What's going on? What's happening? That's what people want to know about in the Pagan communities around our world! People do care about what's happening with other's. Should we be aware of what's happening around us? "Yes!" Being aware of what's going on around you is important.

You can't stop people from being curious about, "The Good, Bad and Ugly!" They want it all. If you feel the same way and you want other's toknow about new's worhty happenings that impact our community whether there Good or Bad and want other's to know about. E-mail it in. If you have comments and/or suggestions about any article e-mail it in and will post it.

April 17, 1998

Antarctic Ice Shelf Breaks Off

By AP

Sydney, Australia -- A massive chunk of ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula broke away earlier this year and scientists on Friday blamed global warming.

Satellite images of the Larsen B ice shelf, which reaches toward South America, show the section broke away between Feb.26 and March 23, toward the end of the Antarctic summer, according to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.

The icebergs produced by the crumbled shelf pose no particular threat, since there are no major shipping lanes in that area and Antarctic cruise ships or those resupplying bases all have radar to detect icebers.

The collapse of the 75 square mile chunk of ice shelf is consistent with "what we see from effects of increased greenhouse gases, which cause warming," said Bill Budd, a meteorology professor at Australia's Antarctic Cooperative Research Center.

"And it's the warming in the ocean that is most important for the reduction in the ice shelves," he said. "It is the mealting from underneath that can be much more effective than warming of the air."

The British Antarctic Survey has predicted the entire Larsen Ice Shelf, which covers more than 4,000 square miles, is nearing its limit of stablitity.

In January 1995, the Larsen A ice shelf to the north broke away in a 48 mile by 23 mile mass, 600 feet thick.

Over the past 50 years, the Antartctic Peninsula has warmed about 4.5 degrees. Research by Budd and his colleagues indicates global warming will melt most of the ice shelves, which border about 44 percent of Antarctica and cover 580,000 square miles.

Budd's computer climate models predict significant degradation of the ice shelves beginning in the 21st century and their near-total loss within 500 years.

MUSEUM DENIES BUYING STOLEN SILVER

New York -- The Metropolitan Museum of Art responded angrily Friday to charges that 15 of its ancient silver vessels and utensils were looted from a Sicilian archeological site.

Met spokesman Harold Holzer called the accusations speculative and inflammatory and said it was impossible to know where the pieces had actually originiated.

He was responding to a story in Friday's Boston Globe that said the museum bought the stolen pieces after they were smuggled from Italy to Switzerland and had rebuffed Italian authorities' efforts to prove the purchase was illegal.

Holzer said the silver, which dates to the third century B.C., had been publicly displayed and studied since the museum bought it in 1982.

"We believe that it is impossible to tell from any description that has been advanced that these are the materials taken from that site," he said. "We have seen no confirming or convincing evidence."

Italian authorities believe they can tie the 15 pieces to an ancient Greek settlement in central Sicily, the Globe reported.

Giusseppe Mascara, reported to be a major looter of Italian antiquities, described to authorities a set of exquisite silver pieces he said his associates had unearthed in the ruins of the city of Morgantina, according to the Globe.

Italian authorities say Mascara's description of the looted silver fits the pieces at the Met, the Globe said. They accused museum officials of rebuffing their attempts to pin down the treasure's origins.

Holzer said Met officials had been incontact with Italian authorities and were treating their complaints seriously. But he said accusations based on Mascara's statements were not credible.

"I don't think his testimony can be taken seriously, considering who he is, what he's said he's done and what arrangements he might have to make with authorities to be looked on more favorably," Holzer said. "He's outrageous, and the comments are outrageous."

April 16, 1998

MASS> CRITICIZED ON ARCHEOLOGY FIND

Apringfield, Mass. -- When a college student discovered an ancient Indian encampment on state land 20 years ago, cash-strapped Massachusetts officials decided to preserve it.

Now a New York archeologist is criticizing the state, saying it is trying to hide what is believed to be a major archeological find.

"This is a very sad situation," Michael Gramly, director of the Great Lakes Artifact Repository in Buffalo, N.Y., said Wednesday. "This is such an important site that it belongs to the entire nation. It could very well be the largest Paleo-Indian encampment discovered in North America."

