Yalta divided Europe into what quickly became postwar spheres of influence for Western powers and the communist bloc.

"My grandfather had the highest regard for your grandfather as a wartime leader," British author and politician Winston S. Churchill told Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, Stalin's grandson, a retired colonel and military historian.

The meeting occurred at Maastricht in The Netherlands at a conference looking at Europe's progress in the 60 years since World War II.

But Churchill "was concerned what would be the fate of Europe with the Red Army on its doorstep and at its throat", his grandson said.

Mr Dzhugashvili said the three grandfathers were friendly personally, but in fact Stalin viewed the US and Britain as implacable enemies.

"They didn't have allies, only colonial interests," he said. "Danger united them. As soon as the war was over, Churchill wanted to start a war against the Soviet Union."

Curtis Roosevelt, the grandson of Franklin D. Roosevelt, said the decisions made at Yalta were mostly about realpolitik after the late entry of the US into the war.

"Nobody got what they wanted from Yalta except the Russians, who were in a position to get it," said Mr Roosevelt, a former UN diplomat.

"FDR had failed in his effort to get America behind the war effort until Pearl Harbour, although he was convinced Hitler had to be confronted. What he thought was: 'If Britain goes down, we're next,"' he said.

His heyday was the decade between 1955 and 1965, when several leading stand-up comics turned philosophical and radical. But even his contemporaries such as Mort Sahl, Bob Newhart and the comic duo of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, were much more in a mold that would give shape to the likes of Jerry Seinfeld and Woody Allen: gentle lampooners of the middle class and its newfound suburban neuroses.

Lenny Bruce began that way, performing in the "alpine borscht belt" of the Catskills in New York State, but soon he was confronting America with its dark underside, turning the tables on the country's self-righteous scam-artist leaders. He challenged virtually every taboo, openly using "offensive" language and denouncing racial and religious bigotry.

"If Jesus had been killed 20 years ago," he said, "Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses."

He sent up evangelist Billy Graham and Cardinal Spellman of New York to the high heavens, and did a hilarious shtick about the Pope in which the pontiff calls him from Rome, and Lenny says, "Yes, operator, I'll accept the charges."

"Every day people are straying away from the Church . . . and going back to God" was his way of pointing out how far the established Church itself had strayed from original faith.

I listened to a great many old routines of Lenny Bruce in preparation for this article, and they are still as funny and relevant as ever.

In one, he is in conversation with a black man at a party. Trying to be nice and liberal, he exposes the patronizing prejudices of the white community.

"Hey, all of you people can tap dance," he tells the black man. "Want somethin' to eat? They got watermelon and fried chicken."

But the thing that incensed the stalwarts more than anything else was his use of language. If you want to hear an offensive word, he said, " 'segregation' -- that offends me."

"Take away the right to say 'fuck' and you take away the right to say 'fuck the government.' " Lenny Bruce would be amused (if that's the word) by our world today, where a vice president of the United States can get away with what he was arrested for....

"We consider this an honorable flag. This is a soldier's flag," said Ron Casteel, national chief of staff for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, one of the memorial's planners. "There will be no substitute."

Camp Butler, just east of Springfield, was a training facility for Union troops during the Civil War and a prison camp for more than 3,500 captured Confederates. More than 800 of the prisoners died and were buried there, and the site is now a national cemetery.

British Transport Police said an Army bomb disposal team dealt with the 2ft long device, which was on land in Woodgate Lane.

Police are trying to find out how it got there.

In fact, of the 109 justices who have served in all of U.S. history, there were 40 — nearly 40 percent of the total — who never served a day as a judge.

“It's actually a plus,” says Kermit Hall, president of the University at Albany and editor of the Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States. “Because it brings someone with some additional and new kinds of experience into a group of people whose lives have been pretty much consumed with working inside the judiciary and inside the law in a very tight-knit way.”

The late Chief Justice William Rehnquist said in March 2004, in fact, that variety on the court is a good thing. “You don't necessarily have to have been in politics,” Rehnquist said. “But it helps if you have people who have been in different branches of government.”

The question now: Is Harriet Miers’ experience in the executive branch and private practice enough experience for this big a job?

“What may matter,” says Harvard University Law School professor Laurence Tribe, “is not only no judicial experience, but there seems to be no kind of national experience, no occasion when her client was the Constitution of the United States.”

Her client right now is President Bush, who Monday put his full faith in his lawyer and friend.

“I think what President Bush is saying is, ‘I cannot predict what Harriet Miers, if confirmed, will do on the court for 10 or 20 or 30 years, if she's there,” says historian Beschloss. “But I've known her for a long time. I think I know her heart.”

In 2000, Miers contributed to the campaign of Texas Gov. George W. Bush, who was running against Gore that year. When the votes were still being counted in Florida and the outcome was in doubt, she gave $5,000 to the Bush-Cheney Inc. Recount Fund, according to the non- partisan Political MoneyLine.

