Editor's note: Today marks the birthday of George Washington, our first nation's president. Every year on February 22, the vice president selects one senator to read Washington's farewell address aloud on the floor of the Senate. Illinois Democrat Sen. Roland Burris was chosen to read the address today.

President George Washington’s Farewell Address was not really an address. Nor was it really a true farewell. The message was printed in a Philadelphia newspaper on September 19, 1796, more than five months before the nation’s first president turned over his office to its second, John Adams.

The document, “in language that was plain and intelligible,” was intended clearly to indicate that Washington was leaving office and that another American must be elected to succeed him. The Farewell was entitled “Friends and Fellow Citizens,” and was addressed directly to the American people – not to members of Congress as most presidential documents were in those days. The paper was designed to be a definitive statement of Washington’s political beliefs and his considered advice for his fellow Americans after two terms in the presidency.

French Professor Jean-Marie Apostolidès finds link between blood and ink in Ted Kaczynski's "Manifesto" – but should we listen to a killer?
Jack Hubbard

For French Professor Jean-Marie Apostolidès, briefly a penpal of the notorious Unabomber and a translator of his writings, these very questions are a scholar's terroir.

He was intrigued by the killer's anti-technology stance, and says that on that score, Theodore Kaczynski may have been right. "Technology transformed humanity into something different than it was before, into a new creation – flesh and technè," he said.

"We are mutants now. What will come out of it nobody knows. It's something unprecedented – and scary," he said. Science fiction, in many cases, is simply "presenting the fears of the metamorphosis."

Apostolidès recently published in book form a French translation of the Unabomber's manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future. He is currently working on a philosophical and psychological study, Of Ink and Blood: The Writings of Theodore Kaczynski. The author of 1999's L'Affaire Unabomber also has written the recently published The Metamorphoses of Tintin: Or, Tintin for Adults....

Despite some sympathy for Kaczynski's views on industrial society, Apostolidès embraces technology – "because I think there is no other way. It brings positive and negative things. They cannot be separated....

The translation of Kaczynski's 1995 manifesto, which Apostolidès began the day after he read it in the Washington Post, was the first step in a longer journey. The next began with a secret....

"They thought I would be a perfect penpal," he said. Apostolidès was told to keep the correspondence secret even from his family. Thus began a brief, lopsided correspondence screened by Kaczynski's lawyers and the FBI.

The brief correspondence did not go smoothly: "He did not want to talk to me; he wanted to preach. I detest that," he said. "On one side he was scolding me, on the other side complimenting me."...

When the fearsome Baltic pirate Klaus Störtebeker was executed 600 years ago his headless body is said to have walked 12m (40ft) along the length of Hamburg quayside.

He had struck a deal with the elders of the port: any of his 70 men that he managed to pass in his post-decapitation walk should be spared. The quivering corpse passed 11 fellow pirates before the executioner put out a foot and tripped him up.

Little wonder, then, that the skull of Störtebeker has fascinated Germans for so long — and that its theft from a Hamburg museum last month has kept police busy.

They interrogated members of the often reckless FC St Pauli fan club and dug deep into the city’s Goth scene before concentrating on a new possibility: that the pirate’s skull has become a trophy in the turf wars between rival biker gangs. On Saturday night a skull was placed outside the offices of the Hamburger Morgenpost with “No Tacos” written on its crown. “Tacos” is slang for the biker group Bandidos, which is challenging the Hell’s Angels for control over northern Germany’s lucrative drugs trade.

Ralph Wiechmann, head of archaeology at the Hamburg Museum, was called in to examine the skull and ruled that it belonged to a more recent corpse than that of Störtebeker. The pirate’s skull has a gaping hole on its right side, where it was nailed to a wooden stake outside the harbour gate to deter people from piracy. The latest skull bore axe wounds but no nail hole.

Even so, the local press continues to insist that a Hell’s Angels chapter is the likely culprit. The Morgenpost cites an “insider from the biker scene” as saying that the skull was offered to the Hell’s Angels free of charge by an unnamed thief. “The piratical skull and crossbones is certainly part of the insignia of aggressive motorcycle gangs,” a police investigator said. “Störtebeker is a hero for some of these people.”

Störtebeker is regarded as a Robin Hood or even a Che Guevara figure by many northern Germans, because he robbed the rich merchant ships of the Hanseatic League. However, there is little evidence of him redistributing his booty to the poor. Indeed, legend has it that after his execution Hamburg senators found that the masts of his ships had cores of gold and silver.