State archeologist Brona Simon did not return a telephone message Wednesday, but she told the Union News in Springfield that money was scarce in 1978. Officials with the Historical Commission decided to excavate when more advanced equipment would be available.

However, Gramly said the state's attempt to hide the Mount Sugarloaf site near the Connecticut Riber by burying it under 6 feet of sand may onlyhave damaged it and left it open to possibility of accident disruption.

The debate over excavating or preserving sites has been a lingering one.

Mary Lou Curran, a curator at the Peabody Museum in Salem, said she could understand the state's initial decision given its money problems. Still, she told the Union News that after 20 years "there are some valid questions" as to whether it should now be excavated.

Gramly was so frustrated that he made some test excavations on private property adjacent to the protected site in 1995, and determined that it extended well beond the 2 acres the state had protected.

The state has since purchased control of the adjacent 20 acres and has barred excavations.

"What I really fear is this little bit is all we will ever know about this site," said Gramly, who has published his findings and plans to present them at the Massachusetts Archeological Society meeting Saturday.

He estimated the campsite could be more than 400 feet in diameter with space for more than 60 individual fires clustered around an open area.

"These central gatheing areas are so important, because it is here you find the unexpected things that can help answer so many questions," he said.

Among the items Gramly uncovered in his brief exploration were a drilled bead and bit of etched stone, which are rare in such ancient sites, as well as tools made of stones from both the Hudson Valley of New York and an area near Boston.

Tests of charred bone fragments show the early hunter gatherers, whose diet is still an open question, had apparently dined on some member of the deer family.

Gramly said he could not submit the charcoal fragments for carbon dating because the soil in which they were found had been contaminated by oil dripping from a farm tractor.

April 15, 1998

ROBERTSON TV NETWORK MUST TURN OVER CHRISTIAN COALITION PAPERS

Norfolk, Va. -- The Christian Broadcasting Network was ordered to turn over documents to federal regulators searching for evidence that the Christian Coalition engaged in partisan politics.

The 38 memos and letters described business and financial dealings between CBN and the Christian Coalition, including how the two groups shared an airplane, broadcast time and some employees.

U.S. District Judge Jerome B. Friedman upheld a magistrate's January order for CBN to turn over documents to the Federal Election Commission, which is suing the coalition. The documents must be handed over by Monday.

The FEC is seeking evidence that the coalition coordinated political efforts from 1990 to 1994 with various Republican candidates.

The Chesapeake based coalition says it is a political education organization that does not endorse candidates and has denied any wrongdoing. Both the coalition and CBN in Virginia Beach were founded by religious broadcaster Pat Robertson.

Both CBN and the coalition have fought a July 1996 FEC subpoena for various records. Some documents have been ruled exempte, but Friedman's order Friday called for 38 records to be handed over.

April 14, 1998

A Mystery Unraveled, Twice

By Gina Kolata

Half a millennium ago, a German abbot wrote a book on communication with spirits. It gained instant notoriety. The author, Johannes Trithemius, was an adviser to emperors and a leading humanist. But he also was a magician, and his book was couched in the language of the occult. It outraged Renaissance intellectuals who said it showed that Trithemius was a dabbler in demonic magic and that he could conjure up spirits.

Trithemius's book, volume three of his trilogy, "Steganographia," circulated widely in manuscript form for a century before it was published by entrepreneurs in Frankfurt. Upon publication, it was banned by the Roman Catholic Church and attacked by Protestants. Yet it remained a cult classic, and, to this day, the book is pored over by believers in witchcraft and demons for spells to conjure spirits. Historians cite it as a prime example of 16th century black magic.

But some people always thought the book was something more -- a cleverly disguised code. And now two researchers, from different disciplines and knowing nothing about each other's work, have broken the code.

The first was Dr. Thomas lErnst, a professor of German at La Roche College, in Pittsburgh. Ernst resolved the Trithemius problem several years ago while he was a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh. But his 200 page paper, written in German and published in 1996 in a Dutch journal, Daphnis, went largely unnoticed. "There wasn't much reaction to it, "Ernst said.

