It's not surprising that outsiders and, indeed, many Quebecers, believe that Quebec City is solidly French. As Louisa Blair points out in the second volume of her aptly titled The Anglos: The Hidden Face of Quebec City, the English-speaking population began to lose its visibility long, long ago. "The interest of historians in anglophone Quebecers was deflected at Confederation, and by the 1940s had almost vanished completely."

Blair, whose own family has deep roots in Quebec City, has sought to at least "partially unveil the hidden face." Her latest book begins in 1850, when English speakers made up 40 per cent of the overall population; an anglophone Protestant elite dominated the timber trade, shipbuilding and other industries; hundreds of British troops provided "a pack of trouble on payday and prestigious matches" for the daughters of local anglophones; and an anglophone served as mayor.

By the late 19th century, Blair notes, the British garrison had departed and Irish, European, American and Chinese immigrants had changed the composition of the city's English-speaking population.

"While the anglophone gentry with their snowshoe clubs, skating parties and afternoon teas behaved as if nothing was amiss, their numbers were in decline and the economy was undergoing a sea change."

In the early 20th century, anglophones accounted for little more than 10 per cent of the total citizenry and were divided by religion and ethnic background.

IRELAND's president during World War II offered condolences to Nazi Germany's representative in Dublin over the death of Adolf Hitler, newly declassified government records show.

Until now, historians had believed that Ireland's prime minister at the time, Eamon de Valera, was the only government leader to convey official condolences to Eduard Hempel, director of the German diplomatic corps in Ireland. De Valera's gesture -- unique among leaders of neutral nations in the final weeks of World War II -- was criticised worldwide.

The presidential protocol record for 1938-57, made public last week within a trove of previously secret government documents, shed new light on one of the most embarrassing chapters in the history of independent Ireland -- its decision to maintain cordial relations with the Nazis even after news of the Holocaust emerged.

The new document confirmed that President Douglas Hyde visited Hempel on May 3, 1945, a day after Ireland received reports of Hitler's death.

The newly released document says Hyde -- who served as Ireland's symbolic head of state from 1938 to 1945 and died in 1949 -- visited Hempel at the diplomat's home in Dun Laoghaire, a Dublin suburb. It says the president did not send an official letter of condolence to German government headquarters because ''the capital of Germany, Berlin, was under siege and no successor had been appointed''.

The Republic of Ireland, then called Eire, remained neutral throughout World War II.

After a protracted battle, a monument to one of America's oldest fraternal organizations may soon be demolished to restore an even older, more sacred resource: a tribal burial ground.

In August, a state commission decreed that the 1928 Masonic Temple in Norwich, Conn.,—a massive neoclassical building with fluted columns and elaborate details—could come down so that the Mohegan Nation can reclaim land it has long considered desecrated. The tribe's 17th-century leader, Uncas, and others are buried on the 3.4-acre site, but a 19th-century monument to Uncas has been the only prominent indication of the site's tribal history. Both the temple and the burial ground are listed on the National Register of Historic Places as contributing resources in the Chelsea Parade historic district.

State papers released yesterday under the 30-year rule revealed that there was escalating tension between the Irish and British governments during 1975. Then on ceasefire, IRA negotiations with the British were viewed with concern by the Irish coalition government of the day led by Liam Cosgrave. The organisation’s ceasefire endured for most of 1975. Government ministers were suspicious about what the British Government was discussing and with whom. The papers revealed that suspicions increased after contradictory versions of events produced by the British Ambassador in Dublin over a series of meetings.

Washington's lieutenant governor has been thinking lately about a lynching of a 14-year-old boy 120 years ago in Canada that nearly sparked a cross-border race war.

In 1884, a vigilante mob of more than 100 men from Washington Territory rode into Canada, abducted an Indian boy of the Sto:lo tribe and hanged him from a tree. The boy, Louie Sam, had been accused of killing a shopkeeper in Nooksack, in what is now Whatcom County.

