Bin Laden capture rumors

There was much speculation prior to President Bush's press conference last night that it would be to announce the capture of Osama bin Laden. The rumors became so prevalent that the White House went so far as to officially deny them.

Even before the denial, however, it was clear that no capture had yet taken place. For if Bin Laden is captured, you can bet that the US will be put on the highest stage of alert. And even if the Code Red announcement is not immediately announced to the general public, word of the alert will soon spread from police, military, and emergency workers, even if the reason for the alert is unknown.

Reports have also been circulating for a day or so about the capture of Bin Laden's sons; the Times of London has judged them credible enough to print, but no official government confirmation has yet appeared.

Wartime GPS blackout?

The Pentagon has told New Scientist it will not implement a global GPS blackout for civilian users if war starts in Iraq, as seems increasingly likely.

"We would not create a global problem for transport out of spite for Saddam," says a spokesman at the US Department of Defense. However, he admitted that the US military does have the capability to jam civilian GPS signals regionally, and did not rule this option out.

A blockade of non-military GPS access in the "theatre of war" could significantly hinder the capabilities of Iraqi forces. But millions of civilian users depend on the US-controlled network of 27 global positioning satellites, in activities including shipping, transportation and power transmission.

Any sudden GPS blackout would trigger chaos, say experts. It might also help break the deadlock in negotiations over Europe's proposed rival to GPS, Galileo. This 30-satellite system would be run for entirely civilian purposes. If agreement is reached it could be operational by 2008 at a cost of $2.8 billion.

Read the full story here.

Hey, you can't park that MiG there!

Wish I could provide a picture:

A German woman returned from a shopping trip to find a fighter jet had landed on top of her car. . .

It had been knocked off a display by a lorry which bumped the platform it was standing on. The Mig 21 jet was on display in a car park in Hagen, Westphalia, and completely destroyed the car.

From Ananova.

Pen guns seized in Germany

Police in Germany have found more than 1,200 James Bond-style shooting pens. A weapons fanatic had been trying to sell the 16-centimetre pen-guns for £100 each.

It is illegal to make or own such weapons in Germany. The man is thought to have made the pen-guns himself. Police say he evaded being found out by ordering the parts he needed from a number of different suppliers.

Nothing a competent machinist couldn't turn out from scratch, however. From Ananova.

Providence Athenaeum to sell Audubon folio

Faced with the double whammy of rising operating costs and shrinking investments, the venerable Providence Athenaeum has decided to sell one of its most prized possessions: a rare folio edition of John James Audubon's Birds of America.

The Athenaeum can still back out of the deal, provided it raises enough money from other sources to meet its obligations. Otherwise, the folio, which is in mint condition and has been part of the Athenaeum's collection since the early 19th century, will be sold on Oct. 14 at Christie's auction house in New York City.

Based on a similar sale three years ago, Christie's expects the folio to fetch $5 million to $8 million. . .

Birds of America is Audubon's masterpiece, a collection of 435 hand-colored prints that pushed the matter-of-fact techniques of scientific illustration into the realm of fine art. Begun in London in 1827, Birds was eventually sold in two editions -- a large-format set known as the Elephant Folio and a smaller set known as the Royal Octavo Edition.

The Athenaeum, which was founded in 1753 as a private members-supported lending library, owns one of each. . .

Yet even if the folio is sold, it won't be the end of Audubon in Rhode Island.
The Athenaeum will still have its octavo edition. Meanwhile, the Athenaeum's College Hill neighbor, the John Hay Library, owns another Elephant Folio edition of Birds. . .

The Athenaeum also faces some major home-repair problems. Last summer, a routine inspection uncovered serious structural damage to the rear wall of the Athenaeum's 1838 Greek Revival headquarters on Benefit Street.

"Some of the timber supports at the back of the building had given way," says board president Susan Kertzer. "As a result, the only thing holding up the walls were the stacks of books we have in that part of the building. Our books literally saved us."

From the Providence Journal. Here is a link to the Athenaeum website.

UPDATE: While the overwhelming majority of Athenaeum members have come out in support of the sale, a handful of diehards are now suing the Athenaeum leadership -- ostensibly to save the institution from its own members. But who will save the Athenaeum from its saviors?

NY to bid farewell to the subway token

New York subway fares will be going up to $2 this spring, according to this article, and tokens are officially on their way to being phased out.

For the history of the New York City subway token, look here.

And don't forget the New York City Transit Museum -- worth a visit!

Killing Peter to save Paul

In just a decade, the population of saiga antelope in Central Asia has plummeted from more than 1 million to near extinction. Of the 30,000 remaining saiga (Saiga tatarica), most are females; the males have been all but hunted out.

In the early 1990s, conservation groups such as WWF encouraged the use of saiga horn as an alternative to the endangered rhino's horn, a campaign that has seeded today's crisis. Today, the horns of male saiga are being exported to China in record numbers as a traditional fever remedy.

From the Environmental News Network.

Tallest man's shoe

An article from Florida:

Port Orange residents Robert and Margarite Nicholas, of Water's Edge, say they own a shoe that once belonged to [Robert Pershing] Wadlow, [the tallest human on record].

