A sunken ship, which dates back almost three centuries, has been discovered in the Gulf of Finland during a seabed survey for the Nordstream gas pipeline project. The wreck was found, 54 metres beneath the seabed, near the island of Gogland along with the remains of five other ships from a Russian fleet which sank after a storm in 1713. The 16-metre long ship is a Dutch-modelled tjalk, a flat-bottomed military transport ship with a shallow draught particularly adapted to the rivers and coastal waters of Old Frislandia. It is one of the few remaining vessels from the time of Peter the Great and a precious relic of his attempts to build up the Russian navy and transform Russia into a maritime power.

Andrey Lukoshkov, the consultant for the project 'Sunken Ships', explained:

‘It was the time when Sweden and Russia fought each other over supremacy in Europe’s North’.

The ship is remarkably well-preserved and personal possessions and tableware are still identifiable in the captain’s cabin. Scientists now hope to raise the necessary funds in order to bring the ship to the surface and to transport it to a naval museum in Kaliningrad before construction work on the pipeline begins.

On the question of whether we'll get to the bottom of the Bush White House's role in the US Attorney firings, it's starting to look more and more like the ball is squarely in President Obama's court.

Yesterday, as we noted, House Judiciary chair John Conyers issued a subpoena to Karl Rove, ordering him to testify about the affair February 2nd and declaring ominously: "It's time for him to talk."

(Rove, making a claim to executive privilege backed by President Bush, had defied a subpoena issued by the last Congress. That Congress ended before the full House could vote on contempt charges against Rove.)

And just now, Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, told TPMmuckraker that he had already forwarded Conyers' subpoena to the Obama White House, asking them to give an opinion as to whether President Bush retains his ability to assert executive privilege.

In other words, the Obama White House will decide, essentially, whether to back Rove's claim of privilege, or to deny it. (And given that Rove is supposed to appear February 2, that decision from the White House should come soon.) In the latter case, said Luskin, a negotiation would ensue between the Obama White House, President Bush, and Rove. That would likely result in the matter going to court.

In a an analysis of the size, shape and asymmetry of the cranium of Homo floresiensis, Karen Baab, a researcher in the Department of Anatomical Scienes at Stony Brook University, and colleagues conclude that the fossil, found in Indonesia in 2003 and known as the 'Hobbit,' is not human. They used 3-D shape analysis to study the LB1 skull of the hobbit and found the shape of the skull to be consistent with a scaled down human ancestor but not modern humans. Their findings, reported in the current online edition of the Journal of Human Evolution, add to the evidence that the hobbit is a new species.

The question as to whether the hobbit was human or another species remains controversial. Some scientists claim the hobbit was a diminutive human that suffered from some type of disease that causes microcephaly, which results in abnormal growth of the brain and causes the cranium to be much smaller than the normal human cranium. But Dr. Baab and co-author Kieran McNulty, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, believe their findings counter the microcephaly theory. "The overall shape of the LB1 skull, particularly the part that surrounds the brain (neurocranium) looks similar to fossils more than 1.5 million years older from Africa and Eurasia, rather than modern humans, even though Homo floresiensis is documented from 17,000 to 95,000 years ago," explains Dr. Baab.

He is one of Britain’s best-known historical figures, famed for his exploration of the New World, controversial romantic liaisons and the chivalrous act of placing his jacket over a puddle so that Queen Elizabeth I’s feet would not get wet.

Much less known is Sir Walter Raleigh’s kinship with a young black boy from Guyana, whom he brought back with him from the Americas and who became ensconced in the explorer’s household, according to newly discovered records.

Centuries after his death, an intriguing new chapter in his life has emerged following the chance discovery of a baptism register in the London Metropolitan Archives.

The boy may have been one of the earliest – and certainly one of the youngest – “natives” brought to Britain to be marvelled at in the royal court.

As the twentieth anniversary of the end of communism in Poland approaches, polls estimate that around 44% of Poles have come to approve of his move against the Solidarity movement while only 32% are critical. The general himself invariably claims that his decision was motivated by fear that the Soviet Union would invade Poland - thus crushing far more than Solidarity. His critics argue that Moscow wouldn't have invaded and have Soviet documents to back their case. The Russians, relieved that that this is one event they can shift responsibility for, are not saying much.

Meanwhile ex-general Jaruzelski and the surviving members of his leadership are on trial in a Warsaw court. They are accused of organising an armed conspiracy against the Polish nation. The case has been brought by the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), a state organisation responsible for prosecuting Nazi and Soviet crimes.

