Friday March 20 marked the end of the second month of the Obama Presidency. Obama still maintains his lead in unilateral actions (Executive Orders, Proclamations, and Memoranda; see chart below). Recently the president has begun to define a distinctive mode and method for communicating with the public.

The German city of Speyer, in Rheinland-Palatinate, boasts some macabre relics. A collection of skulls, shin bones and vertebrae might not seem unusual in an archaeology museum, but these particular remains are special. They all show signs of having been cut, scraped or broken, indicating that their owners were cannibalised."These grooves, running from the base of the nose to the back of the neck, or here on the temples, show, beyond all possible doubt, that the flesh was torn off," says Andrea Zeeb-Lanz, the regional head of archaeology, holding up a skull.

All these human remains were found at the stone-age site at Herxheim, near Speyer. About 7,000 years ago farmers, who grew wheat and barley, raised pigs, sheep and cattle, settled here, building a village of four to 12 houses, the post holes of which have survived. At the time the first farmer-stockherders were moving into Europe, supplanting their hunter-gatherer predecessors. The Herxheim settlers came from the north (between 5,400 and 4,950 BCE) and belonged to the Linear Pottery culture.

The ruins of a village dating back to the fall of the Roman empire have been found at an excavation site in Salzburg.

Workers found the remains of the village which is thought to date back to the 5th to 7th centuries at a 6,000-square-metre site for construction of a home for pensioners at Anif-Niederalm in the Flachgau region.

Archaeologists say that a layman probably wouldn’t recognise anything special at the site, but claim it may shed considerable light on a period of local history about which relatively little is known.

An archaeologist said it was the largest find from that period of history in Salzburg to date. He noted the settlement had consisted of wooden buildings and such items as jewellery, tools like hammers and anvils and vessels made of clay had already been found at the site.

The University of Massachusetts in Amherst said Friday it would scan, catalog, digitize and put online papers of civil rights movement pioneer W.E.B. Du Bois.

The university's W.E.B. Du Bois Library has an estimated 100,000 diaries, letters, photographs and other items related to Du Bois, who helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

UMass received a $200,000 grant from the Verizon Foundation to put the collection online during the two-year project, which begins in July.

The collection includes correspondence with other influential African-Americans, such as Booker T. Washington and Langston Hughes, as well as important public figures of his day, such as Albert Einstein and Mohandas Gandhi.

One of Cox's favorite pieces is a menu signed by those who attended the first meeting of the Niagara Movement, a precursor to the NAACP. The group was forced to meet in Ontario, Canada, because no restaurant in Buffalo, N.Y., would serve them.

Shirley Graham Du Bois donated her husband's papers to the Amherst campus in 1973. W.E.B. Du Bois was born in nearby Great Barrington in 1868. He died in Ghana in 1963.

Du Bois wrote more than 4,000 articles, essays and books, many of which are now out of print or difficult to find, Cox said. While dozens of universities have microfilm copies of Du Bois work, the new online archive will allow anyone to search his words from anywhere.

Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., the director of Harvard Univesity's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research who edited a compilation of Du Bois' writings, said much of Du Bois' never published works and early drafts are hard to find.

More than 2,400 languages around the world are in danger of extinction, according to Unesco, and the US is second only to India in having the highest number of endangered languages.

The US has already lost more than a third of the indigenous languages that existed before European colonisation, and the remaining 192 are classed by Unesco as ranging between "unsafe" and "extinct".

As recently as 2008, the Alaskan tongue Eyak became officially extinct with the death of Marie Smith Jones, the last native speaker.

"We need more funding and more effort to return these languages to everyday use," says Fred Nahwooksy, of the National Museum of the American Indian.

Some 40 languages, mainly in California and Oklahoma, where thousands of Indians were forced to relocate as part of the notorious 19th Century Trail of Tears, have fewer than 10 native speakers.

The decline in American Indian languages has historical roots: in the mid-19th Century, the US government adopted a policy of Americanising Indian children by removing them from their homes and culture.

Within a few generations most had forgotten their native tongues.

But even so-called "dead" languages can be brought back to life.

The Wampanoag Indians of Massachusetts were the first to greet the pilgrims of the Mayflower - but until recently their language had not been spoken for a century.

In 1993, tribeswoman Jessie Little Doe Baird began researching and collecting word stems.

Now her daughter is the first native speaker in six generations and other children are learning.

Modern challenges to language survival remain.

There is a growing movement in the US to try to revitalise indigenous languages, but regaining the trust of community elders who were often punished for speaking their own language can be a problem.

Many now have to be persuaded to pass it on to a younger generation.