A 3,000 year old Bronze Age trading vessel – the oldest shipwreck ever found in British waters – has been located off the coast of Devon in South West England.

It went down around 900 BC carrying a precious cargo of tin and copper ingots from the continent, and has lain undetected on the seabed in just eight to ten metres of water in a bay near Salcombe ever since. Experts have hailed the discovery – one of only four Bronze Age vessels found in British waters – as “extremely important,” and “genuinely exciting.”

Investigation and recovery work on the boat’s cargo was carried out by archaeologists from South West Maritime Archaeological Group (SWMAG) between February and November 2009, but the find was only made public this month at the annual International Shipwreck Conference in Plymouth.

295 artefacts – with a combined weight of 84 kilograms – have been retrieved so far, including weapons and jewellery, alongside abundant raw metal.

The buried antiquities of Ur, Biblical birthplace of Abraham and one of the cradles of civilisation, could one day outshine those of ancient Egypt, archaeologists and workers on the site believe.

With Iraq ravaged by war and strife since the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, Baghdad's struggling government has had greater priorities than funding large-scale digs at Ur, where only small teams have been working since 2005.

Inside he found some of the greatest treasures of antiquity, including a golden dagger encrusted with lapis lazuli, an intricately carved golden statue of a ram caught in a thicket, a lyre decorated with a bull's head and the gold headdress of a Sumerian queen.

A replica of the sacred center of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire, will begin construction this year outside Mexico City, the directors of the project said.

Notable among the 21 buildings that will make up the replica of Tenochtitlan, a city founded in the 14th century and one of the biggest of its day, will be the pyramids of Coacalco, Cihuacoatl, Chicomecoatl and Xochiquetzal, the Temple of the Sun and courts for the pre-Columbian ball game that played a central role in Aztec culture, all of them surrounded by a canal.

"Rescuing history" is the key to this project, which will occupy some 300 hectares (740 acres), and where besides the pre-Columbian-style buildings there will also be offices, two Hilton hotels and two shopping malls, one of them dedicated to international designer fashions.

The buildings of the "sacred premises" will preserve the original dimensions, colors and paintings that, according to the observations of chroniclers like the Spanish conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo, decorated the Aztec capital.

The Polish authorities have for the first time admitted their involvement in the CIA's secret programme for the rendition of high-level terrorist suspects from Iraq and Afghanistan, it emerged today.

After years of stonewalling, Warsaw's air control service confirmed that at least six CIA flights had landed at a disused military air base in northern Poland in 2003.

"It is time for the authorities to provide a full accounting of Poland's role in rendition," Adam Bodnar, of the Warsaw-based Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, said.

"These flight records reinforce the troubling findings of official European inquiries and global human rights groups, showing complicity with CIA abuse across Europe."

For years, European and human rights investigators have believed Poland played a key role in the secret renditions programme, which became a human rights scandal for the George Bush administration.

South Carolina archaeologists believe they might have unearthed the first octagonal house in the United States. The ruins were found last fall on the banks of the May River in the southern coastal town of Bluffton. A letter written in 1796 by a visitor mentions the octagonal house and helps date the structure.

Archaeologists Heather Cline and Mary Socci say the 900-square-foot house was owned by Scottish immigrant William McKimmy and was built about 1790.

It’s official: The Bennington Battlefield is on a list of proposed parks and historic sites that could be cut from the state budget.

The announcement, made by the Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, includes a list of 41 parks and 14 historic sites to be closed outright, with service reductions to be made at 23 parks and one historic site.

Eileen Larrabee, a spokeswoman for the parks office, said that if the cuts are approved, it would save $6 million from the state’s budget. She said the recommendations from the office of parks to Gov. David Paterson’s office also include $4 million in fee increases at the remaining sites.

Closure means different things for different sites, she said, adding that "Every park and every historical site is unique."...

Newtown Battlefield State Park in Chemung County is on the list of parks and historic sites across the state facing possible closure because of budget crisis.

The park is part of the site of the battle of Newtown from the American Revolution. It hosts re-enactment events and offers visitors an opportunity to learn about local history, an opportunity that would be missed by the community....

They fought in the largest war in history at the same time they were fighting a "war" just as large — the fight against a racial divide between whites and blacks.

For some African-American veterans of World War II, the segregation and animosity between the two races was something of a mystery.

Lloyd Morrison, 92, grew up near Boston, and he didn't know much about segregation until he tried to enter the military.

