Steichen autochromes

At first glance the two pictures seem to be gorgeous anachronisms, full-color blasts from the black-and-white world of 1908, the year Ford introduced the Model T and Theodore Roosevelt was nearing the end of his second term.

But they are genuine products of their time, rare ones, among the few surviving masterpieces from the earliest days of color photography, made using a process developed by the Lumière brothers in France and imported to the United States by the photographer Edward Steichen a century ago this year. They were taken by Steichen, probably in Buffalo, and are thought to be portraits of Charlotte Spaulding, a friend and student who became his luminous subject for the portraits, which resemble pointillist miniatures on glass.

Read about their rediscovery here. More on the autochrome process at Wikipedia; there is a collection of WW1 autochromes online here.

Anthony M. Brooks obit

From today's New York Times:

Mr. Brooks was 20 when he parachuted into France in July 1942 as a British undercover agent dispatched to France to aid the anti-Nazi resistance — part of a special force that Churchill assigned to “set Europe ablaze”. . .

Before he was 21, Mr. Brooks received the Distinguished Service Order, a medal awarded for exceptional valor. Sabotage by his network of Resistance fighters succeeded in bringing railway transit to a stop in southern France, thereby preventing German troops from moving to the north as Allied forces pressed south after D-Day, on June 6, 1944. . .

Mr. Brooks’s triumph was in hindering the progress of the Second Panzer Division, an armored unit commanded by Heinz Guderian, considered the father of the blitzkrieg, or lightning war. That was accomplished by sabotaging rail cars carrying tanks, and by creating barriers by sabotaging other trains. Every train leaving Marseille for Lyon was derailed at least once.

Amazing.

Chinese imports: not good enough to eat?

Dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical.

Frozen catfish laden with banned antibiotics.

Scallops and sardines coated with putrefying bacteria.

Mushrooms laced with illegal pesticides.

These were among the 107 food imports from China that the Food and Drug Administration detained at U.S. ports just last month, agency documents reveal, along with more than 1,000 shipments of tainted Chinese dietary supplements, toxic Chinese cosmetics and counterfeit Chinese medicines.

For years, U.S. inspection records show, China has flooded the United States with foods unfit for human consumption.

No nativist screed, this -- it's from the Washington Post. With the recent pet holocaust and the scores of dead in Panama thanks to tainted Chinese medicine and toothpaste, one wonders how much more it will take before business as usual comes to an end.

Despite those violations, the Chinese government is on track to get permission to legally export its chickens to the United States -- a prospect that has raised concern not only because of fears of bacteria such as salmonella but also because Chinese chickens, if not properly processed, could be a source of avian flu, which public-health authorities fear may be poised to trigger a human pandemic.

Opening up the archives: the Displaced Persons files

Those who don't study the past are not only doomed to repeat it, but worse, to think that what they are doing is somehow different. War is messy, and so is its aftermath -- as this article reminds us:

When the Third Reich surrendered in May 1945, 8 million people were left uprooted around Europe. Millions drifted through the 2,500 hastily arranged DP camps before they were repatriated.

A bleak picture springs with stark immediacy from typewritten reports by the Allied officers, found in the massive archive of the International Tracing Service . . .

Far from scenes of joyful liberation that should have greeted the end of Nazi oppression, the files reveal desperation, loss and confusion, and overwhelmed and often insensitive military authorities. . .

"Owing to ill treatment by the Germans, most DPs have a distrust and fear of the Allied authorities," said a September 1945 report signed by British Lt. Col. C.C. Allan. "Many DPs have sunk into complete apathy regarding their future". . .

Inmates were kept under armed guard to maintain order. They still wore their old striped, pajama-like concentration-camp-issue uniforms and slept in the same drafty barracks through a bitter winter.

Compounding their misery, they could watch through barbed wire fences and see German villagers living normal lives. In some places, those villagers were forced to tour the camps and help with the burials or at least face up to what their Fuehrer had wrought. But it was scant comfort to the victims.

"As things stand now, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them," wrote presidential envoy Earl G. Harrison in his famously quoted report to Truman after visiting that summer.

The article notes that the last DP camps were closed in 1953.

Dining inside, all'Italiana

DINERS are flocking to what could perhaps be termed the most exclusive restaurant in Italy — inside a top security prison, where the chefs and waiters are Mafiosi, robbers and murderers.

Serenaded by Bruno, a pianist doing life for murder, the clientele eat inside a deconsecrated chapel set behind high walls, watch towers, searchlights and security cameras of Fortezza Medicea, at Volterra near Pisa.

Under the watchful eye of armed prison warders, a 20-strong team of chefs, kitchen hands and waiters prepares 120 covers for diners who have all undergone strict security checks. Tables are booked weeks in advance. . .

Instead, a smart, mainly middle-aged crowd tucks into a vegetarian signature menu, cooked up by head chef Egidio — serving life for murder.

The restaurant opened two months ago and has proved so popular that Italy's prison department is thinking of trying it in other jails.

Full article here, but no mention of tipping policy.

Smuggled Roman ring

I'm not sure how important this ring is, though it sounds quite interesting. What struck me was this article's inapt description of it as "Turkish":

A Turkish ring, dating back nearly 2,000 years, will be returned to its country after it was discovered in Derby.

The ring, which dates back to between 161AD and 169AD, was taken to Derby Museum for valuation by a member of the public.

