They rolled cigars for a living - all day, every day. But Ybor City and West Tampa cigar factory workers looked forward to something new and different each morning.

They paid several cents a week to listen to a lector read homegrown Spanish newspapers from a pulpit in the factories for two hours a day.

During their half-hour lunch breaks, the cigar workers referenced newspapers such as Cuba, published in Ybor City in 1893 during Cuba's revolutionary struggle against Spain to try to organize exile communities in Florida. Or they'd get riled up by labor publications that advocated better working conditions.

Over time, they grew to know the names of elected officials and foreign leaders and events happening half a world away in countries they'd never visit.

"The Latino cigarmaker was the most informed working class in the United States at the time, because he may not have known how to read or write very well, but for two hours in the morning, he was finding out what was happening in Japan, in Paris, in London, in New York, in Moscow," said Judge E.J. Salcines, a West Tampa native and local historian.

They owed that education to local newspapers, many of which published for a year or two, then faded into obscurity.

Until now.

Collected over the years by the University of South Florida's Department of Special Collections and through donations from local historians, the papers published between 1886 and the 1980s were digitally scanned and saved electronically.

Prints of the digitized papers will be on display at the Borders bookstore in South Tampa with their English translations.

Bush compared terrorist leaders to ideological "fanatics" Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, Nazi tyrant Adolf Hitler, and Cambodia's Khmer Rouge kingpin Pol Pot.

"Evil men obsessed with ambition and unburdened by conscience must be taken very seriously and we must stop them before their crimes multiply," Bush said.

"We have seen this kind of shameless cruelty before, in heartless zealotry that led to the gulags and the Cultural Revolution and the Killing Fields."

Speaking in Washington's Ronald Reagan Building, dedicated to the man many Americans believe was instrumental in winning the Cold War, Bush made several comparisons between al-Qaida and communism.

"Like the ideology of communism, our new enemy pursues totalitarian aims. Its leaders pretend to be an aggrieved party, representing the powerless against imperial enemies.

"In truth, they have endless ambitions of imperial domination, and they wish to make everyone powerless except themselves."

Earl Warren had worked for 18 years as a prosecutor and was three times elected governor of California. But he had no prior judicial experience. Nor did William Rehnquist, Felix Frankfurter, and Louis Brandeis. Who is qualified to sit on the Supreme Court is a determination made on a nominee by nominee basis by at least 51 US senators. There are no set rules for qualification. Although every past justice has been a lawyer, 41 of the 109 justices had no prior judicial experience.

Another book on abortion and seduction, We Have Been Warned by Naomi Mitchison, was a ‘pornographic concoction’ compared to the ‘innocent pastoral’ Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D H Lawrence. Other files show that ministers opposed allowing television cameras into the House of Commons in the 1960s as it might encourage MPs to become ‘TV performers’. Another batch of documents relates to Scotland Yard’s failure to arrest Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs in Brazil in 1974 and other released files relate to Home Office concerns over design flaws in Britain’s gallows.

In the late 1990s, as a member of the advisory board for Southern Methodist University's law school, Ms. Miers pushed for the creation of an endowed lecture series in women's studies named for Louise B. Raggio, one of the first women to rise to prominence in the Texas legal community. A strong advocate for women, Ms. Raggio helped persuade state lawmakers to revise Texas laws to give women new rights over property and in the event of divorce.

Ms. Miers, whom President Bush announced on Monday as his choice to fill the Supreme Court seat being vacated by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, not only advocated for the lecture series, but also gave money and solicited donations to help get it off the ground.

A feminist icon, Gloria Steinem, delivered the series's first lecture, in 1998. In the following two years, the speakers were Patricia S. Schroeder, the former Democratic congresswoman widely associated with women's causes, and Susan Faludi, the author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991). Ann W. Richards, the Democrat whom George W. Bush unseated as governor of Texas in 1994, delivered the lecture in 2003.

