(Sept. 21) -- UFOs have monitored and possibly tampered with American nuclear weapons, according to a group of former Air Force officers who will make their claims public next week at a Washington, D.C., news conference.

"While most of the incidents apparently involved mere surveillance, in a few cases, a significant number of nuclear missiles suddenly and simultaneously malfunctioned, just as USAF security policemen reported seeing disc-shaped craft hovering nearby," says Robert Hastings, author of "UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites."

On Monday, at the National Press Club, Hastings will present six former Air Force personnel who will break their silence and disclose dramatic first-hand experiences with UFOs at nuclear weapons sites....

Nearly 70 years after a famous Second World War incident in which a Canadian ship rammed and sank a German submarine in the Mediterranean Sea, the only survivor of the doomed U-boat and perhaps the last living sailor from HMCS Ville de Quebec have rediscovered each other via the Internet -- two former enemies now forging a poignant, long-distance friendship via e-mail.

The remarkable reunion came about after a California newspaper published a story last November featuring the wartime reminiscences of Frank Arsenault, an 86-year-old Canadian veteran now retired and living in Santa Cruz.

The highlight of the P.E.I.-raised Arsenault's four years aboard HMCS Ville de Quebec was the corvette's fateful encounter with U-224, a German submarine that was menacing a convoy of Canadian ships on Jan. 13, 1943, off the coast of Morocco....


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Three hundred years on the ocean floor can be pretty rough on a body. The Underwater Archaeology Branch (UAB) of the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources (www.ncculture.com) will dedicate its fall dive to treating some large bodies of iron in the Atlantic Ocean. Researchers, from Sept. 22-Oct. 29, will be on wreck site of the likely Queen Anne’s Revenge (QAR) (www.qaronline.com), Blackbeard’s flagship, which sank in 1718 near Beaufort.

They will try to change the electrochemical process that corrodes iron in saltwater by applying anodes, skinny aluminum rods, to the objects as they are in situ (in the original place). A dozen cannons, 6 feet to 8 feet long and weighing 700 pounds to 1 ton, will undergo the treatment. So will three large anchors, 11 feet to 13 feet long and weighing an estimated 1,800 pounds....

Before the Friends of Fort Dobbs Board started soliciting others for donations toward the $2.6 million fort reconstruction project, the group wanted to show its own dedication.

On Tuesday, the 14-member board presented North Carolina Historic Sites Director Keith Hardison with a check for $500,000 at its annual membership meeting at the Fort Dobbs Historic Site.

“We are thrilled,” said board chairman Ralph Bentley. “Every board member has pledged. This is a great start. I hope to see the community and the state respond the same way.”

Capital Campaign Chairman David Grogan said rebuilding the fort is a huge opportunity for the community and the state. He said the community has the chance to be the first, the last and the best....

Apparently laid to rest more than 10,000 years ago in a fiery ritual, one of the oldest skeletons in the Americas has been retrieved from an undersea cave along Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, researchers say.


Dating to a time when the now lush region was a near desert, the "Young Man of Chan Hol" may help uncover how the first Americans arrived—and who they were.

About 80 miles (130 kilometers) south of Cancún, the cave system of Chan Hol—"little hole" in a Maya language—is like a deep gouge into the Caribbean coast.

In 2006, after entering the cave's opening, about 30 feet (10 meters) underwater, German cave divers swam more than 1,800 feet (550 meters) through dark tunnels spiked with rock formations. There they accidentally uncovered the Ice Age human's remains and notified archaeologists based in the surrounding state, Quintana Roo.

For the last three years researchers led by Arturo González, director of the Desert Museum in Saltillo, Mexico, have been studying and documenting the bones in place, so as not to lose any clues offered by context.

In late August scuba-diving researchers finally raised the bones for lab study, after having placed them in plastic bags of cave water and sealing the remains in plastic bins....

A team of Peruvian archaeologists have discovered two ceremonial temples more than 4,000 years old in Peru’s northern jungle, which makes them the most ancient in the country and identifies them with the Bracamoros culture, the daily El Comercio said on Saturday.

On both sites were found 14 burial vaults that typically contain the skeletons of newborns and adolescents placed there as offerings at different times in the course of the 800 years these buildings were in use, the newspaper said.

The Bracamoros culture occupied part of the current Ecuadorian province of Zamora Chinchipe and the Peruvian regions of Amazonas and Cajamarca, where the temples were found, the daily said.

