Earth Day 2001 (eXoNews):

With the whole world watching, police and protesters clashed repeatedly at the site of the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, Canada.

Americans my not have paid much attention, still feeling the impact of a week of riots in Cincinnati Ohio over the death of 19-year-old Timothy Thomas, who was killed by a white officer.

Cincinnati resident Norma Payne said that when she looks at city officials she sees "the same old slave masters," and "the same Gestapo of Hitler's regime."

"When I look at you, I think you may be the KKK in disguise," the black woman said. Six of Cincinnati's nine City Council members are white; the city of 331,000 people is 43 percent black.

Click here for our Special Protest Feature with stories on the Cincinnati situation and other protest reports from Quebec, Paris, Spain, Zambia, Azerbaijan, Ethiopia, Washington DC, Washington State and New York City.

Dodgson entertained the children with a story he made up as he went along. Alice was the heroine, while Lorina and Edith became the Lory and the Eaglet. Alice later pleaded with Dodgson to write the story down, which he did, eventually publishing Alice's Adventures in Wonderland under the pen name Lewis Carroll.

Nearly 140 years later, a collection of the original Alice's letters, manuscripts and photographs - including famous images of her taken by Carroll - is expected to sell for $3.5 million (U.S.) at Sotheby's.

Highlights of the collection will be exhibited at Sotheby's in New York starting Friday and will be shown in Chicago, Los Angeles and London before the June 6 auction in London.

The collection is being sold by Mary Jean St. Clair, the only grandchild of Alice Hargreaves, nee Liddell.

''We've decided that the moment's come to sell it,'' said St. Clair, who was three when her grandmother died in 1934 and hardly remembers her.

Besides being one of the most beloved authors in the English language, Carroll was an important figure in the early days of photography.

The auction includes Alice's personal print of Carroll's most famous study of her, Alice Liddell as a Beggar Girl.

The young Alice, dressed in graceful rags, gazes intently at the camera in this 1858 photograph inspired by a Tennyson poem. Sotheby's estimates it will sell for $144,000 to $217,000 (U.S.).

There is also an album presented as a gift to the Liddell family that includes more images of Alice and her sisters as well as portraits of Carroll's Oxford contemporaries. The auction house estimates that the album could sell for up to $1.1 million (U.S.).

The original manuscript for Alice's Adventures Under Ground, as it was then called, was sold by Sotheby's in 1928, but the current auction features Alice's copy of the bound volume, inscribed by Carroll ''to her whose namesake one happy summer day inspired this story.''

And there is a nostalgic 1891 letter from Carroll to the adult Alice recalling their earlier friendship. In the letter, one of only 11 from Carroll to his muse still in existence, he invites her to tea along with her husband, whom he had recently met.

''It is hard to realize that he was the husband of one I can scarcely picture to myself, even now, as more than seven years old,'' he wrote.

Carroll's relationship with the girls he photographed has been the subject of speculation over the years, with some scholars suggesting that his devotion to his young models was unhealthy.

By all accounts, Carroll, who never married, simply preferred children's company to that of adults.

''He was very shy and he just loved children,'' St. Clair said. ''And in those days children were looked on as pure and inviolable.''

Peter Selley, a specialist in English literature at Sotheby's, acknowledged that a friendship between a bachelor and a young girl like Alice ''would be difficult to have these days without suspicion.''

St. Clair, in New York for the exhibit, said the collection was lovingly preserved by her father, Caryl Hargreaves, who ''kept everything to do with his mother.''

Hargreaves was the youngest of Alice's three sons; the other two were killed in the First World War. St. Clair said her father, who died when she was 23, never told her much about his mother and her famous friend.

''I think he was saving it up and was going to tell me,'' she said. ''I think he thought I was too young to be interested.''

"I felt like we need to try this case in the courtroom and not in the news media," Circuit Judge James Garrett said.

The order came after defense lawyer John Robbins said news reports about secret recordings of his client, Thomas Blanton Jr., had tainted the jury pool and warranted a mistrial.

Garrett said no mistrial motion had been filed as of Thursday and that he could not rule on one until jury selection was complete. That isn't expected until at least Monday.

Blanton, 62, is charged with murder in the dynamite bombing at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on Sept. 15, 1963. The blast killed 11-year-old Denise McNair and 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson.

The church had become a gathering place for civil rights activists.

Garrett on Monday had ordered prospective jurors to avoid news reports about the case.