“Over the summer,” Allison said in a prepared statement, “they repeatedly discussed the issues that separated them and they eventually resolved their differences privately. Although not a direct participant in their discussions, I was in frequent contact with Edin and Anderson during that time, and I know that they worked very hard to reach an amicable resolution of the issues. At the time, all parties expressed full satisfaction with their agreement.”

In an interview Wednesday, the dean of Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences, Rebecca Bushnell, said that the department had followed the procedures laid out publicly in Penn’s faculty handbook for resolving disputes that, as she put it, “fall into the broad category of [alleged] misconduct in research.”

Bushnell and Allison both emphasized that no formal complaints were filed, which would have resulted in a more formal process involving the Faculty Senate. The deliberations were mediated, Bushnell said, although “I can’t discuss who was there,” but “it was very conscientiously and thoroughly handled, and, as far as I was concerned, settled.”

But apparently not as far as Harold Bershady was concerned. Bershady, an emeritus professor who retired in 2002, sent an e-mail last week on an internal listserv for the sociology department, in which, according to The Daily Pennsylvanian — which first reported on the situation — he accused Edin of taking ideas and concepts from Anderson’s work “practically wholesale.”

The rejection was a major upset for the prestigious publishing company, which for the first time was trying to enter the lucrative California market for teaching materials for kindergarten through eighth grade.

California is the nation's largest textbook purchaser, and often sets the tone for what is adopted by other states.

David Gershwin of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles laid out for the commissioners Oxford's depiction of the Exodus.

Not only, he said, does the Oxford text note that there is no historical record of the Exodus — a caveat not included in descriptions of the seminal religious events of other faiths — it incorrectly states that the story is important to Jews mainly as a way to set themselves off from other people.

After the hearing, Oxford University Press representatives said they had"misunderstood" the public comment procedure, and are eager to work with Jewish and Hindu groups to make needed changes before November, when they plan to resubmit their program to the California state board.

Shakespeare's plays were not written by the bard but rather a politician descended from King Edward III and John of Gaunt, remarkable new evidence suggests.

British Shakespeare scholar Brenda James and historian Professor William Rubinstein of the University of Wales propose the real Shakespeare was English courtier and diplomat Sir Henry Neville.

The research is already being described as "pioneering" by Mark Rylance, the chairman of the Shakespearean Authorship Trust and artistic director at Shakespeare's Globe theatre in London.

The revelations - based on five years of research - are contained in a book to be launched at the Globe.

Firstly, the political content and geographical location of the bard's plays are a perfect reflection of the known travels of Sir Henry, who lived from 1562 to 1615.

Love's Labours Lost echoes in part the issues discussed at Oxford University at the time Neville was studying there between 1574 and 1579. Many characters in the play were known personally by Neville.

Measure for Measure was set in Vienna, where Neville visited in 1580. A theme of the play - laws against immorality - reflects ideas Neville discussed with a leading Calvinist philosopher there.

Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merchant of Venice were all set in northern Italy, which he visited in 1581 and 1582.

Hamlet was set in Denmark - and, according to James' research, Neville obtained specific information on Hamlet while visiting what is now Poland - and possibly Denmark.

Henry V reflects Neville's diplomatic duties in France between 1599 and 1600. Some of its scenes were written in French, which Neville spoke but Shakespeare did not.

Neville was involved in an unsuccessful revolt by the Earl of Essex against the government in 1601. He was jailed in the Tower of London for treason - when the tone of the plays changed abruptly from historical and comic to sombre and tragic.

The plays also portray many of Neville's ancestors - John of Gaunt in Richard II, Warwick the King Maker in Henry VI part II and King Duncan of Scotland in Macbeth - all in a favourable light.

A document written by Neville while a prisoner in the Tower of London contains detailed notes, the contents of which ended up being used in Henry VIII.

When you peek into letters 200 to 400 years old, instead of the guilty pleasure of reading somebody else's mail, you feel good about connecting to living history.

