Andrew Everett, a student senator and senior at the University of Washington, says he had little idea that introducing a resolution in support of building a campus memorial to Col. Gregory “Pappy” Boyington, a 1934 graduate of the institution and a World War II Medal of Honor winner, would result in rampant partisan bickering on campus. But, thanks to words and actions by both liberals and conservatives on campus and elsewhere, the lens of politics has now framed a debate that he and others say could hamper his continuing efforts to honor alumni war heroes.

“I’m somewhat historically oriented,” says Everett, a former intelligence specialist in the military who forecasted weather reports in regions where U.S. forces were deployed. “I wanted to help us express our gratitude and appreciation.

But this month, Everett’s resolution was voted down 46-45 in the Student Senate. Some senators said they couldn’t support a memorial for one person when there were other distinguished war alumni who have graduated from the university. Others argued that the resolution shouldn’t be considered before items that had been on the docket longer had been voted on. And some flat out refused to support such a memorial because they oppose killing people, even in wartime.

What disappointed Everett was not the fact that the resolution failed — he figured he could create a new resolution that could garner a plurality. Rather, he says, the ensuing political debates that have occurred not only on campus, but in the blogosphere and on TV shows, like MSNBC’s “Scarborough Country,” have been most irksome.

“I don’t like that this has been framed in absolute terms,” says Everett. “I think it’s wrong that this turned into a political grab bag.”

A once sleepy crossroads town in Pennsylvania where the blood of 50,000 Americans was shed, a fertile valley in Virginia where armies clashed for four long years, and a little-known New Mexico battleground known as the "Gettysburg of the West," were today announced as some of the nation's most endangered Civil War battlefields.

At a news conference this morning, the Civil War Preservation Trust (CWPT) unveiled its annual report on the status of the nation's historic battlegrounds. The report, entitled History Under Siege: A Guide to America's Most Endangered Civil War Battlefields, identifies the most threatened Civil War sites in the United States and what can be done to rescue them.

"Today our Civil War battlefields are being destroyed at an alarming rate," warned CWPT President James Lighthizer during the news conference. "Hallowed ground, where more than 600,000 Americans gave their lives, is being paved over in favor of shopping malls housing tracts, and even gambling casinos. These endangered battlefields are irreplaceable treasures and now, more than ever, we must work to preserve and protect these sites because once they're gone, they're gone forever."

Joining Lighthizer at the news conference was writer, economist, commentator and well-known actor Ben Stein. In addition to appearing in dozens of movies, and hosting Comedy Central's Emmy award winning quiz show, "Win Ben Stein's Money," Stein is an active battlefield preservationist.

Cemetery Lane in Ross is home to cemeteries that are Jewish, Catholic and Protestant, but few know that an old African-American cemetery also is there on an overgrown hillside hugging the road.

Two posts with a fallen chain between them are all that mark the rutted road that leads to the cemetery. Woods crowd the hillside graveyard which, on a recent afternoon, was bone quiet except for a distant train whistle.

"When I first saw it, I thought it was just the most pathetic cemetery I've ever seen," said Sandy Brown, a local historian who lives in Ross. She heard about the cemetery a couple of years ago at a West View Historical Society event, and she searched for the burial ground until she found it -- unkempt and seemingly forgotten.

When she checked on it again a year or so later, it still appeared to be abandoned.

But that could change soon.

In the waning days of 1864 and the Civil War, Franklin hosted one of the conflict's bloodiest battles. More than 140 years later, that battle is again pitting neighbor against neighbor.

At issue is the effort to reclaim portions of the battlefield, most of which now house commercial ventures. On one side, preservationists and battlefield boosters point out the hard economic advantages of creating a battlefield park, as Civil War buffs pump tourist dollars into the town.

WHEELING, W.Va. -- On a corner near what was once this city's bustling transportation center is a landscaped lot of about 1.5 acres that civic officials hope can be transformed into a major tourist attraction.

But before the tourists who flock to Oglebay Park and the massive Cabela's outdoors store nearby can be persuaded to visit it in downtown Wheeling, millions of dollars will have to be raised for the proposed attraction -- a National Civil War Memorial.

Why Wheeling? It's the question most people initially ask when they hear of the proposed memorial being in West Virginia rather than, say, Gettysburg, Antietam or Appomattox.

In fact, the proposal for a national memorial originated in Gettysburg about seven years ago and was pitched to that city, as well as to Antietam and other famous Civil War battlefield locations.

For various reasons, mostly concerning money, the proposal didn't find a home until it was introduced a little more than a year ago to folks in Wheeling.

The cost is daunting at $11.3 million. A second phase of the project, a Center for Civil War Studies that would have electronic versions of Civil War documents, would be housed in an old warehouse and cost an additional $9.45 million.

With the Civil War re-enactors, including members of the U.S. Colored Troops, standing at attention, the monument of an African-American Union soldier became a Nashville landmark. The unveiling of the 9-foot-tall bronze statue evoked a spontaneous applause from the audience.

"The monument will remain as living history to the testimony of the African-Americans who believed so strongly in fighting for their freedom," said Lyn Norris with the local African American Cultural Alliance, which spearheaded the effort to honor fallen members of the U.S. Colored Troops. "I never heard about colored troops until the movie Glory came out. Every one of them gave life for the country they loved, and to be cast away and treated as second-class citizens, it's just a shame."

The life-size statue, made by Middle Tennessee artist Roy Butler, is believed to be one of only two in the South to honor black Union soldiers. The first was dedicated two years ago at the site of the Battle of Vicksburg in Mississippi.

ALBANY -- Authorities in southwest Georgia are investigating after a Civil War-era cemetery was plowed under by workers at a plantation.

The site is next to the Ecila Plantation in western Dougherty County near Albany. Sheriff's investigators say the manager of the plantation told them workers harrowed the area in May or June of 2004 -- NOT knowing the graves were there.

Sheriff's Lieutenant Craig Dodd tells WALB-TV that the area had become "something of an eyesore" and had NOT been kept up. He says the workers were trying to clean up the area when they discovered the cemetery, with graves dating back to 1863. Investigators say the manager admitted the workers plowed up headstones and pulled up a concrete slab.

Archaeologists have found a 3,000-year-old cliff painting made with human hand prints and believed to depict a dancing man and woman in southwestern China, a news report said Monday.

The 1.4 meter-by-1.6 meter (50-by-60-inch) painting was found near the Jinsha River in Yunnan province, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

Local people guided a three-member team of archaeologists to the painting, said Ji Xueping, associate professor with the Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology.

The painting was made with a mixture of iron ore and animal blood, Ji said.

A kind of Hindu civil war that wasn't always civil erupted in a Sacramento hearing room Monday over what California middle school students should be taught about ancient India.

An emotional four-hour hearing ended with a few angry members of the overflow audience shouting at a subcommittee of the state Board of Education after it rejected changes they sought in six new social studies textbooks for California middle school students. A security guard eventually cleared the room and ordered the crowd of almost 200 out of the building. "Learning about Hinduism in my sixth-grade class left me feeling ashamed and angry," Sameera Mokkarala, a sophomore at Gunn High School in Palo Alto, one of several dozen speakers, said during the hearing. "All that was talked about was the caste system, polytheism and sati." (Sati is the long-banned burning of widows on a husband's funeral pyre.)