Now, more than a century later, Washington Lt. Gov. Brad Owen says there is convincing evidence the boy had nothing to do with killing and was framed.

Owen plans to ask the Legislature next month to pass a "healing" resolution acknowledging Louie Sam's innocence and decrying the lynching. He also wants to pursue other gestures to make amends with the boy's descendants.

"From everything I've seen, there was a definite injustice done to this young man," Owen told The Seattle Times.

But he does not plan to push for a formal apology from Washington state.

"I find it difficult to go back and apologize for something that happened over 100 years ago when Washington wasn't a state and you don't have all the details," Owen said.

Owen first learned about Louie Sam in September, while attending a Government House reception in Victoria, B.C. Owen's counterpart, British Columbia Lt. Gov. Iona Campagnolo, recounted the lynching in a speech. She said it is a mere footnote of history to some but "is as alive today with the Sto:lo people of the Fraser River as it was when it occurred."

Campagnolo asked Owen to join her in urging both the B.C. and Washington state governments to apologize to the Sto:lo. Owen responded by letter to say his office would look into the matter.

Owen's staff has enlisted two historians, one of them Keith Thor Carlson from the University of Saskatchewan, to help with wording a proposed legislative resolution.

Carlson, a former historian for the Sto:lo Nation, has researched the Louie Sam case for more than a decade and is writing a book about the saga. Using government archives, Carlson has reconstructed in remarkable detail the events leading up to the lynching and the futile efforts by British Columbia to bring the mob leaders to justice.

Carlson's research has been made into a documentary, "The Lynching of Louie Sam," that is making the film-festival circuit.

Carlson said he thinks both governments share in the blame for not clearing Louie Sam's name and pursuing his killers. Lt. Gov. Owen agrees.

"The politics of the day was just more powerful than this incredible injustice," Owen said. "They didn't put a value on this young life."

The schools exam watchdog has reported secondary schools in the UK are continuing to concentrate on Nazism and the Tudors, to the detriment of other topics.

The annual report of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), the Government’s curriculum authority, stated: ‘There has been a gradual narrowing and ‘Hitlerisation’ of post-14 history. The option choices made by schools and colleges in GCSE and AS/A level mean that the content of post-14 history continues to be dominated by topics such as the Tudors and the 20th-century dictatorships.’ Imminent guidelines will also suggest that children should also learn about the Cold War and German reunification and about Black British history. QCA chief executive Ken Boston commented: ‘The past 60 years have seen great events in Germany — the Cold War, the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, reunification — and great achievements that too few English children are taught. Schools in England need to spend time teaching what happened in Germany after 1945.’ The watchdog also expressed worries that other subjects dominate at the expense of history.

Loyalty and continuity have marked the Bush White House since early on. After two wars, devastating strikes by terrorists and hurricanes, a bruising re-election and countless legislative battles, President Bush's team is continuing the trend — defying history and shakeup rumors to remain almost entirely intact five years in.

"They've been there long enough to qualify for the Medicare prescription drug benefit," quipped Paul Light, a professor of organizational studies at New York University.

The big question is how much longer Bush's inner circle can hold together.

Only a handful of the president's most senior aides have departed since Bush came to Washington in 2001. Though some have shifted roles, it's a familiar cast of characters at the president's side: Vice President Dick Cheney, chief of staff Andy Card, political guru Karl Rove, deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin, counselor Dan Bartlett, budget chief Josh Bolten, White House counsel Harriet Miers and press secretary Scott McClellan among them.

Most of those who left the White House remain within easy reach. Bush's first national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, is secretary of state. Longtime communications adviser Karen Hughes is in charge of reversing anti-American sentiment abroad from a high-level State Department job. Former White House domestic policy chief Margaret Spellings heads the Education Department. Former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales is attorney general. One-time White House political director Ken Mehlman chairs the national Republican Party.

The few who have left the fold entirely were never household names to begin with, including Larry Lindsey, ousted in 2002 as part of an economic team shakeup; two chief Capitol Hill liaisons, and Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, who was Bush's first budget chief.