Morrison scored a 98 percent on his written entry exam for the Army Air Force and his vision was rated at 20/21. He was a perfect specimen to join the Army Air Force. Only the Army Air Force didn't see it that way. He was denied entry for his vision.

"I was stunned," Morrison said.

After asking around, Morrison learned he wasn't accepted because of his skin color, disappointing to a man of intelligence, holding a Harvard degree.

"I was upset by the attitudes of the so-called people in authority," he said....

An Orange County Circuit Court judge heard preliminary arguments earlier this month from national groups and local residents who oppose the planned 240,000-square-foot commercial development featuring a new Walmart on the Wilderness Battlefield in Orange.

The public meeting was held on Feb. 3.

Representatives from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Friends of Wilderness Battlefield and Orange residents are challenging the Orange County Board of Supervisors’ decision to approve the supercenter near a historic battleground....

It was the humble request of a weary soldier who had served in the Continental Army for five years and had just survived the most severe winter of the Revolutionary War, weathering 23 snowstorms in wooden huts at Jockey Hollow in Morristown.

Dated: "Camp near Morristown April 16th 1780,'' Cpl. John Allison, a 25-year-old soldier in the 5th New York Regiment, sought the highest commander's relief to his plight, asking to be discharged as his three-year enlistment had expired.

"To His Excellancy Genl Washington Commander and Chief of the United States of North America -- Now Please your Excellancy I implore that you would deeme justice done in this affair and your Petitioner in Duty bound shall Pray.''

Robert A. Mayers, 79, of Watchung, found the letter -- which was written by his
great-great-great-grandfather -- in New York Public Library archives.

"I am amazed by this evidence that common soldiers believed that they had a personal relationship with the commander in chief,'' Mayers said.

The letter appears in Mayers' book, "The War Man,'' published by Westholme Publishing last year, which chronicles his ancestor's eight years in the Continental Army. A retired human resources executive, Mayers also served in as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy during the Korean conflict....

FORMER ATTORNEY general John Rogers SC, who lives in the Boyne valley, will be among the objectors to plans by Meath County Council and the National Roads Authority (NRA) to build a bypass of Slane 500 metres from the Brú na Bóinne archaeological complex.

Today is the last day for making submissions to An Bord Pleanála, which will adjudicate on the scheme under the 2006 Strategic Infrastructure Act.

Depending on the number of objections, the board may decide to hold an oral hearing.

The proposed route, running east of Slane, is being opposed by the newly formed Save Newgrange campaign, led by Vincent Salafia, who was prominent in the protracted struggle against the M3 motorway because of its proximity to the Hill of Tara.

Yesterday, Mr Salafia called on An Bord Pleanála to extend the deadline, arguing that the public notice was inadequate, that more time was needed by the public and that access to information on the project had been “unreasonably curtailed”....

A megalithic settlement has recently been unearthed at Skendal village, 10 kilometers from the town of Pagaralam in South Sumatra.

Irfan Wintarto, an official at the Lahat Culture and Tourism Agency's Historical and Archeological Preservation Department, said local residents had discovered around 36 types of rocks on a 150-by-300-meter plot in the middle of a 2-hectare coffee plantation. The site is currently being investigated by the Archeological Region Conservation and Heritage Center (BPPP)....

...Until now, the accepted view has been that our ancestors underwent a "creative explosion" around 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, when they suddenly began to think abstractly and create rock art. This idea is supported by the plethora of stunning cave paintings, like those at Chauvet, which started to proliferate across Europe around this time. Writing, on the other hand, appeared to come much later, with the earliest records of a pictographic writing system dating back to just 5000 years ago.

Few researchers, though, had given any serious thought to the relatively small and inconspicuous marks around the cave paintings. The evidence of humanity's early creativity, they thought, was clearly in the elaborate drawings.

While some scholars like Clottes had recorded the presence of cave signs at individual sites, Genevieve von Petzinger, then a student at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, was surprised to find that no one had brought all these records together to compare signs from different caves. And so, under the supervision of April Nowell, also at the University of Victoria, she devised an ambitious masters project. She compiled a comprehensive database of all recorded cave signs from 146 sites in France, covering 25,000 years of prehistory from 35,000 to 10,000 years ago.

What emerged was startling: 26 signs, all drawn in the same style, appeared again and again at numerous sites (see illustration). Admittedly, some of the symbols are pretty basic, like straight lines, circles and triangles, but the fact that many of the more complex designs also appeared in several places hinted to von Petzinger and Nowell that they were meaningful - perhaps even the seeds of written communication....