The Vedic Foundation and Hindu Education Foundation are seeking to remove or soften references to the untouchable caste and the subordinate status of women in India more than 2,000 years ago, among other elements that the groups view as demeaning to their religion and humiliating to Hindu schoolchildren in California.

They also object to the theory that Indian development was heavily influenced by an Aryan invasion and to portrayals of Hinduism as polytheistic.

"I am appalled by the selective amnesia and fake history that is being advocated," Laju Shah, who teaches sixth- and seventh-grade social studies in San Francisco Unified School District, said of the changes the foundations sought.

An ancient medical mystery—the cause of a plague that wracked Athens from 426 to 430 B.C. and eventually led to the city's fall—has been solved by DNA analysis, researchers say.

The ancient Athenians died from typhoid fever, according to a new study.

Scientists from the University of Athens drew this conclusion after studying dental pulp extracted from the teeth of three people found in a mass grave in Athens' Kerameikos cemetery.

The mass grave was first discovered in 1994 and was dated to about 430 B.C., the time of the plague.

At least 150 bodies had been thrown into the pit, the corpses piled in five layers with no soil between them.

"It was evident that they were buried irregularly, hastily, and without the death rituals of the time, almost in a state of panic," said Manolis Papagrigorakis, a professor at the University of Athens' School of Dentistry who lead the study.

Scientists excavating at the site of the world's biggest recorded volcanic eruption on an Indonesian island have found human remains and artifacts in an area they said may be the ``Pompeii of the east.''

The discoveries were made near Tambora, on Sumbawa Island, which erupted in 1815. The volcano produced 150 cubic kilometers of ash that fell as far as 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) away. Tambora lies about 1,300 kilometers to the east of Indonesia's capital, Jakarta.

``There is a potential that Tambora could be the Pompeii of the east and it could be of great cultural interest,'' Haraldur Sigurdsson of the University of Rhode Island, who led the excavation, said in a statement published on the university's Web site. ``All the people, their houses and culture are still encapsulated there as they were in 1815.''

The archeological dig led to the discovery of two human bodies, ceramic pots and artifacts linking Tamboran culture to that of Vietnam and Cambodia. The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Italy in 79 AD covered the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in layers of ash. Pompeii was discovered in 1748 with buildings and artifacts intact. The discovery gave insight to historians about ancient Roman life.

``If it's true that they found such remains, it will reveal the culture at that time,'' said Atje Purbawinata, head of volcano monitoring and research at the Volcanological Survey of Indonesia. ``A generation of local people might have been lost due to the eruption. Now it could be revealed what happened.''

The expedition involved teams from the University of Rhode Island and the University of North Carolina, the statement said. They spent six weeks in the island in 2004.

Still, the team didn't seek permission from the Indonesian Institute of Science, said Neni Sintawardani, department head in charge of issuing research clearance at the agency.

Igan Sutawidjaya, a senior researcher at the Volcanological Survey of Indonesia, a member of the team to Tambora, said they obtained permission from Indonesia's immigration department and the foreign ministry. He didn't know if the science agency needed to approve the trip.

``In granting a clearance, we always require them to cooperate with a qualified Indonesian so we can share knowledge,'' Sintawardani said.

Some Indonesian archeologists said the evidence of Khmer culture among the ruins could have been because of trade.

``The ceramic pots and other household materials found might be goods that the people of Tambora traded overseas, the Mon- Khmer culture has actually never been found across Indonesia,'' said Bagyo Prasetyo, an archeologist with the Center of Archeological Research in Jakarta. ``We also need to know if the team did carbon dating.''

Volcanic Explosivity Index

Tambora's eruption was rated 7 according to the Volcanic Explosivity Index, which measures the height of the eruption and the amount of ash ejected, according to the Volcano World Web site hosted at the University of North Dakota, making it the biggest recorded eruption. Mount Toba in Sumatra Island, which erupted 76,000 years ago, had a Volcanic Explosivity Index of 8.

Tambora's eruption killed about 10,000 people because of the pyroclastic flows, while an estimated 82,000 died after the eruption because of disease and hunger. The year 1815 is also known as the ``year without a summer,'' because gases released by Tambora resulted in a global cooling and led to food shortages in Europe.

``The findings were remarkable,'' said Sutawidjaya of the Volcanological Survey. A team from the agency will visit the area again in April to continue its research, he said.

Pumice, Ash

The Tambora discovery was made after cutting through a 10- foot thick deposit of pumice and ash, the statement said. The area may also have a wooden palace. Sigurdsson and his team plan to return in 2007 to complete the excavation process.

The announcement comes three weeks after scientists exploring the mountains in Indonesia's Papua province said they found a ``lost world'' of at least 35 previously undocumented species, including frogs, butterflies and plants, and a bird of paradise not seen by scientists since the 19th-century.

Indonesia, the world's biggest archipelago, has 129 active volcanoes. The nation's 18,000 islands are prone to earthquakes because the country sits along the Pacific's so-called ``ring of fire'' zone of active volcanoes and tectonic faults. The country lies above three major tectonic plates, or slabs of the Earth's crust that float on the planet's molten core.

Effa Manley became the first woman elected to the baseball Hall of Fame when the former Newark Eagles co-owner was among 17 people from the Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues chosen Monday by a special committee.

"This is a historic day at the Hall of Fame," shrine president Dale Petroskey said. "I hoped that someday there would be a woman in the Hall. It's a pretty proud moment."

This year's Hall class - 18, including former reliever Bruce Sutter - is by far the biggest in history, breaking the record of 11 in 1946. There are now 278 Hall members.

Mule Suttles and Biz Mackey were among the 12 players selected, along with five executives.

Buck O'Neil and Minnie Minoso, the only living members among the 39 candidates on the ballot, were not elected by the 12-person panel.

Manley co-owned the New Jersey-based Eagles with her husband, Abe, and ran the business end of the team for more than a decade. The Eagles won the Negro Leagues World Series in 1946 - one year before Jackie Robinson broke the major league color barrier.

"She was very knowledgeable, a very handsome woman," said Hall of Famer Monte Irvin, who played for the Eagles while the Manleys owned the team, as did Don Newcombe and Larry Doby.

"She did a lot for the Newark community. She was just a well-rounded influential person," Irvin said. "She tried to organize the owners to build their own parks and have a balanced schedule and to really improve the lot of the Negro League players."

Manley was white, but married a black man and passed as a black woman, said Larry Lester, a baseball author and member of the voting committee.

"She campaigned to get as much money as possible for these ballplayers, and rightfully so," Lester said.

Manley used baseball to advance civil rights causes with events such as an Anti-Lynching Day at the ballpark. She died in 1981 at age 84.

"She was a pioneer in so many ways, in terms of integrating the team with the community," said Leslie Heaphy, a Kent State professor on the committee. "She's also one of the owners who pushed very hard to get recognition for Major League Baseball when they started to sign some of their players."

Ray Brown, Willard Brown, Andy Cooper, Cristobal Torriente and Jud Wilson were the other former Negro League players elected. Five pre-Negro Leaguers - Frank Grant, Pete Hill, Jose Mendez, Louis Santop and Ben Taylor - were also chosen.

Willard Brown was the only person among them to play in the majors - he hit .179 in 21 games with the St. Louis Browns in 1947.

Alex Pompez, Cum Posey, J.L. Wilkinson and Sol White were the other executives elected.

