THE Federal Government has referred a case of alleged fraud involving a man who claimed to be one of Australia's youngest prisoners of war to the Australian Federal Police for investigation.

South Australian Arthur Rex Crane, 83, has been on the highest level of service pension since 1988 and is the Federal President of the Prisoners of War Association of Australia, Fairfax Media reported.

He has alleged he was captured by the Japanese in 1942, became a prisoner of war at 15 and was imprisoned in Singapore's Outram Road jail.

Some 85 million years ago in a shallow ocean, a handful of miniature great white sharks were pigging out on the carcass of a giant marine reptile called a plesiosaur, a new study suggests.

During this apparent feeding frenzy, some shark teeth got stuck in the plesiosaur's bones, which were subsequently buried and remained undiscovered until a high-school student in Japan found them in 1968. Other shark tooth fossils were found near the bones. Only recently did paleontologists examine and describe the fossils scientifically.

The results, to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, bring to light the diet of ancient sharks. And though the study scientists think the ocean feast was one of scavenging, it's possible the shark gang attacked a vulnerable, elderly reptile, now called
Futabasaurus suzukii, while it was alive.

The man who ran John McCain's presidential campaign warned Friday that Sarah Palin could lead to a 'catastrophic' election result for the GOP in 2012 if the former Alaska governor captures the party's presidential nomination.

The comments came during The Atlantic Magazine's First Draft of History Conferece, held at the Newseum in Washington, DC.

Looking ahead to Palin's upcoming book — entitled "Going Rogue" — Schmidt predicted he would be portrayed as "anti-rogue in the running of the campaign."

Helmut Preller is wearing the kind of white overalls typically worn by housepainters as he sits in room number 3 on the second floor of a former guesthouse that was once called Stadt Lübeck. His laptop lies open on the table, on the window sill stands a monitor connected to a video camera. He is keeping watch on the wall next to his house night and day.

Preller winds back the video recording on his laptop. "He must be on here," he hisses. Someone has been attacking his wall, and Preller is looking for the perpetrator. It's not long before he finds what he's looking for. A clock on the screen shows the time: 3:15 p.m. A red station-wagon can be seen stopping on the right-hand side, a man gets out, in his left hand he holds a tool, in the other a spray can. He looks around then runs up to the wall, hammers against it, sprays something, then goes back to the car and drives off. On Aug. 27 he broke a hole through the wall, painted a pig and drew a circle around the hole. "It's an asshole," Preller says. "He means me."

On Aug. 13, 2009, Helmut Preller put up a wall in the eastern German town of Schönberg just a few kilometers from the former border that used to divide the former East and West Germanys before 1989. The wall, erected right by a main road, was made of thick white chipboard topped with barbed wire. It was intended to be as a work of art. Preller, who hails from Hamburg, the port city situated in the former West, is a painter and poet. And he wanted to create a memorial to the people who lost their lives in the death strip between Schönberg and Lübeck.

In Shira Engelhart's 4th grade class in Virginia, students asked why the pilots on the plane didn't just say "no" to the hijackers on 9/11. In his journal, an elementary school student offered a possible explanation that the attacks were perpetrated by German soldiers during the period when there were frequent wars between the U.S. and Germany. When Ms. Engelhart asked her class what happened on 9/11, eight out of 24 of her students knew that something bad occurred but were not sure what, while the rest of her class did not know the day is significant. Some students responded that it was their sibling's or parent's birthday. Elyse Ross, a teacher in New York City, said her school did nothing to commemorate or educate the students about the day. Michael Volodarsky, who worked as a tour guide at the Ground Zero Museum Workshop said he guided a group of fourth graders; about half of the group knew definitively that 9/11 was a terrorist attack that killed thousands of people and the remainder of the group had either vaguely heard of it or did not know of it at all.

The September 11th Education Trust announced the launch of a trial curriculum to be tested this year. The curriculum includes various lesson plans, videos, interactive exercises that includes utilizing Google Earth to locate global terrorism. Relatives of victims provide video testimonials, as do Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The curriculum will be tried in New York City, California, New Jersey, Alabama, Indiana, Illinois and Kansas. The primary purpose of the curriculum is teach about the 9/11 attacks in historical and present day terms. The Trust provides a range of material from enough for a few class sessions to a whole semester's curriculum.

However, Ms. Engelhart wonders whether such attention is really so necessary: "The thing about this event is--what's the purpose of teaching it to our children? What do we want them to take out of it? That there are mean people out there who don't like us and who take their anger out the wrong way? It's not a very teachable moral that we need to focus on. I think it's a historical event that changed America and every child should know what happened, but there is no need for 'drilling' it into such young children. I think that would just be drilling negativity and fear into them. We need to figure out a teachable lesson and what our intentions are when teaching about 9/11."...