That dancing "N" signature at the end of the letter seeking supplies for officers encamped at Valley Forge in 1778 belongs to Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene, George Washington's quartermaster.

George Washington signed "GWashington" to a bill of lading for 10 barrels of shad and 40 of herring at Mount Vernon on May 29, 1788, connecting the G and W with a flourish and crossing his t with a trademark curlicue.

These letters are among the treasures in the Ed and Jean Siskin collection of American Colonial and Early U.S. Mails from 1662 to 1799 that will be sold tomorrow evening in New York City by Timonium's Matthew Bennett International stamp auction company.

Harvey Bennett, president of the company and son of the founder, thinks the auction of 342 items at the Four Seasons Hotel will bring about a million dollars. This is a stampless philatelic collection with all the postage fees handwritten or handstamped. The world's first adhesive postage stamp, the famous British Penny Black, wasn't issued until 1840.

This collection was assembled by Ed Siskin, a New Jersey engineer and postal historian, and his wife, Jean. Siskin acquired his first Colonial "cover" - an envelope, or sometimes only a folded letter - more than 50 years ago. He began to collect seriously in 1974, often buying mail from earlier collectors.

"All these things actually went through the mail - as opposed to [being] just documents," Bennett says. He estimates there are only about 2,000 pieces of this kind of mail in private hands.

"[Siskin] acquired about a third of it," Bennett says. "It's amazing for one person to have a third of anything. Very little of it becomes available. This is the watershed.

"Over the typical course of the year, we might sell five or 10 pieces," he says. "And we're pretty big. We're actually No. 1 in the country saleswise at this point for U.S. postal history. We just don't see a lot of it. ... But to have 300 pieces - and there's more. ... This is great mail."

Much of the interest for collectors is in the postmarks and the routes the mail traveled.

"But a lot is of great interest because of the historical content." Bennett says. "If you like U.S. history, you're going to be fascinated."

For postal historians, the best piece is the first handstamped postmark in all of British North America. It's on a letter mailed from Philadelphia in June 1712.

"To the ordinary person, that probably doesn't mean much," Bennett says. "To the postal historian, this will be fought over."

With a faded address, some postal fee calculations and the New York handstamp, it's not very flashy. But it's expected to bring $50,000 to $75,000.

Bennett also likes an envelope from Ben Franklin, the colonial postmaster general at the time, forwarding a 1765 business letter to John Hancock, the first signer of the Declaration of Independence, then a merchant in Boston.

"There are probably not more than 10 total free franks where [Franklin] signs his name and puts `free'," he says. "I love this one `free from Ben Franklin to John Hancock.' What a piece of Americana that is!"

The same free franking system, of course, exists today for official letters of members of Congress and other government officials.

Many of the historical letters offered in this sale are truly amazing Americana.

A British officer describes Washington's assault on Trenton, N.J., on Dec. 26, 1776, in a letter to the Earl of Lauderdale in Edinburgh, Scotland:

"The rebels crossed the river in extreme bad weather and in the morning about nine they drove in [a Hessian colonel's] regiment and entered the town."

The historian David McCullough is said to have drawn on the same account in his work about the Revolution, 1776.

An amusing 1771 letter from a young fellow in Philadelphia to a friend in Lancaster talks about legal matters then ends with a personal note: "Do you think you could recommend a Tolerably handsome Dutch lass with some money to a Young Irish Friend of yours. Finally began to think of Matrimony seriously."

Bennett finds "terribly exciting" a 1755 letter from Virginia to England describing Gen. Edward Braddock's defeat and death at the battle with French and Indian forces on the Monongahela River, near modern-day Pittsburgh.

"The point is how it goes on and on about Washington," he says, "how he was such a hero and did such a great job, and when you think about it, he was 23 years old at the time. That's an incredible firsthand account; you want to talk about living history, that's amazing."

