and concrete. If it's not about high-priced stuff that we can build," he accuses Daley of reasoning,"it doesn't appear on the economic-development agenda."

Public worry over spending is"a legitimate concern," says Olympic historian David Wallechinsky. The US government does not provide federal funds to cover the Games beyond providing security, and sponsorship money is not as secure as it once was, due to the economy. That means cities can be left on shaky ground as expenses rise.

"There's no guarantee" that preliminary budgets will be right. Bidding organizations will"always tell you it's only going to cost this much, but as soon as they get the bid, it's 'Oh, we forgot this,'" says Mr. Wallechinsky."That happens, always."

This doesn't mean that bidding for the Games is not worthwhile, Wallechinsky adds. But"a city should never bid for an Olympics thinking it will turn a profit,"; he says."If they try to tell you that, it's a stab in the dark."...

... But history has proved that prestige comes with a significant cost to the public, says Jeffrey Segrave, an Olympic historian at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. The economics of the Games are"extraordinarily elusive" because they involve"indirect expenses that are always difficult and cantankerous to deal with."

Prominent academic and human rights defender, Dr. Salomón Lerner Febres, has reported receiving death threats at his office in the Catholic University of Peru, Human Rights Watch has said. The former president of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been subjected to harassment before and the Peruvian authorities are being called upon to investigate the threats immediately.

Dr Lerner, also the former rector of the Catholic University of Peru and current president of the Institute for Democracy and Human Rights, reported that on 5 September 2009 his dogs, which were on his property, were poisoned and killed. On 23 September 2009 anonymous calls were made to his home and his office at the Institute for Democracy and Human Rights warning that “What we did to your dogs, we will do to you.”

According to Human Rights Watch, Dr. Lerner has previously been a victim of harassment and repeated threats by telephone and email. A prominent public figure in Peru, he is currently vice-president of a commission to establish a memorial museum to commemorate the victims of the civil violence in the last two decades of the twentieth century.

The Coordinadora Nacional de Derechos Humanos in Peru (an umbrella organisation of most Peruvian human rights NGOs) has condemned the “persistent campaign” against Dr Lerner and has called on the government to take action. The Catholic University of Peru has also issued a statement of solidarity with Dr Lerner.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION:
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up in 2001 to examine human rights violations and acts of violence committed by terrorist groups and the military during the 1980s and 1990s in Peru. Since the Commission issued its report in 2003, Lerner has been a victim of several incidents of harassment and has received repeated threats by phone and email. According to Human Rights Watch, the carefully collated information gathered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has led to an increase in the number of prosecutions of former military and police officers for human rights abuses.

Peru is a signatory to the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights which states in Article 17 that everyone has the right to the protection of the law against unlawful interference with his privacy, family or correspondence.

ADDITIONAL NEWS FROM HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH (1 October 2009):
The Peruvian authorities should provide immediate protection to the president of the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Human Rights Watch said today. Salomón Lerner, the president of the commission, has recently received death threats and insulting, anti-Semitic e-mails. Human Rights Watch said that the Peruvian government should also undertake an immediate and thorough investigation to find out who is responsible for the threats. “The Peruvian government must respond firmly to these vicious threats before Lerner or another human rights defender is hurt,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “And the people responsible for the threats must be promptly found and brought to justice.”

Lerner told the Peruvian newspaper Peru21 that a few days ago, when he was out of the country, an anonymous caller called his office at the Catholic University in Lima. The caller told his secretary that Lerner should “consider himself dead.” Over the last few weeks, Lerner, whose father was Jewish, has also received insulting and crudely anti-Semitic e-mails that accuse him of attacking the Peruvian armed forces. Other members of the commission have also received insulting messages. Most have been sent by a writer calling himself “Pachacútec,” which was the name of an Inca emperor.

Peru’s truth commission published its report on human rights violations in the country’s 20-year armed conflict on August 28, 2003. This year, on the second anniversary of publication, the commission came under fierce attack in the press from retired military officers and politicians. Largely due to the commission’s careful collection of evidence, the number of former military and police officers under prosecution for human rights violations has climbed steeply in the past year. At the last count 378 were facing charges, including 273 from the army. Lerner and other commissioners are now facing nine legal suits filed by military officers and one civilian for allegedly misrepresenting the facts and making baseless accusations against them. Human Rights Watch urged the Peruvian government to issue a public declaration of support for the commission and renew its pledge to carry out the commission’s recommendations in full.