It's become a truism that American attitudes on gay rights are changing at a rapid clip. Supporting civil unions -- now a compromise position -- almost endangered the career of then-Vermont Gov. Howard Dean as recently as 2000. And that was Vermont. Now, a mere nine years later, the Pentagon appears to be signaling that it's ready to give up on the "don't ask, don't tell" (DADT) policy regarding gays in the military.

The evidence is mainly in the form of an article denying DADT's usefulness, published by the National Defense University's Joint Forces Quarterly. The essay, written by Col. Om Prakash, argues that there is “no scientific evidence to support the claim that unit cohesion will be negatively affected if homosexuals serve openly.” Prakash, by the way, works in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the essay has received an award that goes out under the name of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Michael Mullen.

An Armenian-American-Irish archeological expedition claims to have found the remains of the worlds oldest human brain, estimated to be over 5,000 years old.

The discovery was made recently in a cave in southeastern Armenia.

An analysis performed by the Keck Carbon Cycle Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratory at the University of California, Irvine confirmed that one of three human skulls found at the site contains particles of a human brain dating to around the first quarter of the 4th millennium BC.

The preliminary results of the laboratory analysis prove this is the oldest of the human brains so far discovered in the world, said Dr. Boris Gasparian, one of the excavations leaders and an archeologist from the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology in Yerevan.

Of course, the mummies of Pharaonic Egypt did contain brains, but this one is older than the Egyptian ones by about 1,000 to 1,200 years, he added.

As Stanford University reported a couple of days ago and Inside Higher Ed noted, the estate of James Joyce, headed up by James Joyce’s grandson, Stephen James Joyce, has lost a lawsuit with English professor Carol Loeb Shloss and must pay her legal fees and costs of nearly a quarter-million dollars.

This finding appears to end the almost two-decade battle with the estate by Shloss, and to represent relief for other Joyce scholars who’ve felt the estate to be unfair and unreasonable in the number of demands and limitations imposed on them. (An article in 2006 in The New Yorker describes this tension and offers a portrait of the artist’s grandson as gatekeeper: “Stephen is a handsome man of seventy-four, with a gray beard, sloping forehead, and deep-blue eyes—he looks the way Joyce might have looked if he had not smoked and drunk himself to death, at fifty-eight, in 1941.”)

The mural graced the old Verizon building in the Financial District for more than a half-century, a towering illustration that paid homage to the men and women who toiled as telephone operators, connecting distant relatives and dear, old friends.

But Verizon sold the building last year and quietly took the mural down over the summer as part of the sales agreement. The removal has triggered a storm of protest among local preservationists, who worry about the loss of a significant piece of New England history, as well as the future of the Art Deco building where it long resided.

“We are outraged about the removal,’’ said Tony Fusco, president of the Art Deco Society of Boston. “This is undoubtedly the most important mural of its kind in Boston.’’

Fusco said the removal is tantamount to stripping the murals out of Rockefeller Center in New York or the Boston Public Library.

Belo Corp. said Thursday it will be preserving its television broadcasting history by donating its archives to Southern Methodist University’s DeGolyer Library.

Dallas-based Belo Corp. (NYSE: BLC) said the archives also will receive documents and materials from The Dallas Morning News and its parent company, A.H. Belo Corp., which was spun off from Belo Corp. to establish two separate entities in 2008.

“Since 1985, Belo Corp. has invested in updating its archival collection that traces the history of the company as well as the City of Dallas. We are proud of this collection and believe it is best situated in a permanent curatorial setting such as the DeGolyer Library,” said Robert W. Decherd, chairman of Belo Corp. “The Board of Directors and management of Belo Corp. are very pleased that SMU will be home to the archives and thereby enhance the university’s already significant collections.”

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — A federal judge says the defense may not introduce any specific mention of the 9/11 terrorist attack during the corruption trial of former New York City police Commissioner Bernard Kerik.

Kerik received heavy publicity, much of it glowing, for his actions as commissioner after the attack that brought down the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

Judge Stephen Robinson said Tuesday the attack had no relevance to the case. Kerik’s accused of accepting apartment renovations from a construction company in exchange for recommending the company for city contracts.

New York City -- Court Justice Edward Lehner has begun consideration of NYC CAN's motion to reject Referee's Louis Crespo's recommendation that the NYC CAN 9/11 petition not be submitted to the voters on November 3. The petition would ask whether or not there should be an independent New York City investigation into 9/11.