Bennett says he's prejudiced against buying stamps as an investment: "I don't like seeing good stamps being put into a safe deposit box."

But he explains that Siskin bought the premium early handstamp 10 years ago for $45,000. If it sells for just $50,000, the lower estimate, Siskin could have done better putting his money in a bank.

But there are intangible rewards.

"When you're holding something from a great person, it feels very special," Bennett says. "Just think, they say George Washington slept here. I don't know about that. But I know he wrote that letter. He was holding that in his hand. And I know that for a fact. And that's what's so exciting about it."

"But we also know from experience that there are things we can do now to prevent further loss later on," Burnham said.

Founded in 1965, the New York-based WMF uses an international panel of experts to draw up its biennial list, which aims to raise funds for preserving some of the world's most imperiled architectural and cultural sites.

The Gulf Coast and New Orleans will be the 101st site named in the latest list which was published in June.

The only other time the WMF has added to its list was following the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center when an historic section of Lower Manhattan was appended.

The WMF also announced it was teaming with the US National Trust for Historic Preservation to advocate for restoration and sensitive reconstruction measures that respect the rich historic and cultural assets of the region hit by Hurricane Katrina at the end of August.

"Holocaust-deniers are not scholars or researchers -- they are bigots who try to hide their anti-semitism behind the mask of fake scholarship," said Wyman Institute Director Dr. Rafael Medoff. "For a U.S. government report to call them 'scholars' gives them the legitimacy they desperately crave but do not deserve."

The report, "Eavesdropping on Hell," was published recently by the National Security Agency. It was authored by Robert Hanyok of the NSA's Center for Cryptologic History. In the report, Hanyok mentions the Journal of Historical Review, which he describes as a "forum for that faction of scholars and researchers associated with a movement known as 'Holocaust denial.'" Hanyok proceeds to summarize the article and explains why he believes the author was mistaken. In a footnote, Hanyok characterizes the journal's sponsors, the Institute for Historical Review, as "a loosely organized scholarly association" that promotes "a revisionist or denial viewpoint about the Holocaust."

Dr. Medoff commented: "A U.S. government publication should not treat Holocaust-deniers as if they are a legitimate part of scholarly discussions about the Holocaust. One glance at the web site of the Institute for Historical Review reveals its blatant hate-mongering, including articles defending Hitler and alleging international Jewish conspiracies. Such bigots should not be described as 'scholars and researchers,' their organization should not be described as 'scholarly,' and their publications should not be included in a discussion of the writings of legitimate scholars of the Holocaust. We urge the National Security Agency to immediately withdraw the report from circulation until its reference to deniers as 'scholars' is corrected or removed."

The Wyman Institute points out that the U.S. State Department officially considers Holocaust-denial to be a form of antisemitism. In the State Department's January 2005 "Report on Global Anti-Semitism," there are nine separate references to incidents of Holocaust-denial included among the report's listing of anti-semitic incidents in various countries.

Like the 1918 virus, the current avian flu in Southeast Asia occurs naturally in birds. In 1918, the virus mutated, infected people and then spread among them. So far, the current Asian virus has killed at least 65 people but has rarely spread person-to-person.

But viruses mutate rapidly and it could soon develop infectious properties like those seen in the 1918 bug, said Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger of the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.

"The effort to understand what happened in 1918 has taken on a new urgency," said Taubenberger, who led the gene-sequencing team.

The public health risk of resurrecting the virus is minimal, U.S. health officials said. People around the world developed immunity to the deadly 1918 virus after the pandemic, and a certain degree of immunity is believed to persist today. Also, in previous research, scientists concluded that modern antiviral medicines are effective against Spanish flu-like viruses.

The virus recreation, announced Wednesday, is detailed in the journal Science. The completion of that gene sequencing was announced in the journal Nature.

The virus was made from scratch, but based on a blueprint from Alaska.

The book is widely slashed for glossing over Japanese aggression and colonial rule in Asia.