The new inductees will be enshrined with Sutter - elected by the Baseball Writers' Association of America last month - on July 30 in Cooperstown, N.Y.

Only 18 Negro Leagues players had been chosen for the Hall prior to this election.

The election was the culmination of a Hall of Fame project to compile a complete history of blacks in the game from 1860 to 1960.

More than 50 historians, authors and researchers spent four years sifting through box scores in 128 newspapers of sanctioned league games from 1920-1954. The result was the most complete collection of Negro Leagues statistics ever compiled, according to the Hall, and a database that includes 3,000 day-by-day records and career leaders.

"What we're proudest of is the broadening of knowledge," Petroskey said. "When we started five years ago, we had 20 percent of the stats. We've got 90 percent of the stats now."

Candidates needed nine of 12 votes - 75 percent - from the committee of researchers, professors and baseball historians for election.

Former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent chaired the committee, which voted by secret ballot. Vote totals were not released.

O'Neil, now 94, started his playing career in the 1930s and hit .288 lifetime. He became the first black coach in the majors in 1962 with the Chicago Cubs, and played a key role in the building of the Negro League museum in Kansas City. He served on the Hall's Veterans Committee for nearly two decades.

Minoso played in the major leagues for 17 seasons, mostly with the Chicago White Sox, and hit .298 lifetime. He was a seven-time All-Star and won three Gold Gloves in the outfield.

"I know that baseball fans have me in their own Hall of Fame - the one in their hearts," the 83-year-old Minoso said. "That matters more to me than any official recognition.

"If it's meant to be, it's meant to be, and I am truly honored to be considered. I've given my life to baseball, and the game has given me so much."

Deep in the territory of the old Confederacy, a new glass and stone edifice will soon begin rising -- the first national museum in the United States devoted to the subject of black slavery.

Builders will soon start sinking foundations for the 2,700 sq meters United States National Slavery Museum that organisers hope to open to the public in early 2008.

The structure, 37 meters high, will be built on a 15 hectares site on donated land overlooking the Rappahannock River about 80 km south of Washington and close to where several fierce Civil War battles were fought.

The building, illuminated at night, will be clearly visible to drivers on Interstate 95, the main north-south East Coast artery, said former Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder, himself the grandson of a slave, who is spearheading the project.

Wilder, now the mayor of Richmond, said there was a burning need for such an institution. "We need to ask new questions and provide new information about one of the most misreported and misunderstood institutions in American history," he said.

After slavery was abolished in the 1860s, blacks were reluctant to dwell on their painful history and were absorbed with the continuing fight for economic survival, civil rights and equality in the United States.

Wilder's own father was reluctant to speak about his father's experiences and handed down only a few stories about how his owner would beat him for sneaking off to visit his family on a different plantation. "He really tried to just get past it," Wilder said of his father.

That is now changing as black leaders express a growing desire and need to reexamine the past. Wilder said all Americans needed to understand, for example, the role slavery played in U.S. economic development in the 19th century.

Museum officials said they have already raised around $50 million (28 million pounds) -- around half the amount needed to build the museum. Wilder wants to raise an additional $100 million as an endowment and has called on U.S. corporations that may have profited from slavery to help, "not in the sense of reparations but as an acknowledgement of doing what is right." Several major corporations have pledged to help.

In a recent Washington speech, actor Ben Vereen, who played in the groundbreaking TV mini-series "Roots" in 1977, told corporate leaders they had an obligation to step forward.

"TIME TO TALLY UP"

"We've bought your cars. We've smoked your cigarettes. We've built your industries. Now it's time to tally up," he said.

"This is our Holocaust Museum," Vereen said, evoking a direct comparison with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington that opened in 1993.

The museum design is by architect C.C. Pei, son of renowned architect I.M. Pei. The centrepiece is a massive glass-roofed atrium that will hold the replica of a slave ship, the Dos Amigos, which is being reconstructed from its original plans.

Museum executive director Vonita Foster said there were some 6,000 museums in the United States. Several smaller regional museums of slavery are in the works but this will be the first national museum devoted to the issue.

Apart from the ship, visitors to the slavery museum will undergo a multimedia experience that will allow them, if only for few moments, to feel a little of what it was like to be captured in Africa and become a slave.

"We want to surprise visitors, take away control and not let them know what is coming next," said exhibit designer Lyn Henley. "We will walk them through an experience of being psychologically captured."

She would not say exactly how this would happen but added that parts of the exhibit would be unsuitable for young children.

In another part of the exhibit, visitors would be taken into an "invisible church" where they could eavesdrop on the voices of slaves creeping away into the woods at night to practice their religion and meet their loved ones.

The museum already has a growing collection of artefacts, including slave shackles, furniture and clothing and a large collection of what Henley called "objects of racism" -- paraphernalia of the slave owners. One of the most evocative is a set of shackles designed for an infant.

The first signs of the destruction wrought by vandals came into view just after dawn. Almost simultaneously, several calls came into the National Park Service office at Gettysburg National Military Park. That was 12 days ago and the park service since has calculated the cost to repair and restore the monuments at just over $61,000. It was the worst case of vandalism at the park in 93 years.

A coalition of Gettysburg-area groups and individuals has put up a reward totaling $36,000 for the arrest of the perpetrators. Monuments to the 4th New York Independent Battery and 11th Massachusetts and 114th Pennsylvania regiments were damaged.

"It infuriates me, it absolutely infuriates me, and I think I speak for just about everybody," said Charles Kuhn, junior vice-commander-in-chief of the Sons of Union Veterans, a descendant of Civil War veterans who grew up in Gettysburg and lives in nearby East Berlin. "The first feeling I had was a sick feeling. Then all of a sudden that sick feeling becomes anger."

The sense of outrage over the deliberate desecration of monuments has deep roots. The last time there was such widespread damage was 1913, when nine Gettysburg monuments were vandalized. At the time, R.B. Reath closed a letter to the park's superintendent with the following:

"We all hope you will secure the maniac who injured the monuments. Unless he was insane, a rope's end would be the proper thing for him."

Though this is the third time in the past 18 months that Gettysburg monuments have been vandalized, instances of vandalism at the country's Civil War battlefields are relatively rare, said Dennis Burnett, a law enforcement administrator with the National Park Service in Washington, D.C. Fewer than a dozen incidents are reported a year, and most involve relatively minor damage, he said.

Not since 1998 and 1999 had there been damage to several monuments at once. In a series of incidents then, vegetable oil was sprayed on battlefield monuments in Vicksburg, Miss.; Shiloh in Tennessee, Antietam in Maryland and Gettysburg.

Three Indiana men arrested in the 1998 incidents said they put vegetable oil on Vicksburg monuments at God's direction as part of a ritual that would unite the North and South. They received five years of probation and had to pay more than $5,600 in restitution to the park service.

If there are arrests for the recent damage at Gettysburg, the defendants could be prosecuted under the Archeological Resources Protection Act because the damaged monuments are more than 100 years old. A newer federal law, the Veterans Memorial Preservation and Recognition Act of 2003, could also apply. Both laws carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and fines of $100,000 to $250,000.

State Rep. Harry Readshaw, D-Carrick, who has raised more than $360,000 in the past few years to restore Pennsylvania monuments at Gettysburg, plans to introduce a resolution to ask his federal counterparts to pay for the damage and to increase minimum penalties for those convicted of vandalism. The state resolution has no bearing on Congress, but Mr. Readshaw said it is designed to get the attention of federal legislators.