Wadlow was born in Illinois in 1918 and outgrew the then record-holder, an Irishman born in 1877 who reached the height of 8 feet 4 inches by age 18. By 22, Wadlow had reached 8 feet, 11.1 inches and 490 pounds. The giant never grew any taller; he died in 1940 at the age of 22 and is buried in Altin, Ill. . . because of his height and weight, Wadlow needed a large foundation on which to stand. His shoe size was 44 1/2.

African slavery not dehumanizing?

The Smithsonian's African American history museum in Washington, D.C., states that while instances of slavery can be found throughout human history, the practice of slavery did not become "dehumanizing" until white Europeans came along and took slaves to the Americas.

The museum's West Africa exhibit, which opened Feb. 3 and continues through the end of August, includes the following statement at the entrance of the exhibit: "Slavery had existed in Africa as it had in other parts of the world, for centuries, but it was not based on race and it did not result in dehumanization and death, as did transatlantic slavery."

Not surprisingly, this has led to some outrage; read more here.

Irish meteorite hunt

Astronomers and treasure hunters continue to search for the valuable meteorite thought to have fallen somewhere in Galway early in February.

Preliminary reports about the fireball witnessed over Irish skies early on February 12 suggest that the meteorite may have fallen in county Galway, in Galway Bay, or off the coast of Clare but so far the exact location of the rock has not been determined.

According to local astronomy organisation Galway Astronomy Club, precise sightings by two people in Galway, one on the right hand side of Galway airport and the other on the left hand side of the Tuam Rd, indicate the meteorite landed in the vicinity of Galway Bay.

Read more here.

James Gang guns on display

An article from Missouri:

A display . . . of firearms used by Frank James and other members of the James Gang are on display through October at the James Farm, Kearney.

Pistols used by Frank James and his bad-boy sidekicks, and related items owned by Jesse James, comprise [sic] the "Guns of James Gang" exhibit.

Arts grads earn less

Here's an article from the BBC that suggests those who take degrees in the arts & humanities would earn more if they skipped university altogether:

A degree in an arts subject reduces average earnings to below those of someone who leaves school with just A-levels, a study shows.

Graduates in these subjects - including history and English - could expect to make between 2% and 10% less than those who quit education at 18, researchers at Warwick University found. The findings come despite data showing the average university leaver earns £220,000 more than non-graduates during their working life.

Professor Ian Walker, leading the study, said: "Feeling warm about literature doesn't pay the rent."

Call for return of stolen medieval brasses

Parishioners at Brundish, in Suffolk, and Brinkley, in Cambridgeshire, have called on the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to return the brasses.

The tomb brasses were stolen from the church of St Mary's, Brinkley, and St Lawrence Church, Brundish, in the 19th century. No-one knows how they ended up in the US.

From the BBC.

Moat wall collapse at Tower of London

A stretch of stone dating back to the 19th century crumbled away last month. Building work is being carried out to improve access to the Tower, one of London's most famous buildings, built after the Norman Conquest in the 11th century. But a spokeswoman for the Historic Royal Palaces, which is responsible for the Tower's conservation, said it was not related to the collapse on 14 February. . .

The collapse exposed stonework from an earlier period which is being studied and is described as "archaeological evidence of great interest."

From the BBC.

Lowlights of 1970s illustration

James Lilek's latest ode is dedicated to 1970s Textbook "Art". Oy!

Playing with your food

From this morning's NY Times:

Performing music with fresh vegetables brings certain occupational challenges, like the tendency of the instruments to fall apart suddenly.

"We have to be flexible," said Matthias Meinharter, a member of the First Viennese Vegetable Orchestra, who awkwardly lost the mouthpiece for his hollowed-out carrot during a recent concert here, and had to improvise by nibbling at the carrot even as he blew into it.

Carrots, which make fine whistly wind instruments as well as having impressive percussional uses, are the least of it. The orchestra, made up of nine black-clad avant-garde artists from Vienna, uses everything from tiny kidney beans to hefty pumpkins in its work — beating, shaking, blowing, peeling, spitting, snapping, grating, poking, rubbing and mushing them in startlingly ingenious ways. . .

It goes without saying that the quality of the music depends on the quality of the vegetables, which must be "really, really fresh," said Mr. Meinharter, who in his other life is an industrial designer and conceptual artist. To find the proper leeks — fat, fresh and firm — for the leek-o-lin, a string instrument whose squeaky whistling noise comes from rubbing two wet leeks together, he must lick his potential purchases until satisfied of their musical potential.

Sites requiring registration

The Arts Journal is now assisting those who cannot or do not wish to register for access to various online news sources: they are making available here their own username & password (ajreader (or ajreader@artsjournal.com if an email is requested) & "access"). Bravo!

Reading Thomas Friedman

Had been thinking along the same lines, but James Taranto has already put it down well:

Thomas Friedman is one of the more sensible guys on the New York Times op-ed page, but why does he keep repeating this obvious fallacy about how to measure public opinion? "Don't believe the polls," he writes. "I've been to nearly 20 states recently, and I've found that 95 percent of the country wants to see Iraq dealt with without a war."

Aside from the obvious problem that the people Friedman encounters are obviously not a representative sample of the population, how can he claim to know what "95% of the country" thinks on the basis of visits to only 40% of the states?