Before the gag order was imposed, Robbins said he would ask for a mistrial partly because of a story Tuesday by The Associated Press and an ABC news report Wednesday on tapes of Blanton secretly recorded in the 1960s by FBI informant Mitchell Burns.

Burns, a former Klansman, recorded Blanton on a tape recorder the FBI had hidden in the trunk of Burns' car.

Burns told the AP that Blanton once said: "They ain't gonna catch me when I bomb my next church." He also said he was uncertain if there was enough evidence for a conviction.

"He never admitted he did it. It's all circumstantial," Burns told the AP.

A lawyer for Blanton asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday to exclude other secret FBI recordings from the trial. The devices installed in Blanton's kitchen in 1964 lacked clear government approval in violation of a 1967 Supreme Court ruling against unauthorized surveillance, the motion said.

The request has been rejected by Alabama appeals courts.

The prosecutor has argued that no legal protection from surveillance existed when an FBI agent posing as a trucker drilled through a common wall into Blanton's kitchen.

Another former Klansman, 71-year-old Bobby Frank Cherry, was indicted along with Blanton, but his trial was delayed by questions over his mental competence. Ex-Klansman Robert Chambliss was convicted of murder in the bombing in 1977 and died in prison. A fourth suspect died without ever being charged.

THE COMPUTER SIMULATION is part of a new interactive museum that opened Wednesday, just outside the Al Aqsa Mosque that sits on land where Jews believe the remains of their two Temples — one built by King Solomon and the second by King Herod — are buried.

The sacred compound revered by Muslims and Jews is the most sensitive spot in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A dispute over final control over the hilltop helped derail peace talks and triggered fighting that began seven months ago.

RELIGIOUS DEBATE OVER HISTORY

Muslim clerics who administer the compound, known to Muslims as Haram as-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary, claim there is no archaeological proof that the Jewish Temples once stood in the place of the Al Aqsa and Dome of the Rock mosques.

The new Israeli display “is not a museum of historical events, but a factory of lies,” said Adnan Husseini, director of the Islamic Trust that administers the site.

Israel, in turn, bitterly complains that Muslims have recklessly discarded important archaeological artifacts, including those tracing the compound’s Jewish history, as part of the construction of underground prayer halls.

The opening of the multimillion-dollar museum near the southwestern corner of the Al Aqsa compound, known to Jews as the Temple Mount, came at a time of crisis in the tourism industry caused by the unrest that has claimed more than 470 lives.

Israel hopes the show will draw foreigners back to visit.

The computer simulation is housed in what used to be the basement of a palace from which Muslim Caliphs ruled the area in the 7th century.

In the high-tech computer simulation, developed with the University of California at Los Angeles, visitors are guided by computer images under a high gateway, known today as Robinson’s Arch, and up a grand staircase to the majestic Second Temple, as it stood before the Romans destroyed it in A.D. 70.

The computer program, like a flight simulator, takes the audience into the wide plaza surrounding the Temple. The royal portico adorns one side of the courtyard with four rows of columns. The square sanctuary, decorated with a gold frieze, rises high above the covered heads of virtual Jewish pilgrims on the other side.

Not every detail was clear when they reconstructed the Temple in the computer model.

Though he led excavations near the Temple Mount, archaeologist Ronny Reich said he had conflicting information, or not enough, and had to use educated guesswork to complete the model, answering questions posed by Lisa Snyder, a computer expert with the UCLA Urban Simulation Team.

“I couldn’t leave a white area and say, ‘I don’t know,’” said Reich. “The crowd would go crazy from a very empty picture.”

He based his conclusions on historic sources, such as religious texts, archaeological evidence and his knowledge about the architecture of the period.

Snyder, 39, from Los Angeles, said she spent 1,500 hours developing the computer simulation, taking more than 900 digital photographs of the area around the Temple Mount.

21ST-CENTURY REALITY

Emerging from the dark chambers, visitors face 21st-century reality, including some of the structures pictured in the simulation.

A few hundred yards away is the Western Wall, one of the remaining structures of the Temple compound, situated under the Dome of the Rock Mosque.

For Reich, aware of the political questions his work poses, the project gave him a perspective on life and history.

“There were turbulent days in ancient Jerusalem as well,” said Reich. “A lot happened in this city in history, and maybe this (center) will help us learn a lesson about troubles.”