Bush's Cabinet has seen more turnover than his top-level White House staff. Still, a third of the 21 Cabinet-rank positions are held by the same person as when Bush came to Washington.

"I don't think there's any other president in the modern era that has seen this kind of stability," said David Gergen, who served in the administrations of Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton.

It does have advantages. The president has a group of highly experienced aides who have earned his trust and work well together because of their familiarity — a hardy few even are holdovers from Bush's days as Texas governor. The Bush crowd also benefits from its trademark loyalty, both to the president personally and to his ideology, and from a shortage of the backstabbing that bedeviled the Clinton White House and many others before it.

But 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. is known for generating high stress and quick burnout, even in good times.

And the lack of change has contributed to criticism of Bush as governing from inside a bubble that isolates him from smart dissent, healthy competition, fresh ideas and bad news.

A Russian historian claims the Kremlin archive holds documents proving Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was poisoned.

Nikolay Dobryukha, described as a historian and publicist, said documents of medical examinations of Stalin disprove the official cause of death as a cerebral hemorrhage caused by hypertension and arteriosclerosis, Pravda reported on its Web site.

Stalin died March 5, 1953, at age 73 after a dinner with several other Soviet officials, including Interior Minister Lavrenty Beria. Stalin was said to have collapsed in his room but guards, under orders not to disturb him, did not find the Soviet leader until the next night. He died four days later. A memoir by Vyacheslav Molotov claimed Beria boasted of having poisoned Stalin.

The report this week on Pravda says doctors' journals from treating Stalin say on March 5, results of blood and urine tests indicated poisoning but the doctors feared telling Beria of the finding because he might think the doctors poisoned the leader, Pravda said.

Stalin led the Soviet Union from the last 1920s until his death in 1953. While he is credited with building a force that helped defeat Germany in World War II, he is also known for draconian rule that caused the deaths of millions of Russians.

SECRET documents detailing the government's emergency response to a nuclear attack have revealed officials had no plans for a mass civilian evacuation - but a strategy was in place for saving treasured works of art.

According to the 30-year-old files - described by historians as the "most secret" to be released by the National Archive at Kew to date - Russia had so many nuclear warheads trained on Britain that around 12 million citizens would have been wiped out.

People would have been urged to stay indoors while all radio and television were to be replaced by an emergency BBC broadcast telling them: "There is nothing to be gained by trying to get away".

While members of the public would not be offered a shelter in nuclear bunkers, the government had devised a strategy for saving the country's art treasures.

Masterpieces from galleries in Edinburgh and London would have been transported to Wales, where they would have been stashed in a slate quarry.

Meanwhile, the prime minister and top officials would have been taken to government bunkers manned by civil servants.

According to the 1975 Government War Book, much of which remains classified, a single, looped broadcast would have taken over the airwaves and television.

A Catholic saint and martyr has been nominated as one of the nastiest villains in British history by a BBC publication, while in early November an influential Jesuit magazine praised him as a defender of church rights against the state.

St. Thomas Becket, a 12th-century archbishop of Canterbury, was among 10 "worst Britons" of the last millennium, selected by a group of British historians in the BBC compilation. The saint, whose feast is celebrated Dec. 29, was chosen by John Hudson, a professor at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, because he divided England in a way that was "unnecessary and self-indulgent."

"He was a founder of gesture politics with the most acute of eyes for what would now be called the photo opportunity," said Hudson, a specialist in early medieval English and French history.

"He was also greedy," he said in BBC History magazine Dec. 27. "Those who share my prejudice against Becket may consider his assassination in Canterbury Cathedral Dec. 29, 1170, a fittingly grisly end."

BBC History magazine compiled the list after asking 10 historians to name their pick for "worst Briton."

Yet, the influential Jesuit magazine, La Civilta Cattolica, which is reviewed by the Vatican Secretariat of State prior to publication, made mention of the 12th century saint in commenting last month on possible sainthood cause of Archbishop Oscar A. Romero of San Salvador.

