A once-secret archive, assembled by a Pentagon task force in the early 1970s, that shows that confirmed atrocities by U.S. forces in Vietnam were more extensive than was previously known.

The documents detail 320 alleged incidents that were substantiated by Army investigators — not including the most notorious U.S. atrocity, the 1968 My Lai massacre.

Though not a complete accounting of Vietnam war crimes, the archive is the largest such collection to surface to date. About 9,000 pages, it includes investigative files, sworn statements by witnesses and status reports for top military brass.

The records describe recurrent attacks on ordinary Vietnamese — families in their homes, farmers in rice paddies, teenagers out fishing. Hundreds of soldiers, in interviews with investigators and letters to commanders, described a violent minority who murdered, raped and tortured with impunity.

Abuses were not confined to a few rogue units, a Times review of the files found. They were uncovered in every Army division that operated in Vietnam.

Retired Brig. Gen. John H. Johns, a Vietnam veteran who served on the task force, says he once supported keeping the records secret but now believes they deserve wide attention in light of alleged attacks on civilians and abuse of prisoners in Iraq.

"We can't change current practices unless we acknowledge the past," says Johns, 78.

Among the substantiated cases in the archive:

• Seven massacres from 1967 through 1971 in which at least 137 civilians died.

• Seventy-eight other attacks on noncombatants in which at least 57 were killed, 56 wounded and 15 sexually assaulted.

• One hundred forty-one instances in which U.S. soldiers tortured civilian detainees or prisoners of war with fists, sticks, bats, water or electric shock.

Investigators determined that evidence against 203 soldiers accused of harming Vietnamese civilians or prisoners was strong enough to warrant formal charges. These "founded" cases were referred to the soldiers' superiors for action.

Ultimately, 57 of them were court-martialed and just 23 convicted, the records show.

Fourteen received prison sentences ranging from six months to 20 years, but most won significant reductions on appeal. The stiffest sentence went to a military intelligence interrogator convicted of committing indecent acts on a 13-year-old girl in an interrogation hut in 1967.
He served seven months of a 20-year term, the records show.

Many substantiated cases were closed with a letter of reprimand, a fine or, in more than half the cases, no action at all.

There was little interest in prosecuting Vietnam war crimes, says Steven Chucala, who in the early 1970s was legal advisor to the commanding officer of the Army's Criminal Investigation Division. He says he disagreed with the attitude but understood it.

James Cameron, the director of Titanic, is the executive producer of a new documentary that claims to have uncovered evidence confirming one of the most dramatic episodes in the Old Testament: the parting of the Red Sea and the Jewish exodus from Egypt.

In The Exodus Decoded, a 90-minute documentary to be shown in the US this month, Cameron and Canadian producer Simcha Jacobovici claim a volcanic eruption on the Greek island of Santorini triggered a chain of catastrophes recorded in the Bible as the 10 plagues God visited on Egypt for enslaving the Jews.

Cameron believes the parting of the Red Sea may have been a tsunami that destroyed the pharaoh's army as it pursued the escaping Jews. The documentary claims the episode occurred not at the Red Sea but at the smaller Sea of Reeds, a marshy area at the northern end of the Gulf of Suez.

Despite the obvious reference in the $5.2 million documentary's title to Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, Cameron is not suggesting any conspiracy in the Bible. He says he is confirming that the Bible is correct, despite the conclusions of many archeologists and Jewish historians that the exodus never occurred.

''Whether it's a completely mythic story that's specific to the Judaeo-Christian religion, or whether it's something that really happened, knowing there was a physical event that underlies that is fascinating,'' Cameron said.

Jewish scholars have reluctantly concluded that an episode central to their faith -- commemorated each year at Passover -- may never have taken place.

Rabbi David Wolpe, head of one of the US's biggest Jewish congregations, sparked a furore five years ago when he admitted that ''the way the Bible describes the exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all''.

Yet Cameron and Jacobovici claim to have unearthed more than a dozen archeological relics suggesting the exodus took place three centuries earlier than Bible scholars estimate.

Adopting Brown's revisionist techniques of reinterpreting artwork at museums in Luxor, Cairo, Athens and elsewhere, Jacobovici dates the exodus to about 1500BC.

That was about the time, some geologists believe, when the Santorini volcano, 650km north of Egypt, erupted. Historians have long speculated that the 10 plagues suffered by Egypt were linked in a ''domino theory'' of natural events.

The documentary's website argues that a series of earthquakes ''destabilised the entire Nile Delta system and resulted in part of the delta sliding off the African continental shelf''. This would have raised the level of land around the Sea of Reeds, believed to have been saltwater swamps.

''In other words, the sea parted,'' the website says. ''Water would have cascaded from higher ground to lower ground ... creating dry land on which the Israelites could cross. This event would also have caused an enormous 'backsplash' of water, a veritable tsunami. If the waves went a mere 12km inland they would have engulfed the Egyptian army.''

The Exodus producers believe the waters were turned red by chemicals released by underwater tremors. Something similar happened to lakes in Cameroon in 1986. If the waters were poisoned, amphibians would hop ashore, producing the biblical plague of frogs. When the frogs died, insects would breed on their rotting corpses leading to plagues of locusts, fleas and lice.

They, in turn, would spread disease to humans (the plague of boils) and animals (the plague of dying livestock). Crops would have been threatened, forcing the storage of grain, which might have then turned mouldy. Contaminated food might account for the plague of deaths among first-born Egyptian males. Weather conditions caused by the eruption might also have caused the plagues of hailstorms and darkness.

Jacobovici said scholars might ''scoff at my evidence ... but they can't just dismiss it''. If The Da Vinci Code is any guide, the Exodus producers will be scoffed at all the way to the bank.

After four weeks of excavation at the Knowe o' Skea in Westray, archaeologists Graeme Wilson and Hazel Moore can boast a remarkable statistic.

The burials they have unearthed at the Berstness site make of an incredible 90 per cent of the known Iron Age remains found in Scotland to date.

And this year, the bodies are still turning up.

Prior to the start of work in 2000, Iron Age burials were rare - in the whole of Scotland, let alone Orkney.

The thumbnail-sized bone fragments are engraved with parallel lines and match similar artefacts uncovered in the same area during the 19th century. They were carved by hunter-gatherers as they slowly made their way north in pursuit of moving populations of mammoth and reindeer 25-30,000 years ago.

The unusual find was made by a Cambridge scholar, Becky Farbstein, who has been working at Predmosti in north Moravia, in the Czech Republic. The excavation team comprises archaeologists from both the University of Cambridge and the Czech Republic.

Experts are, however, still not sure what significance the markings had and are trying to build up a collection to interpret their meaning. So far such finds have been few and far between.

