A report issued by the Air Force Audit Agency that was released to the National Security Archive this week identifies significant mismanagement in the Air Force Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) program. The findings demonstrate a pattern of noncompliance with statutory timeframes to respond to records requests from the public and misrepresentations about the state of the Air Force FOIA program. In particular, the Air Force audit agency found that the Air Force:

* Did not properly track or record FOIA requests;
* Overstated the number of requests it received and understated its response times, leading to inaccurate reporting about its program to Congress;
* Failed to comply with the Electronic Freedom of Information Act requirements to include all frequently requested records in its Electronic Reading Room;
* Failed to inform all requesters of their appeal rights under the law; and
* Failed to notify interested third parties, such as government contractors, of the intent to release information.

"Four years after our law suit, and despite multiple court orders, the Air Force system remains broken," said David P. Dean, of the law firm James & Hoffman, P.C., who represents the Archive. "The facts, though stunning, speak for themselves. In 2005, we complained about 82 unprocessed FOIA requests that the Archive had submitted up to eighteen years earlier. Despite several court orders requiring the Air Force to complete processing and to create a functioning FOIA system, today six requests are still outstanding and the system is still dysfunctional."

The Archive's suit was filed in March 2005 and alleged that the Air Force failed to acknowledge FOIA requests, lost FOIA requests, failed to process requests, tried to discourage the public from pursuing FOIA requests, failed to respond to inquiries about the status of the requests, and let requests languish while records were destroyed or transferred to other agencies. The Archive's lawsuit resulted in a court decision in 2006 finding that the Air Force had a pattern and practice of not processing FOIA requests in accordance with the law. At that time, the court noted that "the Air Force only woke up in May 2005 to its need to fulfill its FOIA obligations on a more timely basis..."

Since that time, and as a result of the lawsuit, the Air Force has instituted numerous changes to its FOIA program, including:

* Committing to training all Air Force personnel about the agency's FOIA obligations;
* Committing to posting all released records in its Electronic Reading Room and linking all of its Electronic Reading Rooms;
* Putting in place a centralized database system that will track FOIA requests from initial submission to completion; and
* Receiving FOIA requests online through its FOIA web site.

"While we are extremely glad that our litigation has forced the Air Force to bring its program closer to what the public is entitled to expect under the law, we are concerned that these small changes are not sufficient to bring about the transformation that is needed at the Air Force," commented Meredith Fuchs, the Archive's General Counsel. "The Air Force has not yet addressed its problems with interagency referrals and consultations--which has proven to be a significant black hole--and it has not yet gotten the old, long pending requests into its new tracking system." Ms. Fuchs concluded, "If the Air Force is going to enter the new era of transparency promised by President Obama, then it is going to have to shift its culture to one that appreciates the agency's legal obligation to keep the public informed about its activities on their behalf."

President Obama's special envoy to Sudan, retired Air Force Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration, said Wednesday that the Sudanese government is no longer engaging in a "coordinated" campaign of mass murder in Darfur, marking a shift in the U.S. characterization of the violence there as an "ongoing genocide."

"What we see is the remnants of genocide," Gration told reporters at a briefing in Washington. "The level of violence that we're seeing right now is primarily between rebel groups, the Sudanese government and . . . some violence between Chad and Sudan."

Gration's remarks come as the Obama administration is finishing a review of its Sudan policy. The comments appeared to expose an emerging rift between Gration and Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who accused the Sudanese leadership of genocide as recently as two days ago.

‘Refugee Voices’ will be launched this evening during a reception at the Wiener Library as part of Refugee Week 2009. ‘Refugee Voices’ is an audio-visual Holocaust testimony archive featuring a collection of 150 filmed interviews with Holocaust survivors and refugees, who escaped and survived Nazi-occupied Europe and rebuilt their lives in Britain. The interviews, in English, focus on the personal life stories of Holocaust survivors in Britain after the Second World War. The collection includes 450 hours of filmed and transcribed accounts and each interview is accompanied by photographs, artefacts and documents. Visitors will be able to consult the archive at the library.