Bricks dating back 5,000 to 7,000 years have been unearthed in northwest China's Shaanxi Province, adding between 1,000 to 2,000 years onto Chinese brick-making history, archaeologists claimed. "The five calcined bricks were unearthed from a site of the Yangshao Culture Period dating 5,000 to 7,000 years ago. Previously, the oldest known bricks in the country were more than 4,000 years old," Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology researcher Yang Yachang said. Only parts of the bricks, including three red ones and two gray ones, have been recovered, Yang said.

Yangshao Culture is a Neolithic culture that flourished along the Yellow River, which runs across China from west to east. The culture was named after Yangshao, the name of the first village discovered of the culture, in 1921 in central China's Henan Province. Archaeologists used to believe the ceramics were applied to architecture in the Shang Dynasty (1600 BCE-1100 BCE), which had been proved wrong by the new discovery, Yang said....

There was really only one way the weird conservative carnival called CPAC 2010 could end Saturday night: with Glenn Beck stalking around the stage for an hour, scribbling paranoid wordplay on his trademark chalkboard, praising Calvin Coolidge and giving dramatic readings of a poem by a bona fide Socialist to stir an overflowing, anti-government crowd into a frenzy....

Beck spends a lot of his time on his TV show talking about the 1920s; his CPAC speech was no different. It didn't take long before he had scrawled the real menace's name onto his chalkboard: "Progressivism." Woodrow Wilson and his allies have their tentacles deeply wound around today's politics, it seems; after all, liberals call themselves progressives, and if Wilson's bunch can be discredited, so can modern liberalism. QED! "After the Progressives got into office with Woodrow Wilson... he gives us the Fed -- how's that working out for us?" he said. "Then he gives us the -- let's remember this, America -- progressive income tax." He drew the word out into three or four extra syllables' worth of S's, sneering as he drew his theories out in chalk. "Everything's changed since the Progressives came," he said.

And if Wilson is the bad guy, Calvin Coolidge had to be the hero. Beck roused the crowd into a lengthy ovation for tax cuts Coolidge advocated nearly 90 years ago, which brought the nostalgia at CPAC to new highs. He mocked the media, accusing reporters of some sinister conspiracy to cover up the fact that the Roaring Twenties were good. And then suddenly he was jumping back to the modern day, bashing U.S. bond sales to China. It was hard to follow if you were trying to find any logic to it all, but that didn't seem to be a problem for many of the people in the room. It certainly wasn't for Beck....

EU nuke boffins say that mysterious bits of uranium found last year in a Dutch scrapyard originated in the Nazi nuclear-weapons programme of the 1940s.

Forensic nuke scientists at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) traced the two pieces of metal - described as a cube and a plate - back to their exact origins and dates. Apparently both came from ores extracted at the "Joachimsthal" mine in what is now the Czech Republic, though the two are from different production batches.

The cube, according to specialists at the JRC's Institute for Transuranium Elements (ITU), was produced in 1943 for the Nazi nuclear programme and was used in the lab of famous boffin Werner Heisenberg (of uncertainty principle fame). The plate was apparently part of experiments by Heisenberg's collaborator Karl Wirtz.

Most historical analysis, with hindsight, suggests that the Nazi nuclear research programme never got very close to developing an atomic weapon. There was no equivalent of the Manhattan Project; rather, different lines of research were followed in different labs. Furthermore the Germans were hampered by having driven many top physicists out of the country with their anti-Semitic policies, and also by drafting other boffins into the army to fight as ordinary soldiers.

Not content with that, the Nazi leadership also chose to clash with the few top brains they had left. At one point Reichsfuhrer Himmler suggested that Heisenberg should be treated as a "White Jew", with presumably fatal consequences. Himmler later changed his mind, but this climate can hardly have encouraged Heisenberg to do his best work.

The halting progress of the Germans was largely unknown to the Allies, however, a factor which prompted the crash efforts of the Manhattan project. In particular, German plans to acquire large quantities of heavy water from Norway for use as a reactor moderator aroused intense worry among the Allies. A sequence of clandestine operations and bombing raids - by the French and British secret services, Norwegian resistance fighters, spec-ops troops and allied air forces - took place, which saw heavy water and its production tech stolen, repeatedly blown up and in one case sunk aboard a sabotaged ferry.

Though the Telemark operations were some of the greatest spec-ops successes ever seen, they may not in fact have been all that critical. After the war, Heisenberg said that he and his colleagues had always been doubtful of the potential of nuclear fission as an explosive. Furthermore, they had taken good care not to big that aspect of the research up to their Nazi masters, for reasons of self-interest.