La Civilta Cattolica said that almost immediately after Archbishop Romero was murdered in 1980, people started comparing him to St. Thomas, the English archbishop martyred in 1170.

"Thomas was killed for defending the legitimate rights of the church, which the king of England wanted to transform into an instrument of his own power, while Msgr. Romero was killed for having defended – in the name of the faith – the rights of man, which the church today proclaims as its 'first and fundamental path,'" the magazine said.

For a month 100 years ago, a quiet New England port held the focus of the world. From Aug. 9 to Sept. 5, diplomats were thrown together with local ladies clubs, and foreign reporters swooped onto picket-fenced streets and called the town a beacon of hope to end the cataclysm between "East" and "West." In fact, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, fought mostly in Manchuria, was so profound in its effect that some historians now call it "World War 0."

Today the 1905 war is often little more than a footnote. It has been marginalized and dwarfed by the horrors of World Wars I and II. Yet a century later historians say the conflict marked a series of crucial global turning points: It opened what historian Herbert Bix calls a "new era of imperial rivalry in Asia and the Pacific." Japan began its rise. The war was unique: Fought between two powers, Russia and Japan, within the boundaries of two neutral countries, China and Korea.

The war showcased modern hardware and tactics. Improbably, the peace was brokered by a third party, the US, in a debut international performance.

The war showcased modern hardware and tactics. Improbably, the peace was brokered by a third party, the US, in a debut international performance.The scale and severity of the clashes, and the possibility that Europe might join in, frightened the entire world. Japan lost 110,000 soldiers in the first year. Russia's great Baltic Navy steamed four months to the Pacific - then lost 16 battleships in 36 hours in the Tsushima Strait. After 18 months Russia didn't win a battle. Its proud image was shattered. Japan destroyed the myth of European invincibility, but was nearly bankrupt. Neither side wanted talks. Neither wanted a mediator.

But President Theodore Roosevelt stepped into the fray, hosting 30 days of negotiations that resulted in a peace pact - and America's first Nobel Peace Prize, awarded partly for a diplomatic approach later called "multtrack."

The Sakhalin and Kurile islands, whose ownership was still under discussion last month in Tokyo at a meeting between Russian and Japanese heads of state, were the central sticking point in the Portsmouth treaty, and nearly scuppered the deal. Chief Russian diplomat Sergius Witte twice pocketed cables from Czar Nicholas asking him to come home.

For Russia, the war was a disaster for the Czar; grumbling in the streets added to unhappiness leading eventually to the rise of the Bolsheviks.

In Japan, the war had an opposite effect: It brought Japan international prominence, and stoked pride. The event closely melded military and emperor - and set the stage for Japan's push through all of Asia. Emperor Hirohito, says Mr. Bix, grew up playing childhood military games from the Russo-Japanese War. Later, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, Japan refused to leave Manchuria, arguing that to do so would "give up the fruits of the ... Russo Japanese War," as Hara Yoshimichi, privy council in Tokyo, put it. Naval tactics, especially Japan's "single blow" approach against the Russian navy, prefigured Pearl Harbor.

It would be hard to overstate how transfixing the war was at the time. "The loss of life was terrible on both sides," says Peter Randall, a Treaty of Portsmouth historian. "In the Port Arthur battle the Japanese kept attacking and attacking, and with modern weapons the severity was frightening. The entire world was watching. "

Concern ran so high that many American churches held services for peace. The founder of this newspaper, Mary Baker Eddy, asked her church members to pray daily for peace from June 17 to July 1 1905.

Today, Japanese and Russian historians tend to downplay it as a "regional conflict." However, a major exhibition of 1905 war artifacts just closed at the Yushukan museum in Tokyo, and presented the war as a glorious moment in Japan's rise.

For the 100th anniversary in Portsmouth earlier this year, local groups put on an exhibit at the John Paul Jones House, hosted two state dinners and historical reenactments, and developed a curriculum, a traveling exhibition, and a website (www.portsmouthpeacetreaty.com).