“There has not been much in the way of decorated objects found at this site for a very long time,” Miss Farbstein said. “They are very similar in design to other decorations that were found a century ago. The designs are pretty enigmatic and understanding their meaning is still a problem. But for that reason any addition to the amount of art we have is valuable as it will enable us to piece that meaning together.”

TEHRAN -- Road construction and railroad development are threatening the 6000-year-old Yaqut-Tappeh mound near Behshahr in Iran’s northern province of Mazandaran, the Persian service of CHN reported on Sunday.

A team of archaeologists recently began excavations at Yaqut-Tappeh to save artifacts from sections of the site which will be buried under the road being constructed for Amirabad Port.

Railroad construction previously destroyed over 3000 square meters of the site 70 years ago.

“However, some parts of the mound are still intact. The team has excavated the site and found evidence from the Chalcolithic period, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age,” team director Ali Mahforuzi said.

“The team has also unearthed a 40-centimeter black stratum, which is believed to be sediment brought by a flood over 30,000 years ago. We have discovered three graves dating back to the Iron Age. One of the graves is intact,” he added.

Patterson , Stanislaus County -- As nearby hillsides were covered with orange flames and thick black smoke, two archaeologists stared with wonder -- not up at the raging forest fire but down at three prehistoric stone grinding tools they had just discovered on the ground.

"Look at these artifacts -- they are as well preserved as anything you could ever find," archaeologist Richard Jenkins said as he examined a mortar stone with a perfectly rounded indentation. "This whole settlement is in great shape. It's survived for hundreds of years. Hopefully it will make it through this fire without major damage."

As about 2,000 of their colleagues at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection were fighting the Canyon fire all last week, Jenkins and Chuck Whatford searched the fire scene in the rugged mountains east of San Jose looking for archaeological sites worth documenting and -- if possible -- saving.

Jenkins and Whatford are two of six CDF archaeologists who document prehistoric and historic sites for firefighters to be aware of when fighting a wildland fire. On Friday, they used pink tape to warn their colleagues about three archaeological sites that were directly in the path of the Canyon fire.

ACTOR Mel Gibson was once involved in providing support for a friend who was member of a far-right group in Australia known for its antisemitic views, according to newspaper reports.

The actor, who last week allegedly harangued police with an antisemitic outburst after being arrested on suspicion of drunk driving California, was said to have campaigned for Robin Taylor, a member of the Australian League of Rights, who stood unsuccessfully for a local government seat in northern Victoria in 1987.

A former director of the group, which denies that the Holocaust occurred, claimed in the Melbourne-based Sunday Herald Sun that Gibson and his father, Hutton, were interested in the extremist group's ideas.

Charles Pinwall said: "They were never members of the league, no. But we never really recruited members, just support. [Gibson and his father] were interested in some of our ideas.

he weathered skull in Chris Stojanowski's luggage passed through Atlanta's airport security without turning a single head.

As cold cases go, the cranium in his custom-made carry-on case was a classic. A long time ago, someone lost his head --- this particular head --- near present-day Darien, on the Georgia coast.

Now Stojanowski, a bioarchaeologist at Arizona State University's new School of Human Evolution and Social Change, wants to find out more about the brittle skull which, until recently, was gathering dust in a Georgia laboratory.

The Rev. Conrad Harkins is curious, too. For more than a decade, he has worked tirelessly to see that five Spanish missionaries killed by Indians on the Georgia coast in 1597 are recognized by the Roman Catholic Church as martyrs and, perhaps in time, as saints.

Are these the relics of a prospective saint, or just the bones of another sinner? Time --- along with some forensic investigation, a little DNA analysis and some luck --- may tell.

A half-century after the skull was unearthed at the site of a former Spanish mission near Darien, and 20 years after the Diocese of Savannah proposed beatification for the "Georgia martyrs," science and religion have found a common bond in their curiosity about the weathered remains.

"Without any living relatives, there is little chance of being very definitive about the identity," says Stojanowski. "But there are some tests that can narrow the possibilities."

That prospect has persuaded Harkins, historian at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, and the official "vice postulator" for the Cause of the Georgia Martyrs, to spend a little of the faithful's money on a scientific long shot.

"The case for beatification of the Georgia martyrs is a historical one, and it will be accepted or rejected by the Vatican on the basis of the historical record," Harkins says.

The portfolio of Spanish records and the reports of Franciscan friars documenting the missionaries' martyrdom --- compiled, notarized and copied in triplicate --- is now ready for submission to a Vatican tribunal this year.

Physical remains are not required for beatification. But the unsubstantiated suggestion by an archaeologist in the 1950s that the skull might be that of one of the missionaries, Pedro de Corpa, is enough to pique Harkins' curiosity.

The curious thread that now ties science, history and religion reaches back to 1597 and a violent clash of cultures between the Franciscan missionaries on the Georgia coast and the Guale Indians they ministered to. At issue was the Guale custom of bigamy: de Corpa insisted that Church would not condone the decision by the local chief's eldest son, Juanillo, to take a second wife.

An angry Juanillo and a band of warriors attacked de Corpa at his morning prayers, beat him to death and then beheaded him, placing his head on a pike. Spanish military sources investigating later reported that during the next few days, the Indians killed four other missionaries.

The remains of three missionaries were retrieved after their deaths, but the bodies of de Corpa and another, Francisco de Verascola, who was scalped, were never recovered.

There the story might have ended, but for archaeologist Sheila Caldwell.

In the early 1950s, while excavating the state-owned Fort King George historical site --- then believed to be the site of the Guale village where de Corpa died --- she found the skull in question in a native trash pit. She promptly decided that it must be the skull of the beheaded Franciscan friar.

Moved by the story of the slain missionaries and by renewed public interest in Georgia's mission period, the bishop of Savannah, Raymond Lassard, launched the "cause of beatification" of the "martyrs for marriage" in 1984, a step that started the five missionaries on the Church's long and arduous road to sainthood.

"It's not enough to simply prove that they were killed, you have to prove that they died for the faith," explains Harkins, who has championed the cause.

Stojanowski quickly concluded that the skull was that of an adult male, of an age compatible with either of the two missing friars, who were in their 30s when they died. Anatomically, it also didn't appear to be Native American.

As in any crime scene investigation, there are also some confounding factors.

"All of the physical evidence points to de Corpa, but the location is more suggestive of de Verascola," Stojanowski says.

It could, of course, be neither.

And that's why Stojanowski recently flew to Atlanta to take custody of object FKG-121 --- partial cranium, property of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources --- and return with it in his carry-on luggage to his Tempe, Ariz., laboratory.

Over the next year, he hopes to more accurately date the skull, perform a number of chemical analyses of the bone that may suggest the person's diet and, perhaps --- if donor contributions will support the expense --- recover enough DNA to suggest its ancestral affiliation.