While the American media is often blamed for undermining other languages and cultures, the same technology might become the native languages' best chance for survival.

Native American filmmaking is a growing industry, providing a unique voice for communities that are often wary of being photographed or recorded in any form.

Alleged Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk (dem-YAHN'-yuk) is marking his 89th birthday in seclusion as he awaits word on an appeal to halt his deportation to Germany.

The retired auto worker from suburban Cleveland says his deportation would amount to torture, given his frail health.

Demjanjuk kept out of sight Friday, as has been the case for years.

His son, John Demjanjuk Jr., says the family is awaiting word on the appeal. The immigration appeals court says nothing has been decided.

In tracing the arc of black history and politics, it is easy to draw the link between Dr. King and Barack Obama. But the black power movement deserves equal credit for reshaping the face of American politics.

April 4, 2008—The 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 slaying in Memphis—provoked endless conversations about the way forward for black politics and whether it was King who truly prepared the nation to elect Barack Obama as the first black president. This year, the topic has moved beyond musings about what is possible for African Americans in the American political system, to the more controversial question: Just who deserves the credit for Obama’s decisive, historic victory?

It was one of the most provocative topics at a conference presented this week by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. And though the event was convened in the days before the anniversary of the King assassination, the topic of discussion was not the civil rights movement which King so embodies, but rather the black power movement.

The symposium brought together 1968 veterans Amiri Baraka, Kathleen Cleaver, Charles Cobb Jr. and Sonia Sanchez to discuss the impact of the black power movement on America. In one of the more dynamic roundtable discussions on politics, King’s name scarcely came up. Rather, Ronald Walters, a professor at the University of Maryland and a veteran black political activist, reminded listeners that “there were two post civil rights movements.” The nonviolent, conciliatory approach that brought King martyrdom, he said, still overshadows the more confrontational forces that barricaded buildings, condemned government and radicalized thousands of blacks in the 1960s. And the more militant movement, Walters and other panelists argued convincingly, deserves as much credit for priming America for Barack Obama as the peaceful protest marches mainstream that Americans are much more comfortable embracing.

In the months since Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush as president of the United States, the global financial crisis has overshadowed most other ideas about the new White House. But for veterans of the American civil rights movement, discussions of economics have become part of a previous conversation about what it means for the world's wealthiest nation to have elected its first black leader. During the week of Obama's inauguration ceremony, photographer Lauren Hermele met with several veterans of the U.S. civil rights movement and talked to them about the change of government. Hermele's interviews, conducted with the assistance of two reporters, myself and Sandra C. Roa, uncovered a range of reactions to Obama's arrival at a pivotal moment in world history. (Click "View a slide show" at right.)

The trial in Ward Churchill's wrongful-dismissal lawsuit against the University of Colorado drew to a close on Wednesday with the embattled professor’s lawyer telling jurors that nothing less than the fate of the Constitution rested in their hands.

“The United States of America wants to know what you are going to do with the freedom we have in this country,” the lawyer, David Lane, said in his closing argument in a packed Denver courtroom. Placing a pitcher on a stack of books written by Mr. Churchill, he said the university had punished the ethnic-studies professor for a controversial essay on the September 11, 2001, attacks by reducing his 30 years of scholarship to a "pitcher of warm spit."

But the university’s lawyer, Patrick O’Rourke, had a different view—that the university, its faculty members, and its students were under assault by the wanton recklessness of academic fraud perpetrated by Mr. Churchill.

The discovery of numerous bodies Tuesday by construction workers at a city lot in downtown Montgomery is drawing national attention. In all, officials say they've recovered remains of 11 humans, including at least eight skulls.

Montgomery Police spokesman Major Huey Thornton said it's believed the bodies are from a mass grave of victims who died of a Yellow fever outbreak sometime in the early 1800's.

A structure built on the burial mound in the 1940's was recently torn down in order for the city to build a new complex, Thornton said. He added that officials don't believe there's any cause for concern. The lot where the remains were found butts up against the Oakwood Cemetery property.

A list of 191 Australian soldiers who are believed to have died in the Battle of Fromelles in 1916 has been published by the Defence Force.

The group area mong 400 Australian and British soldiers who are believed to still lie at Pheasant Wood in Fromelles, France, after fighting in the first battle fought by Australians at the western front in the First World War. An excavation last May confirmed the group burial.

The Army Corps of Engineers has agreed with archaeologists for the SugarHouse casino that the project's 22-acre Philadelphia site along the Delaware River does not hold remnants of a British fort from the Revolutionary War or an 18th-century men's social club.