PITTSFIELD, N.H. — An assignment intended to teach students about tolerance and the Holocaust angered some students at Pittsfield Middle High School, who claimed it violated their religious freedom.

English teacher Harry Mitchell last week asked students to make and wear yellow stars similar to those Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis. The graded assignment, part of a lesson on The Diary of Anne Frank, was intended to teach empathy, he said.

But some students protested, instead wearing paper notes bearing the words, "We're not Jewish."

"Many people won't learn anything except that their religion (if they're not Jewish) isn't good enough and that being Jewish or expressing Jewish symbols is a better religion and the only way to get the grades we deserve," wrote Samantha Gage, 13, in a letter to the Concord Monitor.

That misses the point, Mitchell said.

"My intention with the star was to get them to have some empathy and the feeling of what it was like to have to identify yourself with a symbol," Mitchell said. "If you're not wearing it, you're not getting the full awareness of Anne and her family."

School principal Karen Erlandson said she supported the assignment, as well as the right of students not to participate.

THE German Government angrily rebuked a former hostage yesterday who is determined to return to Iraq despite being held captive for three weeks by a Sunni gang.
Susanne Osthoff, a 43-year-old archaeologist, announced this week on al-Jazeera television that she would go back to her work in northern Iraq, trying to set up a German cultural centre in Arbil.

Angela Merkel’s new Government, which regards the freeing of Frau Osthoff this month as its first foreign policy triumph, is furious. It made huge efforts to secure her release and is widely believed to have paid a ransom.

It has now blocked all funding for her project and has told her that she should leave the region immediately. She is believed currently to be in Jordan, with her 12-year-old daughter, preparing to return.

Fact may be stranger than fiction, but when it comes to espionage, fiction makes for better storytelling. That was the conclusion drawn by many veterans of -- and experts on -- the Israeli intelligence service Mossad when they heard about Steven Spielberg's new thriller "Munich," which opens Friday in North America. "The basis for this film has no relation to reality, though it may be a cracking tale," said Eitan Haber, a Mossad historian.

In his portrayal of the Mossad's retaliation for the Palestinian terrorist attack on its athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Spielberg has drawn on the book "Vengeance," despite the fact it has been discredited in Israel and abroad.

The killing of senior Palestinians blamed for the Munich massacre, in a series of shootings, booby-trap bombings and commando raids in Europe and the Middle East, is beyond dispute.

What irks those few Israelis with direct knowledge of the top-secret missions is the way Spielberg's Mossad hit team functions, a depiction they say owes more to a romantic idea of the Zionist fighting ethos than to accurate historical research. "The modus operandi is entirely wrong," said Gad Shimron, a former Mossad operative turned journalist.

Spielberg insists that he consulted with a former Israeli agent for "Munich," and he opens the film with the disclaimer that it was inspired by real events. Like "Vengeance," Spielberg's film focuses on an Israeli assassin, Avner, who suffers a crisis of conscience over his country's reprisals policy.

Spielberg shows Avner's doubts growing over time and under operational duress. "Munich" posits that the hero was the leader of a diverse group of agents assigned to track down a rogue's gallery of wanted men from the Black September faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

For dramatic effect, the assassins are isolated in the field, left to their own devices by an Israeli high command loath to risk exposure. But such a set-up flies in the face of logic as well as logistics, according to Israelis-in-the-know.

"There was never a single list of targets drawn up, and certainly never a single hit-team assigned to handle them," a retired Mossad deputy chief said on condition of anonymity. "It was a matter of putting out the word to our people who were posted in various countries to look out for top Black September members. When these were located, then we sent out the right agents to take care of business, on a more ad-hoc basis." "Munich" rightly notes that Golda Meir, Israel's prime minister at the time of the Olympics attack, authorized Mossad to go on the offensive -- this was an executive decision.