As the owner of FKG-121, the state of Georgia must approve each test in advance.

"Archaeology is, at its heart, about solving mysteries, and we certainly have one here," says Georgia State Archaeologist Dave Crass, who approved the loan of the skull for research.

Harkins' principal objective, of course, is to see that the missionaries get recognized by the Church as true martyrs. The next step, elevation to sainthood, will require proof, in the Church's eyes, of at least one miracle in their names.

Harkins' Web site, www.georgiamartyrs.org, invites those who believe they have "received from God an extraordinary favor though the intercession" of the martyrs to file a concise report.

But miracles aside, Harkins sees opportunity in another cause --- to stir public interest in a forgotten chapter of American history whose legacy is slowly being rediscovered in the archaeological record and in the dusty archives of America's first colonial power.

"I'm afraid most Americans have no appreciation for this part of our history," he says, "and many of them, sadly, don't know about it at all."

Four people in England, back in 1953, gazed at the mysterious image called Photo 51. It wasn't much--a grainy picture showing a black X. But three of these people won the Nobel Prize for figuring out what the photo really showed--the shape of DNA, the basic unit of life on Earth. The discovery brought fame and fortune to scientists James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins. The fourth, the one who actually made the picture, was left out.

Her name was Rosalind Franklin. "She should have been up there," says Mary Ellen Bowden, a historian at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia. "If her images hadn't been there, the others couldn't have come up with the structure." One reason Franklin was missing was that she had died of cancer four years before the Nobel decision, and it can't be awarded after death. But there is a growing suspicion among scholars that Franklin was not only robbed of her life by disease but robbed of credit by her competitors. She, as much as the men around her, was first in the race to understand DNA.

Scientists knew, in the 1940s, that DNA was the thing carrying hereditary information from an organism to its descendants. But because it was too small to see directly, they had no idea how the molecule performed this feat.

So at Cambridge University in the 1950s, Watson and Crick went at it indirectly, by making models; they cut up shapes of DNA's constituents and tried to piece them together. Meanwhile, at King's College in London, Franklin and Wilkins shined X-rays at the molecule. The rays produced patterns reflecting the shape.

But Wilkins and Franklin's relationship was a lot rockier than the celebrated teamwork of Watson and Crick. Wilkins thought Franklin was hired to be his assistant. But the college actually brought her on to take over the DNA imaging project.

Which is what she did, producing X-ray pictures that, among other things, told Watson and Crick that one of their early models was inside out. And she was not shy about saying so. That antagonized Watson, who lambasted her in his 1968 book, The Double Helix: "Mere inspection suggested that she would not easily bend. By choice she did not emphasize her feminine qualities. ... Clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place." (Other colleagues remember her as a supportive and highly skillful scientist.)

As Franklin's rivals, Watson and Wilkins had much to gain by cutting her out of the clubby little group of researchers, says science historian Pnina Abir-Am of Brandeis University. Exclusion was made easy by her gender--King's banned women from important dining rooms. And Wilkins grew closer to Watson. Close enough to show to Watson, casually, Franklin's Photo 51. "My mouth fell open," Watson wrote. That X shape was in fact a double helix, two strands wrapped around one another but running in opposite directions. This made it a biological copying machine, able to transmit mirror images of information from one cell to a daughter cell, from a parent to a child.

Watson and Crick, Wilkins, and Franklin published separate papers describing this code of life in the same 1953 issue of Nature. Franklin went on to study viruses, and then took sick, and in 1962 the others took to the Nobel podium. Wilkins gave a speech in which he thanked 13 colleagues by name before he mentioned Franklin. Watson wrote his book deriding her. Crick wrote in 1974 that "Franklin was only two steps away from the solution."

No, says Abir-Am: Franklin was the solution. "She contributed more than any other player to solving the structure of DNA. She must be considered a codiscoverer." Lynne Osman Elkin, a biographer of Franklin, agrees, saying that Franklin's notebooks show she was on to the double helix--a claim backed up by Aaron Klug, who worked with Franklin on viruses and later won a Nobel Prize himself. Once described as the "Dark Lady of DNA," Franklin is finally coming into the light.

The Battle of Flamborough Head, as it came to be called, entered sailing history as one of the most epic single-ship actions ever, and made Jones a celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic. The Bonhomme Richard and its opponent, the HMS Serapis, each lost half its crew in a battle so improbably fearsome it would seem lifted from a Patrick O'Brian novel. For more than an hour, the two ships fought hull-to-hull, firing and on fire at the same time. Bound together by grappling hooks and fallen masts, the ships were so close that the Jones' crew could hack at the long ramrods British gunners wielded to reload their cannon.

Eventually the Serapis' heavier guns inflicted so much damage that their cannon balls began to fly straight through Jones' ship, touching nothing. When two of his junior officers tried to surrender, believing their captain dead and their ship lost, an enraged Jones leveled a pistol at one and pulled the trigger. Then, when the gun misfired, he threw it at the fleeing pair, breaking one's skull.

Now an attempt is underway to literally resurrect Jones' ship and its place in history. Since mid-July, an expedition launched from the Avery Point campus of the University of Connecticut in Groton has been searching the North Sea for the wreck of the Bonhomme Richard. Already sinking under its still fighting crew, it went down the next day, abandoned by Jones in favor of the captured Serapis.

The day before he left for England, the chief organizer of the hunt, Ret. Navy Capt. John ``Jack'' Ringelberg, turned on his office computer and punched up a map of the approximate search location. It is off Flamborough Head in water about 200 feet deep. The map showed a grid of overlapping rectangles plotted by computer from first-hand battle reports and estimates of where the Bonhomme Richard might have drifted in the 36 hours before it sank.

``History says it should be there. The drift area says it should be there. And the weather and tides say it should be there,'' Ringelberg said, moving a finger from one rectangle to another. The darkened area where they intersected formed the search area.

``We're looking at 50 square miles,'' he said. ``My hope is to end up with one to three high probability targets.''

Ringelberg spoke with a kind of finger-crossed excitement. Finding a 227-year-old rotted wooden wreck beneath the rough North Sea in an area littered with centuries of wrecks isn't easy. Bottom sands shift with every storm, and the search season is limited to a few weeks. ``If you're not out there in July and August, you're going to get beat to death,'' he said.

With luck, the instruments dragged by a slow moving search vessel -- such as magnetometers that can detect iron relics, like cannon -- will identify locations to explore close up next summer.

Ringelberg didn't want to give away the precise search area because he and his collaborators have competition. The adventure novelist Clive Cussler, who's augmented his writing by mounting dozens of lost ship expeditions, has been looking for Jones' ship for years. Initially, Ringelberg said, ``Cussler went to the last known site of the battle and drifted for 36 hours. His last search was in an area slightly east of ours. He's already done 600 square miles.''