Responding to a motion brought by NYC CAN attorney Dennis McMahon, a hearing was held Tuesday September 29 at the New York State Supreme Court, and concluded with the understanding that the Court will likely render a decision on the petition's legality by Friday, October 2...

... The Judge proceeded to invite discourse on why an investigation was needed. When McMahon raised as an example the 9/11 Commission's omission of the collapse of Building 7 from its final report, the Judge replied in puzzlement, "Building what?"

When asked by the Judge whether or not there has been an investigation into 9/11 by New York City authorities, Steve Kitzinger, the City's lawyer, replied, "It's irrelevant", to which the packed courtroom was loudly disdainful, some openly laughing in disbelief. At which point Mr. Kitzinger prevailed upon Judge Lehner to quiet the crowd, which the Judge did.

With order restored, the Judge again asked Kitzinger if the City had done anything to investigate 9/11. Kitzinger flatly responded, "No."

"The City never did anything?" retorted the Judge in disbelief. "Nothing, Kitzinger admitted...

Jelawur, Afghanistan - The men of Bravo Company have a bitter description for the irrigated swath of land along the Arghandab River where 10 members of their battalion have been killed and 30 have been wounded since the beginning of August.

"Like Vietnam without the napalm," said Spc. Nicholas Gojekian, 21, of Katy, Texas.

A prime agricultural area of vineyards and pomegranate orchards, the 18-miles of valley that the 1st Battalion, 17th Infantry Regiment patrols includes Taliban insurgents, booby traps and buried explosives. The troops call the area the "green zone," but unlike Iraq, where it's a fortified area in the heart of Baghdad, this green zone can be a hellish place.

Figuring out the story of human origins is like assembling a huge, complicated jigsaw puzzle that has lost most of its pieces. Many will never be found, and those that do turn up are sometimes hard to place. Every so often, though, fossil hunters stumble upon a discovery that fills in a big chunk of the puzzle all at once — and simultaneously reshapes the very picture they thought they were building.

The path of just such a discovery began in November 1994 with the unearthing of two pieces of bone from the palm of a hominid hand in the dusty Middle Awash region of Ethiopia. Within weeks, more than 100 additional bone fragments were found during an intensive search-and-reconstruction effort that would go on for the next 15 years and culminate in a key piece of evolutionary evidence revealed this week: the 4.4 million–year–old skeleton of a likely human ancestor known as Ardipithecus ramidus (abbreviated Ar. ramidus)...

... So what does that mean? Based on Ardi's anatomy, it appears that chimpanzees may actually have evolved more than humans — in the scientific sense of having changed more over the past 7 million years or so. That's not to say Ardi was more human-like than chimplike. White describes her as an "interesting mosaic" with certain uniquely human characteristics: bipedalism, for one. Ardi stood 47 in. (120 cm) tall and weighed about 110 lb. (50 kg), making her roughly twice as heavy as Lucy. The structure of Ardi's upper pelvis, leg bones and feet indicates she walked upright on the ground, while still retaining the ability to climb. Her foot had an opposable big toe for grasping tree limbs but lacked the flexibility that apes use to grab and scale tree trunks and vines ("Gorilla and chimp feet are almost like hands," says Lovejoy), nor did it have the arch that allowed Australopithecus and Homo to walk without lurching side to side. Ardi had a dexterous hand, more maneuverable than a chimp's, that made her better at catching things on the ground and carrying things while walking on two legs. Her wrist, hand and shoulder bones show that she wasn't a knuckle walker and didn't spend much time hanging or swinging ape-style in trees. Rather, she moved along branches using a primitive method of palm-walking typical of extinct apes. "[Ardi is] a lovely Darwinian creature," says Penn State paleoanthropologist Alan Walker, who was not involved in the discovery. "It has features that are intermediate between the last common ancestor and australopithecines."

Nearly 25 years after G. Douglas Jones watched a historic case unfold as a law student, the former federal prosecutor found himself in the same third-floor courtroom.

He was no longer a lawyer in training seeking tips on how to try a case. He was the lead prosecutor, and the case was a historic sequel to the one he had watched from a balcony seat decades earlier.

The case of the 1963 bombing deaths of four young girls in a Birmingham, Ala., church yielded a conviction in 1977. Jones and his team were seeking the same for defendant No. 2.

"When I became U.S. attorney, my staff said, 'Don't get your hopes up,' " said Jones, 55. "I said, if we don't do this now, we may never get another chance."

