Anti-Semitism at Russell Square?

IN HER native Israel, Channa Gerrard is on the political left and involves herself in peace campaigns. In London, where she came to study Arabic at the School of Oriental and African Studies, she believes that she is singled out as a Zionist extremist.

Ms Gerrard, 29, is one of a number of Israeli and Jewish students at the renowned college in Russell Square, Central London, who complain of being targeted by radical Muslim students in an increasingly isolating and intimidating atmosphere.

Concern about anti-Semitism at the school has led Hazel Blears, the Minister who is responsible for policing and community safety, to order her officials to prepare a report on events at SOAS. She told MPs that legislation banning religious hatred may be needed.

From the Times of London.

Settlement over WW2 US Army looting

The United States government and a group of Hungarian Jews have agreed to a $25.5 million settlement for the looting of the Hungarians' valuables by American soldiers during World War II, lawyers for the group said Friday. . .

The property involved, including gold, silver, paintings and furs, had been stolen from Jews, some of whom had been sent to internment and death camps by the Nazis. Near the close of the war, the property was loaded onto a train for Austria. Americans intercepted the train in May 1945 and moved its contents to a warehouse near Salzburg, Austria.

The items belonging to Hungarian Jews were appropriated by the United States Army and sold to soldiers, according to a 1999 report by the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the United States. Two suitcases filled with gold dust disappeared, investigators found, and other property was stolen by soldiers.

The proposed settlement requires the government to declassify all the documents involved in the case and have them archived.

From the NY Times.

When phones and cars don't mix . . .

. . . and not necessarily in the way you'd think, as the Times of London notes:

MOBILE-PHONE masts are inconveniencing thousands of drivers because they interfere with car locking systems and immobilisers, government documents have revealed.

The low-power radio signal from car keyfobs can be drowned out by the stronger transmissions of the masts, which use a similar frequency. The RAC and the AA say that they deal with thousands of stranded motorists whose cars have been locked or disabled because of phone masts.

Cars are at risk from every type of phone mast but there are particular difficulties with the new high-powered police digital radio system . . .

The AA was called out to 114,000 key-related problems last year and the RAC dealt with 70,000 similar security problems, many believed to have been caused by mobile- phone masts.

In most cases the immobiliser can be deactivated by pushing the car 100 yards further away from the mast, but some drivers have to pay a garage about £50 to have the system reset. In the worst cases immobilisers have to be replaced at a cost of up to £600.

Bronze Age shipwreck found off Devon

A TEAM of amateur archaeologists has discovered one of the world’s oldest shipwrecks off the coast of Devon, believed to date back to 1,300BC.

The find, in 60ft of water, has caused much excitement among marine archaeologists, who believe that the artefacts on board could give the clearest picture yet of life in the Bronze Age.

The South West Maritime Archaeological Group, who made the discovery, found bronze axes, swords and a cauldron hanger, along with a torc — a solid gold bracelet — suggesting that the ship may have been more than an ordinary trading vessel.

The items are believed to have come from the Seine Valley and could shed light on the sophistication of Britain’s earliest links with the Continent.

Read the rest in the Times of London.

Domestication of pigs: great minds think alike

Pigs were domesticated independently at least seven times around the globe, a new study has found. The discovery was made by linking the DNA of tame porkers with their wild relatives, Science magazine reports.

The researchers found tame pigs in several locations were closely related to wild boar in the same region, suggesting local domestication. This challenges the notion that boar were tamed just twice before being transported throughout the world.

From the BBC.

4000-year-old Cypriot perfumery

What may be the world's oldest known perfumery, set atop a Cyprus hillside with sweeping views of the Mediterranean, has just been excavated by a team of archaeologists from the Italian Institute of Technologies Applied to Cultural Heritage, according to recent news reports.

Remains at the Pyrgos-Mavroraki site near Nicosia include clay perfume bottle fragments that contain 14 perfumes of varied fragrances and ten odor essences. Archaeologists also found an olive oil press next to the perfume factory.

Read the rest at Discovery News.

Repicturing Dante

Dante Alighieri's best known features — a prominent, hooked nose and a severe expression — might have been a Renaissance fable, according to a historian who has unearthed the earliest documented portrait of Italy's greatest poet.

Discovered in the vaulted ceiling of the Arte dei Giudici e Notai (Judges and Notaries Art [read "guildhall" for "Art" -- D.]) palace, next to the Bargello museum in the heart of Florence, the frescoed portrait dates to about 1390. . .

The face of the medieval poet appeared after a seven-month restoration stripped away layers of grime, revealing a rather short, dark-skinned figure in profile, with a prominent lower lip, and a long, straight nose. . .

Visitors and tourists will be able to admire the frescoes by mid-May, when the building will be opened as a restaurant.

From Discovery News.

al-Thani ousted

A wealthy sheik from Qatar who has emerged over the past three years as the world's single biggest buyer of art has been dismissed as his country's art acquisitions chief after a disagreement with the emir of Qatar over his spending habits, art world figures familiar with the case said.

