You know, Leon Jaworski has been a hero to Democrats for decades. Now it has been shown that he was willing to let a guilty white murderer go free to ensure the conviction of innocent black soldiers.

Fortunately, it appears that belated justice is being done.

Guglielmo Olivotto, an Italian prisoner of war, died with a noose around his neck, lynched at a military post on Puget Sound 63 years ago. Samuel Snow, 83, hopes that people will stop blaming him and the 27 other black soldiers convicted of starting the riot that led to Mr. OlivottoÂ’s death. It was one of the largest Army courts-martial of World War II.

This week, a review board issued a ruling that could lead to overturning the convictions of all 28 soldiers, granting honorable discharges and providing them with back pay.

The board found that the court-martial was flawed, that the defense was unjustly rushed and that the prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, a young lieutenant colonel who went on to fame three decades later as a Watergate special prosecutor, had important evidence that he did not share with defense lawyers.

All of the 28 have died except for Mr. Snow and another soldier.

Leon Jaworski went on to fame and fortune after railroading these men. Why did he ignore the evidence and insist upon sending them to prison? Could it have been the race of Jaworski's victims -- and of the murderer?

And I wonder -- Jaworski's grandson, Joe Jaworski, is seeking to unseat my state senator. Will he have the integrity to condemn his grandfather for this clear example of prosecutorial misconduct?

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It appears that they may have found the seal of one of the most infamous women of the Bible.

An ancient seal that surfaced in Israel more than four decades ago belonged to the biblical Queen Jezebel, according to a new study released on Tuesday by a Dutch university.

The seal, which some scholars date to the ninth century BCE, was first discovered in 1964 by the Israeli archeologist Nahman Avigad, with the name "Yzbl" inscribed in ancient Hebrew, Utrecht University said.

Although it was initially assumed that the seal belonged to Jezebel, the powerful and reviled Phoenician wife of the Jewish King Ahab, there was uncertainty regarding the original owner both because the spelling of the name was erroneous, and because the personal seal could easily have belonged to another woman of the same name.

Moreover, the unknown origin of the seal, which was not found in an official excavation but purchased on the antiquities market in Israel, has left Israeli archeologists uncertain of its ownership for the last 40 years.

But the study by Utrecht University Old Testament scholar and Protestant minister Dr. Marjo Korpel, 48, concludes that the seal must have belonged to Jezebel, based on the symbols that appear on it.

Will it ever be possible to authenticate the seal with 100% certainty? No, it won’t – but once again, we have archaeological evidence that seems to corroborate the existence of biblical figures. And while that doesn’t “prove” that the Bible is 100% accurate, it does show that it contains at least some elements of historical truth not available elsewhere.

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The Austrians are facing this issue right now – and not to the satisfaction of some groups tracking those involved in documenting the Holocaust.

She seems harmless enough now, the elderly figure in a dressing gown peering round the door to her flat.

Erna Wallisch, an 85-year-old grandmother, rarely ventures out, spending her days drinking coffee and being cared for by her family.

But the image she presents belies a dark past which has put her seventh on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's list of most-wanted Nazi war criminals still at large.

Under Austria’s laws, the statute of limitations has run out on Wallisch’s crimes. But are there some crimes that deserve no statute of limitations? Is there no place else that she could be prosecuted – perhaps Poland or Israel? How long should participation in crimes against humanity be subject to punishment – or should such individuals be subject to the perpetual threat of punishment for their participation in genocide?

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This is the first of its kind -- First Temple artifacts found on Temple Mount.

The unauthorized dig of a trench this past summer by the Moslem Waqf on the Temple Mount, in the course of which it was assumed that precious findings were destroyed, apparently had a thin silver lining. Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) personnel monitoring the trench-digging have, for the first time, found traces of the First Temple.

* * *

Archaeological examination of a small section of this level, led by Jerusalem District Archaeologist Yuval Baruch, uncovered fragments of ceramic table wares, animal bones, and more. The finds date from the 8th to 6th centuries BCE; the First Temple existed between the 9th and 5th centuries BCE, having been built by King Solomon in 832 and destroyed in 422.