It is highly debatable whether the martial-law decision in 1981 is a matter for a criminal court at all. This is, in truth, a political trial. But the fact that it was brought at all reflects a shift in the debate on Poland's recent past brought about by the rightwing Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc (Law & Justice / PiS) party, which came to power in September 2005 and was voted out in October 2007 in a wave of revulsion at its authoritarian and nationalistic policies. Before the PiS fell it managed to reverse the hitherto dominant view that the key event of the 1980s in Poland was the peaceful handover of power in 1989 by General Jaruzelski and his communists to Solidarity. The advent of PiS brought to the fore a set of historians too young to remember the communist times, who see the key date of this period in terms of Jaruzelski's 1981 clampdown.

No, the mascots didn't have to slug it out.

Instead, the case of Robert Morris versus Robert Morris, a spat over identity that landed two campuses hundreds of miles apart in federal court, has been amicably resolved.

Under an agreement, the college named Robert Morris -- the one in Chicago -- can legally begin calling itself a university as long as it tacks the word "Illinois" onto the end of the title.

It's part of a settlement preserving the name belonging to Robert Morris University of Moon, Pa., which became a university in 2002 and holds federal trademarks asserting it alone can be called Robert Morris University.

The agreement addresses everything from campus signs and athletic uniforms to logos. It ends a lawsuit that showed how important campus identity is in a brand-conscious world, and what can happen when schools with similar or identical names try to coexist.

Shepherd boys scale the ancient tower at Aqar Quf with ease.

The ziggurat’s clay-brick walls have eroded into steep cliffs over the past 3,500 years, and the
shepherds go hand over hand on a well-known path to the peak. There are no guards blocking the
climb, no visitors to watch the spectacle.

On the desert below, the shepherds’ flock grazes among the gutted remains of a museum and restaurant.

The Aqar Quf ziggurat is among the 10 oldest structures in Iraq and once drew hundreds of visitors
each week from nearby Baghdad. But the ancient site was abandoned and stripped by looters during the
war.

As violence subsides, the government in this rural corner of the Abu Ghraib district is struggling
to get national funding to reopen the Aqar Quf historic site and bolster the local economy....

When Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States on January 20, Americans might have concluded that the nation had finally overcome its racist past.

But for retired psychology professor Dr. Terrence Roberts, 67, one of nine black teenagers who integrated Arkansas’ Little Rock Central High School in 1957, the ceremony was another cleared hurdle in the continuing battle for equal rights.

Obama’s election validates what the “Little Rock Nine” tried to accomplish, said Roberts, a former co-chair of the Master’s in Psychology program at Antioch University in Los Angeles who has been invited to attend the inaugural ceremony for the first black president in U.S. history.

“It adds substance to what we tried to do,” Roberts said. “When you look at this country’s history, and you look at the opposition to integration, and then you look at what has happened with Obama’s election, it is quite apparent that the old system is crumbling.

Cory Holliday almost didn't see the stick figure painted on the sandstone. His first impression was that it was a clever fake. A cave specialist for the Tennessee chapter of The Nature Conservancy, Holliday was searching for caves in a remote part of Fentress County on the Cumberland Plateau (Tennessee, USA) when discovered the foot-long painting of a dancing stick figure. The left leg appeared misshapen, and the right hand resembled a claw.

The rock shelter painting came as a complete surprise. "I knew that Native American rock art had been found in the area, but I didn't realize this was so significant," Holliday said. "My first impression was that someone had drawn it with charcoal." In fact, the artist most likely lived during the Mississippian Period between 1000 and 1600 CE and used a paint based on a prehistoric recipe whose main ingredient was pulverized clay. That's according to Jan Simek, a University of Tennessee anthropology professor who specializes in cave archaeology.

Last spring, Simek, the acting UT chancellor, visited the rock shelter site. Using a scalpel, he chipped off a tiny sample of the pigment and brought it back to UT for a high-level chemical analysis. The tests revealed no modern paint trace elements such as lead or zinc. What's more, Simek discovered that the reason the pictograph looks so fresh is because it's protected by a veneer of calcium carbonate leaching out of the sandstone.

Almost 20 years after the fall fo the Berlin Wall an architect has come across an abandoned apartment in the eastern German city of Leipzig where time has stood still since the communist era.