LONDON April 19, 2001 (AP) - In a scrawled, smudged letter written in Cockney English, a man claiming to be the infamous serial killer Jack the Ripper described a foiled attempt to kill a woman and promised to find another victim soon.

The eerie note to a London doctor, made public by the government Thursday, is filled with spelling errors mimicking the Cockney accent and gives the gruesome details of an attempted murder.

''I was goin to hopperate agin close to your ospitle just as I was goin to dror mi nife along of er bloomin throte then cusses of coppers spoilt the game,'' it said. ''But I guess I wil be on the job soon and will send you another bit of innerds.''

The letter, dated Oct. 29, 1888, and once part of the original police file, was released Thursday by Britain's public records office under rules which require many government documents to be made public eventually.

It was given to the public records office about 30 years ago by Donald Rumbelow, a police officer. Rumbelow would not explain how he got the letter, but said police files were often mislaid before Scotland Yard hired its first archivist in 1951.

The letter also refers to a human kidney that had been sent to authorities in a cardboard box.

''Old boss you was rite it was the left kidny,'' the writer says.

The letter, signed ''Jack the Ripper'' was sent to Dr. Thomas Horrocks Openshaw, curator of a London hospital's pathological museum.

It is one of many letters purporting to be written by the Victorian murderer who killed at least seven prostitutes in London's East End during a three-month period in 1888. A person claiming to be the killer wrote a series of taunting notes to police, but the murders remain one of the most famous unsolved mysteries in British criminal history.

''Of course the letter is genuine in terms of it being sent in 1888, but if it is from the real killer, I do not know,'' Rumbelow said.

Stewart Evans, author of the forthcoming book Jack the Ripper, Letters from Hell, said it was ''better than most'' alleged Ripper letters.

''Who can say it is not genuine? You cannot categorically prove it is a hoax,'' Evans said.

Check out http://www.casebook.org for more on The Ripper.

By Paul Majendie

LONDON (Reuters) - First the anthology, now the film -- Beatlemania shows no sign of fading 30 years after the world's most famous pop group split up.

An album of their number one hit singles has sold more than 27 million copies and topped the charts in more than 30 countries around the world since its release last November.

Now it is the turn of "A Hard Day's Night" -- the critically acclaimed 1964 box office smash. It was directed by Richard Lester and hailed by New York's Village Voice as "the Citizen Kane of jukebox movies."

The grainy black-and-white film is being re-released in Britain -- and Paul McCartney is set to attend a gala screening Monday in Liverpool, birthplace of the Beatles.

The Sunday Times, celebrating the film's return to the big screen in a digitally re-mastered print, said: "It is still the greatest music movie of all time ... . The magic of the Beatles has not dated at all.

"And all in wonderfully evocative monochrome, of course, because United Artists wouldn't pay for color in case the band's fame had evaporated by the time the movie was released," the paper recalled.

In his script, Alun Owen captured the claustrophobia of fame suffered by the most famous pop group on the planet.

Director Lester is eternally grateful to the "Fab Four."

"The Beatles gave me a film career," he said. "I was able to trade on that for 40 years. So in terms of gratitude I owe them a lot more than they owe me.

"All I did was to try to make sure that they were presented in a way that was as respectful and honest as it could be, and is as close to what I think they would have liked to have made as a film," he told the Mirror.

Lester thought George Harrison was the best Beatle actor in the film and he felt McCartney's performance suffered because he tried too hard. He loved Ringo Starr because he looked so lugubrious.

He said of Lennon: "John is one of the three or four most interesting people I've ever met ... . John was unique in that he suffered fools very badly, and he was quick-witted and cynical. He hated pomposity and hated people in authority who treated them as hired servants."

The United States, which has declined to sign a 139-country treaty outlawing land mines, has a stockpile of the weapons estimated at 11 million.

The former Beatle was in Washington with his girlfriend, Heather Mills, who spearheads a charity campaign that provides limbs for victims of wars around the globe. Mills' left leg was amputated below the knee in 1993 after a road accident.

"We had a really good meeting. General Powell was very helpful," McCartney said outside the State Department after the morning meeting.

Powell "expressed his support for Adopt-A-Minefield, which is hoping to clear all the mines in the world and to allow people to go back to their fields and their towns and get on with life," McCartney said.

The U.S.-based Adopt-A-Minefield organization buys minefields for $25,000 a plot and clears them.

McCartney said the meeting with Powell was the start of a worldwide campaign to raise awareness of the horrors of land mines and to urge people to push their governments to support a ban.