This will certainly make it harder for those who claim the Jews never had a temple on Temple Mount -- but then again, the Muslim radicals don't really care about historical finds like this one.

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Our ancestors wiped them out tens of thousands of years ago. Were they able to call for help? New evidence indicates that perhaps they could.

Neanderthals, an archaic human species that dominated Europe until the arrival of modern humans some 45,000 years ago, possessed a critical gene known to underlie speech, according to DNA evidence retrieved from two individuals excavated from El Sidron, a cave in northern Spain.

The new evidence stems from analysis of a gene called FOXP2 which is associated with language. The human version of the gene differs at two critical points from the chimpanzee version, suggesting that these two changes have something to do with the fact that people can speak and chimps cannot.

The genes of Neanderthals seemed to have passed into oblivion when they vanished from their last refuges in Spain and Portugal some 30,000 years ago, almost certainly driven to extinction by modern humans. But recent work by Svante Paabo, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has made it clear that some Neanderthal DNA can be extracted from fossils.

That is an exciting use of DNA to learn more about the past, including the development of the human species.

Of course, there is other evidence of Neanderthals being able to speak -- and type.

H/T Malkin

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Professor David Currie of the University of Chicago, a great scholar, passed away this week. This report comes in from the Volokh Conspiracy about a great resource provided by the school.

Via the University of Chicago Law Faculty blog, I learn that the Chicago website has posted an MP3 file recorded in 2006 of the late Professor David Currie reading the U.S. Constitution (link to the hosting page rather than the file). It's a big file, but a download is well worth it: Currie has a marvelous voice, and hearing the Constitution read aloud gives you a particularly keen sense of the structure and internal consistency of the document. Super cool.

I've downloaded it -- you should, too.

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This is cool stuff – stashed away for seven centuries, we can now get access to the evidence that was used to destroy that famous order of Crusader Knights, the Knights Templar.

The Vatican has published secret archive documents about the trial of the Knights Templar, including a long-lost parchment that shows that Pope Clement V initially absolved the medieval Christian order from accusations of heresy, officials said Friday.

The 300-page volume recently came out in a limited edition -- 799 copies -- each priced at $8,377, said Scrinium publishing house, which prints documents from the Vatican's secret archives.

* * *

The work reproduces the entire documentation on the papal hearings convened after King Philip IV of France arrested and tortured Templar leaders in 1307 under charges of heresy and immorality.

The military order of the Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon was founded in 1118 in Jerusalem to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land following the First Crusade.

As their military might increased, the Templars also grew in wealth, acquiring property throughout Europe and running a primitive banking system. After the Templars left the Middle East with the collapse of the Crusader kingdoms, their power and secretive ways aroused the fear of European rulers and sparked accusations of corruption and blasphemy.

Historians believe that Philip owed debts to the Templars and seized on the accusations to arrest their leaders and extort confessions of heresy under torture as a way to seize the order's riches.

Of particular interest is the fact that Pope Clement was prepared to absolve the Templars of the heresy charge, only to relent later and suppress the order at the insistence of Phillip. Given that this is an area of history that IÂ’m not familiar with, IÂ’d love to know more.

However, I won’t be buying this book – at over $8000, it is well beyond my reach.

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To this day, Turkey denies the Armenian genocide.

Not only that, it punishes its citizens who speak of the Armenian genocide.

And it also rails against those outside its borders who dare to speak the truth about the Armenian genocide.

Turkey reacted angrily Thursday to a House committee vote in Washington to condemn as genocide the mass killings of Armenians in Turkey that began during World War I, recalling its ambassador from Washington and threatening to withdraw its support for the Iraq war.

In uncharacteristically strong language, President Abdullah Gul criticized the vote by the House Foreign Relations Committee in a statement to the semi-official Anatolian News Agency, and warned that the decision could work against the United States.

“Unfortunately, some politicians in the United States have once more dismissed calls for common sense, and made an attempt to sacrifice big issues for minor domestic political games,” President Gul said.