Friedman's piece is here.
The idea that one's circle of acquaintance embraces more than a tiny, atypical fraction of the population is one of the most widespread of delusions. And it seems particularly entrenched among the educated and well-to-do, who have often grievously misread the temper of the times as a result. Do you remember the flap in Cincinnati over the Mapplethorpe exhibition? Local academics and artists thought their little circle was representative of the community at large; the filing of obscenity charges showed them otherwise.

I'm afraid similar lapses in logic chronically bedevil Friedman -- a pity, and especially maddening given how perceptive he can be. My take overall? Friedman is an historian miscast as a commentator, good at explaining what has already happened, rather spotty when it comes to figuring out what will happen next.

Black military history site

Just spotted this through StrategyPage: the African Military History website, documenting the experience of blacks in the US military.

Old Bailey trial records online

Yet more primary sources placed on the web:

The record of every trial to have taken place at the Old Bailey from 1674 to 1834 has gone online.

The 100,000 trials have been placed on the OldBaileyOnline.org website by academics from the universities of Hertfordshire and Sheffield.

From Ananova.

Christopher Hill a Soviet spy?

One of the most influential historians of the 20th century, who went on to be Master of Balliol College, Oxford, stands accused today of taking a dark secret to his grave: he was a Soviet mole.

Christopher Hill, who died last week aged 91, concealed his membership of the Communist Party to serve first in Military Intelligence, then at the Foreign Office, during the Second World War.

Declassified government papers suggest that Hill used his position as head of the Russian desk at the Foreign Office to push pro-Soviet policy, and that he was a close associate of another Soviet agent.

Read the full story in the Times of London.

UPDATE: Read on for more. . .

Hill never made any secret of his left-wing sympathies and was open about his membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the postwar years, before resigning in 1957. However, his name appears to have been kept on one of the CPGB’s secret membership lists. He joined at some point between taking a first in history at Balliol in 1934 and returning as a tutor in 1938. He spent ten months in the Soviet Union in the intervening period. Hill established his academic reputation by offering a Marxist interpretation of the events surrounding the English Civil War and was elected Master of Balliol in 1965.

The existence of a group of spies at Oxford, similar to but less successful than the infamous Cambridge spy ring, was discovered when the KGB briefly opened its files four years ago. However, while researching his book in 1985, [historian] Dr [Anthony] Glees came across a series of previously confidential Foreign Office papers which, he says, suggest that Hill operated as an “agent of influence” for the Soviet Union during his time as a civil servant.

Dr Glees wrote to Hill in September that year to request a meeting. “He rang me a couple of days later and asked to see me immediately, before catching a bus from his home near Banbury to visit me at my house in Oxford.”

During their 90-minute meeting, Hill explained to Dr Glees that he assumed he had been vetted by MI5 before being recruited to Military Intelligence in 1940 and seconded to the Foreign Office three years later. However, he escaped identification as a Communist by simply not declaring his party membership.

Hill had first worked as a liaison officer with Soviet military engineers who were in Britain to inspect British tanks and had then been assigned to a small unit that was preparing to be parachuted into the Baltic states to foment rebellion. When that mission was shelved, he was seconded in 1943 to the Northern department of the Foreign Office, and as a fluent Russian speaker was quickly appointed head of the Russian desk.

Among the papers discovered by Dr Glees was a proposal, signed by Hill, that all White Russian emigrés teaching Russian at British universities and schools should be sacked and replaced with Soviet-approved staff. Polish exiles were to face similar treatment after the war. . .

Dr Glees discovered that Hill had forged a relationship with Peter Smollett, the head of the Russian desk at the Ministry of Information, and that the two men had formed a committee to help to develop future British government policy towards the Soviet Union.

Smollett, an Austrian-born former journalist at The Times, whose real name was Smolka and who was a friend of Kim Philby, was a Soviet spy. Among his successes, as an agent of influence, was to persuade a number of publishers to reject George Orwell’s Animal Farm. He was later exposed and fled to the Soviet sector of Vienna. . .

While at the Foreign Office, Hill wrote a book, The Soviets and Ourselves: Two Commonwealths, which he published after the war under the pseudonym K. E. Holme, with the help of Smollett. In the book he extolled “Lenin’s genius”, claimed that all Soviet citizens enjoyed the vote, and described the Stalinist purges of the 1930s as “non-violent” and comparable to the Chartist movement.

The story has also been picked up by the Guardian, which does its best to spin it to minimize the devastating nature of the evidence:

The late Christopher Hill, the distinguished Marxist historian who became master of Balliol College, Oxford, is alleged to have operated as a Soviet "agent of influence" during wartime service at the Foreign Office.

A fellow historian has revealed details of conversations and government papers which he says prove that Mr Hill - who died aged 91 on February 23 - was a Soviet "mole" who concealed his membership of the Communist party.

The allegation has prompted a fierce defence of Mr Hill by other academics.

The only defender mentioned, however, is Eric Hobsbawm -- himself a committed Marxist, and self-described "unrepentant Communist", about whom you can read more here.
Meanwhile, today's Times is running a blistering essay by Ferdinand Mount: "Stalin’s Ghost Sits Too Easily Among Us":

They miss him still, you know, they really do. It was the 50th anniversary of Stalin’s death last Wednesday, and the Russian parliament spent the day happily debating a motion to turn Volgograd back into Stalingrad. An opinion poll reported that more than half the population thought that Uncle Joe had been a benefit to Russia.