Matthew Brooke, 26, was charged Friday with felony theft of library materials and criminal damage to property. He went to the Historical Society on Thursday, according to a criminal complaint, and smashed the window on a second-floor antique display case with his elbow. He allegedly swiped the "Pennsylvania Evening Post" from inside the case.

A police officer found the book stuck in the waistband of Brooke's pants, the complaint said. Brooke told detectives he took the book because he wanted to read a story on page 106 about a historical figure named William Hill.

”Through this visit I have discovered that Chinese people are really something! I’m proud! So proud!” wrote a recent visitor in the comments book, a well thumbed tome on a small table by the exhibition shop. “Zheng He established for us a bridge of friendship between China and other countries,” wrote another. “I truly thank and admire him.”

In part, such praise reflects Zheng’s achievements. From 1405 to 1433 he led fleets, each of up to 240 ships and 28,000 men, on seven voyages of diplomacy, commerce, politics and discovery to south- east Asia, the Indian Ocean and Africa.

The long-lost city of Ithaca, home of the legendary hero Odysseus in the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," is on the island of Cephalonia off the western shore of Greece, three British researchers said Thursday.

The original contours of Ithaca have been distorted over the millenniums by a series of earthquakes that raised land levels, converting it into a peninsula of Cephalonia called Paliki.

The researchers said the topographic changes hid Ithaca's identity from generations of historians and archeologists who traced Odysseus' epic journey around 1200 BC.

The team, led by Robert Bittlestone, chairman of management consulting firm Metapraxis, has identified the locations of 26 sites in Ithaca mentioned by Homer, they said.

" 'The Odyssey' fits Paliki like a glove," Bittlestone said at a London news conference for "Odysseus Unbound," a new book describing the discovery.

His co-authors are historian James Diggle of the University of Cambridge and geologist John Underhill of Edinburgh University. The next step is to dig for traces of Odysseus' castle and city as soon as the group can secure sufficient funding.

The search for the location of Ithaca has been in progress at least since the time of the 1st century Greek historian Strabo, who placed it east of Cephalonia (Kefallinia in Greek), on the modern-day island of Ithaca (Ithiki in Greek).

Historians seeking an accurate record of how Winston Churchill governed Britain from his Whitehall bunker in the darkest days of the blitz will from next January be able to read the contemporary notes taken by the cabinet secretary at the time, breaking a tradition which has protected these documents for more than 60 years. The decision to release the notebooks follows pressure from Lord Phillips, the new lord chief justice, to publish the notebooks under the Freedom of Information Act.

Until now the government has resisted their release on the grounds that it would break the collective responsibility of cabinet government. The first tranche of the notebooks - from 1942 to 1947 - will cover the Churchill and Attlee governments. They are expected to reveal the gloomy reports of Britain under the blitz, the victory at El Alamein, the preparations for the D-Day landings, plus plans for the welfare state and the Butler plans to reform education.

The Attlee government's discussions should cover the nationalisation programme and establishment of the NHS and answer the vexed question of whether the cabinet was ever told Britain had the atom bomb - and what happened when ministers found out.

Unlike cabinet minutes which generally record briefly the decisions taken in a bland, non-committal way, the notebooks record in vivid detail the disputes and fears of the people who governed Britain. But unlike politicians' memoirs, their views will have been recorded in an impartial way, with no political agenda to embellish success or run down rivals.

Until 1942, custom and practice meant that the government of the day destroyed these accounts at the end of the year. But in 1942 a decision was taken to preserve the notes for posterity.

Hundreds of heartfelt poems were carved into the walls by those detained there. As much as anything, it will be the poems that provide a window into the station's past.

"Here, we actually have talking walls," said Erika Gee, director of education for the San Francisco-based Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation, which is raising private funds for the project.

Some of the poems were written with pencil or brush nearly 100 years ago. Others were carved using a classical Chinese technique, deep into the wooden walls -- most likely by a professional carver. Many of the poems were written in the Tang dynasty style of regulated verse and couplets.

Gainsboro, a 73-acre, 33-block tract north of the Norfolk Southern railroad tracks and west Interstate 581, was first developed about 1835 and was initially known as Big Lick.

For many years, the neighborhood was the economic, cultural and residential heart of Roanoke's black population.

The effort to recognize Gainsboro as a historic neighborhood dates to the 1980s.

"Suppose I had proposed, in a moment of euphoric bipartisanship, to erect a statue of [former Conservative Prime Minister] Margaret Thatcher in Trafalgar Square. Would I have had problems with Westminster City Council?" the left-leaning mayor asked the Labor Party's annual conference this week.
He answered his own question: "No."
The Conservative-controlled Westminster Council has rejected Mr. Livingstone's plans for a 9-foot-high bronze statue on the square's north terrace, outside the main entrance to the National Gallery.
The council says its opposition is practical, not political. It does not like the look of the proposed statue by sculptor Ian Walters, which depicts Mr. Mandela clad in a characteristic loose-fitting shirt, his hands raised as if in animated conversation.