The project was completed by the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR), which was founded in 1941 as a self-help organisation by those refugees who fled Nazi-occupied Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. The association now aims to provide social and welfare services to victims of Nazi persecution living in Britain and to promote and support projects related to Holocaust education and commemoration.

The Wiener Library, founded in 1933 and the world’s oldest Holocaust memorial institution, is the first UK institution to receive a copy of Refugee Voices.

From today, web users will be able to access more than two million pages of 19th and 20th century history by browsing a selection of 49 British and regional newspaper titles, courtesy of the British Library.

Included in the collection are archives from the Graphic, an illustrated weekly publication which ran from 1869 to 1932. Writing on October 13 1888 after the Jack the Ripper murders, one journalist said: "To the general public it is some comfort to reflect that the late atrocities were aimed at a particular class, and that their object was not robbery. Educated persons, who have many interests and subjects of conversation, can, perhaps, scarcely realise the impression made by these occurrences on poor and ignorant people, whose lives are usually monotonous and uneventful."

Meanwhile, in the Penny Illustrated Paper, another weekly, a self-described "old-fashioned woman" explains why women want the vote: "Under these altered conditions it is a matter of paramount importance that the women who help to find the money which keeps up the State should also have a voice in the spending of that money, and more, that they should have a voice in electing the men who make the laws under which they live and which they must obey." Women would have to wait an additional 18 years before being granted the right to vote on the same terms as men.

Other key topics, as highlighted by the British Library, include Slavery and its Abolition; Chartism; The Sepoy Mutiny; Bryant and May Match Girls' Strike; Sex and Scandal; The Napoleonic Wars; and the Crimean War.

Parts of Charles County's Zekiah Swamp are every bit as inhospitable as the name suggests, choked with tick-infested woods and boot-sucking wetlands.

But as archaeologists are discovering to their delight, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries Zekiah was a growth center for the young Maryland colony.

The site of a 1674 courthouse was found last summer. Excavations this month have uncovered what might be traces of the "summer house" that Gov. Charles Calvert built to dodge his political enemies. And diggers are searching for traces of Zekiah Fort, built in 1680 to resettle several hundred "friendly" Piscataway Indians.

Archaeologists at the National Institute of Culture (INC) have found a pre-Inca tomb in the Salapunku archaeological site, located inside the Machu Picchu Archaeological Park in Cusco, southeastern Peru.

Resident archaeologist Francisco Huaycaya Quispe said that these remains would belong to a woman from the Quillke culture, an indigenous which flourished before the Inca Empire.

According to the archaeologist, this hypothesis is based on the pottery and ruminant and poultry bones found at the site.

A University of Colorado at Boulder team has uncovered an ancient and previously unknown Maya agricultural system -- a large manioc field intensively cultivated as a staple crop that was buried and exquisitely preserved under a blanket of ash by a volcanic eruption in present-day El Salvador 1,400 years ago.

Evidence shows the manioc field -- at least one-third the size of a football field -- was harvested just days before the eruption of the Loma Caldera volcano near San Salvador in roughly A.D. 600, said CU-Boulder anthropology Professor Payson Sheets, who is directing excavations at the ancient village of Ceren. The cultivated field of manioc was discovered adjacent to Ceren, which was buried under 17 feet of ash and is considered the best preserved ancient farming village in all of Latin America.

The ancient planting beds of the carbohydrate-rich tuber are the first and only evidence of an intensive manioc cultivation system at any New World archaeology site, said Sheets. While two isolated portions of the manioc field were discovered in 2007 following radar work and limited excavation, 18 large test pits dug in spring 2009 -- each measuring about 10 feet by 10 feet -- allowed the archaeologists to estimate the size of the field and assess the related agricultural activity that went on there.

An archaeological excavation in Jerusalem has revealed an ancient aqueduct that brought water to the Sultan's Pool and to the Temple Mount, supplying clean water to the city's residents and visiting pilgrims.

