Edward Low knew he wasn't supposed to play there, high up on a sandy hill in Parkersburg, W.Va., overlooking the silver ribbon of the Ohio River.

But the 12-year-old and two friends, armed with boyish curiosity and a World War II trench shovel, had sneaked away from home to explore.

While digging a foxhole to play soldier, Low hit something hard about 15 inches deep in the soil. The thin piece of sandstone, about 5 inches by 3 inches, was engraved with Indian markings of human faces and birds.

Low didn't know then that he'd found a valuable piece of pre-history: an Early Woodland Adena cultural artifact created 400 years or more before the birth of Jesus. Its value at auction has been estimated at up to $200,000.

To Low, it was simply his "Indian rock." For years, he kept it wrapped in a newspaper in his sock drawer at home, bringing it out occasionally for show-and-tell at school or to show colleagues at work.

Now 76 and in poor health, the longtime Reynoldsburg resident finds himself in a bitter legal fight with the Ohio Historical Society. Earlier this year, he filed suit in Franklin County Common Pleas Court.

In an interview, Low said he lent the artifact to the historical society in 1971 for research and display; the society contends he gave it to the state, and so refuses to return it.

"I feel like I have done nothing wrong and they're flat-out stealing," Low said.

Historical society officials would not comment on the dispute. They deferred to a statement by attorneys that said, in part, that Low donated the tablet in 1971, a fact noted in two issues of Echoes, a society publication.

"Although Mr. Low has known since 1971 that the Society considered the tablet to be a gift, he did not inform the Society that he considered the transfer of the tablet a loan rather than a gift until December 2007," the statement said.

"The Society has protected and preserved this valuable artifact since 1971. It is vigorously defending the suit filed by Mr. Low so that the people from Ohio, other states and other nations may continue to enjoy and appreciate the tablet."

The saga began in May 1971 when Low, who had moved to Ohio, read a story in The Dispatch about Raymond Baby, then curator of archaeology at the society. Low subsequently took the tablet and went to see Baby. At Baby's request, Low left the tablet with him for what was supposed to be a week to 10 days to research its origin.

Low didn't hear from Baby for three months. When Baby finally called in September, he offered to buy the tablet. Low refused, but agreed to allow the society to keep it for public display for an indefinite period. In return, Low said, he was offered and accepted a lifetime membership in the society.

At no point, Low says, did he sign an agreement to sell or give the tablet to the historical society. He always considered it a loan.

"I never intended for them to keep it," he said. "I told them it's not for sale."

Low said the artifact has great sentimental value for him, not only because he found it as a child, but also because he has American Indian ancestors who could be related to the ancient Adena people who made the carving.

Two years ago, Low decided he wanted to get the tablet back so he could donate it permanently it to the Blennerhassett Museum of Regional History in Parkersburg, W.Va.

To his surprise, the society refused.

"We treat donations as permanent and not subject to changes in attitude on the part of the individual donors," the late William K. Laidlaw Jr., executive director, said in an Oct. 6, 2008, letter to Low. "We have applied this principle in consideration of your request, and we are prepared to defend our title to the Adena tablet."

More than a dozen similar tablets have been found in Ohio and contiguous states where the Woodland people lived. Historians don't know exactly what they were used for, but it's suspected they had ceremonial use. Low's tablet is unique because it includes human faces interpreted to be shamans wearing costumes of raptorial birds.

In documents released as part of the court case, the society acknowledged that it has no records proving transfer of ownership. However, officials said at that time, many museums did not require written documentation of gifts.

Two letters turned up, dated Sept. 2, 1971, and Oct. 18, 1971, in which director Daniel R. Porter thanked Low for his "gift to the Society of the two Adena tablets which you so generously presented." Neither letter was on society letterhead, and the September letter was not signed.

Low said he didn't receive either letter.

On Pearl Harbor Day 2009, here is a look at lingering questions such as: How did the Japanese fleet get so close to Hawaii without being spotted?

How did the Japanese do it? That question remains 68 years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a day that spawned some of the greatest unanswered questions of US military history.