Ringelberg took pains to emphasize the collaborative spirit of the U.S. search. His large team of partners and sponsors includes Peter Reaveley, an independent historian who once advised Cussler and is considered the world's leading authority on the Battle of Flamborough Head. Another is Robert Neyland, the director of underwater archaeology for the U.S. Navy Historical Center in Annapolis.

Ringelberg himself began his 16-year Navy career as a diver and once commanded the Navy's experimental diving team. Now a very fit 67, he came to New England in 1998 to run a high-tech naval and salvage engineering business, JMS Inc., founded by one of his former executive officers. A recent job was doing a stability analysis of the Lake George tour boat that capsized last year, drowning 20 people.

Headquartered at Avery Point, the company also operates a commercial diving school in Seattle (where Robert DeNiro and Cuba Gooding Jr. went for coaching for their roles in the movie ``Men of Honor'' about the Navy's first black diver), and has a non-profit arm, the Ocean Technology Foundation.

Ringelberg doubles as president of the foundation, whose mission is to foster marine studies and education. It took on the Bonhomme Richard project after Ringelberg got a call almost two years ago from an old friend, the naval muralist, Dean Mosher. Mosher was looking for technical help with a proposed movie about the Battle of Flamborough Head. But wanting to know more, Ringelberg contacted Reaveley and learned that finding the Bonhomme Richard might be possible.

In Ringelberg's opinion, recovering whatever remains of the wreck would be a greater discovery than the Titanic. ``The Titanic was a commercial vessel that got hit by an iceberg. Sure it got a lot of publicity,'' he said. ``But the analogy here [with the Richard] is, whatever you think of Iraq, we took the war to the enemy. The reason for being there was to attack the enemy in their own towns. The English didn't know whether there was another 100 ships behind him.''

Jones' orders were to terrorize the English. After a first foray in 1778 in a smaller ship, the 20-gun Ranger, the English press painted Jones as a pirate. The British public, skeptical of the war, feared that his raids in the summer of 1779 were in reprisal for British attacks that July on the Connecticut towns of Fairfield and Norwalk.

Jones, then 32, was once described by President John Adams as ``the most ambitious and intriguing officer in the American Navy'' and also ``leprous with vanity.'' The son of a master gardener on a Scottish estate, originally named John Paul, he had gone to sea at 13. He crossed the Atlantic on merchant ships and slave ships before getting his own command. In late 1773, after killing a rebellious crew member, he fled to America, changed his name to John Paul Jones, and cultivated himself as a gentleman. He began seeking a Navy commission soon after the battles of Lexington and Concord, hoping for glory.

His mission aboard the Bonhomme Richard was two-fold. He was to lead a small squadron harassing the Irish and English coasts and act as a diversion for a planned invasion of England by a combined French and Spanish fleet. But epidemics of smallpox and typhus aborted the invasion, so Jones continued his raids on his own.

He captured merchant ships and on Sept. 14 launched an assault on Leith, the main port of Edinburgh, only to be repelled by a sudden gale. On the 23rd, he sighted a vast convoy carrying naval supplies from Scandinavia guarded by just two British ships, the 44-gun Serapis and the smaller Countess of Scarborough. At 5 p.m. he ordered his crews to prepare for battle.

One ship in his squadron chased the Countess of Scarborough. But the others -- including the largest, a 36-gun American frigate, the Alliance, commanded by a French officer -- did not follow the Bonhomme Richard toward the Serapis.

The Richard was a converted merchantman. It had a larger crew than the Serapis, including about 100 Americans released in a prisoner exchange, and it carried almost as many cannon. But the heaviest were six old guns carried below the main deck. On the second broadside, fired about 7:15 p.m., at least one of the heavy guns burst. The explosion ripped a gaping hole in the Richard's starboard side and Jones ordered the remaining big cannon abandoned.

At 7:30 the Serapis, with a better-trained crew, crossed the Richard's stern, firing three broadsides that killed 22 marines. Already the Richard was leaking below the waterline. At 8 p.m. a light wind died to almost nothing, and the two ships collided when the Serapis tried to cross the Richard's bow for another raking broadside. The ships separated, then collided again.

This time Jones lashed them fast together, the Serapis' bow grinding against the Richard's stern. As the battle progressed, marksmen in the Richard's mast tops drove the English off their exposed main deck. But the Serapis gun crews protected below deck continued to batter the Richard, so that by 9 p.m. the Richard had only three small cannon left.

Jones was at one of them, directing fire at the Serapis' main mast, when his carpenter and gunner's mate, who'd seen the devastation below deck, tried to strike the Richard's flag, lowering it to signal surrender. Jones turned from his cannon to stop them. Soon after he heard the Serapis' captain shout if he wanted to give up the battle.

Decades later, one of Jones' lieutenants would tell a biographer that his captain replied, ``I have not yet begun to fight.'' But what he probably said was something like, ``I may sink, but I'll be damned if I strike.'' In his own report, written several days later, Jones only said he ``answered in the most determined negative'' and that the battle then resumed with ``double fury.''

It continued for another hour, growing more incredible. Twice the Alliance appeared out of nowhere to fire broadsides of grapeshot -- at both ships. Somebody released English prisoners trapped deep inside the sinking Richard to save them from drowning. Instead of joining the fight, the prisoners, who had been taken in earlier actions, manned the Richard's pumps to keep it afloat.

The end came suddenly, around 10:15, when a sailor crawled out on one of the Richard's yardarms with a bucket of grenades. He began dropping them toward a half-open hatch on the Serapis. One bounced through and a series of explosions followed. The grenade ignited powder cartridges piled near the English cannon, setting off a flash fire. At almost the same time, the Serapis' splintered main mast toppled.

After trying to save the Bonhomme Richard, Jones escaped on the re-rigged Serapis, eluding British pursuers on his way to a neutral port in Holland. He'd always sought glory and he got it. King Louis XVI gave him a sword to commemorate his victory, and he became the toast of Paris, where in the fashion of the time, he had many mistresses. Thomas Jefferson would keep a bust of Jones alongside those of Franklin, Lafayette and Washington.

But the rest of his life was mostly frustration. The Revolution ended before he saw any more real action, and the new nation had no money for a navy. In 1788, he was loaned to Catherine the Great of Russia to lead her Black Sea fleet in a war against Turks. He won a decisive victory, but left Russia in disgrace after being caught, or entrapped, in a sex scandal involving a young prostitute.