The Israel Antiquities Authority uncovered the main aqueduct that conveyed water to the Sultan's Pool during an excavation prior to the construction of the Montefiore Museum in Mishkenot Sha'ananim by the Jerusalem Foundation. The ancient aqueduct supplied pilgrims and residents with water for drinking and purification.

Lewis' modern-day relatives have spent years seeking permission from a reluctant federal government to remove his body from its Tennessee grave, examine it and answer the question once and for all.

Now they're pushing even harder — hiring a publicist, launching a Web site and opening new lines of dialogue with the National Park Service, the agency that would permit the exhumation.

Some historians have criticized the effort, and how much evidence is in Lewis' grave is a matter of debate.

Several archeologists have signed on to help the family, including James Starrs, a professor of law and forensic sciences at George Washington University who has worked with the family since the mid-1990s, and anthropologists at Middle Tennessee State University.

Larry McKee, senior archeologist with the archeology and preservation firm TRC, said there's a chance that the true story of Lewis' death might still be etched on his bones.

Nearly 200 distant nieces, nephews and cousins have signed a petition seeking permission to exhume the remains in hopes of learning what really killed him and, if nothing else, giving him a proper Christian burial.

The president has said he wants to reach out to all of his predecessors.

Americans are fascinated by their ex-presidents. The public has been through so many experiences with them that even when they leave office, the "exes" remain celebrities and, more important, compelling reminders of the recent high and low points in our history.

There are four of them alive now—Carter, Bush, Clinton, and George H. W. Bush. There are two Democrats and two Republicans, each very different in personality and outlook, and all of them experienced in the toughest job on Earth.

The potential relationship between the old and the new started out in a promising way, when Bush the younger, at Obama's request, hosted all the living ex-presidents at the White House before he left the scene. This generated memorable photographs in the Oval Office but, apparently, little else so far.

Incumbent presidents sometimes avoid contact with their predecessors because they don't want to be tarnished by past errors and seem insecure in their own judgments. But experts say misplaced pride should not keep Obama from using his predecessors to help him govern.

Former presidents usually want to be useful in some way, in part to burnish their legacies and also out of a patriotic desire to help the country. And Obama wants to reach out to all of his living predecessors. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs says Obama is speaking to them privately, but he doesn't want to violate confidentiality by talking about the frequency and content of the president-to-president contacts. Other White House advisers say Obama realizes that only a president can fully understand what his job entails. And experts say it would be a shame if he failed to make maximum use of the other four living members of the world's most exclusive club.

A solid majority of Americans (61%) continue to approve of Barack Obama’s job performance, although they express mixed views of several of his policies. An important positive sign for Obama is the public’s continued optimism that his policies will improve the economy – fully 65% express this view. A smaller majority (55%) is optimistic Obama will reduce the budget deficit over the long-term. Nonetheless, Obama’s job approval on the economy has declined from 60% in April to 52% currently.

The slippage in the president’s economic ratings appears unrelated to the public’s assessments of his administration’s impact on current economic conditions – most (53%) say his policies have “not had an effect so far” or that it is too early to tell. Instead, it may have more to do with his relatively poor ratings for handling the problems of troubled automakers General Motors and Chrysler.

Nearly as many disapprove (44%) as approve (47%) of Obama’s performance in handling the automakers’ problems. There is even less support for government efforts to keep G.M. and Chrysler in business: 58% disapprove of the government spending billions to keep the troubled automakers in business, while just 36% approve.

The new survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted June 10-14 among 1,502 adults, finds:

Obama receives solid ratings on foreign policy: Majorities say he strikes the right balance in dealings with U.S. allies and the Middle East, and most reject the notion that his terrorism policies have made the country less safe than during Bush’s presidency.

Public attitudes toward health care show some similarities – but also clear differences – with opinions in 1993. A large majority (75%) favors changing the health care system so that all Americans are covered for medically necessary care; that is down somewhat from 1993 (83%). Substantially fewer say the health care system should be completely rebuilt than did so then.