It said that the place where the archaeological remains were uncovered was used as a rubbish dump by the inhabitants of Jaen, until a team of archaeologists led by Quirino Olivera decided to excavate the buildings, following the lead of fossil and ceramic evidence found in recent decades.

As the work was getting started in May, experts found large semicircular walls built with a mixture of mortar and stones weighing 200 kilos (440 pounds).

The perfectly aligned walls were built in eight phases of construction and were decorated with an early fresco technique, El Comercio said.

Olivera told the newspaper that “we are standing before one of the first civilizations of Peru.”...

The Vikings, the famed Scandinavian warriors, started raiding Ireland in 795 and plundered it for decades, before establishing two Irish outposts, according to the Annals of Ulster, a 15th century account of medieval Ireland. One outpost, Dúbh Linn, became Dublin, the other, Linn Duchaill, was lost in time. Perhaps until now. A team of archaeologists announced on Friday that it has found the lost Viking settlement near the village of Annagassan, 70 kilometers north of Dublin. "We are unbelievably delighted," said archaeologist and team leader, Mark Clinton, an independent archaeological consultant.

The Annagassan locals have long believed they lived near an ancient Viking town or fort. The stories of Viking raids were told to local children by schoolteachers, and there were also occasional finds that underscored this story. For example, a few years ago, a set of handcuffs once used to shackle Viking slaves was found by a farmer ploughing land. The modern search for Linn Duchaill began 5 years ago when a local filmmaker named Ruth Cassidy, a member of the Annagassan and District Historical Society, enlisted the help of Clinton, a family friend, to find the lost Viking town. They searched through 2005, 2006, and 2007 and were on the point of despair when they came across a flat area—ideal for lifting boats out of the water for shipbuilding and repairs—a couple of kilometers up the River Glyde. They managed to secure funding to pay for a geophysicist, John Nicholls, to survey the site. Nicholls found a series of defensive ditches about 4 meters deep, running in lines. The pattern of ditches does not seem compatible with the typical Irish structure of the period, a ring fort, and no evidence of a Norman settlement, such as moat or castle remains, was found. That left just one other option: Vikings....

The frigid waters of the North Atlantic aren't among the most prominent cruise destinations, but that may change as the world remembers one of the worst maritime disasters in history.

At least two cruises are planned in the spring of 2012 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, with both touting special activities, lectures and memorials to commemorate the tragic voyage.

Organizers insist it's a learning opportunity and a way to remember the victims, but some critics have called the trips tasteless and dubbed them "disaster voyeurism."

Still, both voyages are attracting interest as Titanic -- the subject of countless books and movies -- continues to fascinate....

EDITOR’S NOTE [FROM NEW AMERICAN MEDIA]: Eminent scholar and historian Franz Schurmann, who co-founded Pacific News Service in 1970, passed away on August 20, 2010. Richard Rodriguez, a long-time editor and writer with PNS, remembered him in a powerful eulogy delivered Sept. 19 at UC Berkeley Alumni House.

Franz Schurmann was a terrible driver.

I remember once, after lunch, in his car, he was still talking about the Peloponnesian War or Richard Nixon in China or the spiritual energy, he predicted, would come from Latin America and wash over our gringo nation of drug users—and he ran a red light at Arguello. Horns. Fingers. Franz drove on.

His father died when Franz was 13 years old.

People say about children who suffer the trauma of a parent’s death early in life, that they often are filled with anger at the injustice of life or an out-sized appetite for life. Franz was often angry, always hungry....

More than 120 renowned Chinese archaeologists on Sunday agreed that an ancient tomb belonged to Cao Cao, a cunning general and ruler who lived some 1,800 years ago, amid doubts about its authenticity.

"After discussions about excavated items from the tomb, a consensus has been reached that it belongs to Cao Cao", Bai Yunxiang, deputy director of the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), told a symposium after a brief study of the tomb in Xigaoxue Village of Anyang, Henan Province, and some excavations on Saturday, along with some 120 archaeologists.

"The location of tomb does not contradict the historical records," said Han Lisen, director with the Archaeological Institute of Hebei Province....

For most people, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like to be Barack Obama as his Administration’s high hopes are dashed by daily waves of bad news. But for Walter Mondale, who spent four years as Jimmy Carter’s Vice-President, the experience is all too familiar. When the public sours on you, he said last week, the Presidency seems “like a unique four-year marriage contract, in which divorce is not an option.”