He died alone in Paris in July 1792, where his body, preserved in alcohol, was buried in a lead-lined coffin. More than a century later, in 1905, the coffin was dug up and sent to the U.S. in great pomp and circumstance. President Teddy Roosevelt, an advocate of naval power, presided at Jones' reburial beneath the U.S. Navel Academy Chapel. ``Every officer should know by heart the deeds of John Paul Jones,'' Roosevelt said.

Jones, still known as the father of the U.S. Navy, was already immortal. Herman Melville in one of his later novels placed his fictional hero, Israel Potter, aboard the Bonhomme Richard at the Battle of Flamborough Head and wrote these words:

``Intrepid, unprincipled, reckless, predatory, with boundless ambition, civilized in externals but savage at heart, America is, or may yet be, the Paul Jones of nations.''

As of last week, this summer's search was showing promise. Ringelberg, back in Groton, said the data gathered was creating an ``underwater mosaic'' that will be analyzed over the winter.

``We got two targets we made additional passes over,'' he said. ``These are `new wrecks,' for want of a better word, that no one's found before.''

Melissa Ryan, the Ocean Technology Foundation's project director, reported from England that the North Sea the first week was extraordinarily calm. The search vessel had been able to cover as many as 10 square kilometers a day.

``We start in a corner and work back and forth. It's like mowing your lawn in stages, so you get overlap,'' she said.

The magnetometers give continuous readings analogous to a heart-beat line and the side scan sonar is so sensitive it makes small ridges in the sand look like mountains. A bulge in the sea bed with a strong magnetic field could be the Bonhomme Richard. Besides cannon, it carried tons of iron ballast.

A biologist, Ryan was spending a lot of time on land, lecturing local groups and briefing reporters. Last week she was entertaining a History Channel crew, and expecting the search to extend to the middle of the month.

``The only thing I knew when I started was [John Paul Jones] said, `I have not yet begun to fight.' I didn't know what the Bonhomme Richard was. I didn't know why he said it,'' Ryan said.

IBM delivered the first disk drive 50 years ago. It was about the size of two refrigerators and weighed a ton.

If there's a bottle of vintage champagne you've been saving, next month is the time to pop it open: it's the 50th anniversary of hard-disk storage. Don't laugh. On Sept. 13, 1956, IBM shipped the first unit of the RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) and set in motion a process that would change the way we live.

The RAMAC, designed in Big Blue's San Jose, Calif., research center, is the ultimate ancestor of that 1.8-inch drive that holds 7,500 songs inside your pocket-size $299 iPod. Of course, the RAMAC would have made a lousy music player. The drive weighed a full ton, and to lease it you'd pay about $250,000 a year in today's dollars. Since it required a separate air compressor to protect the two moving "heads" that read and wrote information, it was noisy. The total amount of information stored on its 50 spinning iron-oxide-coated disks—each of them a pizza-size 24 inches—was 5 megabytes. That's not quite enough to hold two MP3 copies of Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog."

I (anti-immigrant “Palmer Raids”); World War II (internment of Japanese Americans); and the Vietnam War (COINTELPRO); the risks to our citizens’ rights today are potentially more grave, as the war on terror has no specific end point. - are quite serious. However, the current Majority Party has shown little inclination to engage in basic oversight, let alone question the Administration directly. The media, though showing some signs of aggressiveness as of late, is increasingly concentrated and all too often unwilling to risk the enmity or legal challenge from the party in charge. At the same time, unlike previous threats to civil liberties posed by the Civil War (suspension of habeas corpus and eviction of the Jews from portions of the Southern States); World War - even if presidential pardons ultimately prevented a full measure of justice.

The situation we find ourselves in today under the administration of George W. Bush is systemically different. The alleged acts of wrongdoing my staff has documented- which include making misleading statements about the decision to go to war; manipulating intelligence; facilitating and countenancing torture; using classified information to out a CIA agent; and violating federal surveillance and privacy laws Scandals such as Watergate and Iran-Contra are widely considered to be constitutional crises. They were in the sense that the executive branch was acting in violation of the law and in tension with the Majority Party in the Congress. But the system of checks and balances put in place by the founding fathers worked, the abuses were investigated, and actions were taken

The history wars are about to be reignited, thanks to a paper that argues that Australian history in schools focuses "excessively" on topics such as the Vietnam War and the Whitlam government while ignoring issues such as economic development.

The paper, commissioned by the Federal Government for consideration at a national Australian history summit this month, also stresses the need to tackle the common perception that "Australian history is crap … 'cause nothing happened"'.

Its author, Gregory Melleuish, says school is the only significant contact most people have with the study of history. But he argues there is a tendency for Australian history lessons to "exclude or marginalise" many significant elements.

"These include economic development issues, middle-Australia, people of religious belief and the churches," Associate Professor Melleuish says in the paper, which outlines what he believes students should be taught by the end of year 10.

"It is necessary that a place be made for these elements."

Education Minister Julie Bishop announced the summit last month, claiming that not enough students were learning Australian history, there was too much political bias and that not enough pivotal facts and dates were being taught.

She said it was essential that a structured, narrative approach was taken and every child should know when and why James Cook sailed along the east coast of Australia.

Earlier this year, Prime Minister John Howard waded into the history wars, using his Australia Day speech to urge "root and branch renewal of the teaching of Australian history".

In the past, Professor Melleuish, associate professor of history and politics at the University of Wollongong, has criticised cultural studies at universities, claiming students spent "three or even four years studying Barbie dolls, shopping malls and gender identities".

Mr Howard quoted him in his Australia Day speech, saying: "We've moved on from a time when multiculturalism, in the words of historian Gregory Melleuish, came to be associated with 'the transformation of Australia from a bad old Australia that was xenophobic, racist and monocultural, to a good new Australia that is culturally diverse tolerant and exciting'."

In his paper, Professor Melleuish said he had read the textbooks set for the compulsory 20th century Australian history course in NSW.

"I found that these books lacked balance, focusing on some topics excessively such as the Vietnam War, the Whitlam government and social movements of the late 20th century while other significant matters such as economic development received minimal treatment," the paper says.

One perennial complaint about Australian history was that it was not interesting because it lacked the wars, violence and revolutions of other countries, he said. But Professor Melleuish said there were episodes of great drama.

He said his experience was that Australian history struggled to compete against European and ancient history. "The reasons for this weakness need to be uncovered and addressed."

Professor Melleuish's paper proposes that the bulk of Australian history be taught in years 9 and 10, with some work in primary school.

NSW is the only state or territory where Australian history is compulsory in years 9 and 10.

A paper by Tony Taylor, an associate professor of education at Monash University, will also be discussed at the summit. He says history will be introduced as a clearly defined discipline into all Victorian government and Catholic schools next year.

"Under the previous curriculum framework, it was possible for a student to reach year 10 (in Victoria) without having attended a 'history lesson'," the paper says. "That is no longer the case."