The completeness of the surprise, as well as the enormity of the attack's destruction, have led conspiracy theorists to surmise that President Franklin D. Roosevelt must have known what was coming, and allowed it, to rouse the nation for World War II.

Most historians don't believe that. The conspiracy theorists generally premise their arguments on the notion that the United States had broken the codes of the Japanese navy and thus knew its carriers were steaming toward Hawaii. But that's not true, according to Robert J. Hanyok, a former historian with the US National Security Agency.

In 1941, US code breakers had made only minimal progress in understanding encrypted Japanese navy messages, Mr. Hanyok writes in a recent Naval History magazine article.

"No intelligence about Pearl Harbor could come from this source," he writes.

A better explanation for the enormity of the US defeat might be that the attack was a so-called black swan event: something so far outside the realm of expectations that Americans could not conceive of it occurring.

This was true even of American servicemen looking at hints of what was coming their way.

"It just wasn't in their frame of reference," says naval historian Lawrence H. Suid.

Today, a number of what-ifs, or enduring mysteries, about the Pearl Harbor attack continue to inspire debate. Among them:

Why didn't the US see Japanese planes coming on radar? Actually, US Army radar operators did spot the Japanese air assault on radar. They just did not know what they were seeing.

Radar technology was in its infancy, and an Army crew was training on a new radar installed at the northern point of the Hawaiian island of Oahu. On Dec. 7, 1941, this crew spotted a mass of incoming somethings larger than they had ever seen. They decided it was probably some expected US B-17s and reported it as such.

But the radar return looked much different from what they were used to seeing.

"Why didn't this stir up their curiosity?" Suid says.

Why did the US Navy ignore the sinking of a Japanese submarine prior to the attack? At 6:37 on the morning of Dec. 7, the USS Ward, an old four-stack destroyer, attacked and destroyed a Japanese mini-sub making its way toward Pearl Harbor.

Crew members of the Ward saw a submarine periscope, dropped depth charges, and saw an oil slick and debris indicating they had destroyed a target. They immediately sent a dispatch saying that they had destroyed "a submarine operating in defense sea areas," according to a copy of the ship's report of the attack.

This incident took place an hour prior to the arrival of the first wave of Japanese warplanes. But US military officials did not heed the warning provided by the Ward, or did not believe it, or simply were unable to react in time.

Three years later to the day, on Dec. 7, 1944, the Ward was sunk by a Japanese kamikaze air attack off the island of Leyte.

How did the Japanese fleet get so close to Hawaii without being spotted? The Japanese military's attempts to deceive its US counterparts as to where Japan's carriers were in early December 1941 succeeded to a remarkable degree.

A radio ruse contributed greatly to this success. Beginning in mid-November, the Japanese ships pretended to be continuing with a routine communications drill – knowing that all the while US eavesdroppers were listening in.

They then followed with a week of only occasional chatter, leading US analysts to believe that the carriers had entered home waters for rest. Instead, they were steaming toward Hawaii.

Japanese operational security prior to the fleet's departure had been so tight that at least one foreign ship approaching a Japanese navy training area had been boarded and seized. Fleet plans for the month of December had been printed without an annex detailing the destination of Hawaii. Even senior Japanese officers weren't told of the attack until the last possible moment.

In the end, the Japanese achieved almost complete tactical surprise. And in that might lie the key to understanding Pearl Harbor, writes Hanyok, the former NSA historian.

The key could be not the surprise per se, but the skill of the Japanese. Most US analyses of Pearl Harbor probe for American mistakes, or they at least see the attack in an American frame of reference.

"But the key to understanding why the surprise assault was so successful lies in realizing what the Japanese did right," according to Hanyok.

How do you carve up a cow? First you cut the meat off the bones. You start by severing the muscles from the joints with a sharp knife. The fibrous meat can then easily be scraped off, from top to bottom. After you've removed the flesh there's still a lot of goodness left. Deep in the long bones and vertebrae lies the marrow. To get at this delicacy you smash the bones and scrape out the marrow or simply boil it out in water. What's left is a pile of naked bones with traces of scratching and scraping as well as the small debris of bone that contained marrow.