Half of Americans (50%) support Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation to the Supreme Court while 25% are opposed. Opinion was similar regarding John Roberts’ confirmation to the Court in 2005.

Both Barack and Michelle Obama remain overwhelmingly popular. Currently, 72% have a favorable view of the president while 76% -- including 59% of Republicans -- have a favorable impression of the first lady.

Observers with a working knowledge of Iranian politics have largely been able to shrug off President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's bluster and bullying, knowing the diminutive President must still answer to a far more powerful figure: Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei. Since 1989, the shadowy cleric — a former president himself — has sat at the apex of Iran's complex hierarchy as the final word in all political and religious matters. The massive protests roiling Tehran in the aftermath of the June 12 elections have underlined both the vast sweep of Khamenei's powers and, perhaps, its limitations. After hailing Ahmadinejad's "divine victory," Khamenei backpedaled by ordering the country's Guardian Council to investigate the results — a decree that some took as an implicit capitulation to factions sympathetic to Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Ahmadinejad's challenger. In his two decades at the helm of the Islamic Republic, Khamenei's present challenge — to guide Iran through this stretch of turbulence while the world watches transfixed — may be his toughest yet.

The rise of “the wall” between intelligence and law enforcement personnel that impeded the sharing of information within the U.S. government prior to September 11, 2001 was critically examined in a detailed monograph (pdf) that was prepared in 2004 for the 9/11 Commission.  It is the only one of four staff monographs that had not previously been released.  It was finally declassified and disclosed earlier this month.

In April 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft testified (pdf) that the failure to properly share threat information in the summer of 2001 could be attributed to Justice Department policy memoranda that were issued in 1995 by the Clinton Administration.  That is an erroneous oversimplification, the staff monograph contends:  “A review of the facts… demonstrates that the Attorney General’s testimony did not fairly and accurately reflect” the meaning or relevance of those 1995 policy documents.  For one thing, those policies did not even apply to CIA and NSA information, which could have been shared with law enforcement without any procedural obstacles.

But if Attorney General Ashcroft was misinformed, he was not alone.  The 1995 procedures governing information sharing between law enforcement and intelligence “were widely misunderstood and misapplied” resulting in “far less information sharing and coordination… than was allowed.”  In fact, “everyone was confused about the rules governing the sharing and use of information gather in intelligence channels.”

“The information sharing failures in the summer of 2001 were not the result of legal barriers but of the failure of individuals to understand that the barriers did not apply to the facts at hand,” the 35-page monograph concludes.  “Simply put, there was no legal reason why the information could not have been shared.”

The prevailing confusion was exacerbated by numerous complicating circumstances, the monograph explains.  The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was growing impatient with the FBI because of repeated errors in applications for surveillance.  Justice Department officials were uncomfortable requesting intelligence surveillance of persons and facilities related to Osama bin Laden since there was already a criminal investigation against bin Laden underway, which normally would have preempted FISA surveillance.  Officials were reluctant to turn to the FISA Court of Review for clarification of their concerns since one of the judges on the court had expressed doubts about the constitutionality of FISA in the first place.  And so on.  Although not mentioned in the monograph, it probably didn’t help that public interest critics in the 1990s (myself included) were accusing the FISA Court of serving as a “rubber stamp” and indiscriminately approving requests for intelligence surveillance.

In the end, the monograph implicitly suggests that if the law was not the problem, then changing the law may not be the solution.  The document, which had been classified Secret, was released with some small though questionable redactions.  See “Legal Barriers to Information Sharing: The Erection of a Wall Between Intelligence and Law Enforcement Investigations,” 9/11 Commission Staff Monograph by Barbara A. Grewe, Senior Counsel for Special Projects, August 20, 2004.

Senate confirmation hearings begin July 13 for Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Barack Obama's choice for the U.S. Supreme Court. Experts say that Sotomayor's confirmation is likely, given the Democrats' majority in the Senate. But history shows that the confirmation process can be unpredictable.