An attempt is underway to literally resurrect John Paul Jones' ship, the Bonhomme Richard, and its place in history. Since mid-July, an expedition launched from the Avery Point campus of the University of Connecticut in Groton has been searching the North Sea for the wreck of the Bonhomme Richard.

The day before he left for England, the chief organizer of the hunt, Ret. Navy Capt. John "Jack" Ringelberg, turned on his office computer and punched up a map of the approximate search location. It is off Flamborough Head in water about 200 feet deep. The map showed a grid of overlapping rectangles plotted by computer from first-hand battle reports and estimates of where the Bonhomme Richard might have drifted in the 36 hours before it sank.

"History says it should be there. The drift area says it should be there. And the weather and tides say it should be there," Ringelberg said, moving a finger from one rectangle to another. The darkened area where they intersected formed the search area.

"We're looking at 50 square miles," he said. "My hope is to end up with one to three high probability targets."

Ringelberg spoke with a kind of finger-crossed excitement. Finding a 227-year-old rotted wooden wreck beneath the rough North Sea in an area littered with centuries of wrecks isn't easy. Bottom sands shift with every storm, and the search season is limited to a few weeks. "If you're not out there in July and August, you're going to get beat to death," he said.

With luck, the instruments dragged by a slow moving search vessel - such as magnetometers that can detect iron relics, like cannon - will identify locations to explore close up next summer.

Ringelberg didn't want to give away the precise search area because he and his collaborators have competition. The adventure novelist Clive Cussler, who's augmented his writing by mounting dozens of lost ship expeditions, has been looking for Jones' ship for years. Initially, Ringelberg said, "Cussler went to the last known site of the battle and drifted for 36 hours. His last search was in an area slightly east of ours. He's already done 600 square miles."

Ringelberg took pains to emphasize the collaborative spirit of the U.S. search. His large team of partners and sponsors includes Peter Reaveley, an independent historian who once advised Cussler and is considered the world's leading authority on the Battle of Flamborough Head. Another is Robert Neyland, the director of underwater archaeology for the U.S. Navy Historical Center in Annapolis.

Ringelberg himself began his 16-year Navy career as a diver and once commanded the Navy's experimental diving team. Now a very fit 67, he came to New England in 1998 to run a high-tech naval and salvage engineering business, JMS Inc., founded by one of his former executive officers. A recent job was doing a stability analysis of the Lake George tour boat that capsized last year, drowning 20 people.

Headquartered at Avery Point, the company also operates a commercial diving school in Seattle (where Robert DeNiro and Cuba Gooding Jr. went for coaching for their roles in the movie "Men of Honor" about the Navy's first black diver), and has a non-profit arm, the Ocean Technology Foundation.

Ringelberg doubles as president of the foundation, whose mission is to foster marine studies and education. It took on the Bonhomme Richard project after Ringelberg got a call almost two years ago from an old friend, the naval muralist, Dean Mosher. Mosher was looking for technical help with a proposed movie about the Battle of Flamborough Head. But wanting to know more, Ringelberg contacted Reaveley and learned that finding the Bonhomme Richard might be possible.

Arizona’s legislature recently earned national attention by requiring the American flag in all public classrooms. But according to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, Arizona’s leaders left a much bigger problem unsolved: None of the state’s major public universities requires the study of American history.

“The Arizona legislature’s desire to protect our national heritage is commendable,” ACTA president Anne D. Neal said. “But symbols of America are only valuable when students understand their significance, and we have no reason to believe that Arizona’s students do. The governor and the legislature should urge these institutions to fix this problem.”

On June 20, the Arizona House of Representatives and Senate approved House Bill 2583, which requires the prominent display of an American flag—as well as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights—in every Arizona public school classroom from kindergarten through college. Gov. Janet Napolitano signed the bill into law on June 28.

In response, ACTA conducted a review of course requirements of Arizona’s major public universities—the University of Arizona, Arizona State University, and Northern Arizona University. This research revealed that not one of the three universities has an American history requirement for undergraduates. Instead, students can fulfill the schools’ loose history requirements with courses like “Human and Animal Interrelationships from Domestication to the Present” (UA), “Fossil Hominids” (ASU), and “Hollywood & the Social Construction of Crime & Justice” (NAU).

ACTA brought these facts to light in a July 12 letter to Gov. Napolitano, the sponsors of HB 2583, and leading Democrats and Republicans in each chamber. ACTA’s letter placed Arizona’s situation in a national context, noting that its 2001 study Losing America’s Memory: Historical Illiteracy in the 21st Century proved that most colleges nationwide have similarly loose curricula.

As ACTA’s letter also pointed out, such curricula have consequences. When ACTA polled graduating seniors from 55 of our country’s elite colleges and universities, they displayed virtually no knowledge of American history: More than 75 percent of the students polled could not identify James Madison as the father of the Constitution and 65 percent could not identify Harry Truman as the president at the beginning of the Korean War. Yet 98 percent knew that Snoop Doggy Dogg is a famous rapper and 99 percent could identify Beavis and Butthead as television cartoon characters.

Finally, ACTA’s letter outlines immediate steps that the governor and the legislature can take to remedy this problem. ACTA provided Gov. Napolitano with a draft proclamation that she can issue to call for curricular reform and fight historical illiteracy. The legislators were also urged to adopt a similar resolution.

Trustees at the State University of New York, Virginia Tech, and George Mason have already imposed American history requirements to address the troubling historical illiteracy amongst college graduates.

“Gov. Napolitano and the Arizona legislature obviously appreciate the importance of cultivating an appreciation for America in the leaders of tomorrow,” Neal noted. “That’s why I am sure they will see the importance of having graduates of Arizona’s universities learn about our country’s history.”

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni is a national education nonprofit dedicated to academic freedom, academic quality, and accountability. ACTA boasts a nationwide network of alumni and trustees and has issued numerous reports on higher education including How Many Ward Churchills?, Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action, The Hollow Core, and Losing America’s Memory: Historical Illiteracy in the 21st Century. For further information, contact ACTA at 202-467-6787.

The Brooklyn Public Library has agreed to stock a book that refers to London as a hotbed of terrorism, as an acquisitions librarian who initially rejected a patron's suggestion to buy the book, calling it "potentially incendiary," reversed his decision.

The librarian, Wayne Roylance, changed his mind days after the patron, disappointed with the decision, emailed him prominent critics' appraisals of the book, "Londonistan" by Melanie Phillips, a library spokeswoman said.

The 2006 book blames extreme multiculturalism for making the city what it calls a jihad Petri dish that produces attacks such as a transit bombing last July that killed 52 commuters. The library's spokeswoman, Stefanie Arch, defended the decisions leading to the "Londonistan" acquisition, noting that the library's procedures eventually worked, as the book was ordered.