It evidently hasn't been touched since early 1989, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the place is filled with East German furniture, fittings and grocery brands that give a glimpse of everyday life in the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) 20 years ago.

Mark Aretz, an architect who renovates buildings in eastern Germany, inadvertently walked into history while he was refurbishing a building in the Leipzig district of Reudnitz last week. When he unlocked an apartment on the third floor it was as if he had stepped out of a time machine into the humdrum surroundings of the kind of apartment millions of East Germans once lived in.

There is a great deal of over-classification,” admitted Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the nominee to be the next Director of National Intelligence, at his confirmation hearing last week.

“Some of it, I think, is done for the wrong reasons, to try to hide things from the light of day. Some of it is because in our system, there is no incentive not to do that, and there are penalties to do the reverse, in case you get something wrong and don’t classify it.”

“So I think we need to do fundamental work on the system,” he said in response to a question from Sen. Ron Wyden at the January 22 hearing.

“I’ll be working to see if we can come up with a different approach that incentivizes it at the right level and that informs not only those of you who have security clearances on this committee but the wider interested public whose support we need,” Adm. Blair said.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse pursued the same question. “My experience,” the Senator said, “is that, over and over and over again, we have seen official secrecy used not for national security purposes, but to mislead the public and to frame — or more particularly, mis-frame — an outside, political debate. Will you pledge to us that you will take this trust of secrecy that you are given as Director of National Intelligence and use it only to protect national security and not to manipulate public opinion or frame or mis-frame political debates?”

“Absolutely, Senator,” Adm. Blair replied.

The DNI-nominee also told Sen. Kit Bond and Sen. Whitehouse that he favored prosecution of leakers of classified information. “If I could ever catch one of those it would be very good to prosecute them.”

He suggested that there might be new technical steps that could be taken to identify leakers.

“If confirmed,” he added, “I would like to come to talk to you about some ideas where we can build in some technical, some procedural safeguards into agencies so that it’s not a case of going back afterwards and trying to get records and question people but we have some tools that will let everybody who works for the government know that if you are going to pass classified information to a reporter or to someone, there will be a trace of it which will make it relatively quick to identify you as the one who did it,” Adm. Blair told Sen. Whitehouse.

Presumably this refers to improved tracking of classified intelligence “records,” not of “information.”

In answers to pre-hearing questions (pdf), Adm. Blair said that he favored continued publication of the annual intelligence budget total. “It has not, to my knowledge, caused harm to the national security, and provides important information to the American public,” Blair said.

He also endorsed declassification review of 25 year old classified intelligence records.

“While much intelligence information remains sensitive even at 25 years, that which can be released to the public should be. Intelligence — especially the intelligence that informed key policy decisions — can and should ultimately become part of the country’s historical record.” [at p. 55]

The profound confusion that prevails in intelligence classification policy was recognized last year in an internal report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (Secrecy News, April 10, 2008). Even the most basic concepts of classification policy, it said, are open to question and interpretation.

“The definitions of ‘national security’ and what constitutes ‘intelligence’ — and thus what must be classified — are unclear,” the ODNI report stated (pdf).

A new directive signed by outgoing DNI Mike McConnell on January 21 is intended to “foster an enduring culture of responsible sharing and collaboration within an integrated [intelligence community]” and to breakdown traditional “stove pipes” that inhibit communication within the government. See “Discovery and Dissemination or Retrieval of Information Within the Intelligence Community,” Intelligence Community Directive 501 (pdf), January 21, 2009.

The continuing classification of obsolete Cold War intelligence satellite imagery, to the disappointment of space historians and others, was examined in “A ray of sunshine into a dark world: the future declassification of satellite reconnaissance information” by Dwayne Day in The Space Review, January 26.

Two centuries after Charles Darwin's birth on Feb. 12, 1809 , people still argue passionately about his theory of evolution.

Was Darwin right? Should schoolchildren be exposed to contrary views in science class? These two controversies continue to rage, partly because both sides are evenly matched.

Most scientists and courts that have ruled on the matter say that overwhelming evidence backs Darwin's explanation of the origin and evolution of species, including humans, by natural selection.

Many people, especially religious and social conservatives, strongly disagree.

Economists find loyalty and sacrifice prevailed among Union soldiers with similar backgrounds.

No experiment can ethically test how humans behave in life-or-death situations. But two UCLA economists dug up the records of 41,000 Union soldiers from the American Civil War to see how men of shared or different backgrounds fared in the worst conditions.