Meanwhile, Dr. Jim Reeds, a mathematician at ATT&T Labs in Florham Park, N.J., had been fascinated by the Trithemius mystery for 30 years. Last month, he solved it. But two weeks later, as Reeds continued to search for information on Trithemius, he came upon Ernst paper and found that Ernst had already solved the mystery. Reeds's 26 page manuscript has been accepted for publication in the journal Cryptologia, said David Kahn, its editor.

Ernst and Reeds began with the same basic information. Trithemius was a monastic reformer who became an abbot at age 20. He was an adviser to Emperor Maxmilian. And he published prolifically.

Trithemius was an adept practitioner of fictionally enhanced nonfiction. "He wrote histories, chronicles, even fake chronicles," said Dr. Gerhard F. Strasser, a historian at Pennsylvania State University in State College. "He invented people who were only uncovered in the 19th century as being fictitious Germanic heroes," Strasser added.

Trithemius also was a magician. "Everyone who as interested in magic emulated him," Reeds added.

In 1499, Trithemius began publishing a trilogy, written in Latin, that he called Steganographia, which means, in Greek, "hidden writing." Books one and two were clearly systems for encoding messages and were the first books written on cryptography, Reeds said. Trithemius's "ideas were influential; his books sold like hot cakes," Reeds added.

But the third book was different. "It was written under the guise of occult astrology," Ernst said. "It contains many tables of numbers, but it wasn't quite clear what you were supposed to do with them. It looked like an occult treatise and people took it quite literally," and thought that the numbers contained the secrets of conjuring spirits.

From the 16th century through the 18th century, highly regarded scholars tried to figure out the book, Ernst said. While most thought it was a book of demonic magic, a few decided it provided a secret code, couched in a language involving angels, spirits and astrological signs.

In 1676, Wolfgang Ernst Heidel, an otherwise obscure figure who trained in the law and worked for the archbishop of Mains, Germany, claimed that Trithemius's third book was a code and that he had deciphered it. But Heidel wrote about his discovery in his own secret code, which no one could decipher. So his claim to have solved the mystery was itself a mystery, Ernst said.

Ernst decided that, given what was known about Trithemius, it was much more likely that book three was a secret code than that it was a work of demonology. The long lists of numbers in the book, separated by astrological signs, were probably encrypted messages, Ernst speculated. And Trithemius's eerie passages about communicating one's thought's over distance with the use of spirits were probably his inside joke about what his code could accomplish.

He took on the writing as a problem in cryptography, and within two weeks, he said, he had figured it out. As he had suspected, the demonology was simply a disguise for a code.

Reeds, who does research on the mathematical problems of making and and deciphering codes, said it took him two days to break Trithemius's code. The hardest part, he said, was transcribing Trithemius's tables of numbers from a photo copy of a microfilm into his computer.

"For me, the mystery wasn't, Could I solve a cryptogram? It was, Is there a cryptogram there?" Reeds said. "If there was a cryptogram and it wasn't garbled -- the book was printed 100 years after it was written -- then I knew it couldn't be too hard to solve." After all, he said wryly, "there has been some progress in the past 500 years."

Trithemius offered plenty of hints, Reeds said. "He says that these are elaborate calculations that you have to do, and he tells you that you have to read the tables," he said. When Trithemius said that people can send messages without using letters he probably just meant they could use number codes instead.

Book three had seven tables, each containing roughly twoo dozen to 200 numbers. Reeds saw patterns in the numbers that led him to try arranging them in columns but to examine that hypothesis, Reeds had to know the Latin alphabet of the time. And the alphabet was ambiguious, sometimes it had the letter "w" sometimes "k" and sometimes "y."

Reeds guessed that Trithemius might have assigned letters to numbers using alphabetical order. He was almost right -- he discovered that Trithemius used reverse alphabetical order. Reeds also discovered the Trithemius's alpabet did not have the letters "k" or "y," but it had "w" and "a couple of other letters stuck on the end that stood for 'sch' and 'tz,'" he said.

