Archives are the foundation of historical research. Without access to primary material—be it documents, photographs, financial statements, engineering or test reports—historians lack the building blocks necessary to write the chronicles that inform our understanding of the past and illuminate the future. To their credit, America’s automakers have gone to great lengths and expense to preserve and protect the historical documents which chronicle and define their existence. Until recently. As Chrysler and GM plunged into bankruptcy, they turned their back on their own heritage and destroyed a priceless part of our collective past.

Chrysler was incorporated on June 6, 1925. Over the following decades, the automaker centralized and organized its archives, records dating back to the very beginnings of the American automobile industry. And then the company’s new owners decided history is bunk. Cerberus eliminated its archivist position. They stopped funding the documents’ maintenance. The company limited access to their archives and then stopped it altogether.

Worse was to follow.

With little notice and no planning, Cerberus literally abandoned the engineering library at the Chrysler Technical Center. The library was shuttered and the librarian laid off. And then the real crime: all the library’s books and materials were offered to anyone who could carry them away. I repeat: the documents were free for the taking. Within a week, a collection spanning decades was scattered to the winds; the books and other materials will never again be available in any coherent, comprehensive form.

The rest of Chrysler’s historical archives remain intact in a central location. Intense work by dedicated archivists has, over the years, provided organization and access to historians. Will FIAT consider these archives worth preserving? Do they even know they exist?...

Following in the footsteps of Howard Carter and Abbot and Costello, a specialized robot will penetrate deeper into the Great Pyramid of Giza than ever before. The robot, part of a years-long exploration called the Djedi Project, will explore a shaft inaccessible to a previous robot, unlocking a room that has remain sealed for 4,500 years.

The robot explorer, built by researchers at the Leeds University, England, in collaboration with French aviation company Dessault and British robotics company Scoutek, will incorporate a small fiber optic camera for looking around corners, an ultrasonic probe for testing the quality of the rock and a releasable mini-robot that can fit through spaces as small as 0.7 inches in diameter.

Additionally, the robot uses special nylon and carbon fiber wheels that won't deface the pyramid's sensitive rock.

"All the robots were designed from scratch to do as little damage to the shafts as possible," Shaun Whitehead, Systems engineer and mission manager, told TechNewsDaily. "The previous robots both used tracks that scrubbed away at the floor and ceiling as they moved. We use soft brace pads to grip the walls, like an inchworm or the technique that rock climbers use for ascending 'chimneys.' The wheels don't need to grip, they need to slip as much as possible."
Whitehead designed the robot so that the team could easily swap out different components, depending on what they find down the shaft. To create the different components, Whitehead and his team used 3-D software provided by Dessault, and then "printed" out the parts on a 3-D fabricator at Leeds University....

Precious historic collections from the 8th and 9th centuries — ranging from gold jewelry, gold plates and statues — have vanished from Sonobudoyo Museum in Yogyakarta.

Yogyakarta Police chief Sr. Comr. Atang Heradi said Friday his office was investigating Tuesday night’s theft at the museum and had questioned four museum officials, including head curator Martono.
“This case is a challenge for the police. We will thoroughly investigate this case,” he said.
Eighty-seven pieces from the museum’s collections, including gold jewelry and statues, were stolen from three of the museum’s glass display cabinets on Tuesday night.

Martono said after the questioning that the stolen collections were originals, not replicas.
The gold collections, he said, were placed and displayed in the room, which were not accessible to museum visitors without permission.

Even with permission, a security guard would accompany visitors to view the collections, he added.
Martono said that the room was also equipped with a CCTV camera, but that it was 10 years old.

“The camera was a manual one, not a digital one. It cannot cover the entire room,” he said.

The museum, set up in 1935 and located close to the Yogyakarta Palace, sees 100 visitors during weekdays and up to 2,000 on holidays.

Responding to the case, Yogyakarta Cultural Agency head Djoko Dwiyanto voiced his suspicion that the burglary might involve both professional art thieves and collectors....

The grave site for an 1860s Army hero awarded the Medal of Honor is now a popular Ventura dog park with poop soiling what veterans say should be sacred ground.

"Talk to any veteran, he will tell you it is a terrible thing. It's disrespectful," said retired Marine Sgt. Craig "Gunny" Donor, who served two tours in Vietnam and is bent on getting the soldier's remains moved.

Pvt. James Sumner, who was awarded the nation's highest military honor for gallant actions after a band of Apache Indians kidnapped a settler's child, died in 1912 and he was buried in what was then St. Mary's Cemetery.