Mondale, now in his eighties, was speaking on the phone from his home state of Minnesota, in advance of the publication of his memoir, “The Good Fight: A Life in Liberal Politics.” He could not help noting the similarities between Obama’s embattled White House and Carter’s. The problems that he and Carter faced from 1976 until 1980, he recalled, often seemed “overwhelming,” with “no good answers” in sight. As the economy was ravaged by what was known as “stagflation,” he said, the public “just turned against us—same as with Obama.” He went on, “People think the President is the only one who can fix their problems. And, if he doesn’t produce solutions, I’m telling you—when a person loses a job, or can’t feed his family, or can’t keep his house, he is no longer rational. They become angry, they strike out—and that’s what we have now. If you’re President, they say, ‘Do something!’ ”...

Three centuries after the birth of Christianity, at least one wealthy family in the town on Sussita, on the east shore of the Sea of Galilee, was still adorning its home with images of goddesses.

Archeologists from the University of Haifa in Israel and Concordia University in Minnesota discovered a wall painting of Tyche, the Greek goddess of fortune.

They also found a figure of a maenad, one of the female companions of the wine and fertility god Dionysus.

"It is interesting to see that although the private residence in which two goddesses were found was in existence during the Byzantine period, when Christianity negated and eradicated idolatrous cults, one can still find clear evidence of earlier beliefs," Prof. Arthur Segal and Dr. Michael Eisenberg of the Zinman Institute of Archaeology said in a release....

After 95 years, the Eucharist was celebrated once again in the Holy Cross Armenian Church on Akdamar Island in Lake Van, in eastern Turkey near the border with Armenia. Archbishop Aram Atesyan, vicar of the Armenian patriarch of Turkey, described the event, which occurred yesterday, as “a miracle”. However, in the Armenian Diaspora, many voices were critical.

“It is miracle to be able to celebrate the Eucharist here today,” the bishop said in his sermon. Speaking in Armenian, then Turkish, he thanked Turkish authorities who restored the building and authorised the celebration. “This will be a golden page in history,” he said at the end of the service.

Built more than a thousand years ago, Holy Cross Armenian Church is a beautiful specimen of Armenian architecture, but for Armenians and the international community it symbolises the Armenian “genocide”, a term rejected by Turkey.

In 2005, Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who was murdered in January 2007, called for its reopening so as “to restore our spent souls”....

The Iraqi National Museum has found more than 600 missing artifacts stashed away in a storeroom of the prime minister's office, two years after the U.S. government returned them to Iraq, officials said on Monday.

Most of the artifacts were among some 15,000 relics looted during the chaos that followed the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that ousted dictator Saddam Hussein.

The 638 pieces were recovered, handed over to the premier's office, and promptly lost again, officials said.

"We found these artifacts in one of the storerooms of the prime minister's office along with some kitchen appliances. When we opened the boxes we found them," Qahtan al-Jibouri, Iraq's Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, said....

...In the first days of 2009, hundreds of angry Vietnamese Americans marched outside an exhibit in Santa Ana featuring Vietnamese artists. Some arrived by bus from as far away as San Jose.

The object of their fury was a 2-foot-by-3-foot photo featuring a young woman sitting next to a brass bust of former Communist leader Ho Chi Minh. She wore a red tank top with a large yellow star, the color of the official flag of Vietnam.

The protesters shouted into bullhorns and raised pickets skyward. Here, on the edge of the largest Vietnamese community in America, the image of the hated Communist leader and the flag of a country that was no longer theirs stirred painful memories....

The 40-year-old artist from Long Beach insisted he didn't mean to hurt anyone. The photo poked fun at communism, he repeated in a weary voice during interviews with Vietnamese and American media. It was comical that the bust was no longer held up in reverence, that the flag was worn as a tourist knickknack. Doan saw the photo as a modern Vietnamese American point of view.

The anger only spread. Dozens picketed on the campus after Cypress College administrators declined to remove the photo, citing freedom of expression. The anger boiled up in e-mail messages on Doan's iPhone. "How dare you, kid!!" one read. "…seeking fame at others' grief," read another....

The New York Times has made reference to research universities consistently over its many years of publication. But in the last half century, the newspaper has grown less interested in the universities and more interested in their researchers, according to a new study.

A team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign analyzed 60 years’ worth of Times archives in an attempt to find out how its coverage of research universities has evolved since World War II. The researchers found that the proportion of articles focusing on particular institutions has declined significantly, while the share of articles on non-university topics that contain “sound bites” from university researchers has risen.