Here in Britain it is a pity that Stalin’s most devoted admirer, Christopher Hill, the Marxist historian and former master of Balliol college, Oxford, should have died nine days earlier. For he would surely have given us a second epitaph to rival his ringing words on Stalin’s death in 1953: “He was a very great and penetrating thinker. Humanity not only in Russia but in all countries will always be deeply in his debt.”

Only this week it has emerged that Stalin might have had some reason to return Dr Hill’s gratitude. For the historian Anthony Glees of Brunel University has unearthed some interesting material about Hill’s wartime service in charge of the Russian desk in the Foreign Office.

Hill, it seems, had not declared his membership of the Communist party when being recruited. Did the FO think to ask? Please, Hill was a Balliol man — and had been recommended by another former master of Balliol.

While in this key post Hill used his formidable energies to the full. He urged the government to sack all White Russian émigrés working in British schools and universities and replace them with Soviet-approved staff. He set up a Committee for Russian Studies including other Communists, notably the Soviet agent Peter Smollett (alias Smolka), to make it easier for Soviet citizens to come to Britain and to exchange intelligence with the USSR. Meanwhile Smollett at the Ministry of Information was busy persuading British publishers not to print George Orwell’s Animal Farm. And in face of all the evidence to the contrary, the Foreign Office remained strangely convinced that Stalin’s intentions towards eastern Europe were strictly benign.

I would scarcely dignify Hill by the name of mole, that charming and resourceful mammal. After all, his activities were scarcely subterranean. Anyone who had read a line of his would know which way his political proclivities lay. Similarly, anyone who had dipped into the pre-war art criticism of Anthony Blunt would get a strong whiff of vulgar Marxism. But then, from my brief experience, vetting officers do not tend to be very literary types (I was cleared by a man named Carruthers with a walrus moustache).

Still, even if all this had been known when Hill popped off at the ripe age of 91, I doubt that it would have altered the dignified and elegiac tone of his obituaries. After all, we do know most of what Blunt, Burgess, Maclean and Philby got up to. This has not inhibited the BBC from commissioning a new drama called Cambridge Spies, which a BBC apparatchik sought to puff by saying that: “This is the first time they can be seen as heroic” . . .

No such indulgence would have been extended if Blunt had turned out to be a Nazi agent. Similarly, Hill would not have had a hope of being elected master of Balliol if he had recently resigned from the National Front (he only packed in his party card when Khrushchev sent the tanks into Hungary). Yet surely someone who could stomach Stalin’s purges, his terror famines and his subjugation of half a continent was no more suited to guide young minds than a recently convicted paedophile. . .

Have we at long last discarded these illusions, I wonder? It is so easy to forget how deeply they penetrated into British life and thought. In English history, for example, the three most revered practitioners bestriding the modern era were convinced Marxists: Hill (17th century), EP Thompson (18th-19th) and Eric Hobsbawm (19th-20th). Hobsbawm, who didn’t even leave the party after Hungary, was appointed a Companion of Honour under new Labour.

Over the years these talented and persuasive academics have sought to elevate class warfare as the driving force in English history, downplaying other motives such as religion or patriotism.

Even in fields that seem remote from the political heat — such as English literature or art history — the assumption that most things can be explained in terms of hidden economic motives has soaked deep. After all, Stalin thought of himself as an “engineer of human souls” who was just as qualified to impose the correct ideological outlook on music and literature and genetics as on mere politics. And there are still plenty of students today who believe in a conspiracy theory of just about everything.

First T Rex fossil belatedly identified

News from Colorado:

A banana-shaped dinosaur tooth unearthed in Golden in 1874 sat in an East Coast museum cabinet for more than a century before a Denver researcher determined its true significance.

The 67 million-year-old fossil is the first collected specimen of Tyrannosaurus rex.

The revelation is of little scientific value, but it rewrites a piece of paleontological history, said curator Lyndon Murray of Yale University's Peabody Museum, where the 3 ½-inch serrated fossil tooth resides. Until now, Garfield County, Mont., was known as the site of the first T. rex discovery. Nearly half a skeleton was found there in 1902, and the species was named from that specimen three years later.

18th-century house escapes demolition, going to Met

An old house hidden by later additions, rediscovered in Pennsylvania [whoops -- looks like that should have been New York (see comments)]:

A large piece of Bethlehem history that was almost demolished soon will find a new home at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This week the 18th-century, two-story Dutch house, which had been hidden amid decades' worth of additions, is being dismantled and shipped to the museum in Manhattan. By Friday, barring unforeseen weather, the last beams will be stacked in a shipping trailer. Curators hope to include it in an overhaul of the museum's American Wing in the next five to 10 years.

The original homestead's condition is so pristine that restorers recently discovered antique blue and white ceramic tiles in the fireplace, untouched for centuries, said Michael Kelley, who is in charge of the project. The original owner's initials, DW, are clearly carved into the wood siding, although few details are know of the life of Daniel Winne, who built the structure around 1730.