Most of the flat grave markers have been hauled away, but a few dozen markers still pepper the 7-acre Cemetery Memorial Park that was home to about 3,000 permanent residents. Most were never relocated.

The lush, well-manicured hillside patch of green on Main Street just a few blocks east of downtown Ventura has pine, thickets of overgrown junipers and a magnificent view of the Pacific Ocean and Ventura Pier....

One of our most accomplished scriptwriters was initially thrilled to discover his $200 vintage Longines watch was worth £50,000. The catch? He is Jewish – and a secret swastika inside proved it once belonged to Hitler's right-hand man . . .

Working for a Hollywood studio should carry a warning: Comedy can seriously damage your health. It certainly damaged mine when, in 1985, I was employed as a house writer at Paramount Studios on a new television comedy series.

There wasn't much to laugh about. In true Hollywood tradition I could have hit the bottle, or worse, but I sought solace in shopping. And it was on one summer afternoon as I was wandering along Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles, that my eye was caught by a tray of what Americans call estate watches. Here they are known simply as second-hand, although I prefer 'previously used'.

I was drawn to a small, simple and beautiful Longines Art Deco wristwatch. I was in a buying mood. Could this watch cheer me up? Would it take my mind off having to return to Paramount Studios on Monday morning to spend the week with a group of American comedy writers who were driving me nuts? Who said Hollywood was glamorous?

The watch was $200. I tried it on. It suited me. I left the shop 20 minutes later with the watch on my wrist and a smile on my face. I couldn't stop staring at it although never once did I wonder whom it might have belonged to, or how it came to be in the shop window. What I did wonder was whether it would lift my spirits during what was becoming the loneliest time of my life.

I wore the watch for the rest of my time in Hollywood and long after I escaped and returned to Britain. Friends commented on it: 'They don't make watches like that any more.' Then in 1993, I treated myself to a modern chronograph and put the Longines in a bank deposit box, where it lay for nearly ten years.

In 2002 I started wearing the Longines again. I had forgotten how simple and beautiful it was. But I quickly realised it was losing between eight and ten minutes each day. I decided to take it to a City of London watch repairer.

Had I not done so I would never have discovered the watch's provenance; a discovery that made me look into my soul and ask myself, what kind of person am I?...

Until recent years, Indian citizens could fly their flag only on two days: Republic Day (Jan. 26) and today's holiday, Independence Day. That changed after an Indian studying in Dallas saw Americans proudly waving Ol' Glory six ways from Sunday....

"What we are facing is something America faced from its foundation. If you have a non-homogenous population, a multicultural nation, what unifying thing have you got?" says Graham Bartram, chief vexillologist of the Flag Institute in London. "The two things we've got are the queen and the flag."

He sees India facing similar challenges.

"Young nations face from the start the problems that Britain is facing now, and that is you have a group of people who are not necessarily feeling that they belong to each other. But you need them to feel that way in order for your country work."...

THE huge archive of material relating to the discovery of King Tutankhamun has been put online for the first time.

The comprehensive notes and photos recording the find by archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922, were donated to Oxford University’s first Professor of Egyptology, Frank Griffith, by the Carter family.

In turn, this archive became the Griffith Institute, attached to Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, and it is the institute’s Keeper of the Archives Dr Jaromir Malek, 66, along with his assistant Elizabeth Fleming, who have diligently been loading the mass of information on to the Internet in their spare time.

Yet one of the real curses of Tutankhamun, from Dr Malek’s point of view, was the failure of Egyptologists to publish the discovery in its entirety....

An investigation begun after a man was killed by a falling rock at the ancient city of Hasankeyf has revealed that construction vehicles working in the area have brought the 10,000-year-old settlement close to collapse.

“It is a crime by law to enter protected areas with heavy-duty vehicles. Before the rock broke, there were cracks but the necessary precautions were not taken,” said archaeologist Ercan Alpay, a member of the committee formed by the Initiative to Revive Hasankeyf to investigate the death of a man killed July 13 when a rock fell from a tower in the area.

After the fatal incident, the road to the ancient bazaar and tents located near the Tigris River were closed to vehicle and passenger traffic.

“Excavating with vehicles in a historical site has nothing to do with scientific research,” Alpay said, adding that such work can do massive damage to a fragile site such as Hasankeyf.