"I'm realistic enough to know it may be thrown in the garbage can once it passes, but I'm hoping we can contact federal officials and draw their attention to this," he said.

Civil War afficionados, including former professional wrestler Ric Savage of New Jersey, as well as park officials, are convinced the damage at Gettysburg overnight between Feb. 15 and Feb. 16 was the work of vandals and not collectors because the pieces of the monuments that were taken have almost no resale value.

The monuments that were damaged were constructed from 1885 to 1888 with Union veterans of the battle present at the dedication. The monuments predate Gettysburg's designation as a national park, which occurred in 1895. The three damaged monuments commemorate units from the ill-fated Third Corps, commanded by Maj. Gen. Daniel Sickles, who lost a leg during the battle after he moved his troops forward to a salient along the Emmittsburg Road.

The three-day battle of Gettysburg in July 1863 was the bloodiest battle of the Civil War with 51,000 casualties and is considered by many Civil War historians as the turning point in the conflict, as well as the "High Water Mark of the Confederacy."

Gettysburg spokeswoman Katie Lawhon was one of the first people to view the damage as she was on her way to work shortly before 7 a.m. on Feb. 16.

"I was very, very upset," she said. "It's just hard to understand why someone would do something like this. It was just too much destruction for it to be for anyone interested in resale."

The $36,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of the vandals is comprised of $30,000 from four organizations, $5,000 from Gettysburg businessman David Levan and $1,000 from the Adams County Crime Stoppers. The four organizations offering the bulk of the reward are the Gettysburg National Battlefield Museum Foundation, the Association of Licensed Battlefield Guides, the Gettysburg Civil War Roundtable and the Friends of the National Parks at Gettysburg, said Dru Anne Neil, spokeswoman for the Friends group.

"Maybe [the reward] will be an incentive in case someone shows something to someone or brags about it," Ms. Neil said. "We're just hoping someone saw something somewhere."

The instances of vandalism occurred at a time when the National Park Service's law enforcement staff is smaller than it has been in the past 25 years. Gettysburg is not patrolled 24 hours a day and the park relies on a citizen patrol to supplement its ranger patrols of the park's 36 miles of roads and more than 1,300 monuments, Ms. Lawhon said.

Other national battlefields rely on similar resources to keep an eye on what many people consider hallowed ground.

"From the park's perspective, we often talk about our mission here being about remembering the people who fought here and these monuments are the symbols of the men who fought here," Ms. Lawhon said. "The nice thing about Gettysburg is that when you work here you run into people who really appreciate the sacrifice. It's a place that really has meaning for a lot of people and when something like this happens, people come into the park and tell you what it means to them."

Three account books found in the cupboard of an old house on the Quebec-Vermont border reveal what the first Loyalist settlers of two centuries ago - along with a handful of freed black slaves from the United States - bought, sold, worked at, and even went to jail for.

Handwritten in black ink on bond paper embossed with the British royal insignia, the ledgers were kept at the local inn of Missisquoi Bay, now Philipsburg, a village founded on Abenaki Indian ancestral land in the late 18th century as an outpost on the Albany, N.Y.-Montreal mail road.

The transactions - and the light they throw on the little-known origins of black history in Quebec - are being called a "missing link" to a past that is still not properly understood.

Though not unique - similar ledgers from the same inn, also listing names of blacks, exist in the National Archives in Ottawa - the books offer new insight into life on the border from 1786 to 1816.

The details they contain are both mundane and extraordinary.

Back then, for example, rum was a popular drink; a quart cost three shillings, according to the ledgers. Three yards of calico cloth cost one pound, three shillings and sixpence. Wages for four days of hoeing corn: 10 shillings. The prison sentence for counterfeiting U.S. dollar bills: two months.

Most revealing, however, are the unusual names at the top of some pages of accounts: Morris the Black Man, for example, and the almost feudal-sounding John the Potter, who by the absence of a family name is assumed to have been black.

"This could be a PhD thesis for history students, deciphering these ledgers. They're a gold mine," said the man who discovered them, local freelance photographer Robert Galbraith.

His wife, Phyllis Montgomery, comes from a family with long roots in the community; her grandfather, Quebec Superior Court judge and historian George H. Montgomery, preserved the books.

The ledgers originated at a place known as Champlain House, the first inn of the Eastern Townships, owned at the end of the 18th century by the Ruiter family. The building is now a nursing home, just up the street from the lakeside cottage in Philipsburg where Galbraith and his wife live.

Other ledgers from the Ruiter inn and from the rest of Montgomery's collection - dated 1797, 1798 and 1808-1810 - sit in the National Archives in Ottawa. They list other former slaves like Cato the Black Man (real name Cato Giles) and Jack the Black Man, says Montreal historian and Gazette copy editor Frank Mackey, author of Black Then: Blacks in Montreal, 1780s-1880s.

Now comes news of the other ledgers.

Galbraith first found them a decade ago in a little leather case used by Judge Montgomery that had been stored on the top shelf of a cupboard in the cottage.

The ink and paper were well preserved, perhaps because the box sat next to a stove pipe from the oil furnace, which prevented them from getting damp and rotting.

But busy with other things, Galbraith neglected his find - until now. At the end of Black History Month, he's trying again to generate interest.

Through a friend, Galbraith has approached the Missisquoi Museum in Stanbridge East to give the ledgers their first public viewing. He's also hoping descendants of the blacks named in the books will read about the ledgers' existence and reconnect with their family's past.

"I haven't seen the ledgers yet, but it sounds like a fascinating, remarkable find," said Galbraith's friend, Eden Muir, a Frelighsburg architect. He sits on the Missisquoi Museum's board of directors, which will discuss the books for the first time at a meeting today.

"It's important to get more details of that (Loyalist) period."

That's especially true, Muir added, in light of the controversy over a place in nearby St. Armand called Nigger Rock, thought to be a burial ground for slaves in the late 18th century.

For Galbraith and colleague Robert Cote, president of the Centre historique de St. Armand, the local historical society, the ledgers appear to show a more positive side of black life at the time.

"These books are the missing link to that time," Cote said.

"The black men there weren't slaves. They had money, they could buy things. They paid for their lodgings, were paid for what they produced. This place was a haven of freedom for them."

The first and largest ledger starts in 1786, the second begins in 1806 and the third runs from 1807 to 1816. The earliest book lists the transactions of Morris the Black Man - Morris Emery, a musician from the other side of Missisquoi Bay, according to Mackey.

In 1799, he bought a fiddle for $13 (the hefty sum was, unusually, recorded in dollars), paid 12 pounds sixpence for boarding, consumed quite a bit of rum, and was paid wages for "16 days work at the rate of 6 dollars per month."

As well, there's someone named Billings the Black Man, also identified as Theo Billings, and John the Potter, who was paid for making earthenware pots.

Finally, there's also a page for the other side of the story: a Loyalist settler named John Luke, whose ancestors came to Canada with slaves in tow.

Missing, though, are the names of any slaves they kept and subsequently freed.

On that matter, at least, these history books are silent.

Truth or tall tale, the John Henry story has been told for more than a hundred years. Many historians believe it is based, in part, on a real person and event in the late 1800s.