Salisbury Cathedral timbers study

In 1222 they had a crisis in Salisbury. Masons were racing ahead raising the walls of the cathedral, but the carpenters were running out of timbers needed for the roof. Their startling solution was revealed yesterday when the cathedral and English Heritage released details of tests on the age and origins of the timbers.

In the eastern chapels, which have some of the finest surviving medieval roofs in the country, and elsewhere, the wood is Irish, from ancient oak trees from a forest south of Dublin, felled from 1222 on.

"The quality was superb, far in excess of what was needed for the job," Dan Miles, of the Oxford dendrochronology laboratory, said yesterday. . .

Much of the cathedral's timber was assumed to be 17th-century replacement. But the tests have proved that a remarkable percentage is original, from the last phase of building work between 1220 and 1258.

Read all about it in the Guardian.

The Telegraph has an even more detailed writeup, including this:

The study confirmed that the cathedral was built in 38 years almost entirely to one design. Researchers also unearthed Arabic numerals used to mark up timbers for assembly, one of the earliest examples of the new numbering system being used in construction. . .

The Arabic numerals carved into the timbers by carpenters were still rare in 13th-century Britain and were used almost exclusively by scholars. Tim Tatton-Brown, a consultant archaeologist to the cathedral, who initiated the dating project, described the numerals as "extremely interesting". He added: "There was a huge amount of movement into the Middle East during the third crusade and afterwards. There is no doubt that there was a lot of influence. This was a coding system and the carpenter may have used Arabic numerals because they were simpler."

Botany of the Colosseum

The Roman Colosseum's history is stamped on its plants, say Italian researchers. In plant surveys spanning 350 years, they have charted the monument's progress from slum to tourist attraction, as well as Rome's growth into a metropolis and the city's changing climate.

Built in the first century AD, the Colosseum housed gladiatorial combat until the sixth century. By 1643, when Italian doctor Domenico Panaroli compiled the first plant survey, the Romans had made themselves at home. "It was full of people living and working, and a hideout for thieves," says Giulia Caneva of the University of Rome.

Work on clearing the amphitheatre began in about 1810, under Napoleon's rule. There were three surveys of the Colosseum's flora in the nineteenth century, and one in 1951. Caneva and her colleagues did one more in 2001. . .

In total, the lists contain 684 species — peaking in 1855, with 420, and declining to 242 today. About 200 of these were ever-present.

From Nature.

Curing fear of flying, the hard way

From Ananova:

An Australian who went on a parachute jump to cure his fear of flying ended up dangling upside down from the plane.

The incident happened when the harness strap snagged on the steps of the Cessna as novice Chris Morris jumped in tandem with instructor Mark Poulter.
The two men, who were strapped together, found themselves rotating around the undercarriage, looking back up at the pilot, reports the South China Morning Post.

The pilot eventually had to lean out of the cockpit and cut them loose with a knife. The Aussie reportedly was ready to jump again. May we all be so fearful. . . .

Nikko goes no-smoking

Smoking will be banned in the famous shrines of ancient Nikko in a bid to promote the city's image, officials said on Monday. . .

The officials added, however, that Nikko would impose no penalties on those who smoke in the famous shrines in disregard of the ban.

Read more at Mainichi Interactive.

Cleveland Museum buys big

Art news from Ohio:

Yesterday, museum trustees voted to buy five large mythological paintings by the early 19th-century French painter Charles Meynier. . . a contemporary of the more famous Jacques Louis David, who is already represented in the collection.

The museum did not disclose the price. The purchase instantly made Cleveland the largest repository of Meynier's works outside the Louvre in Paris and the Palace at Versailles and gave new strength to the museum's already formidable collection of 19th-century paintings. . .

The five paintings depict muses of ancient Greek and Roman mythology. The series includes Clio, the muse of history; Erato, the muse of lyrical poetry; Calliope, the muse of epic poetry; and Apollo, the god of light, eloquence and fine arts. . .

The paintings are so big - all are roughly 9 feet high and are nearly 6 feet to nearly 8 feet wide - that the museum won't be able to display them as a group until its expansion is finished in 2008 or 2009.

Wine on the cheap

Conmen used fake barcode stickers to buy hundreds of bottles of vintage wine at rock bottom prices in Parisian supermarkets, police said on Tuesday.

Police arrested three young Romanian men and found 900 bottles of wine and champagne in a shed in a Paris suburb. They said the wine was destined to be sold on to restaurants at a comfortable profit.

From Reuters.

5-year-old finds Neolithic axe

An axe head that could be as many as 6,000 years old has been discovered by a five-year-old boy in a Worcestershire playing field.

Kieran Young was looking for pottery with his mother in West Malvern when he came across what appeared to be a large, smooth stone. They took the axe head to academics at University College, Worcester, who believe it dates from the Neolithic period. The artefact has now been sent to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford for a more thorough examination.

From the BBC.

Museum makes thieves' job easier

From the Herald:

Council officials have been accused of producing "a thief's guide" to a multi-million-pound art exhibition in Glasgow after it put details of a new hi-tech security system into the public domain.

The council's culture and leisure service, which runs all of the city's museums, last week made its security plans for the forthcoming Art Treasures of Kelvingrove show freely available to all in a planning application.

The new £180,000 system is designed to protect more than 200 of the finest pieces from the city's Kelvingrove museum when they go on show at the McLellan Galleries in Sauchiehall Street next month.