Archaeologists found just such a pile -- a huge one -- when they were excavating a Stone Age settlement in the small town of Herxheim in south-western Germany. The only difference is that the bones aren't from cattle. Researchers found the carefully scraped remains of some 500 humans, and they haven't even excavated half the site. "We expect the number of dead to be twice as high," said Andrea Zeeb-Lanz, project leader of the Cultural Heritage Agency of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate.

That's a lot of corpses for a tiny Stone Age village. There were 10 buildings at most here in the last phase of the Linear Pottery culture of the European Neolithic Age around 5,000 to 4,950 years BC. The corpses weren't native to this area, researchers have discovered. They came from all over Europe -- from the area of what is now Paris, from the Moselle River 100 kilometers to the northwest and even from the Elbe River valley some 400 kilometers away. The broken bits of pottery lying between their ribs reveal their origin. It's the so-called Linear Pottery that gave the entire population group its name: decorated with linear patterns pressed into the moist clay while it was being made.

Heinrich Boere announced in an Aachen state court on Tuesday that he killed three Dutch civilian resistance fighters at the end of World War II.

Boere said the three were a bicycle-shop owner, a pharmacist, and another civilian.

Murders "weren't a crime"

He told prosecutors, however, that he did not kill the men in cold blood.

"At no point did I feel like I was committing a crime. Now I see things from a different perspective," he said.

Boere said that as a soldier he was just following the orders of his superior officers who told him to execute the Dutch citizens. Boere's legal team is most likely to use a mental non-responsibility defense to try to win his acquittal.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) upped the rhetorical ante this morning by comparing opponents of health care reform to conservatives who tried to block emancipation and equal rights -- prompting the Republican national chairman to question his sanity.

Speaking on the floor of the Senate, Reid blasted GOP leaders who have urged Democrats opt for a slower, incremental approach to reform instead of the mega-bill the majority hopes to push through the Senate by Christmas

Reid started by mimicking Republicans whom he claims have said: "'Slow down, stop everything, let's start over."

"You think you've heard these same excuses before? You're right," he continued. "In this country...there were those who dug in their heels and said, 'Slow down, it's too early. Let's wait. Things aren't bad enough' " - about slavery...

Washington - How did the Japanese do it? That question remains 68 years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a day that spawned some of the greatest unanswered questions of US military history.

The completeness of the surprise, as well as the enormity of the attack's destruction, have led conspiracy theorists to surmise that President Franklin D. Roosevelt must have known what was coming, and allowed it, to rouse the nation for World War II.

Most historians don't believe that. The conspiracy theorists generally premise their arguments on the notion that the United States had broken the codes of the Japanese navy and thus knew its carriers were steaming toward Hawaii. But that's not true, according to Robert J. Hanyok, a former historian with the US National Security Agency.

WITH BLOWING SNOW and frigid temperatures Sunday, it wasn’t hard to evoke the memory of the Halifax Explosion.

As those familiar with the story know, Mother Nature twisted the knife the day after the Dec. 6, 1917, catastrophe by whipping up a snowstorm that crippled a city already laid bare by the disaster.

Sunday’s nor’easter was a reminder of conditions 92 years ago was not lost on those attending the annual outdoor service at the bell tower in Fort Needham Memorial Park in Halifax’s north end in memory of the disaster and its victims...

... The explosion occurred when the Norwegian ship Imo and French munitions ship Mont Blanc collided in the narrows of Halifax Harbour.

Some 1,900 people were immediately killed by the blast, which took its heaviest toll in north-end Halifax and Tufts Cove in Dartmouth. The fatality figure eventually climbed to more than 2,000, with more than 9,000 also injured in the disaster.

The storm that hit the region a day later hampered rescue efforts, but relief trains from Boston and Montreal eventually got to the city.

Former United States Vice-President Al Gore met with President Barack Obama on Monday ahead of the climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark to discuss climate change and the goals of the United Nations.

The climate summit of 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark began on Monday and in the opening talks, the Saudi Arabian climate negotiator called for an independent international investigation into Climategate, reports Digital Journal...