Though the sheik, Saud bin Mohammed al-Thani, has built up a large private collection of his own, he also had a mandate as chairman of the National Council for Culture, Arts and Heritage to buy art for five museums being planned for Doha, Qatar's capital. The new museums are part of a broader strategy to make the country a regional center for education, science and culture.

No official reason has been given for his removal, which was reported Saturday in The Financial Times. But even before his ouster, there were rumors in art circles that the emir, Sheik Saud's first cousin, was unhappy with his approach: specifically, that it was unclear when the sheik was buying for his own collection and when he was acquiring works for Doha's future museums.

From the NY Times. This is very, very big news for the art market. The crucial questions: To what extent did al-Thani's spending depend on access to Qatari money? Will he spend his own money as freely now? Will his successor(s) spend as freely as he did? As the NYT article notes:

By some estimates, Sheik Saud has spent close to $1.5 billion on art in recent years, with competing collectors often complaining that he pushed up prices at auctions. At Christie's in London last year, for instance, he bought a jade-hilted Mughal dagger for $1.35 million, 11 times the estimate.

"Pushed up prices" wasn't the half of it. There were a series of photography auctions where he bought every single lot, sometimes paying amazing sums against trade bidders who would run up lots just to see how high they would go.

Note too that in 2003, the royal family of Qatar was by itself the UK's largest trading partner in art & antiques, behind only the USA and Switzerland.

AND NOW it is reported that the Sheik has been held in Qatar under house arrest (which would explain his absence from Maastricht).

Chariot burial followup

Here's more on the Iron Age chariot burial first announced a bit over a year ago:

In addition to the man, 10,000 fragments of bones from about 300 cattle were found buried in a ditch around his resting place. Tests have shown that the cattle were put in the ground about 500 years after the man - and all came from different herds and different areas of the country. The finding shows that the site "continued to be venerated for hundreds of years after the burial", Mrs Boyle said.

The team from Oxford Archaeology believe the cattle bones were the remains of feast for native Britons who gathered to commemorate the man. The feast, which thousands of people would have attended, came at a time when the Romans were exerting their authority in the country.

From the BBC (pictures, too).

RI Historical Society update: deaccessioning and institutional identity

The outrage continues over the RIHS's announced plans to sell off the Joseph Brown desk -- the most important single object in its collection. To no one's surprise, descendants of the desk's donors and of its original owner have come out strongly against the sale, while others have contested the need to raise quite so much money.

I must say, the Historical Society's arguments are less than convincing. Contrast the vanishingly slim entry under "Expense Management" in the Society's Strategic Plan (bottom of p. 41) with the rest of the document, filled with plans for a multitutude of new and expanded initiatives. And though their Financial Options Task Force report makes a fair point in noting that too austere a budget could be counterproductive, it then goes to the other extreme by endorsing a budget that includes every bit of the Strategic Plan want list (their term for it is "mission-driven" -- i.e., damn the expenses, full speed ahead).

How is this all to be resolved? Part of the difficulty is that the Historical Society embraces so many activities. There are museums, a library, publications, and various educational programs. And while most large museums have the same, the problem here is that the Historical Society no longer seems to think of itself primarily as a museum. In the museum world at large there is a division between those who put the objects first and those whose priority is education and outreach. The Rhode Island Historical Society would seem to have fallen into the grip of the latter.

This is not to say that most curators and other object-oriented types are indifferent to making collections accessible to the public; quite the opposite. But they understand what is central and what is peripheral: many institutions educate, but preservation and protection falls upon museums alone.

Extreme bird-watching

For nearly 60 years it has been the world's least-known bird - until now. The rusty-throated wren-babbler, a small stub-tailed ball of feathers the size of a mouse, has been seen only once, when a specimen was captured in the Mishmi Hills of north-east India in 1947.

But now two American ornithologists have found and photographed a new example of Spelaeornis badeigularis - by playing its own call back to it. . .

The men travelled deep into one of India's least-known states, Arunachal Pradesh, in the eastern Himalayas close to the border with Tibet, which even Indians need a permit to visit. Having procured the necessary three permits as westerners, they took a little-used road deep into the Mishmi Hills, which are 6,000ft high and covered with broadleaved evergreen forest. . .

The only previous evidence of the species had been a dead bird found about 30 miles away, during a 1947 expedition into the region led by another American ornithologist, S. Dillon Ripley, who was later to head the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

Full story here.

Belgian colonial horrors: a museum takes another look

Was there any African colony treated worse than the Belgian Congo, particularly when under direct royal control? Yet it seems ordinary Belgians have little awareness of their nation's horrifying legacy:

The Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, just outside Brussels, houses one of the world’s finest collections of African artefacts and ethnographic objects, many of them plundered from the Congo during the years 1885 to 1908, when that vast swathe of central Africa was the personal possession of Belgium’s King Leopold II.

The museum has existed for more than 100 years, but never has it enjoyed the popularity it has gained since a new exhibition opened there last month, exposing – for the first time for many Belgians – the extraordinary brutality meted out by their forefathers in their only African colony.