“In 1946, 53 percent of articles mentioning a research university were about that university, focusing on its research or activities,” the authors wrote. By 2005, “Just 15 percent of articles mentioning a university are about that university: the remaining 85 percent simply cite high-stature faculty for soundbite commentary on current events.”

The Urbana-Champaign team parsed the thousands of university references published in the Times in the latter 20th century with the help of a computer program, which separated articles in which the university name appears near the top from those where it shows up farther down in the article -- the assumption being that articles that mention a university’s name higher up are more likely to be about research or activities at that university, while articles that drop the name lower down are more likely to be quoting a professor on some topic apart from the university....

Leetaru and Magelli’s analysis also revealed that the Times’s coverage has historically favored the Ivy League universities, with Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania ranking among the top eight most frequently referenced institutions during the 60-year sample period. (New York University and the University of California were the only non-Ivies to penetrate that circle, ranking No. 2 and No. 3, respectively. Brown University clocked in at No. 29; Columbia, referenced in more than 50,000 separate news items, was first.)

Times staffers contacted Monday by Inside Higher Ed had no immediate comment....

Two exhibitions concerning Alexander the Great are on display in the Netherlands. One is at the Amsterdam Hermitage and the other is at Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam. The exhibition at the Hermitage Amsterdam Museum is about “Alexander the Great – the Immortal”. The second one running at the Allard Pierson Museum in cooperation with the former, is on the subject of “Alexander the Great and His Heritage-Greeks in Egypt”.

The exhibition at the Hermitage Amsterdam Museum will be open to the public until March 18, 2011. The exhibition includes more than 350 top exhibits, including the famous Gonzaga Cameo from the State Hermitage Museum of St. Petersburg. It is the first time in the Netherlands that an exhibition is devoted to the historical figure of Alexander the Great, his trip to the East and his influence to Hellenism around the world....

Iraq has recovered more than 600 historical artefacts that had been stolen and then recovered but mistakenly stored in a warehouse in the country for around two years, a minister said on Monday.

The 638 items include statues, spearheads and glass cups that were taken from Iraq and actually returned to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's office in late 2008, but only accounted for recently.

The items, some dating to the third millennium BC, had been stored in a warehouse alongside common kitchen utensils, after being repatriated by the US military....

Nearly 70 years after a famous Second World War incident in which a Canadian ship rammed and sank a German submarine in the Mediterranean Sea, the only survivor of the doomed U-boat and perhaps the last living sailor from HMCS Ville de Quebec have rediscovered each other via the Internet -- two former enemies now forging a poignant, long-distance friendship via e-mail.

The remarkable reunion came about after a California newspaper published a story last November featuring the wartime reminiscences of Frank Arsenault, an 86-year-old Canadian veteran now retired and living in Santa Cruz.

The highlight of the P.E.I.-raised Arsenault's four years aboard HMCS Ville de Quebec was the corvette's fateful encounter with U-224, a German submarine that was menacing a convoy of Canadian ships on Jan. 13, 1943, off the coast of Morocco.

The enemy sub's presence was detected by a Ville de Quebec sonar operator, and 10 depth charges were dropped into the ocean. One of them struck and damaged the U-boat, which surfaced as the panicked Germans plotted their next move and one officer-- Lt. Wolf Danckworth -- reached the conning tower to size up their plight.

That's when the Canadian ship's captain, Lt.-Cdr. A.R.E. Coleman, wary of the U-boat's deck guns, gave the order to ram the wounded sub.

"I saw this guy coming out of the conning tower," Arsenault recalled. "That's when the captain realized we could hit the sub and he called out, 'Stand by to ram.'"

The impact submerged him so deeply that he momentarily blacked out, but Danckworth was the only German to reach the surface as U-224 was swallowed by the sea....

Leonard Skinner, the gym teacher who inspired the name of the legendary southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd, has died.

The band announced his death on its website, saying Skinner died in his sleep early Monday morning. He was 77.

"Coach Skinner had such a profound impact on our youth that ultimately led us to naming the band, which you know as Lynyrd Skynyrd, after him," wrote Gary Rossington, guitarist and a founding member of the band.

"Looking back, I cannot imagine it any other way. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family at this time."
Band lore has it that Skinner was a coach and gym teacher at Robert E. Lee High School in Jacksonville, Florida -- and a stickler for the school's policy against long hair.

He reportedly sent several students to the principal's office for violating the policy, including some who would go on to form an up-and-coming band with a tongue-in-cheek variation on his name.

The band formed in the early 1970s and had a string of acclaimed songs, including "Freebird" and "Sweet Home Alabama."...