... NPR reports that the White House issued an announcement on the meeting between the two:

“In advance of his Wednesday meeting with business and environmental leaders at the White House regarding the Copenhagen conference, the President will meet with former Vice President Al Gore this afternoon in the Oval Office. This meeting is closed press.”

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's visit to Beirut on Monday casts the spotlight on the plight of nearly 300,000 Palestinians in Lebanon who fear they are doomed to be refugees for life.

His brief trip comes amid renewed efforts to revive the Middle East peace process and concern in Lebanon's political circles that any deal struck on the refugee issue would be at the expense of the Lebanese...

... The majority of the refugees arrived in Lebanon following the creation of Israel in 1948. A second wave arrived in the 1970s after Jordan's then king Hussein kicked out the Palestine Liberation Organisation and thousands of its fighters.

The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) lists nearly 400,000 refugees in Lebanon.

But Lebanese and Palestinian officials say the number actually resident in Lebanon may be as low as 250,000 as UNRWA does not strike off its figures Palestinians who move to other countries...

... For the Lebanese, any mention of permanently settling the Palestinians in the tiny Mediterranean country prompts an outcry and warnings that this would upset the country's confessional balance and further exacerbate political divisions.

Fresh in the minds of many is the key role the Palestinians played in Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war, Israel's 1982 assault on Beirut and, more recently, the deadly 2007 battle at a Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon between an Al-Qaeda-inspired group and the Lebanese army.

But specialists and human rights groups warn that unless the refugee issue is addressed, the camps, already considered breeding grounds for extremism, could one day explode...

It’s been 68 years since the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, but Howard J. Spreeman of Carson City says he remembers nearly every detail of the attack that drew America into World War II.


“I was just ordering breakfast,” said Spreeman, who was an aviation radioman stationed at Naval Air Station Kaneohe Bay, across from Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii. “I ordered bacon and eggs. It’s one of those things I’ll never forget.

“And a plane came over and almost took the roof of the place off.”

After a few moments of confusion, Spreeman and others eating at the base exchange realized they were under attack by Japanese aircraft.

“We all emptied out,” he said. “That’s about a block and a half from where the hangars were, and I could see the smoke coming from there by the time we got out of the building.”

Because they had been trained to salvage aircraft during an attack, Spreeman said he and other Navy personnel ran toward the airfield, hiding behind buildings to avoid enemy gunfire...

A leading Republican strategist and one-time aide to former Vice President Cheney said Sunday that President Obama’s recently announced decision to send an additional 30, 000 troops to Afghanistan is “a reassertion of the Bush doctrine.”

“The [Bush] doctrine is no safe havens [for terrorists intent on harming the United States] and we go after those that provide a harbor [for such terrorists]. That’s the doctrine,” Republican strategist Mary Matalin explained Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union.

Obama’s decision to surge additional troops into Afghanistan is “solid policy,’ in Matalin’s view and “a reassertion of the Bush doctrine.”

EGYPT is preparing to make a formal request for the return of the Rosetta Stone, the ancient artefact that helped to unlock the secrets of the pharaohs, from the British Museum.

Zahi Hawass, the head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, said he is preparing to "fight" for the restitution of the stone which has been on display in the museum in London since 1802.

Hawass hopes Britain will hand it back in time for the opening of a new museum near the pyramids at Giza in 2013. The demand follows the decades-old tussle between Britain and Greece over the Elgin Marbles.

THE US has lacked reliable information on al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden's whereabouts for years, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates says.

The revelation from Mr Gates, speaking in an interview with the ABC News This Week program to be aired overnight, comes days after US President Barack Obama announced he would send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

In excerpts of the interview released ahead of the broadcast, Mr Gates also could not confirm reports about a detainee in Pakistan who claimed he had information on where Bin Laden was earlier this year.

A massive volcanic eruption that occurred in the distant past killed off much of central India's forests and may have pushed humans to the brink of extinction, according to a new study that adds evidence to a controversial topic.