In a letter Monday to the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, the chief of the corps' regulatory branch in Philadelphia, Frank Cianfrani, said the developer had made "a reasonable and good faith effort" to identify historic properties.

He did, however, advise the commission that two areas of the site, which straddles Northern Liberties and Fishtown, are eligible for the National Register of Historic Places and require further excavation. The areas include brick-lined shafts from 18th-century privies and a 1,500-square-foot plot where archaeologists unearthed more than 200 American Indian artifacts.

Human remains of an American Indian man dating back thousands of years were discovered early Monday afternoon at an excavation site on the Sacramento River north of Hamilton City.
Lt. Rich Warren of Glenn County Sheriff's Office said in a phone interview late Monday that the bones were discovered around 1:30 p.m. by an archaeologist from Far Western Anthropological Research Group, out of Davis.

The researchers were doing a test dig on the west bank of the river. Digging stopped immediately and the Sheriff's Office was notified.

Far Western archaeologist Bill Hildebrandt positively identified the remains as Native American. The bones are estimated to be about 4,000 years old, Warren said. The researchers were in the area on a project for the Corps of Engineers. Warren said it isn't certain whether the project is related to the future construction of a new levee or to identify the area as an archaeological site for the National Register.

Warren went to the site to make sure the bones were not left there recently and determined the cause of death wasn't in the sheriff-coroner's jurisdiction. The Sheriff's Office notified the Native American Heritage Commission.

The remains have been covered for protection and all work in the area has stopped. "We pretty much want to leave it alone," Warren said. "We don't want it to be disturbed."

He added there is no indication how the person died or what tribe the individual belonged to.

New York City has positively matched another September 11 victim to long-held human remains after retesting DNA.

The city medical examiner's office says 54-year-old Manuel Emilio Mejia has been identified from remains found at the World Trade Centre site in the months after the 2001 terrorist attack.

Mejia was a kitchen worker at Windows on the World, the restaurant on top of the trade centre's north tower.

Nearly 2,800 people are on the city's September 11 victims list, but more than 40% of them have never been identified from remains.

The construction of a metro underneath the center of the old city is widely blamed for the disaster of March 3 2009 in which two young men died and a huge collection of irreplaceable historical documents was buried under tons of rubble.

Some 200 police officers swooped on the headquarters of Cologne's local transport company, KVB, and on offices of building firms involved in the underground project.

Chief state prosecutor Guenther Feld said Frankfurt, Berlin, Munich, Essen, Duesseldorf, Karlsruhe and Wiesbaden were among the cities where Tuesday's raids had taken place.

Cristina Fernández Sánchez is more concerned with boyfriends and forging a career as a journalist than with dwelling on the past. At 22, she is part of the generation that grew up as Spain embraced democracy and threw off the shackles of nearly 40 years of dictatorship.

She was born after General Franco died in 1975, and to her the Spanish Civil War was just something she learnt about at school.

“We were taught Franco was a bad man and were only told the basics about what happened. It is interesting, but not something I talk about with friends,” she said.

But today, as Spain marks the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, even Ms Sánchez is haunted by its ghost. Like many Spaniards, the Civil War left an indelible mark on her family.

Aristotle once suggested that the sex of a child was determined by the ardour of the man at the time of insemination, whereas other ancient Greek philosophers thought that it had something to do with the left and right sides of the body.

Two millennia later, an 18th-century French surgeon writing under the pseudonym of Procope Couteau took up the idea and advised men wishing to have baby boys to cut off their left testicle – a procedure no more painful than extracting a tooth, he said.

In more recent times, prospective parents wishing for either a boy or a girl have been offered all manner of remedies and food supplements to affect the sex of a baby. But none of these folk recipes – even those involving crystals under the bed – has been able to alter the fundamental biology that determines the 50:50 sex ratio.

A study published yesterday, however, has revealed a new twist to an ancient story. Scientists have found that the probability of giving birth to a baby girl rather than a baby boy increases significantly the nearer the mother lives to the equator. Conversely, the higher the latitude – and the further away from the equator – the greater the chances of a woman having a baby boy.

Sen. John McCain and Rep. Peter King are hoping that they have a fighting chance of persuading the nation's first African-American president to pardon posthumously the world's first African-American heavyweight boxing champion.

McCain, R-Ariz., and King, R-N.Y., were to unveil a congressional resolution Wednesday afternoon calling on President Barack Obama to pardon Jack Johnson, who won the heavyweight title a century before Obama took the oath of office.