If confirmed by the Senate, Judge Sotomayor would become the country's first Hispanic Supreme Court justice.

From humble beginnings in New York City to some of the country's finest universities, Sotomayor would also fulfill the president's desire to appoint a Supreme Court justice with a diverse background and experiences.

"I strive never to forget the real world consequences of my decisions on individuals, businesses and government," she has said.

Sotomayor can expect to face hours of questioning about her background and legal views when her nomination is considered next month by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Jeffrey Rosen teaches law at George Washington University and was a recent guest on VOA's Encounter program.

"The American confirmation process for the Supreme Court is an elaborate Kibuki dance, a kind of ritual where senators ask long-winded and often unfocused questions, and the nominees elaborately dodge and weave and try not to answer them. So the amount of light that emerges from this remains to be seen," Rosen said.

Veteran Washington political insider Tom Korologos knows the process well. He has helped several Republican presidents with their Supreme Court nominees, beginning with President Richard Nixon in 1971.

"In the early days, nominees got approved the same day they got named. And it has now become very contentious. It is a function of this town in which we live. The town has gotten very partisan," Korologos said.

Korologos says the key to the confirmation process is for the nominee to let the senators do most of the talking at the hearings.

"What I advise nominees is that you must follow the 80-20 rule. The 80-20 rule is that if they are talking 80 percent of the time and you (nominee) are talking 20 percent, you are winning," he said. "The hearing is not about you, it is about them, and they want to show that they understand the issues and they want to make their points across. As they are asking the question they are making their point, so you better listen."

Korologos says one past nominee who failed to follow his advice was Judge Robert Bork. He was nominated to the high court in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan, but was eventually voted down by the Democratically-controlled Senate.

Bork and his Republican supporters never forgot what they considered to be unfair treatment at the hands of Senate Democrats.

"To be quite frank about it, the amount of disinformation and falsehoods told about me were such that I do not think the country conceivably could have understood the case (my nomination) on the merits," Bork said.

Four years later, another bitter confirmation fight took place over the nomination of Judge Clarence Thomas. Thomas was a conservative African-American nominated by President George H.W. Bush.

During the Senate hearings, Thomas had to fend off allegations of unwanted sexual advances on an associate. He was eventually confirmed. But the process was politically polarizing for the country and left Thomas embittered, even though he won Senate approval.

"This is a circus. It is a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, as far as I am concerned, it is high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves," Thomas said.

In the case of Judge Sotomayor, Republicans have promised rigorous, but fair hearings.

In addition to Sotomayor's legal opinions, Republicans are expected to ask about remarks she made in 2001 when she said that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who has not lived that life.

Robert Alt is with the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington.

"I think what is causing a great deal of trouble for most people is that, in fact, she has made some suggestions with regard to ethnicity and ethnic superiority that have raised hackles, and which are giving the White House some trouble in responding to," he said.

Even though they are in the minority in the Senate, Republicans could try to block Sotomayor's nomination through a parliamentary delaying tactic known as the filibuster.

But political experts say that is unlikely because Democrats control 59 of the 100 Senate seats. In addition, Republicans may be wary of politically offending Hispanic voters, the country's fastest growing demographic group.

Legal expert Jeffrey Rosen expects that Sotomayor will be easily confirmed.

"In the end, the sheer political symbolism of the first Hispanic justice, with this compelling life story is so overwhelming that it will be difficult for Republicans as well as Democrats to resist that. I think she will be handily confirmed to the United States Supreme Court," Rosen said.

Historically, the record shows that Judge Sotomayor's confirmation is likely, but not a certainty.

According to the Senate historian's office, 28 of the 158 nominees to the Supreme Court have been rejected since 1789. This is a failure rate of about 18 percent, or nearly one in five.

Who killed off werewolves? Darwin did it, says a science historian, by linking humans to ape-like ancestors.

In a July meeting of the British Society for the History of Science, historian Brian Regal of Kean University in Union, N.J., will demonstrate how werewolves, feared hiding behind every tree in travelers' tales for centuries, died out in folklore following the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859.