The Toba eruption, which took place on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia about 73,000 years ago, released an estimated 800 cubic kilometers of ash into the atmosphere that blanketed the skies and blocked out sunlight for six years. In the aftermath, global temperatures dropped by as much as 16 degrees centigrade (28 degrees Fahrenheit) and life on Earth plunged deeper into an ice age that lasted around 1,800 years.

In 1998, Stanley Ambrose, an anthropology professor at the University of Illinois, proposed in the Journal of Human Evolution that the effects of the Toba eruption and the Ice Age that followed could explain the apparent bottleneck in human populations that geneticists believe occurred between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. The lack of genetic diversity among humans alive today suggests that during this time period humans came very close to becoming extinct.

RWANDAN genocide hero and inspiration behind the film Hotel Rwanda, Paul Rusesabagina, says the east African country has neither healed from the 1994 genocide nor learned any lessons from it, as he accused the Rwandan government of continuing human rights abuses through the alleged arbitrary arrest and transportation of Hutus to work illegally in mines in the Congo.

The former hotel manager, who risked his life and saved 1289 people from machete wielding militias and armed forces by hiding them in a Kigali hotel during three months of extensive ethnic conflict, had no kind words for the United Nations system either, which he still sees as flawed.

"It's ironic that I am standing here today addressing a Model UN conference, when 15 years ago, the United Nations abandoned me and many others in a genocide, a madness that took away a million out of seven million lives."

Rusesabagina addressed nearly 1500 political science and humanities students from universities in the U.S., Belgium, Nigeria, Venezuela and China at the just ended American Model UN Conference in Chicago...

Hovering in the shadows of President Barack Obama's decision last week to ramp up the nation's war effort in Afghanistan, even as he promises to bring it to a swift conclusion, are ghosts of another decision, made 44 years ago by a Texan in the White House.

In 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson took ownership of a war he, like Obama, had inherited. Gen. William Westmoreland wanted more troops in Vietnam, and after a protracted debate within the White House, Johnson sent them.

Over the next three years, he would send hundreds of thousands more and launch a carpet-bombing campaign against North Vietnam. Johnson's presidency – and many argue, Johnson himself – were destroyed long before America could finally, 10 years later, quit Vietnam.

Obama's decision to send 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan has reawakened those memories of Vietnam's early days, and brought unsettling comparisons from an array of historians who have spent their careers studying Johnson.

Many of those doubts, historians now know, were shared by Johnson himself, as revealed by White House tapes of telephone recordings released to historians over the years. Listening to them again this week chilled some of the men who know best what that decision cost Johnson.

WASHINGTON — The folks who sneaked into the president's state dinner are part of a long tradition of people showing up as they please at the People's House. It's just that the tradition vanished ages ago.

Americans staked their claim to the White House in muddy boots on fine carpet, picnicked on the grounds, parked their carriages and then their cars outside and tromped inside to look for the man, often finding him. They did not need invitations, engraved or otherwise.

Many were ordinary people. Others were social climbers, gate crashers, fence jumpers, patronage job seekers, cranks and crazies...

... Try that now.

Tareq and Michaele Salahi more or less did. The Virginia couple's caper angered President Barack Obama, mortified his troop of guards, left a mum White House social secretary doubtlessly embarrassed and sent ripples of fear through lawmakers that the security breach, if achieved by a malcontent, might have caused a "night of horror," as one put it.

No, it's not the 1800s anymore. Or the 1900s, for that matter.

Thomas Jefferson wanted the Executive Mansion, opened in 1800, to be accessible, not a palace separated from serfs.

Even the idea of stationing guards in and around the complex was considered inappropriate through the 19th century; their presence was only tolerated when the city itself was threatened in wartime.

So says a federal report that reviewed White House security and access after a disturbed pilot crashed his small plane on the grounds and a man sprayed bullets from outside the fence, both in 1994. The report, rich in capturing the history of openness at the White House, was written by a panel that recommended the closing of Pennsylvania Avenue to traffic outside. That happened in May 1995.

Few remember now that until World War II, the public could freely roam the White House property, gates opening to the masses in the morning and closing at night. The attack on Pearl Harbor was one of many events that tightened security several significant notches...