Johnson's 1908-1915 reign atop the boxing world was flamboyant and controversial. He was reviled by many whites at the time for his boxing prowess, his wealth, and for openly courting and marrying white women.

Displeasure with Johnson spawned a search for a "great white hope," a white challenger who could knock him to the canvass and take his title. But the law delivered the biggest blow to Johnson in 1913 when he was convicted under the Mann Act for having a consensual relationship with a white woman across state lines.

McCain, King, and historians believe that Johnson’s conviction was racially motivated. Johnson fled the United States to France before he was sentenced. He finally lost his heavyweight title to a white fighter — Jess Willard — in Havana in 1915.

Johnson died in a car crash in North Carolina in 1946. His story has been chronicled in stage and film productions of “The Great White Hope,” and in “Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson,” a PBS documentary by Ken Burns.

This is the latest attempt at a Johnson pardon for McCain and King. A similar resolution didn’t make it through both houses of Congress in 2004. The House of Representatives approved a resolution last year urging then-President George W. Bush to pardon Johnson, who like Bush, grew up in Texas. The Senate failed to approve a similar measure and Bush didn’t pardon Johnson.

The Mpu Purwa Historical Object Preservation Center in Malang, East Java, has recovered a 12th-century stone statue of Ganesha, believed to be the only one of its kind in Indonesia. It features a special trait not found on other Ganesha statues in Indonesia - the elephant-headed deity is seen riding atop a mouse.

"The mouse is apparently included as an animal used by Ganesha as a vehicle, but this type of statue has never been found in Indonesia before. Ganesha is usually seen riding the Lembu Nandhini cow, the Jatayu bird, or the Padmasana lotus," Malang archeologist Suwardono said Tuesday.

Other singularities of this statue, recently handed over by a private collector, include Ganesha's stiff facial expression and a badhong carving on the shoulders. The decorations worn by the god, also called samboghakaya, are also more lavish.

"The badhong strand is part of the special trait of statues inherited from the Kediri empire, from the Raja Baneswara to Kertajaya kingdoms. The most special trait is the mouse as a vehicle on the pedestal of the statue," Suwardono said.

Suwardono, a graduate of Malang State University, said he had cross-checked the statue with the National Archeology Research and Development Center in Jakarta, the Trowulan Center for Archeological Conservation and Heritage in Mojokerto, and the Archeological Center in Yogyakarta, the results of which confirmed the statue was a one-of-a-kind that had never been seen before.

For his first major overseas trip as president, Barack Obama has a G-20 meeting, a NATO summit and a roundtable discussion in a Muslim country on the itinerary. But at a morning briefing the day before his departure — as reporters focused on the ouster of General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner — Press Secretary Robert Gibbs didn't field a single question about the President's trip. It was a sign of how ubiquitous and rote presidential foreign travel has become.

Think back to when a President could dominate the news by simply leaving the country and posing for some photo ops. Maybe he'd even sneak in some history-making diplomatic feats. Exhibit A: Richard Nixon. He's remembered for his 1972 trip to China almost as much as he is for Watergate. And while it's conceivable that relations with the Communist country could have been normalized without a face-to-face meeting between Nixon and Chairman Mao Zedong, news photos of the two leaders shaking hands — not to mention images of Nixon walking the Great Wall and eating with chopsticks — helped convince Americans that Red China was not to be feared.

Nixon was the first U.S. president to visit the Asian nation and the jaunt, which came smack in the midst of the Cold War, was a huge boon for the President's public image. The trip ended with the Shanghai Communique, a joint statement from China and the U.S. that pledged to improve relations between the countries and maintained that Taiwan was part of China, a diplomatic sticking point. At the close of the journey, Nixon crowed, "This was the week that changed the world." (See TIME's 1972 Cover Story "Richard Nixon's Long March to Shanghai")

Soon after the U.S. Marines seized the ancient Iraqi city of Babylon in 2003, Iraqi treasure hunters were picking through the ruins of a 2,600-year-old palace.

Capt. Emilio Marrero Jr., a Navy chaplain, watched from atop a fortress wall with a few Marines and two Iraqi guides.

An Iraqi host whispered, "Ali Baba." Thieves.

Armed with little more than indignation and the cross on his left collar, Marrero hollered down in his Bronx accent at the looters: "Ali Baba! Stop."

A pair of armed Marines climbed down from the wall and drove the looters from the ruins.

It was a small victory.

It also was a glimpse into the difficult job of winning the Iraqis' trust while occupying the cradle of civilization. "We're trying to preserve this place, we're not trying to loot it," said Marrero, now the chaplain for Navy Expeditionary Combat Command in Virginia Beach.