Front page, under the fold, today: Even adherents of the Italian
orthodoxy concede that little is known about the provenance of the Great
Navigator, who seems to have purposely obscured his past. "What I
want to write is the final book on Columbus, and I will not be able to
do it without science to settle this," said Francesc Albardaner, who
was seduced by the possibility that DNA a tool whose answers are
treated as indisputable fact in courtrooms and on TV shows would
endorse his deeply held belief in the Catalonian Columbus. Olga
Rickards, a Lorente collaborator at Tor Vergata University in Rome, has
been quoted as saying that she "wouldn't bet on Columbus being
Spanish." A graduate student of Dr. Lorente's who had studied
the Colombo DNA led Italian newspapers to believe Columbus was from
Lombardy, north of Genoa, although she had apparently never seen
Columbus's DNA. And Nito Verdera, a journalist from the Balearic
island of Ibiza, who says the explorer was a Catalan-speaking Ibizan
crypto-Jew, cited leaks from Dr. Lorente's team that link Columbus
to North Africa. Click here: Seeking Columbus's Origins, With a
Swab - New York Times
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/08/us/08columbus.html?ref=todayspaper&pa\
gewanted=all> Sidebars: Catalan, Potugese. Ibiza, Jewish, Behind
the Myth, DNA Great Graphic Columns: 1. Theories, 2. Evidence, 3.
Counterevidence, and 4. the DNA Twist.
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/10/08/us/08columbus.web.graph.htm\
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