As a freed slave following the Civil War, Henry became an icon because of his strength and determination. His strong work ethic was not only an example to African-Americans, but also to every workingman.

Henry was among the thousands of "steel-drivin' men" who built the railroads. They used large hammers and steel stakes to pound holes into rock. The holes were filled with explosives that would blast through rough terrain and mountainsides to make way for new railroad tracks. The work was hard and slow.

When the first steam drills were introduced to railroad work, the role of the steel-drivin' men was challenged. "People were fixated with the drill," says Scott Nelson, a history professor at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. "In the South, mountains stood in the way of railroads and prevented access to the West. But when the steam drill was introduced, its newness was gripping and interesting."

But the drill would be used to replace the men who had been doing the job. Companies felt that the drill would be faster and cheaper. When the railroad company Henry worked for proposed using the steam drill to replace the steel-drivin' men, Henry challenged the drill. He was sure he could beat it. And he did.

Although Henry has been claimed by several states, some historians think he may have competed against the drill at the Great Bend Tunnel in Talcott, W.Va., in 1872. John "Bill" Dillon, a historian who lives in Talcott, says the purpose of the competition was to see who could get through the mountain the fastest.

"The drill drove one nine-foot hole, but John Henry drove two seven-foot holes," he says. "Well, [compare] 14 feet to nine feet, and you know who was faster."

According to the tale, Henry died with a hammer in his hand moments after winning the contest. It's an image that was turned into a number offolk songs in the years that followed the event.

The popularity of Henry's folklore grew in the 1900s. To date, there are more than 400 recordings of the John Henry story, making it one of the most popular American folk songs. Mr. Nelson has more than 80 versions on his MP3 player. One of his favorite versions is by Leadbelly, an influential blues singer and guitarist during the 1930s and '40s.

But other recording artists - such as Woody Guthrie, Johnny Cash, and Burl Ives - have also recorded a version of the John Henry story.

Nelson says that the popularity of the songs grew at public schools during the 1950s and '60s. "It's easy to sing," he says, "and 'John Henry' was a perfect song for teaching music in the classroom."

The message of the John Henry story is that people can accomplish anything they set their mind to. That's why his story has been retold in dozens of movies and books. There's even a John Henry museum and a July festival, "John Henry Days," in Hinton, W.Va., near Mr. Dillon's hometown.

So, is the story of John Henry true? Nelson and Dillon believe parts of it are.

"Was he born with a hammer in his hand?" Dillon says. "No. But I believe he beat that drill. And I believe he died after he won. I stick with those facts."

Nelson's book, "Steel-Drivin' Man: John Henry and the Untold Story of an American Legend," will be published this fall. He thinks that the John Henry story can continue to inspire people today.

Tall tales are larger than life

Do you think you could rope a tornado or jump over a mountaintop in a single leap? You could if you were a character in a tall tale. Tall tales are stories in which the characters and their actions and adventures are exaggerated and entertaining.

Many American tall tales grew out of specific regions of the country. Pecos Bill and his rattlesnake whip, for example, were to cowboys in the West what Paul Bunyan and his giant blue ox were to lumberjacks in the Midwest. And in the South, John Henry was the quintessential "workingman's man" on the railroad.

"Tall tales make the impossible possible," says Scott Nelson. "They represent the Superman character that defines the best a man can do. They're the Marvel Comics' characters of today - like Captain America or Spiderman."

Indeed, tall tales have been a popular form of entertainment for hundreds of years, and they may change a little each time they're told.

Scientists have found what they believe are traces of the lost Indonesian civilization of Tambora, which was wiped out in 1815 by the biggest volcanic eruption in recorded history.

Mount Tambora's cataclysmic eruption on April 10, 1815, buried the inhabitants of Sumbawa Island under searing ash, gas and rock and is blamed for an estimated 88,000 deaths. The eruption was at least four times more powerful than Mount Krakatoa's in 1883.

Guided by ground-penetrating radar, U.S. and Indonesian researchers recently dug in a gully where locals had found ceramics and bones. They unearthed the remains of a thatch house, pottery, bronze and the carbonized bones of two people, all in a layer of sediment dating to the eruption.

University of Rhode Island volcanologist Haraldur Sigurdsson, the leader of the expedition, estimated that 10,000 people lived in the town when the volcano erupted in a blast that dwarfed the one that buried the Roman town of Pompeii.

The eruption shot 400 million tons of sulfuric gases into the atmosphere, causing global cooling and creating what historians call "The Year Without a Summer." Farms in Maine suffered crop-killing frosts in June, July and August. In France and Germany, grape and corn crops died, or the harvests were delayed.

A faculty panel investigating allegations of research misconduct by Ward Churchill said last week that it needed more time and would try to have a report done by May 9. The University of Colorado at Boulder panel was created following an uproar over statements about 9/11 by Churchill, who teaches ethnic studies. The investigation is not over those statements, but over allegations concerning Churchill’s scholarship that surfaced after the controversy broke. Churchill has denied any wrongdoing. The panel said that it needed more time because of the number of allegations and because some committee members quit and needed to be replaced.

Anyone can purchase a copy of the 1958 Department of Defense "Emergency Plans Book," an early cold war description of response planning for a nuclear attack on the United States. It is available for sale through Amazon.com and elsewhere under the somewhat lurid title "The Doomsday Scenario" (Motorbooks International, 2002).

But don't look for it at the National Archives, where author L. Douglas Keeney originally obtained it in 1997, because it is no longer there. It is among the thousands of government documents that have been reclassified and withdrawn from public access.

"When I returned in 2005 for another round of research in the Secretary of the Air Force Files, RG [record group] 340, the boxes were decimated," Mr. Keeney told Secrecy News. "100% of the documents I retrieved 9 years ago were gone."

In their place, he found a "withdrawal notice" of the sort that has been quietly proliferating at the National Archives. An official stamp ironically certifies that the withdrawal notice itself is declassified and may be safely disclosed. See:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2006/02/reclassified.pdf

The documents in this case were removed from public access in 1997, near the beginning of the ongoing reclassification process that has undermined the integrity of the National Archives.

If it cannot be halted and reversed, bureaucratically-driven reclassification threatens to reduce the Archives to a mere repository of officially-sanctioned history.

"Those who control the past control the future, Orwell famously wrote in '1984'," recalled Fred Kaplan in an article in Slate that supplied some of the back story of the reclassification initiative.

See "Secret Again: The absurd scheme to reclassify documents" by Fred Kaplan, Slate, February 23:

http://www.slate.com/id/2136480/

The continuing assault on history was also reported in "U.S.
reclassifies government memos" by Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, February 24:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11546531/

"This effort to stuff this harmless toothpaste back into the tube would be funny if it weren't so emblematic of a disturbing new culture of government secrecy," a Washington Post editorial opined. See "Classifying Toothpaste," February 27:

http://tinyurl.com/hykqx

FORT EDWARD -- Imagine finding an unexpected gift. But you can't open it or touch it. And in fact, not long after you discover it, it must be destroyed. Permanently. If you're lucky, you can take a picture of it. That's roughly the situation for upper Hudson River residents who embrace the area's rich history. An archaeological firm hired by the General Electric Co. to survey the river bottom and shoreline before the massive PCB dredging project begins next year has unearthed some unexpected treasures.