The exhibition, entitled Memory Of Congo: The Colonial Era, has been, in the words of the museum’s director, Guido Gryseels, a “phenomenal success”, attracting 2000 visitors a day. They include not just reluctant groups of schoolchildren but busloads of curious adults too.

Gryseels says Belgium is still coming to grips with its colonial period. Many Belgian family histories include doctors, missionaries or nuns who went to the Congo, and until recently most grew up with the idea that Belgium did nothing but good in Africa.

Full story here.

FURTHER reading: King Leopold's Ghost.

A FEW MORE links, including a writeup from the BBC, and the exhibition website.

AND now a writeup in the Times of London.

Re-picturing Nelson

A waxwork model of Lord Nelson, Britain's greatest naval hero, has undergone cosmetic surgery to remove half of his right eyebrow. The alterations were made at the Royal Naval Museum in Portsmouth to make the figure historically accurate.

Lord Nelson, killed during the Battle of Trafalgar 200 years ago, lost his right arm and sight in one eye. But historian Dr Ann-Mary Hills has discovered that a French cannonball also claimed part of his eyebrow. . .

More details at the BBC.

AND NOW another Trafalgar announcement:

The only surviving sail from the Battle of Trafalgar is to go on show to the public as part of the celebrations for this year's bicentenary. A special exhibition displaying the historic fore topsail from Nelson's flagship, HMS Victory, can be viewed in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard from March 18 to October 30 after an official opening by the Duke of Edinburgh next week. . .

It is battle-scarred and pock-marked by some 90 shot holes, although a few squares were cut out by 19th century souvenir hunters.

Masses of molluscs

Customs officers at Britain's biggest airport have arrested a woman passenger who was carrying well over her own weight in edible snails.

The traveller from Nigeria was detained after walking into the red channel at Heathrow from the baggage reclaim area, saying that she had a "small item" to declare.

Suspicious staff decided to carry out a search of her cases, which turned out to be bulging with sacks of the delicacy - a growing export from Nigeria to Europe's delicatessen trade.

From the Guardian.

Bring me the head of . . . .

Serbia's deputy culture minister has admitted sending agents to steal a shaving from waxworks at Madame Tussaud's in London.

Vladimir Tomcic wanted to ensure that his country's wax museum could be as good as the top London attraction.

But he says the agents went too far and snapped off two whole fingers rather than the small scraping of wax he had asked for.

As noted in the article, this may be an embarrassment for Serbia, though not exactly for the reasons cited. If Madame Tussaud's is the best you can aspire to . . .

From Ananova.

Medieval tunnels found under Scottish farm

A FARMER has unearthed a network of 700-year-old tunnels beneath his Lothians farm. The network, which does not appear on any records, features a large arched tunnel which runs for around a mile beneath Park Farm, near Linlithgow, West Lothian. . .

Excited archaeologists believe the tunnel, just a few miles from the historic Linlithgow Palace, dates back to the early 14th century when a secretive sect of monks farmed the land.

Full story here.

ADDENDUM: Do see the comments about the fundamental silliness of the notion of the monks responsible being in any way a "secretive sect".

Only surviving Alamo flag rediscovered in Mexico

The only flag known to have survived the Battle of the Alamo has been found on display at a museum in Mexico, more than a decade after Mexican officials said they had lost it, a newspaper reported Sunday.

Several flags reportedly flew at the Alamo during the March 1836 battle between a small band of Texas fighters and a Mexican army 10 times their number. All except one were destroyed.

More than a decade ago, Texas officials stepped up efforts to get the flag back, but the Mexicans said they had lost it.

A reporter from The Dallas Morning News recently found the flag at Mexico's National History Museum.

Full story here.

ADDENDUM: And a bit more detail here:

The 4-by-3-foot silk Alamo flag, trimmed with gold metallic fringe, is emblazoned with the words "First Company of Texan Volunteers! from New Orleans." The New Orleans Greys company, formed amid Texas' conflict with Mexico, carried the banner.

More Munchs stolen in Norway

Thieves stole three works by Norwegian painter Edvard Munch from a hotel in south Norway overnight, adding to a list of his missing art including "The Scream," police said.

Thieves took a 1915 watercolor, "Blue Dress," and two lithographs -- a self-portrait and a portrait of Swedish playwright and novelist August Strindberg.

From CNN.

AND MANY HAPPY RETURNS:

Norwegian police have recovered three works by artist Edvard Munch in Oslo, the day after they were stolen.

BBC story here.

More followup in the NY Times.

Oldest bipeds found

We'll be hearing more about this:

A team of U.S. and Ethiopian scientists has discovered the fossilized remains of what they believe is humankind's first walking ancestor, a hominid that lived in the wooded grasslands of the Horn of Africa nearly 4 million years ago.

Reuters puts the number of pieces found at 12.

Building a better roadblock

As Mickey Kaus summarizes it:

Surely our roadblock practices have done much more to alienate Iraqis than the Abu Ghraib abuses

Today's Christian Science Monitor piece, "What Iraq's checkpoints are like" has triggered much anguished discussion; if only it proves as successful in prompting new ideas and the will to put them into action.