It was passed on to the British Museum, which discovered that it had been taken from an archaeological dig at Ephesus, in Turkey.

The item was brought to the UK by an aircraft passenger. It is now with customs officers at East Midlands Airport, who will return it to the Turkish government on Tuesday.

Engraved with gemstones and made of iron, the ring features an image of Lucius Versus, who was co-emperor of Ephesus.

Is this the state of historical awareness in England nowadays? "Lucius Versus"? "co-emperor of Ephesus"? Oy.

Colby College art windfall

Colby College, the second-oldest liberal-arts college in Maine, received a private art collection valued at $100 million that includes the work of American artists Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper, Mary Cassatt, James McNeill Whistler and others.

The gift, from Peter and Paula Lunder of Waterville, Maine, is the largest in the college's history . . .

The collection consists of 500 prints, paintings and sculptures that will be housed at the college's Museum of Art in Waterville. More than 80 works from the gift are currently on display at the museum, which is being expanded to accommodate the entire collection.

From Bloomberg News.

Intact Egyptian tomb find

Belgian archaeologists have discovered the intact tomb of an Egyptian courtier who lived about 4,000 years ago, Egypt's culture ministry said on Sunday.

The team from Leuven Catholic University accidentally found the tomb, one of the best preserved of its time, while excavating a later burial site at the Deir al-Barsha necropolis near the Nile Valley town of Minya, south of Cairo.

The tomb belonged to Henu, an estate manager and high-ranking official during the first intermediate period, which lasted from 2181 to 2050 BC and was a time of political chaos in ancient Egypt.

From Reuters.

Ned Kelly escapes!

Australia's most notorious outlaw Ned Kelly, dead for 126 years, is again eluding authorities.

Kelly, who became a folk hero of Australia's colonial past with his gangs' daring bank robberies and police shoot outs, was hanged for his crimes in 1880 and buried in a mass prison grave.

But now authorities say Kelly has again gone missing -- his remains that is. It seems Kelly's remains were dug up during drainage works in the 1950s and discarded.

Full story here.

Live coelacanth catch

An Indonesian fisherman hooked a rare coelacanth, a species once thought as extinct as dinosaurs, and briefly kept the "living fossil" alive in a quarantined pool.

From USA Today. Not clear from the reports so far if any scientists got to study the fish before it expired. In the photo accompanying the story the fish doesn't look very lively.

More treasure shipwreck news

The Florida-based treasure-hunting company, Odyssey Marine Exploration, announced its discovery of gold and silver - worth an estimated £250m - on Friday, but refused to cite the exact whereabouts of the wreck because of security concerns.

They said the coins were found in international waters, therefore outside the jurisdiction of any country and could legally be taken back to the United States.

But the Spanish government has said it thought the statement was "suspicious" after Odyssey sought permission to explore Spanish waters for the wreck of a British ship in January.

It sounds, however, as if Odyssey has its fingers in a lot of pies -- not all of them off Spain:

Experts initially thought it might be the English ship, The Merchant Royal, after a US judge signed an order granting Odyssey exclusive salvage rights to a site 40 miles off the south-west tip of the English coast.

Known as the "Eldorado of the seas", the vessel sank off the Isles of Scilly because of bad weather in 1641, laden with treasure from Mexico,

Dr Lane Bruner, a coin expert from the American Numismatic Association, said there were clues about the location in a statement given to a US federal court last autumn.

"They told a judge at that point that they had found the wreck of a 17th-century merchant ship in the Atlantic Ocean, just outside the English Channel.

From the Independent.

Digging into the Iron Age at the Castle

SOME of the earliest Iron Age defences at Edinburgh Castle have been unearthed during excavation work for the attraction's new visitor centre.

Archaeologists discovered two huge, 2000-year-old ditches underneath the Castle Esplanade, which would once have protected the ancient hill fort on the site.

A team of experts drilled a series of small bore holes through the Castle's car park and analysed soil samples from many metres below the ground.

Senior archaeologists today described the find as a "major discovery" that would help show how the Castle has developed since being established by Iron Age tribes.

It comes just months after the same team discovered the foundations of a 17th-century stone wall, built after the Castle was seized by Oliver Cromwell.

Full article here.

Meteoric extinction in America's Ice Age?

A controversial new idea suggests that a large space rock exploded over North America 13,000 years ago.

The blast may have wiped out one of America's first Stone Age cultures as well as the continent's big mammals such as the mammoth and the mastodon.

The blast, from a comet or asteroid, caused a major bout of climatic cooling which may also have affected human cultures emerging in Europe and Asia.

From the BBC.

Cutty Sark gutted by fire

Bad news from Greenwich:

A blaze on board the famous 19th Century ship Cutty Sark may have been started deliberately, police believe.

The ship, which was undergoing a £25m restoration, is kept in a dry dock at Greenwich in south-east London.

An area around the 138-year-old tea clipper had to be evacuated when the fire broke out in the early hours.

A Cutty Sark Trust spokesman said 50% of the ship was removed for restoration work. He said the trust was devastated but it could have been worse.

The decks of the ship are said to be unsalvageable. But much of the boat, including the masts, had already been taken away as part of the restoration project.

From the BBC, with followup here.

More in the NY Times here. The Cutty Sark website is here, but no news posted there as yet.