Christopher Columbus

If they haven't been able to determine conclusively where Columbus first landed after 498 years, what makes us think it can be done in the next two years? The Americanized name of Columbus is Columbo--and it would take a detective with the latter's skills to solve this mystery. Instead of celebrating Columbus' 500th anniversary of landing in the Americas in one of three probable locations (San Salvador-Watling Island, Samana Cay or Grand Turk), why not just celebrate it in Columbus, Ohio, as at least the founders of this city admired this great explorer enough to name itself after him. KENNETH L. ZIMMERMAN, Cypress

Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log: They . . . brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells.

Christopher Columbus is popularly credited with discovering North America. But who discovered him? That question is at issue in a U.S. District Court suit filed Wednesday, pitting "Superman" movie producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind against director Ridley Scott. They claim that Scott, one of Hollywood's hottest filmmakers, stole their idea for a project based on Columbus' life after they considered hiring him as the film's director.

The spread of syphilis across the globe was probably sparked by Christopher Columbus and his crew, who ferried the bacterium, or a version of it, from the New World to the Old World, according to a new genetic analysis published Monday. A comparison of 23 strains of Treponema pallidum bacterium found that the modern variety that causes the sexually transmitted disease was most closely related to bacteria collected from a remote tribe in Guyana.

The return of the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria apparently will not be stalled by bankruptcy proceedings. Producers of "Christopher Columbus: The Discovery," a film to be distributed later this year by Warner Bros., have averted a possible involuntary bankruptcy petition, sources said Tuesday.

Among the noteworthy musical byproducts of the Columbus quincentennial are recordings of a pair of all-but-unknown operas on the subject of the "discovery" of America. One is by an all-but-unknown composer, the Italian Alberto Franchetti (1860-1942); the other is by Manuel de Falla, a composer whose great worth we are only now beginning to realize.

There are bitter and sweet ironies in the multimillion-dollar project that Hollywood filmmaker Robert Abel is directing in the back reaches of the empty and once elegant Ambassador Hotel grounds. The Ambassador is past tense. Abel's work is emphatically future. He has turned the leased Bungalow H into a central point for an international multimedia history project that began last July. Abel's year-old Synapse Technologies, Inc.

Is this any way to start a marriage? The groom refuses to leave Barcelona, the bride is wedded to New York, and Valentine's Day nuptials this week in Las Vegas are awash in excess. Then again, the Statue of Liberty and Barcelona's Christopher Columbus monument have been courting too long to turn back now. The couple's engagement was officially announced back in 1986 by then-New York Mayor Edward Koch--who admitted he "didn't even know they were dating"--and the partying hasn't stopped since.

A contemporary copy of a letter Christopher Columbus wrote while returning from the New World will be offered for sale at the Antiquarian Booksellers Assn. book fair in London this month, its price tag set at $900,000. The eight-page document, known as the "Epistola Christofori Colum" (Columbus Letter), is a Latin translation of a letter he wrote to his royal Spanish sponsors, Ferdinand and Isabella of Aragon and Castile, on his return voyage.

Scientists said Friday that they had confirmed that at least some of Christopher Columbus' remains were buried inside a Spanish cathedral, a finding that could help end a century-old debate over the explorer's final resting place. DNA samples from 500-year-old bone slivers could contradict the Dominican Republic's competing claim that the explorer was laid to rest in the New World, said Marcial Castro, a Seville-area historian and high school teacher who devised the study that began in 2002.

IT WAS 500 years ago today, in a small house in Valladolid, Spain, that the man known then as Cristobal Colon (and to us today as Christopher Columbus) gathered around him his two sons, one of his brothers, some seafaring comrades and his seven servants and gave himself over to the last rites of the Catholic Church, knowing he was about to die. At the age of 55, the man who had changed the world more than any other European, before or since, departed it.

I'm sure that I'm not the only one who was struck by the following sentence in the article on the search for the national origin of Christopher Columbus: "Of course, the fact remains that Columbus wasn't the first to step on what became American soil. The Irish, Vikings and maybe even the Chinese got here earlier" (Opinion, May 15). Indeed, others got here much earlier, thousands of years before anyone arrived on a ship from across the Atlantic or Pacific. These travelers also stayed, and in so doing also changed history, even though they're still thought so insignificant that they are routinely erased from even the parentheses of the master narrative so tiresomely recounted in your newspaper.

IN A SCENE straight out of the television show "CSI," Spanish forensic scientists spent the first few months of this year taking DNA samples from citizens of the Catalan region of Spain and southern France, seeking to answer one of history's greatest unsolved mysteries: determining the true identity of Christopher Columbus. The investigation is being led by Dr.

THINK back to high school history class: Remember the part about buffalo in the New World? It probably went something like this: When Europeans began settling the interior of North America in the 17th century, they encountered pristine forests and a vast prairie crowded with millions of the giant horned mammals along with countless other animals and birds.

On May 9, 1502, Christopher Columbus set out on "El Alto Viaje" -- the High Voyage -- the last and, in his own view, the greatest of his four voyages of exploration. As Martin Dugard's playfully archaic subtitle suggests, it was a journey rich in drama and incident, in the course of which Columbus became one of the first Europeans to set foot on the American continent, though he did not realize it.

It's been nearly two years since Spanish scientists asked to examine the contents of this Caribbean nation's most celebrated tomb to determine whether the centuries-old bones are actually those of Christopher Columbus. They've been told yes, no and maybe.