They found that sharing common characteristics with fellow soldiers made all the difference in lowering desertion rates, not to mention surviving the horrors of prison camps. The least diverse companies still had one-third fewer desertions than even more diverse companies with higher morale or stronger commitment to the cause.

Recently discovered bone inscriptions in a province in China have been analyzed to be approximately 1000 years older than those found in another area in the country, which indicates the new finding to be the oldest record of Chinese language.

The Changle inscriptions were found in Weifang city of Shandong Province in China.

According to Professor Liu Fengjun, doctoral supervisor in art and archaeology at Shandong University, the markings on Changle bones represent some kind of original characters of Chinese language approximately 1000 years older than those found in Yinxu.

Hence, the discovery of Changle bone inscriptions may have far-reaching implications.

The Army has decided to cut off retirement pay for veterans of a militia formed to guard the territory of Alaska from the threat of Japanese attack during World War II.

The change means 26 surviving members of the Alaska Territorial Guard — most in their 80s and long retired — will lose up to $557 in monthly retirement pay, a state veterans officer said this week. The payments end Feb. 1.

The state is pursuing a remedy for “these brave Alaskans, who did so much for the cause of freedom during a time of great national peril,” said Gov. Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice-presidential candidate.

The action comes nearly a decade after Congress passed a law qualifying time served in the unpaid guard as active federal service. The Army agreed in 2004 to grant official military discharge certificates to members or their survivors.

An Army official said the law was misinterpreted. The law applies to military benefits, including medical benefits, but not to retirement pay, said Lt. Col. Richard McNorton, with the Army’s human resources command in Alexandria, Va.

Dismissed for 175 years as a fake, a letter threatening the assassination of President Andrew Jackson has been found to be authentic. And, says the director of the Andrew Jackson Papers Project at the University of Tennessee, the writer was none other than Junius Brutus Booth, father of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth.

Dan Feller and his staff solved the mystery of the July 4, 1835, letter to Jackson. The story of their investigation will be featured this summer on PBS' "History Detectives."

The letter, which addressed Old Hickory as "You damn'd old Scoundrel," demanded that Jackson pardon two prisoners named De Ruiz and De Soto who had been sentenced to death for piracy in a high-profile trial of the day.

"The trial of them and the other pirates had been a national news story. It was heavily covered," Feller said.

Pardon the pirates, the letter writer demanded, or "I will cut your throat whilst you are sleeping."

TAMPA – The massive Confederate flag that flies over the intersection of Interstate 4 and Interstate 75 has been raised again after coming down for repairs.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans took it down to fix wind damage.

They say they hope to have it lit up during Super Bowl week, but they say the lights are not installed yet.

The NFL said whether the flag is up during Super Bowl week or not is a private matter.

"The NFL does not have jurisdiction on what private groups or citizens say on private property," said NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy.

City Bank of New York was founded in 1812 by a group of merchants hoping to fill the void left by the demise of the first Bank of the United States, the sort-of central bank whose charter Congress had allowed to expire the year before. City nearly went under in the Panic of 1837 but was bailed out by the country's richest man, fur magnate John Jacob Astor. Astor's associate Moses Taylor built City into a bulwark of sound finance--big capital reserves, stingy lending standards--that bankrolled the Union during the Civil War and easily withstood the first postwar financial panic, in 1873.

Thus began a pattern of alternating conservatism and risk-taking, success and near failure, that has marked the banking enterprise now known as Citigroup--and the American financial system--ever since. James Stillman, who became City's president in 1891, combined prudence with great ambition. City Bank cruised through the Panic of 1893, thanks in part to the huge stash of gold that Stillman had acquired--gold being the backing for credit then--because he sensed trouble. City joined J.P. Morgan in bailing out the nearly bankrupt Federal Government in 1895 and soon grew to be the country's biggest bank. Its growth went international in 1914, after City lobbied Congress to tweak the Federal Reserve Act and allow branches abroad. (See the best business deals of 2008.)

A huge stained glass window celebrating the 90-year history of the RAF is to be unveiled.

The window, which cost £50,000, depicts a Battle of Britain pilot scrambling to get airborne and looking up to a sky filled with aircraft and events from every decade of the RAF's existence.

The window was funded with a donation from ex-City businessman and Lloyds "name" Ivan Heath, 93, who served with the RAF during WW2 and has been a club member of more than 50 years.