Sonar and diving teams have found up to seven boats, including one that may date to the 18th century. The remains can provide clues about history, from prehistoric Native American settlements to the French and Indian War and beyond.

But a preliminary report, not yet made public, suggests the artifacts won't be pulled out of the water -- because they're too polluted with PCBs. So, as of now, the rich material will be dug up and processed as toxic waste, just like the rest of the 2.65 million cubic yards of PCB-laden muck that is to be dredged.

That infuriates locals such as Neal Orsini, who owns the Anvil Inn, a restaurant and hotel on the site of what used to be Fort Edward itself.

"We don't want our history scooped up and taken away," Orsini said. "Let's get in there and pull it out."

A group of German scientists has deciphered the meaning of one of the most spectacular archeological discoveries in recent years: The mystery-shrouded sky disc of Nebra was used as an advanced astronomical clock.

The purpose of the 3,600 year-old sky disc of Nebra, which caused a world-wide sensation when it was brought to the attention of the German public in 2002, is no longer a matter of speculation.

A group of German scholars who studied this archaeological gem has discovered evidence which suggests that the disc was used as a complex astronomical clock for the harmonization of solar and lunar calendars.

"This is a clear expansion of what we knew about the meaning and function of the sky disc," said archeologist Harald Meller.

Recently, however, a team of archaeologists reported a breakthrough: the discovery of a skull deep below the flagstones of the 14th-century Frombork Cathedral. Aided by fresh historical research and a high-tech police crime lab, the archaeologists have tentatively concluded that the skull -- that of a man with a broken nose who was approximately 70 years old when he died -- is indeed that of the astronomer.

The findings have aroused excitement in Poland, where Copernicus is regarded as a national hero. But they have also forced Poles to make some uncomfortable reckonings with history, such as the question of whether Copernicus was Polish at all.

There's also the complicated role in Copernicus's legacy played by the Roman Catholic Church, which suppressed his research as the work of a heretic for almost 300 years after his death, but is now sponsoring the effort to identify his remains.

Historians had long suspected that Copernicus was buried in the Gothic cathedral on a hilltop overlooking Frombork, where he worked as a canon for decades while dabbling in astronomy on the side. But the task of determining exactly where was made all the more difficult because Swedish invaders repeatedly ransacked the crypts beneath the cathedral in the 17th century. Dozens of long-deceased Fromborkians were buried and re-buried on top of each other, turning the church foundation into a giant boneyard.

Jerzy Gassowski, the archaeologist who led the search for Copernicus, said he almost turned down the assignment when he was asked by church officials in 2004 to help. "I said, 'No -- that would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack,' " said Gassowski, chairman of the Institute of Anthropology and Archaeology at the Pultusk School of the Humanities, near Warsaw. "I did not believe for one minute that we would discover him."

Nicolaus Copernicus was born in Torun, Poland, in 1473, and moved to Frombork in 1510. Shortly after arriving, he began formulating radical theories about astronomy, including the idea that Earth circled the sun, rather than vice versa. Catholic leaders declared Copernicus's work immoral and theologically incorrect, placing it on the church's Index of Forbidden Books, where it remained until 1835.

Around that time, historians began to show renewed interest in Copernicus. Unsuccessful searches for his final resting place were conducted in 1802 and again just before the outbreak of World War II.

Under its post-war communist government, Copernicus was celebrated in Poland as a national icon. But his burial site remained a mystery, in part because church leaders were not eager to allow communist functionaries to dig up their property.

That obstacle was removed with the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. But it wasn't until 2004 that another organized search began, on the instruction of the auxiliary bishop of Warmia, a region of northeastern Poland that includes Frombork.

The bishop, Jacek Jezierski, said his primary motivation was to bring some order to the jumbled mess of skeletons lying under the cathedral. But he acknowledged that it was important for the Catholic Church -- and Poland -- to give the astronomer his due place in history.

"Among Poles there is a strong feeling of pride and sense of close bonds with Nicolaus Copernicus," Jezierski said. "We have to bury him with due respect. This will be the homage paid by the church to Nicolaus Copernicus."

Although he was born and buried in modern-day Poland, the astronomer spoke German and may have had German ancestors -- a fact that is occasionally trumpeted by German newspapers and magazines, which rank Copernicus as one of the most eminent Germans of all time.

Such claims gall many people in Poland, where resentment is still acute over long German and Prussian occupations of their land. And that has added a touch of politics to the search for his body.

"There is this delicate issue of his nationality," Jezierski said. "After World War II, this matter was given immense attention, and his Polishness was stressed very strongly. But it is not so easy. We know that his family was undergoing the process of assimilation as Poles. We know that he wrote in Latin, but probably spoke German in everyday life."

Whatever Copernicus's nationality, a team of archaeologists set out last August to find him, digging a large, eight-foot-deep hole in the floor of the Frombork Cathedral. The precise spot was chosen under the guidance of a local historian, who had combed through church archives to examine burial practices from the Renaissance era.

After several days of painstaking work, the crew had uncovered more than a dozen skeletons, but none that appeared to be a man of Copernicus's age.

The excavation pit was growing so deep that the crew feared it might destabilize the foundation of the massive cathedral, and they prepared to call off the search. Poking around in the dirt one last time, however, they discovered another skull.

It was missing its lower jaw, but an anthropological examination indicated that it belonged to a man about 70 years old who had suffered a broken nose. This raised the level of excitement, because contemporary portraits of Copernicus suggest his nose was crooked.

The skull was taken in a box to Warsaw and given to Dariusz Zajdel, an examiner with the Central Forensic Laboratory of the Polish national police. Zajdel specializes in using computer techniques to reconstruct the facial images of corpses found at crime scenes, and he occasionally helps Polish anthropologists with older cases. But he wasn't told where this skull came from or who it might be.

After a few weeks of analyzing the bone structure and other features, Zajdel came up with a computer-generated image of an old man with stringy white hair, bushy eyebrows and a prominent nose. It bears a fair resemblance to portraits of Copernicus.

"Every Pole has a certain image of Copernicus," Zajdel said. "So it was good to keep me in the dark, because otherwise I might have been biased. When I learned that this might be Copernicus, I felt a burden of responsibility."

Gassowski, the archaeologist, said he is now "99 percent certain" that the skull belonged to Copernicus.

The only way to eliminate doubt is to match DNA from the skull with a sample from a known descendant or relative of the astronomer. That won't be easy, since Copernicus had no children.

But researchers think they have a solution. They are now preparing another excavation to look for the remains of Copernicus's uncle, the former bishop of Warmia, who is also believed to be buried in Frombork Cathedral. Exactly where, no one is sure.

The Mexican government and military committed "crimes against humanity" through a "scorched-earth" campaign against rural guerrillas in the 1970s, according to a draft report released Sunday of the first official investigation into Mexico's "dirty war" against leftist rebels and activists.

The investigation by the country's "Special Prosecutor for Social and Political Movements of the Past" was commissioned by President Vicente Fox about a year after his election in 2000 ended decades of one-party dominance here. The Washington-based National Security Archive published the leaked draft Sunday on its website.

"The authoritarian attitude with which the Mexican state wished to control social dissent created a spiral of violence which ... led it to commit crimes against humanity, including genocide," the draft report says.

The alleged crimes outlined in the report were committed from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s under three Mexican presidents. The special prosecutor, Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, received the report from a team of 27 researchers in December.