The documentation includes colour photographs of all exits from the exhibition, descriptions of locks, and engineers' drawings showing the location of CCTV cameras, infra-red sensors, and pressure detectors. . .

Two years ago, the council suffered the theft of a £40,000 medieval tapestry from under the noses of security staff at the Burrell Collection. It later emerged the piece had been fixed to a wall using only Velcro. . . .

Three Little Pigs banned in Yorkshire

A school has banned under sevens from reading the story of the Three Little Pigs in case it offends Muslims. All other tales about pigs, including Babe, are also off limits for pupils under seven at Park Road Junior Infant and Nursery in Batley, West Yorkshire.

The school says any talk of pigs is offensive to Muslims who make up 60% of the 250 pupils.

But leading Muslims say there's nothing in their religious rules to stop children reading about pigs. . . . Inayat Bunglawala, of the Muslim Council of Britain, said: "This is bizarre. There is nothing to stop children reading about pigs. The ban is simply on the consumption of pork and pig products."

From Ananova.

Deaccessioned Correggio "copy" actually autograph?

Not much detail on this, but La Repubblica (in Italian) reports that a Pietà recently sold for $90,000 by the National Gallery in Washington, DC is now claimed to be Correggio's original (several copies are known). Scholars reportedly favoring the attribution include Eugenio Riccomini and David Alan Brown -- which is rather odd, since Brown is curator of Italian Renaissance paintings at the National Gallery.

In search of Masaccio's "Sagra"

News from Florence, via La Repubblica (in Italian): Masaccio's "Sagra" was a fresco painted around 1424 in the cloister of Santa Maria al Carmine; it depicted the consacration of the church, and according to Vasari, contained portraits of a vast number of Florentine citizens, including Filippo Brunelleschi and Donatello. Although some sources state that the fresco was destroyed in the early 17th century, others state that it was simply covered up.

Since 1999 tests have been under way to determine if the lost fresco could be located. At a recent press conference, the researchers revealed that they have determined the precise location where it may be hidden -- on a wall between the church and the cloister, directly over the entrance arch of the convent's interior garden.

Whether anything still remains of the fresco remains to be seen; so far only noninvasive methods have been used (radar, thermal imaging), but the final excavation is set to proceed as soon as official permission is granted.

Malnutrition in the UK

Theodore Dalrymple discusses modern malnutrition, assailing those who oversimplify the problem by blaming dysfunctional eating on problems with supply rather than demand:

I meet at least one young man every week in the hospital with a similar story to relate. It is a story that angers and frustrates me. These young men’s malnutrition is the sign of an entire way of life, and not the result of raw, inescapable poverty. Another patient whom I saw soon after, similarly malnourished, told me that he ate practically nothing, subsisting on sugary soft drinks.

It never takes many links in a chain of reasoning to get from their smooth and raw magenta tongues to the kind of family breakdown favored by a certain ideology of human relations, encouraged by our laws and fiscal system, and made viable by welfare payments. It is the breakdown of the family structure—a breakdown so complete that mothers do not consider it part of their duty to feed their own children once they have reached the age at which they can forage for themselves in a refrigerator—that promotes modern malnutrition in Britain. Such malnutrition, according to the public health establishment, now affects millions of British households. And it is hardly surprising if young people who have not learned to socialize within the walls of their own homes, who have not learned even the minimal social disciplines required by people who eat together, should be completely antisocial in other respects.

One of the things British prisons could usefully do, therefore, but do not even attempt, is to teach young men how to eat in a social fashion. Instead, they reinforce the pattern of solipsistic consumption by making prisoners take their food back to their cells, where they eat it in the same solitary and furtive fashion as they masturbate. . .

The existence of malnutrition in the midst of plenty has not entirely escaped either the intelligentsia or the government, which of course is proposing measures to combat it: but, as usual, neither pols nor pundits wish to look the problem in the face or make the obvious connections. For them, the real and most pressing question raised by any social problem is: “How do I appear concerned and compassionate to all my friends, colleagues, and peers?” Needless to say, the first imperative is to avoid any hint of blaming the victim by examining the bad choices that he makes. It is not even permissible to look at the reasons for those choices, since by definition victims are victims and therefore not responsible for their acts, unlike the relatively small class of human beings who are not victims. One might extend La Rochefoucauld’s famous maxim that neither the sun nor death can be stared at for long, by saying that no member of the modern liberal intelligentsia can stare at a social problem for very long. He feels the need to retreat into impersonal abstractions, into structures or alleged structures over which the victim has no control. And out of this need to avoid the rawness of reality he spins utopian schemes of social engineering.

The British intelligentsia has thus come up with an abstraction that fits this particular bill perfectly—that is to say, the need to explain widespread malnutrition in the midst of plenty without resort to the conduct of the malnourished themselves: food deserts.

From Conceptual to Inconceivable

An artist has been shortlisted for a prize for a work that will never go on display and may never even exist. Carey Young's 'Non-Disclosure Agreement' is in the running to win a £20,000 prize at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

The 'Non-Disclosure Agreement' is a contract signed by Ms Young, 32. According to the London Evening Standard it stipulates the piece must never go on show, adding that visitors to the Institute should not even be told what it is.