It's adoption rate this year was slightly higher than four years ago, but far from the publisher's target of 10 percent.

At the same time, the group's civic studies textbook will be used by 0.2 percent of all students, or an estimated 2,338 students.

The burial site was uncovered in 1991 during planned building construction in lower Manhattan near City Hall and across the street from federal offices and courts.

It has been designated a National Historic Landmark, but making it a monument would place it in the care of the National Park Service, and, under one scenario offered by federal authorities, part of a local "heritage trail" with a federally run visitor center.

The site is now jointly managed by the Park Service and the General Services Administration.

Former university lecturer Brenda James, and historian Professor William Rubinstein, of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, claim the evidence is difficult to ignore.

Published by Longman on October 25, The Truth Will Out, looks set to drive a deep division through the world of Shakespearean scholarship.

For centuries scholars have asked how a grammar school boy whose education was cut short at 12, and who never travelled abroad, could have gathered the breadth of learning displayed in his work.

The new book claims to have comprehensively answered that question by showing that he never did.

Previous theories claiming Francis Bacon or even Christopher Marlowe was the author of Shakespeare’s work have been relatively easy to write off.

The new book reduces Shakespeare to little more than an avaricious money lender whose heroic qualities are the result of having greatness thrust upon him.

James, who now lives in Bognor Regis, made what she regards as the breakthrough while living in Pontypridd, south Wales, after studying Elizabethan transformation codes.

She used her knowledge to decipher the identity of the mysterious W H to whom Shakespeare’s sonnets are dedicated, and said it led her to Henry Neville.

As a wealthy and distant relative of Shakespeare’s he was also his contemporary, born two years before the bard in 1562 and dying one year earlier in 1615.

The scientists analyzed DNA markers in 261 wild and 98 cultivated potato varieties to assess whether the domestic potato arose from a single wild progenitor or whether it arose multiple times - and the results were clear, says David Spooner, the USDA research scientist who led the study.

"In contrast to all prior hypotheses of multiple origins of the cultivated potato, we have identified a single origin from a broad area of southern Peru," says Spooner, who is also a UW-Madison professor of horticulture. "The multiple-origins theory was based in part on the broad distribution of potatoes from north to south across many different habitats, through morphological resemblance of different wild species to cultivated species, and through other data. Our DNA data, however, shows that in fact all cultivated potatoes can be traced back to a single origin in southern Peru."

The earliest archaeological evidence suggests that potatoes were domesticated from wild relatives by indigenous agriculturalists more than 7,000 years ago, says Spooner. Today, the potato - an international dietary staple - is a major crop in both the United States and in Wisconsin, which is fourth in the nation for potato production.

Several senior lawmakers in the Kremlin-controlled parliament followed up on his call, proposing to quickly bury Lenin's body, which lies in state in a red marble mausoleum on Red Square. Deputy parliament speaker Lyubob Sliska said Monday that Lenin's body could be laid to rest as early as January.

Zyuganov said in a statement posted on his party's Web site that the call for Lenin's burial clearly had the Kremlin's blessing, and denounced it as "sacrilegious, ... irresponsible and provocative."

"It defies the nation's history and common sense," Zyuganov said. "With their filthy hands and drunken heads they are crawling into the sanctuary of the state. The desire to rake up remains of the dead is a great sin and a sign of mental pathology."

Zyuganov urged Putin and both houses of parliament to make their stance on the issue clear.

Putin said in 2001 that he opposed the removal of Lenin's body so as not to disturb civil peace in the country. His predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, strongly pushed for its removal but was stopped by vigorous opposition from the Communist Party and others.

The fire happened less than six weeks before a Lewis and Clark Bicentennial event was scheduled to be held at the fort, the culmination of a two-year, national celebration of the explorers' journey West. The expedition had wintered at Fort Clatsop after reaching the Pacific Ocean in November 1805.