In an interview published yesterday in Peru21, Lerner commented: “In our report we condemned the subversion. But we also said that there were people in the armed forces who applied a bad understanding of the strategy of combat, and thought that it was legitimate and moral to pay collateral costs to combat terrorism, that innocent people should die. That’s unacceptable.”

ACTION RECOMMENDED BY NEAR:

Please send appeals: **Calling on the Peruvian authorities to begin immediate and thorough investigations into the alleged threats made to Dr. Salomón Lerner Febres. **Reminding the authorities that Peru is a signatory to the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, which requires (in Article 17) that everyone has the right to the protection of the law against unlawful interference with his privacy, family or correspondence.

Appeals to: President of Peru **Presidente Alan García **2009 Despacho Presidencial **Jr. de la Unión 300 s/n 1era cuadra **Lima, Perú

Mayor of Lima **Luis Castañeda Lossio **Alcalde de Lima Metropolitana **Municipalidad Metropolitana de Lima **Jr. de la Unión 300 / Jr. Conde de Superunda 177 **Lima, Perú

Please also send copies of your appeals to: Jonathan Travis **Programme Officer, Network for Education and Academic Rights **90 London Road, **SE1 9LN London, UK **jonathan.travis@nearinternational.org

MUMBAI, India — An incongruous billboard has appeared high above Mumbai's slums: A thin Mohandas Gandhi, the ascetic father of India's independence, sits wrapped in simple white cloth above the image of a fat Montblanc pen.

German luxury penmaker Montblanc launched a limited-edition commemorative fountain pen in honor of Gandhi this week, just in time for the 140th anniversary of the birth of the Mahatma — or "Great Soul" — on Friday.

The price? $24,763.

A 20-second video showing the only surviving footage of Anne Frank has been posted on her new YouTube channel by the Amsterdam museum, the Anne Frank House.

It was taken in 1941 and is the only film footage of Anne that has ever been known to exist. It is a video of a neighbor's wedding and nine seconds in to the footage, a 13-year-old Anne can be seen leaning over the balcony above to get a look at the bridge and groom. The wedding is thought to have taken place at No 37 Merwedeplein, and the Franks lived at No 39.

It was taken on July 22 1941, just one year before the Franks had to go in to hiding and Anne's contribution to history began. They were discovered in 1944 and Anne was finally taken to Bergen Belsen concentration camp where she died in March 1945.

President Obama has reaffirmed a 4-decade-old secret understanding that has allowed Israel to keep a nuclear arsenal without opening it to international inspections, three officials familiar with the understanding said.

The officials, who spoke on the condition that they not be named because they were discussing private conversations, said Mr. Obama pledged to maintain the agreement when he first hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House in May.

Under the understanding, the U.S. has not pressured Israel to disclose its nuclear weapons or to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which could require Israel to give up its estimated several hundred nuclear bombs.

Israel had been nervous that Mr. Obama would not continue the 1969 understanding because of his strong support for nonproliferation and priority on preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons. The U.S. and five other world powers made progress during talks with Iran in Geneva on Thursday as Iran agreed in principle to transfer some potential bomb fuel out of the country and to open a recently disclosed facility to international inspection.

The discovery of a prehistoric irrigation system in the Marana desert is giving archaeologists a deeper glimpse into one of the first groups of people to farm in the Tucson basin.

"What we're looking at is, perhaps, the earliest sedentary village life in the Southwest with people depending on agriculture as a primary food source," said project director Jim Vint.

For more than 3,000 years, an elaborate ancient irrigation system has remained hidden deep beneath the sand in Marana.

In January, excavation at the Pima County Regional Wastewater Reclamation Facility at Ina Road and Interstate 10 revealed the ancient irrigation system. It is said to be the most intricate system of its kind uncovered in North America.
"We've uncovered dozens of these fields. We can see the actual holes where they planted the corn in many instances" geologist Fred Nials said. "We can completely reconstruct their irrigation system."

DIVING almost blind in the Solent’s murky waters, the team of maritime detectives could just make out the shape of a wooden plank protruding from the muddy seabed.

While it might have been dismissed as underwater junk by the untrained eye, the archaeologists soon realised they had discovered a vital clue to a lost civilisation.

The timber was not isolated. In fact they found another 23 pieces of all shapes and sizes intersecting throughout the underwater cliff off Bouldnor, on the north coast of the Isle of Wight.