"We definitely did not want to get into this bomb business," said Heisenberg. "I wouldn't like to idealize this; we did this also for our personal safety. We thought that the probability that this would lead to atomic bombs during the War was nearly zero. If we had done otherwise, and if many thousand people had been put to work on it and then if nothing had been developed, this could have had extremely disagreeable consequences for us."

Nowadays the Allied nations are once again deeply concerned about hostile countries developing nuclear weapons. According to the Euro nuke-forensics team at the JRC-ITU:

A key international topic today is the work of preventing the spread of nuclear weapon technology and illicit trafficking of nuclear materials that can be used for the production of nuclear weapons or so-called dirty bombs.

They've just set up
a new "large geometry secondary ion mass spectrometer" which they're very proud of, which should be very handy for nobbling nuclear malefactors.

A study led by University of Pittsburgh researchers could finally lay to rest the millennia-old conjecture that the ancient empire of Carthage regularly sacrificed its youngest citizens. An examination of the remains of Carthaginian children revealed that most infants perished prenatally or very shortly after birth and were unlikely to have lived long enough to be sacrificed, according to a Feb. 17 report in PLoS One.

The findings -- based on the first published analysis of the skeletal remains found in Carthaginian burial urns -- refute claims from as early as the 3rd century BCE of systematic infant sacrifice at Carthage that remain a subject of debate among biblical scholars and archaeologists, said lead researcher Jeffrey H. Schwartz, a professor of anthropology and history and philosophy of science in Pitt's School of Arts and Sciences and president of the World Academy of Art and Science. Schwartz and his colleagues present the more benign interpretation that very young Punic children were cremated and interred in burial urns regardless of how they died.

"Our study emphasizes that historical scientists must consider all evidence when deciphering ancient societal behavior," Schwartz said. "The idea of regular infant sacrifice in Carthage is not based on a study of the cremated remains, but on instances of human sacrifice reported by a few ancient chroniclers, inferred from ambiguous Carthaginian inscriptions, and referenced in the Old Testament. Our results show that some children were sacrificed, but they contradict the conclusion that Carthaginians were a brutal bunch who regularly sacrificed their own children."

Schwartz worked with Frank Houghton of the Veterans Research Foundation of Pittsburgh, Roberto Macchiarelli of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, and Luca Bondioli of the National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography in Rome to inspect the remains of children found in Tophets, burial sites peripheral to conventional Carthaginian cemeteries for older children and adults. Tophets housed urns containing the cremated remains of young children and animals, which led to the theory that they were reserved for victims of sacrifice.

Schwartz and his coauthors tested the all-sacrifice claim by examining the skeletal remains from 348 urns for developmental markers that would determine the children's age at death. Schwartz and Houghton recorded skull, hip, long bone, and tooth measurements that indicated most of the children died in their first year with a sizeable number aged only two to five months, and that at least 20 percent of the sample was prenatal.

Schwartz and Houghton then selected teeth from 50 individuals they concluded had died before or shortly after birth and sent them to Macchiarelli and Bondioli, who examined the samples for a neonatal line. This opaque band forms in human teeth between the interruption of enamel production at birth and its resumption within two weeks of life. Identification of this line is commonly used to determine an infant's age at death. Macchiarelli and Bondioli found a neonatal line in the teeth of 24 individuals, meaning that the remaining 26 individuals died prenatally or within two weeks of birth, the researchers reported.

The contents of the urns also dispel the possibility of mass infant sacrifice, Schwartz and Houghton noted. No urn contained enough skeletal material to suggest the presence of more than two complete individuals. Although many urns contained some superfluous fragments belonging to additional children, the researchers concluded that these bones remained from previous cremations and may have inadvertently been mixed with the ashes of subsequent cremations.

The team's report also disputes the contention that Carthaginians specifically sacrificed first-born males. Schwartz and Houghton determined sex by measuring the sciatic notch -- a crevice at the rear of the pelvis that's wider in females -- of 70 hipbones. They discovered that 38 pelvises came from females and 26 from males. Two others were likely female, one likely male, and three undetermined.

Schwartz and his colleagues conclude that the high incidence of prenate and infant mortality are consistent with modern data on stillbirths, miscarriages, and infant death. They write that if conditions in other ancient cities held in Carthage, young and unborn children could have easily succumbed to the diseases and sanitary shortcomings found in such cities as Rome and Pompeii.