From Ananova.

More on Nazi-looted art in the USA

From today's NY Times:

A Clinton administration commission on Nazi plunder failed to examine critical records pertaining to traffic in looted art before, during and after World War II, some leading scholars who worked on the inquiry now say.

The experts, historians and economists who worked from 1998 to 2000 on the panel, the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States, say that as a result it came up with a report that broke little new ground and failed to come to grips with the question of how much stolen art passed through American controls.

Several of the panel's leaders defend the work or say that shortcomings were results of lack of time, but in many quarters the report is perceived as a lost opportunity to provide definitive answers to questions that in many ways are being asked more now than anytime since the days just after World War II. . .

Objections to the panel's work were so strong that some staff members said they contemplated writing a minority report. Their comments, and similar ones from leading experts in the field, were not publicly expressed when the commission reported its findings and came out in recent interviews about the search for missing Nazi plunder nearly 60 years after World War II.

Stuart E. Eizenstat, the former deputy Treasury secretary who urged the panel's creation and served as a member, acknowledged that the report did not go as far as he had hoped. "Lack of time was a major problem," he said. He added that the panel's mandate had proved too narrow and that its work had fallen short of what similar inquiries had uncovered in Europe. . .

The report concluded that American authorities in Europe had made "extraordinary efforts" to find, safeguard and return art and other victims' assets but that their work had been compromised by conflicting wartime and occupation priorities and occasional acts of thievery by G.I.'s.

Yet the report did not, in the words of one of the panel's experts, Helen B. Junz, a former Treasury official, examine "the ways art was laundered into the U.S."

Archeology of Northern slavery

Slaveholding plantations, usually thought of as uniquely Southern institutions, were deeply rooted in the fabric of "free" states of the North as well, new archaeological studies are showing.

The hidden history of Northern plantations and their slaves is emerging -- one shovelful of soil at a time -- from excavations in and around historic manor houses in Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York. From bits of china, kitchen utensils, tools, buttons and personal items, archaeologists are getting glimpses of a chapter of America's past that written histories have either ignored or forgotten.

Most Northern states abolished slavery before the Civil War. But recent excavations show that during the late 1700s and early 1800s, many of what later came to be called manors and landed estates were full-fledged plantations that held African-American slaves under conditions similar to those in the South. . .

Near Salem, Mass., archaeologists have excavated the ruins of a 13,000-acre plantation that produced grain, horses, barrel staves and dried meat. The owner, Samuel Browne, traded those goods for molasses and rum from the Caribbean. The graveyard shows at least 100 African-Americans were enslaved there from 1718 to 1780.

At Shelter Island on New York's Long Island, archaeologists have spent several years peeling open the grounds of present-day Sylvester Manor to reveal the traces of an 8,000-acre plantation that provisioned two sugar plantations in Barbados and made heavy use of African slave labor. During the late 1600s, at least 20 slaves there served as carpenters, blacksmiths, domestics and field hands.

Read the full article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Art thief leaves finger behind

From New Zealand (all prices in NZ dollars):

An art thief left behind part of his finger after cutting it off while stealing a $65,000 Frances Hodgkins painting from an Auckland gallery yesterday in what is being called a theft to order.

It was the second time in a week and a half that Ferner Galleries in Parnell have been the target of burglars. Also stolen in yesterday's burglary was an Alice Whyte painting valued at $7,500. In the earlier burglary, a $15,000 Francis Huddlestone painting was taken.

Gallery owner Peter Jarvis said the burglaries were thefts to order because specific paintings had been taken and the thieves had gone to lengths to also take the paintings' price labels.

In yesterday's burglary, at 5am, the thief smashed in the heavy, plate-glass windows.

Sounds like a bloody mess. Don't know what to make about the taking of the price info. Maybe the idiot thieves are planning to list the paintings on eBay?

Stealing art for beer money

[Charles] Bastien pleaded guilty Monday to a string of art thefts over the Christmas season, admitting he pinched 12 pictures worth an estimated $26,000 to fuel a drinking spree.

He sold three of them for a total of $60 before being arrested a week later, Crown prosecutor Jennifer Mos said.

"I just needed to drink. I just walked by and saw a painting and I thought, 'A lousy $20.' I didn't know they were worth that much money," Bastien explained to provincial court Judge Allan Lefever.

"I look at them and I see a beer bottle. That's what I got for them."

The unemployed pipefitter simply wandered away with prints and originals hanging at the downtown library, the Westin Hotel and the Hotel Macdonald.

Posing as the artist, Bastien sold two pieces displayed at the library by St. Albert's Lewis Lavoie. Worth more than $3,000, they were sold for $20 each. . .

Lavoie said later he was dismayed to see how little [they] fetched on the street.

From Canada.com.

Fire at library of Alexandria

Not again. . .

Dali drawing stolen from Riker's Island

From the BBC:

A drawing by surrealist artist Salvador Dali which was hanging in the lobby of New York's notorious Rikers Island jail has disappeared, prison officials say. In a vanishing act echoing the film The Thomas Crown Affair, the picture was stolen from its usual position and replaced with a replica - despite a 24-hour guard in the lobby. Staff at the men's prison [jail, actually -- D.] discovered the theft of the picture, which depicts Christ on the cross, on Saturday morning.