Once he realized that Trithemius's book was, in fact, a code, Reeds was delighted. Trithemius, he said, had "kind of a cute idea" to encrypt his encryption method. "It's the kind of idea that a computer nerdy sort of person would have nowadays," he said.

But the messages that Trithemius encrypted in the tables in his book turned out to be banal. One was the Latin equivalent of "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" -- a sentence that used every letter of the alphabet, another said. "The bearer of this letter is a rougue and a thief. Guard yourself against him. He wants to do something to you." A third was the start of the 21st Psalm.

Ernst said that when he cracked Trithemius's code he wondered about Heidel, the 17th century man who said he had decoded Trithemius, but who had encoded his book giving the solution to the Trithemius code. So, Ernst returned to Heidel's book and cracked Heidel's code. Sure enough, Ernst discoverd Heidel had figured jout Trithemius code. Why would Heidel encode his discovery? "It was cryptological vanity," Ernst said.

Spiritualist Author is Found Dead in Surf Near His Long Island Estate

By David W. Chen

The police in Suffolk County said yesterday that they had tentatively identified a body found off Setauket, N.Y., as that of Dr. Frederick P. Lenz, the controversail new age guru, spiritualist and author of the best selling book, "Skurfing the Himalayas."

The body was discovered yesterday morning about 60 feet off shore in 20 foot deep waters in Conscience Bay, near Dr. Lenz's estate by police divers.

It was not immediately known how long the body had been in the water, pending an examination by the county medical examiner, said Officer Renee Hauser of the Suffolk County Police Department.

An unidentified woman was found to be in Dr. Lenz's house as the police were combing the property. She was described as "incoherent" and taken to University Hospital at Stony Brook.

It was not immediately known, what caused Dr. Lenz's death, the police said.

Dr. Lenz, 48, who received a doctorate in English literature from State University of New York at Stony Brook, attracted attention beginning in the 1980's for his teachings, which stitched together Eastern philosophies. Known as the "yuppie guru," Dr. Lenz, who wasd based for years in the San Diego area, claimed that he was the first earthly incarnation of a Hindu deity and drew 900 followers in several cities.

Detractors, however, said that he was merely a cult leader who exploited his followers. Former students of Mr. Lenz had accused him of financial improprieties, sexual misconduct and depicting himself as a deity. Mr. Lenz denied the charges.

By 1988, Dr. Lenz's loyal following had largely dissolved, and he moved to Long Island. He then spent muchof his time developing computer programs, lecturing and writing. In 1995, he wrote "Surfing the Himalayas," which documented his snowboard adventures.

Dr. Lenz lived in the exclusive Old Field section of Setauket, and was reported to have lived lavishly, with a Lear jet as one of his possessions.

April 13, 1998

UPDATE

Corps Covering Ancient Bones Site

Kennewick, Wash. -- The site where an ancient skeleton was discovered has been covered under tons of rock and dirt despite objections from scientists and a pagan sect that worships Norse gods.

The Army Corps of Engineers said Monday that work will be completed this week along the Columbia River shoreline near Kennewick in southeastern Washington.

The discovery in 1996 of the 9,200 year old skeleton, known as Kennewick man, put the Army Corps of Engineers in the middle of a fight among scientists who want to study the site, Indian tribes that want to rebury the bones and a California religious sect that claims the skeleton is an ancestor.

Now in a laboratory, Kennewick man may be the earliest evidence of humans with Caucasian features in North America.

The corps had pushed to bury the site to prevent erosion and artifact looting, but a group of scientists who sued for the right to study Kennewick man objected to the work.

However, neither they nor the pagan sect, Asatru Folk Assembly, went to court to stop the work.

A lawsuit over ownership of the bones, among the oldest complete skeletons ever found in North America, is pending in U.S. District Court in Portland, Ore.

Indian tribes contend the skeleton is that of an ancestor and must be promptly reburied under a federal graves repatriation act. The corps initially planned to turn the bones over to the tribes, prompting the scientists' lawsuit.

The archaeologist who initially studied the bones said infection from a spear point wound likely contributed substantially to Kennewick Man's death.