The committee, which includes archaeologists, architects and building and geology engineers, found in its report that caves used as dwellings as early as 800 B.C. had been damaged. It concluded that the ancient city is at risk of collapse....

A recent visit to Isle Royale National Park by the Niagara, a historically accurate reconstruction of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry's victorious 1813 flagship, included an unwelcome surprise. Despite efforts to prevent such problems, the ship was harboring some dangerous stowaways.

The ship is owned by the State of Pennsylvania’s Erie Historic Maritime Museum, "a nonprofit educational association striving to preserve and further the education of historic sailing techniques, environmental stewardship, and outreach education programs." It visited Isle Royale under terms of a special use permit that included some specific conditions: the ship would be free of aquatic invasive species, especially the zebra mussel.

As previous articles on the Traveler have explained, zebra mussels—and their relatives named quaggas—pose a serious threat to any body of water where they become established, and they have already caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage in other parts of the country. Information from Isle Royale notes,
...

For Gao Fengqin, the worst horror of the Second World War happened in the closing days.

"I still remember the day my mother took me to a small restaurant to meet my new Chinese mother," says Gao Fengqin, now 70.

"I had noodles and when I finished, she stood up to leave. I gripped her leg, crying for her not to go."

It was 65 years ago that Gao's Japanese mother, Kobayasi, gave her away to the Chinese couple who raised her into adulthood.

Gao was one of thousands of Japanese children abandoned in China and adopted by Chinese families in the aftermath of the war.

In late 1931, Japan started its armed colonization of northeast China, which had fallen under its control earlier that year.

Gao's birth father died shortly after the family arrived in China, when Gao was too young to remember. Later Kobayasi remarried to a Chinese man, and, for an unknown reason, gave her birth daughter away....

A full size replica of a Second World War spitfire could raise over £50,000 for the Royal British Legion when it goes up for auction in September.

The aluminium replica of a MKVb Supermarine Spitfire was built in 2008 by members of the Ripon branch of the Royal British Legion.

Since it was built, the aircraft has been used at a variety of events including the 70th birthday of RAF Leeming events.
The auction takes place on September 17.

The spitfire took 10 months and 11,000 man hours to construct and represents aircraft number W3850 which was flown by Pilot Officer Atkinson, now Sir Joe Atkinson, over France on 13th October 1941 in an attempt to protect Blenheim bombers attacking port installations.
Atkinson, in formation with other aircraft from 609 Squadron Royal Auxiliary Airforce (West Riding of Yorkshire), engaged and damaged a number of German Messerschmitt 109s during this flight. He was later awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross....

MOSCOW—Russia has rejected a U.S. court ruling to turn over a Jewish library to a Hasidic group in New York.

A U.S. judge last week ruled against the Russian government for its refusal to return thousands of manuscripts that once belonged to a Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi. The library was seized by Red Army in Nazi Germany as war booty....

Femurs and skulls of freshly dead used to make buttons, combs, scientists say.

Members of a pre-Aztec civilization used human bones—likely from their freshly dead relatives—to make buttons, combs, needles, spatulas, and dozens of other everyday utensils, Mexican archeologists say.

The discovery comes from a new analysis of 5,000 bone fragments found in the ancient city of Teotihuacan, a large archaeological site about 30 miles (48 kilometers) northeast of Mexico City (see map).

Femurs (thigh bones), tibias (shinbones), and human skulls were transformed into household items shortly after death, noted team leader Abigail Meza Peñaloza of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)....

...Long dismissed as accidental additions to Viking graves, prehistoric "thunderstones"—fist-size stone tools resembling the Norse god Thor's hammerhead—were actually purposely placed as good-luck talismans, archaeologists say.

Using fire-starting rock such as flint, Stone Age people originally created the stones to serve as axes. But the Vikings, whose Iron Age heyday lasted from about A.D. 800 to 1050, saw the primitive tools as lightning repellent.

Because the axes predate the Viking age by thousands of years, archaeologists have long seen the stones as random artifacts, perhaps stirred up from earlier, lower burials or dropped in centuries after the Viking era.

To solve the thunderstone mystery, Thäte and fellow archaeologist Olle Hemdorff excavated Viking graves in Scandinavia and trawled through catalogs of grave goods from hundreds of Viking burials—all dating to the Iron Age (about 600 A.D. to 1000 A.D.).

For example, in Scandinavia the researchers found about ten Viking burials that held thunderstones up to 5,000 years older than the graves themselves—including a thunderstone in a previously untouched, fifth-century A.D. stone coffin....