"The spread of the idea of evolution helped kill off the werewolf because a canid-human hybrid makes no sense from an evolutionary point of view,” Regal says, in a society statement. Instead, tales of ape-men -- Yeti, Sasquatch and Bigfoot -- began to appear in popular tales, began to "evolve" in the popular imagination, he finds.

As high school students across the country sit to write their final examinations this month, Canadians may be shocked to discover that few of them will be tested on what they know about Canada's history.

For more than a decade, the Dominion Institute has commissioned surveys chronicling the national malaise about Canada's history: Four in 10 Canadians cannot name our first prime minister or identify the year of Confederation. Young Canadians often know even less about our country's past than their parents or grandparents.

The Dominion Institute decided to find out what exactly was required of high-school students in Canada when it comes to learning about the country's past. What events, people and themes are they required to learn in our nation's classrooms? What skills are they expected to acquire?

The results, found in the just-released Canadian History Report Card (the full report is available at report-card.dominion.ca), are troubling.

Related Links

HNN Hot Topics: Low History IQ's

He was little more than a teenager, about 19 or 20 years old. Small and slight for warfare on the frontier, he had the delicate facial bones of a boy and had likely once been a slave.

He was a Buffalo Soldier: one of the legendary African American members of the U.S. Army who served at remote military outposts in the years after the Civil War.

But his grave outside an abandoned New Mexico fort had been violated. His bones were scrambled. And investigators think his skull, still with most of its hair, became a relic hunter's trophy before it was returned to authorities in a paper bag.

Last month, experts working at the Smithsonian Institution matched the young man's skull with a skeleton exhumed from the fort's cemetery, solving a gruesome mystery of looted graves, purloined artifacts, and life and death on the frontier.

It was part of a project of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and federal land, water and law enforcement agencies looking into the decadeslong ransacking of the cemetery outside Fort Craig, in New Mexico.

Federal officials shipped 39 sets of well-preserved remains last month from New Mexico to Washington. Scientists pored over the bones with microscopes, CT scanners, X-ray machines and digital measuring devices for insights into the lives of the fort's dead.

On the day John Dean is releasing a new edition of his autobiography, Blind Ambition, one of his old critics is charging that Dean admitted to him that the book was based on incomplete research.

In a note to HNN Len Colodny reported that in a 1989 interview Dean admitted"I'm gonna be very honest with you. I didn't even reread my testimony when I wrote my book."

In the original acknowledgements to the book Dean wrote that he had reviewed his own testimony in writing the book.

Dean is releasing the new edition of his autobiography at an event at the Nixon Presidential Library & Museum. His appearance has drawn strong criticism from old Nixon supporters. The library is now run by the National Archives and Records Administration.

The interview is posted at Watergate.com.

Dean and Colodny have long been at odds. In the 1990s Dean sued Colodny, the co-author of the controversial book, Silent Coup (St. Martins Press, 1991), which claimed that Dean, not Nixon, was behind the Watergate Affair. The suit ended in a secret settlement that included the withdrawal of Silent Coup from sale by the publisher.

Related Links

HNN Hot Topics: The Watergate Transcript Controversy

How King Louis XV came to shoot his own horse in the bottom is described, by the monarch himself, in a batch of royal letters to be auctioned in Paris today.

The hunting accident took place near Versailles in September 1766 and appears to have caused the 18th-century equivalent of banner headlines all over the country.

In a laconic note to his cousin, the Duc de Penthièvre, the king reports that his "adventure" has been "certainly exaggerated".

"The wild boar, which was very large, charged at me... My rifle misfired when I saw him and I didn't have the time to turn him aside... [the bullet] wounded my horse in the buttock," he wrote.

The collection of 344 rare letters written by French kings and princes and their wives and courtiers is expected to fetch €150,000 (£127,000) when it goes under the auctioneer's hammer at Sotheby's in Paris. The letters once belonged to the last king of France, Louis-Philippe, who was forced to abdicate in 1848 and died in exile in England two years later.