Military and security forces executed or "disappeared" hundreds of Mexican civilians and "armed militants," the report says. Thousands more were tortured or illegally detained.

The extensive documentation contained in the report -- including records from the Mexican military, police and Interior Ministry -- is "absolutely unprecedented," said Kate Doyle, director of the Mexico Project for the National Security Archive.

The report details "death flights" from military bases in Acapulco and other places, in which the bodies of dozens of detained leftist activists and guerrillas were surreptitiously dumped into the Pacific Ocean.

The report also documents a Mexican army campaign to deny food to residents of areas in the southern state of Guerrero where guerrillas were operating. These and other abuses, the report says, amounted to genocide as defined by international law.

Doyle said her nonprofit group published the report because copies had been circulating among writers, historians and intellectuals in Mexico.

"The way that this has leaked out into the hands of a few people has echoes of an old style of doing things in Mexico," Doyle said.

Sources in the human rights advocacy community said they feared that prosecutor Carrillo was delaying publication of the report because of pressure from the army to censor the findings.

Carrillo has been frustrated in his attempts to prosecute a number of high-profile officials, including former President Luis Echeverria, who was interior minister during the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre of student protesters.

On Sunday, as word of the leak spread, some victims' relatives were critical of the special prosecutor.

"It's sad, but since the prosecutor's office was established, there have been no results, no one has been sentenced," said Roberto Gonzalez Contreras, 60, whose brother Alfredo disappeared during a 1971 Mexico City student demonstration.

"What we reproach the special prosecutor for is his lack of fight, his unwillingness to struggle to the end," he said.

Carrillo's office did not return calls seeking comment.

Many of the accusations in the report have been made before, as human rights groups here try to piece together what happened during Mexico's so-called dirty war -- an episode far less well known than the repression that occurred elsewhere in Latin America.

Before the release of the special prosecutor's draft report, there had been no official reckoning of the events in the late 1960s and 1970s when the government fought leftist guerrillas.

The report's authors listed hundreds of police documents and witness accounts that they said showed hundreds of "disappeared" people had died in police and military custody.

The report also offered new detail on the Mexican army's counter-insurgency in Guerrero, where teacher Genaro Vazquez had launched a Marxist guerrilla movement in the late 1960s.

The Mexican army, the report says, "devastated the region, committed a true genocide, killing them with hunger, bombing the area, illegally taking prisoner hundreds of residents to create panic."

The report says the army engaged in "pillage" of some villages and describes how soldiers entered Los Piloncillos, rounded up six men and executed them in the center of town.

"The investigative methods consisted of submitting the detained to torture so that they would identify the people who were linked, in any way, with the guerrillas," the report said. "The torture was so savage and widespread that many had their 'will broken' and collaborated with the army."

Some relatives of the disappeared said Sunday that knowing the truth of what happened a generation ago would not be enough.

"We're sure that very soon the special prosecutor will disappear because he didn't do anything, it was all just a scam," said Teresa Torres Vargas, who lost a son at the Tlatelolco massacre. "What we're hoping for now is that the case files aren't lost and that one day the guilty are punished."

*

MILOSEVIC TRIAL: Criticising the judicial approach at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic currently taking place in The Hague, a Dutch historian told a conference at Trinity College Dublin there was "no concrete evidence" linking the former Yugoslav president with the July 1995 massacre at Srebrenica in which an estimated 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed.

Prof Bob de Graaff, who co-authored a report on Srebrenica which brought down the Dutch government in 2002, was addressing a conference on crimes against humanitarian law.

Analysing the role of Mr Milosevic in the events leading up to Srebrenica, Prof de Graaff, who is attached to the University of Utrecht, compared the former leader to "the sorcerer's apprentice who had started a process that he could not stop".

Mr Milosevic, he argued, had no "de jure" control over the Bosnian Serb forces which carried out the massacre.

He was familiar with their intent, but the professor questioned whether he shared it.

One of the most high-profile and potentially far-reaching copyright cases seen in the English courts recently will start this morning, with two authors of a non-fiction book suing Random House, publisher of Dan Brown's best-seller The Da Vinci Code, over alleged infringement.

Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh are claiming that the American author's novel appropriated themes and ideas that they explored in a 1980s work called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.

These included the contention that Christ might have married Mary Magdalene and, after he survived the crucifixion, they travelled to France with their children. As a result, they could have had a direct bloodline, protected by the Knights Templar and other groups carrying on their work.

Another of the book's suggestions, similarly inflammatory, was that the Roman Catholic church might have tried to kill remnants of this dynasty during the Inquisition to maintain power through the apostolic, rather than hereditary, succession.

Two decades ago clergymen labelled the work "obnoxious" and "academically absurd", but the notoriety prompted brisk sales.

Dan Brown's book, on the other hand, is sold as fiction and has sold tens of millions of copies. The second of a trilogy, it deals with the efforts of a Harvard professor to solve the murder of a curator at the Louvre museum in Paris. This, in turn, leads on to claims that the Catholic Church has been involved in a plot to conceal the true story about Jesus and his bloodline.

Included in the novel is a character called Sir Leigh Teabing, a historian, whose surname is an anagram of "Baigent".

Lawyers say that legal cases involving claims of stolen ideas rather than more direct forms of copying are always likely to face an uphill task in the courts, but they believe the forthcoming battle could have widespread implications for the use of non-fiction research in other books.

"Cases involving copyright infringement are notoriously difficult to prove," says Antony Gold, head of contentious intellectual property at Eversheds.

"The claimant needs to show clear examples of similarities and in most cases has to narrow these down to specific incidents where an idea has been directly copied."

But he adds: "What makes this case interesting is that there is little clarity over the extent to which an author can use another person's research for either background or as a direct influence on a book."

Guy Tritton, an intellectual property specialist and barrister at Hogarth Chambers, agrees that The Da Vinci Code tussle will be "a very interesting case which falls in borderline territory of what is protected".

The case, he suggests, pits the rights of authors to write new books but utilise earlier research, against protections for non-fiction writers who do not want to see their labour and effort misappropriated.

Dan Brown has already triumphed in another legal battle in the New York courts, where a judge found that there was no "substantial similarity" between his book and two novels by another writer, Lewis Perdue.

But Mr Tritton points to an earlier English case, which has some parallels to the current situation, which did end in victory for the claimant alleging infringement.

In the 1980s, author James Herbert was successfully sued over his novel The Spear and its links to Trevor Ravenscroft's The Spear of Destiny.

In the current case, the High Court in London is expected to begin hearing opening arguments this morning.

However, Mr Justice Peter Smith is expected to take time to read the material involved before witnesses, including Dan Brown, give evidence.

If Random House were to lose the case, lawyers said it was likely some form of royalty sharing deal would have to be negotiated or imposed.

Through an agreement with the National Archives, Google Inc. has added historic video footage of such events as the Apollo moon landing and Japan's surrender in World War II to its internet search engine. Students, teachers, researchers, and others now can access these digital video clips free of charge through the Google Video search portal.

Students and teachers now have free online access to more than 100 historic films, including old World War II newsreels and NASA documentaries, thanks to an agreement between internet search giant Google Inc. and the National Archives.

Google has digitized the films through a pilot project announced Feb. 24 by United States Archivist Allen Weinstein and Google co-founder and President of Technology Sergey Brin. The non-exclusive agreement will allow scholars, researchers, and the general public to access a diverse collection of historic movies, documentaries, and other films from the National Archives via Google Video, as well as the National Archives web site.