They are now convinced the timber is evidence of a huge wooden structure built about 8,000 years ago by our Mesolithic ancestors.

SANTIAGO – A Chilean family who was removing the soil from the yard of their home where they were planning to do some construction got a big surprise when they found four skeletons dating from 320 B.C., La Segunda daily reported Monday.

The Valdes Navarro family found the relics of the Bato culture on Saturday in Con-Con, a municipality located about 130 kilometers (81 miles) west of Santiago.

Francisco Allendes, an archaeologist, historian and former director of the Con-Con Museum, said that locating the skeletons about 80 centimeters (2 1/2 feet) beneath the ground “is a relevant find, because it serves to confirm the presence of this group (the Batos) in a super-dense way in demographic terms in this area.”

The Department of Antiquities of the Ministry of Communications and Works announces the completion of the archaeological excavations at the Neolithic site of Choirokoitia. Excavations were carried out in July and August by the National Centre of Scientific Research of France under the direction of Dr A. Le Brun.

Research undertaken in 2005 on the north side of the hill where the site is installed was completed. The aim of this research was to determine the outline of the walls, which constituted the successive boundaries of the settlement.

The results obtained have, in many points, profoundly altered our view of the site of Choirokoitia and, more widely, our knowledge concerning the recent phase of the Neolithic Aceramic period of Cyprus.

Research of previous years has shown that the expansion of the built area on the south side occurred simultaneously with the abandonment of the north side. Therefore, the history of the settlement needed to be reconsidered: it must be interpreted as a rearrangement of the built environment rather than the expansion of the village.

MATSUE--Twenty stone tools believed to be the oldest discovered in the nation have been excavated from a mid-Paleolithic period geological layer, dating back 120,000 years, at an archeological site in Izumo, Shimane Prefecture, researchers said Tuesday.

According to a team of experts, led by Prof. Kazuto Matsufuji of Doshisha University, that has researched the Sunabara remains, the tools are tens of thousands years older than any previously discovered.

The existence of stone tools dating back to the early and mid-Paleolithic period in this country was thrown into question in 2000, when a former deputy director of the disbanded Tohoku Paleolithic Institute buried stone tools and later recovered them, claiming they were unearthed from 700,000-year-old archeological remains in Kurihara, Miyagi Prefecture, and other sites.

Archeologists say the latest discovery could change the way the era is studied.

THE 5,000-year-old Poulnabrone dolmen is an impressive sight, one of the most recognisable megalithic tombs in the country and a highlight of any trip to the world-famous Burren.

It is understandable that visitors might want to create their own version of the ancient portal tomb.

But those tourists were yesterday accused of unwittingly engaging in vandalism by erecting hundreds of mini-dolmens across the protected landscape. The trend began a decade ago but has recently re-emerged.

Two miles from the Poulnabrone dolmen, the project manager with the Burren Connect Project, Carol Gleeson, observed hundreds of mini-dolmens inside a roadside wall.

She said: "The tourists erecting the dolmens are engaging in a form of vandalism. This is a wonderful ecosystem and the erection of these dolmens is like scribbling on a masterpiece."

LONDON — They are, according to their kanji, part earth and part spirit, somewhere between animal and human. They are dogu, the most remarkable products of Japan's Jomon Period, a Neolithic era before the advent of rice cultivation, when the Japanese archipelago supported higher population densities than any other pre-agricultural society in the world.

The dogu are humanoid forms shaped in clay, large and small, richly decorated or homely and unadorned. Some 18,000 of them have been unearthed to date, in Jomon-period settlements stretching from Kyushu, north through Tohoku to Hokkaido. The oldest are nearly 10,000 years old, the youngest a mere 2,300. Yet despite their advanced age, they're on the move.

Sixty-seven dogu, loaned from collections across Japan, have taken up temporary residence in the British Museum, London, for a new exhibition: "The Power of Dogu." In December, they return home for three months' display at Tokyo National Museum...

British archaeologists have discovered the ruins of an arena built early in the third century BC outside Ostia, the ancient imperial port 25 kilometres (16 miles) from Rome, the team leader said Friday.

The ruins were uncovered in three years of digging by the British team from Southampton and Cambridge Universities in cooperation with the British School at Rome, an archaeological academy.

Italian archaeologist Rodolfo Lanciani determined the approximate location of the site in 1868, but more systematic research finally led to its discovery 140 years later.