The war over Watergate never ends. The latest battle is over a decision by the Nixon Presidential Library to commemorate this week's 37th anniversary of the Watergate break-in by inviting an especially provocative speaker: John Dean, the former White House lawyer who pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice after testifying about his boss's role in the cover-up. The invitation from the library—which is now run by the National Archives—has outraged Nixon's dwindling loyalists, who have mounted a lobbying campaign to get the event canceled. "This is in poor taste," says Robert Odle, a former Nixon communications aide. "It's like having Monica Lewinsky speak at the Clinton library on the anniversary of President Clinton's impeachment."

The privately run Nixon Foundation, whose board members include Henry Kissinger, George Schultz and Nixon's daughters, Julie Eisenhower and Tricia Cox, is spearheading the anti-Dean campaign. In recent weeks it has sent letters to all the living presidents urging them to join its protest, warning that such "irrational and unbalanced" programming could dry up donors to their libraries. (None of the ex-presidents has weighed in, according to archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper.) The foundation also rescinded $150,000 in pledged funds for two library exhibits, including one commemorating the Apollo lunar missions during Nixon's presidency, though Cooper said the archives has approved extra funds so they can proceed. Foundation spokesman Richard Quinn described Dean in an e-mail as a "disbarred lawyer and convicted felon" and said the group wants more "non-partisan balance" at such events....

Related Links

New Nixon Blog Commentary on Dean's Appearance

Given away by strange, crop circle-like formations seen from the air, a huge prehistoric ceremonial complex discovered in southern England has taken archaeologists by surprise.

A thousand years older than nearby Stonehenge, the site includes the remains of wooden temples and two massive, 6,000-year-old tombs that are among "Britain's first architecture," according to archaeologist Helen Wickstead, leader of the Damerham Archaeology Project.

For such a site to have lain hidden for so long is "completely amazing," said Wickstead, of Kingston University in London.

The Customs Bio Diversity Protection Unit which cracked the biggest ever attempt to smuggle out a large stock of priceless artefacts including Buddha statues belonging to 19th Century Kandyan era last January concluded the case yesterday.

The BDPU fined the Swedish national Robert Ulvenkrantz Rs.50,000 after the inquiry and released him. He was taken into custody on May 2 for attempting to leave the country with two priceless antique Buddha statues.

According to Customs Superintendent in charge of BDPU Samantha Gunasekara the case was exposed in early January when an American national was taken into custody for attempting to smuggle out 74 priceless artefacts via a private courier service in Ja-Ela.

Govt hails pivotal moment for Cambodian culture as National Museum celebrates an upgrade to its ageing lighting system

FIVE foreign donors handed over five Khmer artefacts at a ceremony Friday to celebrate a new electrical and lighting system at the National Museum.

"Cambodia has lost a lot in the last 20 to 30 years. Anything that is given back to them of any value is of great importance," Douglas Latchford, a collector of Khmer antiquities, told the Post shortly before giving his speech in Khmer.

Son Soubert, a former lecturer at the faculty of archaeology at Royal University of Fine Arts, pointed to a pendant donated by Latchford as a particularly important antiquity.

Food poisoning, not wanderlust, may have inspired early Polynesian wayfarers to undertake risky voyages across the Pacific to Hawai'i, New Zealand and Rapa Nui, according to new research.

Using archaeological evidence, prehistoric climate data and recent reports of ciguatera poisoning from the consumption of contaminated reef fish, researchers at the Florida Institute of Technology theorize that climate conditions conducive to ciguatera outbreaks may have occurred in French Polynesia between A.D. 1000 and 1450 — an active period of Polynesian voyaging and colonization.

"Notwithstanding the adventurous spirit of people of the distant past, we suggest that when ciguatera fish poisoning became chronic, people migrated out of necessity," said a study by Teina Rongo, a doctorate student at the university's Department of Biological Sciences, and his faculty advisers, professors Robert van Woesik and Mark Bush.