"This is an important step for the National Archives to achieve its goal of becoming an archive without walls," Weinstein said. "Our new strategic plan emphasizes the importance of providing access to records anytime, anywhere. & For the first time, the public will be able to view this collection of rare and unusual films on the internet."

Added Brin: "Today, we've begun to make the extraordinary historic films of the National Archives available to the world for the first time online. Students and researchers, whether in San Francisco or Bangladesh, can watch remarkable video such as World War II newsreels and the story of Apollo 11--the historic first landing on the moon."

The pilot program features 103 films from the audiovisual collections preserved at the Archives. Highlights of the project include:

# The earliest film preserved in the National Archives holdings, "Carmencita: Spanish Dance," by Thomas Armat, an 1894 film featuring the famous Spanish Gypsy dancer;

# A representative selection of United States government newsreels from 1941-1945, documenting World War II;

# A sampling of documentaries produced by NASA on the history of the spaceflight program; and

# Motion picture films, primarily from the 1930s, that document the history and establishment of a nationwide system of national and state parks--including early footage of modern Native American activities, Boulder Dam, documentation of water and wind erosion, Civilian Conservation Corps workers, and the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority. In addition, a 1970 film documents the expansion of recreational programs for inner-city youth across the nation.

Google said it is exploring the possibility of expanding the project to include more video. The company also said it wants to make the Archives' extensive textual holdings available via the web, too.

Descendants of a Scottish clan have launched a bid to reclaim ownership of a tiny island in Loch Lomond.

The Clan MacFarlane Society is worried about the condition of Island I Vow between Tarbet and Ardlui, which was once an ancestral stronghold.

It said the island, which is barely the size of a football pitch, was suffering at the hands of vandals.

But a couple from Bo'ness, who are also Macfarlanes, believe they have the best claim on the island.

They claimed ownership of the island several years ago using a legal process for land with no official owner, and they do not want the Clan MacFarlane Society to have it.

Instead, they are considering offering it to a public body such as the National Trust for Scotland.

Choked in ivy, its balconies and pillars crumbling, the once-imposing villa looks as if it were abandoned years ago. A curtain twitches. A dark-haired woman wearing sunglasses peers out before whipping it back.

She lives in just two rooms of the spacious property and one of those has a hole in the ceiling. The others are uninhabitable owing to damp, mold and broken windows.
There has been no heating for 25 years. Water has to be heated on a stove.
Many elderly residents of Belgrade, Serbia-Montenegro, in straitened circumstances share a similar fate. But this is the home of the widow of the former Yugoslavia's communist dictator, Josip Broz Tito.
Jovanka Broz, 81, was discovered living in penury after her sister, Nada, wrote to newspapers to complain of the "disgraceful way" the former first lady was "forced to live."
"Little better than a bag lady" was the headline in one newspaper, amazed to discover that she was still alive.
"This lady used to have such high standards, and now everything around her is rotting, even her wallpaper," said Ljubica Bauk, who was Mrs. Broz's personal maid for 20 years. She now lives in a cold one-room apartment next to her former mistress's rusting entrance gate.
Tito's widow reportedly has three bodyguards supplied by the Interior Ministry and a gardener. But they are nowhere to be seen. The garden is a mess of mud and weeds. The Serbian minister of minorities and human rights, Rasim Ljajic, has now taken up her case, forced to act after Macedonian businessmen appeared at her door offering to help.

SELMA, ALA. - The Museum of Slavery and Civil Rights plans to offer a new frontier in "experiential tourism" this spring: a day as a slave. "In order to heal, we must embrace the history of slavery here in America," said Afriye We-kandodis, the museum's director.

Not everyone is so excited. George Swift steers visitors to the National Voting Rights Museum, but he's not as enthusiastic about its sister attraction.

"Some things are better left in the past," he said.

We-kandodis has designed a tour that takes visitors from Africa, through the Middle Passage, to slavery and finally to freedom.

During the tour, guests are forced to crawl through darkened passages and mount an auction block, with We-kandodis barking commands and harassment, liberally using the N-word. She divides groups against one another and separates families.

Some participants are nonchalant at first. We-kandodis recalls a young Japanese tourist who broke into a mocking hip-hop imitation before the tour began. By the end of the tour, he was apologetic and in tears.

Joann Bland, executive director of the National Voting Rights Museum, is well aware that some in Selma would rather the slavery museum go away.

A sports writer for the USA Today newspaper is wondering; why has broadcast network NBC neglected any mention of the incredibly famous Shroud of Turin, despite the 2006 Olympics being held in its front yard.

In the U.S., NBC has exclusive broadcast rights to the games, making it the primary source for most American’s event coverage.

Michael McCarthy, writing in a column last week, said that in the days of Olympic coverage so far, “NBC (with the exception of [The Today Show]) has yet to mention the Shroud of Turin.”

“Whether you venerate the Shroud as the actual burial cloth of a crucified Jesus of Nazareth or dismiss it as a clever medieval forgery,” he pointed out, “it's odd NBC has ignored one of world's most mysterious, and controversial, religious artifacts.”

William Donohue, President of the New York-based Catholic League for religious and civil liberties, recently called the media neglect "hypocritical", and charged NBC with deliberately avoiding religion.

"If you asked the average American to name something about Turin, Italy, they'd name the Shroud," Donohue said. "It's like having the Olympics in Fort Knox and not mentioning gold.”

Some think that the lack of mention is related to recent Islamic violence over Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed. They say that with the cloud of religious controversy casting a shadow over world media, NBC has sought to avoid any mention of religion whatsoever.

However, NBC’s David Neil, executive producer for the network’s Olympic coverage, said that the station is working on a Shroud feature but, up to now, have been more concerned about giving full coverage to the events--and not getting bogged down in feature stories.

Chinese archaeologists said that parts of an instrument to make fire, dating back to 8,000 years ago, have been found in east China's Zhejiang Province.

The relics, made of bones and wood, were discovered at the Kuahuqiao Relics Site in Xiaoshan, Zhejiang Province, according to Qianjiang Evening News.

Liu Zhiqing, a retired professor from Zhejiang University, was quoted by the newspaper as saying that the relics were part of an instrument to drill wood to get fire.

Some relics in strange shapes were unearthed at the Kuahuqiao Relics Site, which have attracted Chinese archaeologists to investigate their usage.

After studying the relics housed in Xiaoshan Museum, Liu said "Several pieces of the relics were the handle, body and bit of an ancient fire-making drill."

"There should have been a bow to draw the drill to rotate," said Liu.

His opinion was shared by Shi Jianong, curator of Xiaoshan Museum, and Shen Zhongrui, another professor with Zhejiang University, according to the newspaper.

Archaeologists at the Fortress of Louisbourg are scrambling to learn more about a 250-year-old wall exposed in a recent storm.

The storm surge laid open an old defence wall and other structures long thought to have been destroyed, and there are fears another storm could destroy them.

"This was originally built in the 1730s," said archeologist Rebecca Duggan, pointing to a newly exposed wall. "The interesting thing is we thought most of this wall had long eroded."

The fortress was built by France as a defence against the English. Fifty metres of the original French settlement is now exposed, including a house foundation and burial plot.