"He misspoke when he used that term," Ms. Arch said, referring to the "potentially incendiary" characterization, "and he apologized."

IN ANCIENT times, when Scotland was virtually covered in dense forest, there was only one way to get around. Traveling by boat helped early Scots to find food and trade goods with their neighbours.

Now, with the excavation of a 3,000-year-old log boat, archaeologists are hoping to learn more about how prehistoric Scots used the vast network of rivers and lochs. . .

While the remains of 30 log boats survive today – the oldest was a stern portion of a log boat, carbon dated to 1800BC found in Dumfriesshire in 1973 – most are in extremely poor condition. The Carpow boat is not only still in one piece but it also has an intact transom board at the stern.
Full story here.

THESSALONIKI, Greece (AP) - Another subway in Greece, another look into the past.

Tunneling work to build a metro system for the country's second-largest city started Thursday, as Culture Ministry officials signed an agreement to protect antiquities they expect to be discovered during construction.

The agreement follows a massive horde of antiquities uncovered while building a new subway system in Athens, which opened in 2000, with extensions added before the 2004 Olympics. Some of the discoveries are on display at Athens stations.

The subway system for Thessaloniki, where some 1.3 million people live, will span about 6 miles with 13 stations and is due to be completed by 2012, at an estimated cost of $1.27 billion.

On the 40th anniversary of one of its darkest days, the University of Texas took possession of a box of documents related to the infamous massacre at the school's landmark tower. The university's Center for American History accepted the documents Tuesday from a bookstore chain pertaining to what was then the nation's worst mass shooting.

On Aug. 1, 1966, Charles Whitman went to the 28th floor observation deck and began shooting at people below. He killed 16 people and wounded nearly three dozen before police killed him about 90 minutes after the siege began.

The documents, originals and photocopies, were discovered in a box by a relative of Allen Hamilton, who was the school's security chief at the time. The relative recently brought the documents to an Austin bookstore, Half Price Books, and offered to sell them.

"He said he'd been cleaning out stuff," said Christian Kurtz, who inspected the materials when they were brought to the store. "He said he didn't want them to fall into the wrong hands. He told us what they were so we wouldn't be surprised when we saw them."

Once they determined the items to be authentic, officials at the Dallas-based bookstore chain, who declined to identify the seller and the purchase price, decided to buy the materials and then give them to the school, which already had an extensive file on the case.

"We can't forget our history," Don Carleton, the Center for American History's director, said Tuesday. "No matter how tragic an event, it's still part of our history."

Carleton said it would take about a month for researchers to go through the new material, which includes original reports submitted by officers at the scene. There also are some original vehicle information documents signed by Whitman when he was a student in 1965.

On one of two manila folders, with Whitman's name typewritten, is a handwritten notation, "Deceased," and the Aug. 1, 1966 date.

"It was exciting but made us nervous at the same time," said Kurtz, 37, who said reading the material was unsettling. "I grew up in Texas. I knew the framework of the story."

Carleton said it was doubtful Hamilton violated any laws when he kept the paperwork because there were no laws back then regarding document possession.

"In this business, we have papers and records that come from the most unusual places you could think of, mainly from people's attics and things like that," Carleton said. "Our business is to preserve this material and make it available."

Whitman, 25, was a Texas student and native of Lake Worth, Fla. He opened fire just before noon. A 17th death was attributed to him in 2001 when a Fort Worth man died of injuries he suffered when he was shot that day.

Authorities later determined Whitman also killed his wife and mother in the hours before he went to the tower.

In notes he left with their bodies, he said he wanted to spare them the embarrassment of what he planned to do. He was having marital, financial and academic difficulties, was upset with the breakup of his parents and particularly angry with his father.

"It's important that the record be as complete as possible, so we are grateful," Carleton said as he accepted the box of materials. "As an historian, where there are no records, there is no history."

The key to unlocking the Lebanese crisis may come down to a small plot of land, a badly drawn map, a softly spoken historian and some long-forgotten papers in an archive in Paris.

For almost 40 years, a stumbling point between Syria, Lebanon and Israel has been the ownership of a sparsely populated enclave called the Shebaa Farms, which sits on the border of the three states and was seized by Israel from Syria in the 1967 war.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has raised the Shebaa Farms as central to finding a long-term resolution to the conflict. Rice has reportedly asked Israel, which does not claim the land, to hand it over to the Lebanese Government as a goodwill gesture. The US believes this could bolster Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, who would then be expected to call for an international force in southern Lebanon and assist with the disarming of Hezbollah.

The problem is that the land has been claimed by both the Syrians and the Lebanese — ever since French mandate officials began drawing lines between the two countries over an 1860s Ottoman-era map.

Since gaining independence in 1946, Syrian maps have included the land while Lebanese maps, and its 1000-pound note, put the territory in Lebanon.

To settle the dispute, negotiators have long sought proof to show that the land belongs to one side or the other. Four years ago, while rummaging through government archives in Paris, a historian at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Asher Kaufman, stumbled on documents that appear to resolve the dispute.

Kaufman, who bears a slight physical resemblance to Indiana Jones, discovered a set of papers from the French mandate era from 1920 to 1941 that show that French officials in the 1930s had accidentally put the Shebaa Farms in Syria.

The papers reveal that the officials realised their error and wanted to correct the maps, which had been drawn without surveyors or cartographic equipment, but the mistake was never fixed.

After Kaufman published his findings, an editorial in Lebanese newspaper the Daily Star chided the Lebanese academic community and claimed it was embarrassing that the discovery had been left to an Israeli researcher.

An Israeli journalist, Akiva Eldar, urged the UN to revisit its Lebanese resolutions.

"If the Lebanese or Syrians had reached the archives in Paris in time and presented the evidence that Kaufman found, the UN's decision would look very different," Eldar observed four years ago.

But Kaufman's findings were published two years after Israel's Lebanon pull-out in 2000 and were not considered by the UN team that investigated where to draw the border.

At the time, Lebanon presented the UN with a map from 1966 that showed the land was Lebanese, but it was later shown to be a forgery. Eventually, after examining almost 100 maps, the UN declared that "on all maps the UN has been able to find, the farms are seen on the Syrian side".

The Israeli withdrawal was rubber-stamped by the UN and the dispute over the Shebaa Farms put aside for future negotiations between Syria and Israel. But Lebanon never ceded its claim.

Israeli officials have long dismissed Hezbollah's claims to the territory as an excuse to attack Israel, but Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has this week reportedly expressed a willingness to return the land to the Lebanese Government.

Kaufman's papers, which may convince Syria to relinquish its claim, could be the key to peace.