Jones set the stage for his second encounter with civil-rights history at a presentation yesterday before students at Germantown Academy in Fort Washington. The lecture and slide show were history teacher Robert Moyer Jr.'s way of bringing a sense of immediacy to a time that some students might know only from books and movies...

Brett Potas is so angry the University of North Dakota may drop its Fighting Sioux nickname that he canceled his season hockey tickets and says he won't give his alma mater another dime...

... Lucy Ganje, an art professor who led protests against the name, said the school should not only drop its nickname and Indian head logo, but also apologize to Sioux tribes and the school's American Indian students.

The two views illustrate the passionately fought debate over the nickname that has nagged the Grand Forks school for years and could finally be resolved this fall. Unless the school gets the support of the state's two Sioux tribes by Oct. 1, which appears unlikely, the state Board of Higher Education says it must drop the nickname...

... University of North Dakota teams have been known as the Fighting Sioux since 1930. Those who support the name echo the argument made by fans of other teams with American Indian mascots — that it is part of the school's heritage and is a sign of respect that honors the Indians' proud traditions.

Despite years' old concerns that terrorists might strike at iconic units of the National Park System, the National Park Service's approach to security is haphazard, inefficient, and ineffective, according to a Government Accountablity Office report.

The nearly 50-page report, requested near the end of the Bush administration by members of the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Homeland Security and presented to the committee late this past August, paints a sordid picture of the Park Service's approach toward security. The agency does not take advantage of risk-management tools across the entire 391-unit park system; is limited in how it shares and coordinates information internally; lacks a service-wide approach to measuring and testing security systems and performance, and; lacks clearly defined security roles, states the report (attached below).

"More emphasis on key practices would provide greater assurance that Park Service assets are well-protected and that Park Service resources are being used efficiently to improve protection," notes the report. "Critical to advancing the Park Service's security efforts, a more comprehensive risk management approach and related guidance -- which are currently lacking -- would provide management with up-to-date information on threats and trends in security gaps and would allow management to target resources to address the greatest threats and vulnerabilities."

In a previous version of this story, the Daily news incorrectly identified the location of Patara. It was corrected on Oct. 1, 2009.

The Turkish government has allocated a budget to restore an ancient lighthouse, believed to be the world's oldest.

Culture and Tourism Minister Ertuğrul Günay said Wednesday that his ministry would grant 800,000 Turkish Liras for the restoration of Nero's Lighthouse, discovered four years ago in the ancient city of Patara, located near today’s Mediterranean town of Gelemiş in Antalya province.

BEIJING -- When Qiu Zhijie organized a show of fellow young artists in the basement of a suburban Beijing apartment complex a decade ago, police burst in and closed it after just one day. Contemporary art was taboo, and Mr. Qiu was especially provocative, with installations that mocked China's rising consumerism.

Today, Mr. Qiu is as active as ever. His current project looks at the costs of China's 60 years of communism by contrasting the official, heroic history of a giant bridge over the Yangtze River with the span's role as China's top place for suicides.

But there's a key difference: Mr. Qiu is now a member of the Chinese cultural establishment. He has a senior teaching post at the National Academy of Art in Hangzhou. And unlike the old days, exhibitions of his works now fill large halls, staying up for weeks, not hours.

Few art scenes have been as whiplashed by change as China's. As the People's Republic begins a week of celebrations Thursday to mark its 60th anniversary, the country's often-edgy contemporary artists are a proxy for the country's fast-changing political landscape.

First forced to glorify the state, artists across genres were once ostracized. More recently, their work has emerged as one of the few bright lights in China's otherwise staid cultural scene. The National Day celebrations are highlighting China's artistic successes -- its sparkling new concert houses and theaters, cinemas and prolific publishing houses.

OKLAHOMA CITY – The FBI says it did not edit videotapes of the aftermath of the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building before turning them over to an attorney who is conducting an unofficial inquiry into the bombing.

The FBI turned over more than two dozen tapes taken from security cameras on buildings and other locations around the federal building to Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue, who obtained them through the federal Freedom of Information Act. Trentadue said the tapes are blank at various times in the minutes before the blast.

"They have been edited," Trentadue said Wednesday.

The soundless recordings show people rushing from nearby buildings immediately after a 4,000 pound fertilizer-and-fuel-oil bomb detonated in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people, including 19 children, and injuring hundreds more.

Some show people fleeing through corridors cluttered with debris. None shows the actual explosion that ripped through the federal building.

Trentadue said the absence of footage before the blast indicates something was on the tapes that the FBI did not want to make public.