The original, last valued at $175,000 back in 1985, was drawn in red and black ink for a former Corrections Department commissioner and for many years hung in the inmate's dining room. . .

Investigators are baffled as to how the large painting - which measures one metre by 1.2m (four feet by three feet) - could have been removed unnoticed.

In fact police are unable to even pinpoint when the painting could have been stolen and replaced by the fake, which was stapled to the back of the display case.

George Way collection of 16th & 17th-century furniture

The George Way collection of 16th- and 17th-century English and Dutch furniture, paintings and decorative arts is now on view at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center on Staten Island, written up in Friday's NY Times:

The more than 200 items on view are a mere hint of Mr. Way's complete collection, all of which he usually has crammed into a two-and-a-half-room apartment in Silver Lake, Staten Island. His collection of English furniture and objects is considered by experts to be the largest outside the United Kingdom. But according to Mr. Way, who lectured on his holdings recently at Sotheby's New York and is a former consultant on early furniture to Christie's, the collection he began 35 years ago is far less remarkable for its breadth than for its overall quality. "The condition is fabulous, like they were made yesterday," Mr. Way said. "I look at some of these chairs and wonder where they've been for 400 years."

Way's own story is as remarkable as his collection:

. . . a chair was Mr. Way's impetus as a collector, so it is not by accident that there are so many chairs in this exhibition. His first acquisition as a teenager was a reproduction that caught his eye in the basement of an old stone church, coincidentally just three blocks from the exhibition. The budding collector begged the rector for months to let him buy it. "I thought it was the oldest chair I'd ever seen — a thousand years old at least," recalled Mr. Way, laughing. "I paid $50 for it in money I got baby-sitting and collecting soda bottles."

The chair turned out to be a late-19th-century Renaissance Revival piece, which has since been sold, but the die was cast. Mr. Way began training his eye at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in antiques shops around Greenwich Village, where dealers called him "Oak Man" because most of what he was looking for was oak. Much of his collection was found locally and at bargain prices because no one wanted 17th-century pieces at the time. The ball-foot chest in the Charles II room, for example, was in the old Horn of Plenty restaurant in the Village. Mr. Way bought it for $400 when the restaurant moved. A letter from Charles II in the show was found in a plastic sleeve in the Chelsea flea market on 26th Street.

Mr. Way, whose day job is at the delicatessen counter in a local Pathmark supermarket, said: "I've paid less for the entire collection than most people would now pay for two or three pieces. I carried most of it home on the Staten Island Ferry. I always had my own seat."

It may not be the Mahon collection, but George Way is another example of what can be accomplished in collecting "outside the box" (admittedly, the extremes of unfashionability that both collectors so successfully exploited now seem to be a thing of the past; nonetheless, contrarianism still pays in collecting, if not so spectacularly).

Why US alternative media lean right

In today's Times of London, Andrew Sullivan cogently explains what's going on:

The closer you look at [the] notion of a monolithically rightward-moving American media, the less impressive it sounds. The entire theory is based on cable news. It’s true that conservatives have found a real home in the medium and have seen their market share soar. But the broadly liberal networks still reach far more people. Fox News, for example, has a viewership in the realm of 800,000. The combined audience for the evening network news — ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS — skewed broadly centre-left is more than 33m. There really is no serious conservative competition.

Moreover, there’s plenty of evidence that the reason cable news is slanting right is not because of some overarching right-wing conspiracy — but because that’s what the audience wants. Deprived of any non-liberal coverage on the networks, moderate to centre-right viewers have taken to Fox News with alacrity. . .

What you’re seeing here is the market work. Most American journalists, like
journalists everywhere, are liberals. . . The liberal slant is made even worse among America’s daily papers, almost all of which have a virtual monopoly in their own markets, therefore face little or no conservative competition, and so continue to slant the news effortlessly — and to their minds ever so reasonably — to the centre-left. It’s only when you actually get a real and open media market that conservative voices find a niche.

Take talk radio, a deregulated and rambunctiously competitive market. Two forms endure: the shock-jock vulgarity of a Howard Stern and the conservative populist format of a Rush Limbaugh.

Recently some liberal philanthropists have been trying to set up lefty alternatives; but they cannot abolish the laws of supply and demand. The mainstream media are so chock-a-block with high-minded left-liberals, who completely control publicly financed radio in America, that there’s simply no demand for a left-wing alternative on radio.

Or look at the internet, where there isn’t even much price competition, since much of the political content is free. Again, liberals and leftists are for some reason in the minority. The right-leaning Drudge Report still creams its competitors and just scored its highest ratings ever. . .

Or think of the British media market. Compare television with newspapers to see what I mean. Where there’s real competition — in Britain’s newspaper market — you have a real diversity of views, all the way from The Guardian and Daily Mirror to the Daily Telegraph and The Sun. But in monopolistic or near-monopolistic entities like BBC television, you get a monotone left-liberal slant.

Even when conservative voices are heard on the BBC, they’re token. They don’t pervade the entire atmosphere of the institution. In this battle, of course, bias is often in the eye of the beholder. That’s why the only way to see it clearly is through actual media competition — where markets, rather than moguls, determine the content of the product.

UPDATE: the essay is also posted here for those unable to access the Times website.