President Bush may have issued only one veto, but he has added more than 750 "signing statements" to new laws on issues such as detainee torture, the USA Patriot Act and whistle-blower protections. Last week, a task force from the American Bar Association came out against presidents using such statements to show their intention "to disregard or decline to enforce all or part of a law." The ABA also detailed how Bush is far from the first president to add his own interpretation to congressional legislation.

The Constitution says nothing about the President issuing any statement when he signs a bill presented to him. ... Nonetheless Presidents have issued statements elaborating on their views of the laws they sign since the time of President James Monroe who, a month after he signed a bill into law which ... prescribed the method by which the President should select military officers, issued a statement that the President, not Congress, bore the constitutional responsibility for appointing military officers.

In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed an appropriations bill providing for a road from Detroit to Chicago he objected to, but insisted in his signing statement that the road involved was not to extend beyond Michigan. The House of Representatives vigorously objected to his limitation but in fact acceded to it.

In 1840, President John Tyler issued a signing statement disagreeing quite respectfully with certain provisions in a bill dealing with apportionment of congressional districts. As spokesman for the House, John Quincy Adams wondered why such an "extraneous document" was issued at all and advised that the signing statement should "be regarded in no other light than a defacement of the public records and archives."

No signing statements announcing a President's intent not to comply with a law were issued until 70 years after the Constitution was ratified. Although after the Jackson and Tyler contretemps Presidents seemed to shy away from statements denouncing provisions in bills they signed, the practice of identifying their differences with the Congress continued throughout the 19th century.

There is, additionally, at least one example of a 19th century signing statement by President Ulysses S. Grant that "interpreted" a bill in a way that would overcome the Presidential constitutional concern, a technique that would frequently be employed by later 20th century Presidents. ... An appropriation bill had prescribed the closing of certain consular and diplomatic offices. President Grant thought it "an invasion of the constitutional prerogatives and duty of the Executive" and said he would accordingly construe it as intending merely "to fix a time at which the compensation of certain diplomatic and consular officers shall cease and not to invade the constitutional rights of the Executive."

This pattern continued basically into the first 80 years of the 20th century. President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed his intention in 1909 to ignore a restriction on his power to establish volunteer commissions in a signing statement; President Woodrow Wilson advised in a signing statement that executing a particular provision would result in violation of 32 treaties which he refused to do; and in 1943 President Franklin Roosevelt vehemently lashed back at a rider in an appropriation bill which barred compensation to three government employees deemed "subversive" by the Congress. ...

Presaging the formulaic signing statements of the current era ... President Dwight Eisenhower in 1959 signed the Mutual Security Act, but stated, "I have signed this bill on the express promise that the three amendments relating to disclosure are not intended to alter and cannot alter the Constitutional duty and power of the Executive with respect to the disclosure of information, documents and other materials. Indeed any other construction of these amendments would raise grave constitutional questions under the historic Separation of Powers Doctrine."

President (Richard M.) Nixon in turn objected to a 1971 military authorization bill which set a date for withdrawal of U.S. forces from Indochina as being "without binding force or effect." ...

As a general matter, President Jimmy Carter made greater use than his predecessors of signing statements. ... (He) issued a statement accompanying his signing of a 1978 appropriations act which contained a provision forbidding use of funds to implement his amnesty program for Vietnam draft resisters; he maintained that the provision was a bill of attainder, denied due process and interfered with the President's constitutional pardoning power. He then proceeded in defiance of the law to use funds to process reentry visas for the Vietnam resisters and when critics sued the government to enforce the law his administration successfully defended his actions on the ground that the challengers had no standing to sue.

The Administration of President Ronald Reagan is credited by many commentators as a period in which the use of signing statements escalated both quantitatively and qualitatively. The first observation is only moderately accurate; the second is quite true. For the first time, signing statements were viewed as a strategic weapon in a campaign to influence the way legislation was interpreted by the courts and Executive agencies as well as their more traditional use to preserve Presidential prerogatives. ...

Two of the most aggressive uses of the signing statement by President Reagan to control statutory implementation occurred in the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 in which Congress legislated that a "brief, casual and imminent absence" of a deportable alien from the United States would not terminate the required "continuous physical presence" required for an alien's eligibility for legalized status. President Reagan announced in the signing statement, however, that an alien would be required to apply to the INS before any such brief or casual absence, a requirement totally absent from the bill.

A national group is asking Arizona's public universities to require at least one United States history course of every student before graduation.

American History currently isn't a required course at any of the state's major public universities.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has written letters to Gov. Janet Napolitano and 20 state lawmakers, asking them to pressure college regents and administrators to make the change.

"The flag doesn't mean all that much if you don't know how it got there," trustees member Charles Mitchell said. "What use is the Constitution if you don't know how it was written?"

State Rep. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, said he is exploring legislation that would require colleges that received Arizona tax dollars to mandate their students take American history before receiving a diploma.

"I think we have a fundamental responsibility," said Pearce, who sponsored the flag bill from this session. "The risk is losing our understanding and appreciation of the founding principles."

Faculty members note funding and other logistical problems that would come with an additional curricular mandate. Some are wary of what brand of history the American council has in mind.

Some students say they are simply tired of studying our nation's history by the time they reach college.

"You basically take U.S. history for your whole elementary and high school career," said Kristina Guerra, 20, a junior majoring in English at Arizona State University. "It's just really redundant. How many times can you learn about the pilgrims?"

The debate comes as Arizona school districts and colleges prepare for a new state law that requires the presentation of the U.S. flag in every public classroom, as well as display of the Constitution and Bill of Rights in classrooms for Grades 7 through 12 and college.

The measure, approved this session by the Legislature and signed by the governor, takes effect July 1

Mitchell said that, although the law is well meaning, it will do little on its own to ensure students have a grasp of the events and foundational documents that shape our nation.

If scholarly publishing had an endangered-species list, the art monograph would be at the top. At least that's the perception of many art historians as they struggle to publish their work.

"Between dwindling sales and the soaring costs of acquiring illustrations and the permission to publish them, this segment of the publishing industry has become so severely compromised that the art monograph is now seriously endangered and could very well outpace the silvery minnow in its rush to extinction," writes Susan M. Bielstein in a recent call to arms, Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk About Art as Intellectual Property, published this spring by the University of Chicago Press.

As the press's executive editor for art and architecture, Ms. Bielstein writes from the barricades. She knows that publishing art monographs costs a pretty penny. Art historians need high-quality illustrations to support their arguments, but in most cases, they must shell out for reproducible images, even of works in the public domain. And they, not their publishers, foot those bills. "It's not unusual for a scholar working on the Renaissance to pay $10,000 or $15,000 to illustrate a book that may sell only 400 or 500 copies," she says in an interview. Contemporary subjects still under copyright, and subject to an artist's or estate's whims, can prove to be an even costlier proposition.