Sorry, but the shameful thing here is that it has taken over two decades for even one committee in Congress to say what Ronald Reagan did some twenty years ago -- that the Armenians were systematically murdered by the Turks, including the beloved hero and founder of secular Turkey, Kemal Ataturk. No president since that time has had the intellectual honesty and moral courage to stand up and repeat the truth uttered by the greatest president of the twentieth century -- and his successors have actively discouraged officially acknowledging that truth.

Does this vote come at a bad time, in terms of our military and diplomatic relations with Turkey, a valued ally in NATO, which has provided, albeit inconsistently, assistance in the War on Terror? Yes, it does -- because for the Turks, any time that anyone attempts to set the historical record straight is a bad time. The current threats and rumblings are therefore irrelevant.

But those who support the resolution can count their blessings on one score -- no longer are those who publicly proclaim th truth about the Armenian genocide subject to death threats and untimely deaths at the hands of Turkish nationalists and intelligence agencies.

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The genocide of the Armenian people by the Turks in the early 20th century is clearly documented historical fact -- and was even cited by Hitler as evidence that the world would stand by and allow him to destroy the Jews.

Bravo to one committee of House of Representatives for daring to speak the truth on this matter in the face of White House pressure to respect the sensitivities of the nation that perpetrated that crime against humanity.

The Bush administration will try to soothe Turkish anger after a House panelÂ’s approval of a measure describing as genocide the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians early in the last century.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee defied warnings by President Bush with 27-21 approval Wednesday to send the measure to the full House for a vote. The administration will now try to pressure Democratic leaders not to schedule a vote, though it is expected to pass.

Hours before the vote, Bush and his top two Cabinet members and other senior officials made last-minute appeals to lawmakers to reject the measure.

“Its passage would do great harm to our relations with a key ally in NATO and in the global war on terror,” Bush said.

I urge the House leadership to schedule a vote quickly -- and the Senate to take up the matter promptly. We must bear witness to the truth.

And to President Bush, let me say that your actions in this instance shame our country. What next -- a call to tear down the Holocaust Museum to spare the feelings of the Germans?

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DNA tests may finally answer that question for us.

When schoolchildren turn to the chapter on Christopher ColumbusÂ’s humble origins as the son of a weaver in Genoa, they are not generally told that he might instead have been born out of wedlock to a Portuguese prince. Or that he might have been a Jew whose parents converted to escape the Spanish Inquisition. Or a rebel in the medieval kingdom of Catalonia.

Yet with little evidence to support them, multiple theories of ColumbusÂ’s early years have long found devoted proponents among those who would claim alternative bragging rights to the explorer. And now, five centuries after he opened the door to the New World, ColumbusÂ’s revisionist biographers have found a new hope for vindication.

The Age of Discovery has discovered DNA.

In 2004, a Spanish geneticist, Dr. Jose A. Lorente, extracted genetic material from a cache of ColumbusÂ’s bones in Seville to settle a dispute about where he was buried. Ever since, he has been beset by amateur historians, government officials and self-styled Columbus relatives of multiple nationalities clamoring for a genetic retelling of the standard textbook tale.

Why the questions?

A Genoese Cristoforo Colombo almost certainly did exist. Archives record his birth and early life. But there is little to tie that man to the one who crossed the Atlantic in 1492. Snippets from ColumbusÂ’s life point all around the southern European coast. He kept books in Catalan and his handwriting has, according to some, a Catalonian flair. He married a Portuguese noblewoman. He wrote in Castilian. He decorated his letters with a Hebrew cartouche.

Intriguing issues, each of which contributes a bit of mystery to this complex man wh "discovered" America -- if one can ever truly be said to have discovered a land already inhabited by others.

In the end, though, one has to wonder what the significance of this debate really is? Yes, as a historian I would like to know the answer to these questions, but are the man's origins really more important than his explorations? Is this game of historical identity politics -- the same sort of issues that get raised when discussing Barack Obama and Tiger Woods -- really more than a sideshow? Whether Genoese or Jew, rebel knight or royal bastard, his voyages and their later impact must always be seen as outweighing his origins.

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