But the film has elicited strong doubts in Israel by showing Meir personally recruiting Avner for the mission. "C'mon, like any intelligence agency we had the right people trained and ready to go. The idea of a prime minister meeting with a junior field agent is unthinkable -- it's bad for secrecy, for a start, not to mention completely unnecessary," said one veteran of the Mossad operations at the time. When asked about the Mossad's criticism, Dennis Ross, the former U.S. Middle East envoy, characterized them as fair.

The myth of a unified Iraqi identity may have finally been laid to rest this month. More clearly than any other measurement since the U.S.-led 2003 invasion, preliminary results from the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections show Iraq as three lands with three distinct identities, divided by faith, goals, region, history and symbols.

Though Iraqis often speak lovingly of golden ages when they were one big happy family, Iraq has been a shaky proposition since its 1920s founding. Rather than a shared history, the paths of Iraq's Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds diverged from the beginning of the nation's inception as a product of British colonialism.

Sunnis collaborated with the British, who supported the Sunni Arab monarchists. Shiite insurrectionists heeded the calls of their clergy and fought a jihad, or holy war, against the British, who crushed them and reaffirmed their second-class status. Kurdish nationalists unsuccessfully sought independence, first by diplomatic channels, later by the gun.

Iraq's post-World War II order was no less divisive. Sunni Arab nationalists forced their pan-Arab ideology on the diverse country after Britain's departure. Hussein's Sunni-run government magnified discrimination to the point of mass killings, with Shiites and Kurds punished not so much for who they were but for refusing to accept the Baath Party's version of Iraqi identity.

Nonetheless, Hussein's au- thoritarianism was the glue that held Iraq together for decades. Now that he is out of power, the nation's troubled identity has again been cast into flux.

Does the nation continue to bow before the philosophy of Arab nationalism, or that of Shiite mysticism? Is Iraq's national hero Hussein or the 7th century Shiite caliph Imam Ali? Or, for that matter, is it the late Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani?

"What does it mean to be an Iraqi?" wonders Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish politician. "We didn't have something to be proud of, a development or an advance. The only thing we have in common is oppression."

A further erosion of Iraqi identity could pave the way for a partitioning of the country, with unpredictable results.

Kurds, already soured on the idea of Iraq, could bolt the union, taking the oil-rich city of Kirkuk with them and realizing the worst fears of Turkey and Iran, each with sizable and restless Kurdish minorities. Shiites, too, unified by their religious iconography, have begun seriously talking about setting up a nine-province, oil-rich southern region. That would leave an angry and resentful Sunni Arab center and west of the country determined to continue staging an insurgency that could inflame passions throughout the Middle East.

Many Sunni Arab nationalists and former Baath Party adherents blame Iran and the United States for interfering in Iraq's internal affairs and whipping up sectarian and ethnic passions. The U.S., they say, started the troubles by doling out seats on the initial post-invasion Iraqi Governing Council according to ethnicity and sect rather than who was best qualified.

Iran, they say, has flooded the country with religious imagery and propaganda, bolstering the fierce sectarianism of the country's Shiite majority in order to achieve its own ends.

Regardless of the cause, the very idea of Iraq may be slowly fading, politicians and common Iraqis acknowledge, often sadly. Even the Iraqi flag seems to appear only in the posters of politicians bankrolled by U.S.-funded aid organizations. Government buildings such as the ministries of education and health are often festooned with posters of bearded and turbaned Shiite clerics instead of the red, white and black flag of Iraq.

Former President Jimmy Carter, in an interview for the January issue of GQ magazine, reveals how, on the recommendation of then-CIA director Stansfield Turner, he once authorized a psychic to make targeting decisions--while "in a trance"--for America's satellite surveillance system:

GQ: One of the promises you made in 1976 was that if you were elected, you would look into the [UFO] reports from Roswell and see if there had been any cover-ups. Did you look into that?

Carter: Well, in a way. I became more aware of what our intelligence services were doing. There was only one instance that I'll talk about now. We had a plane go down in the Central African Republic--a twin-engine plane, small plane. And we couldn't find it. And so we oriented satellites that were going around the earth every ninety minutes to fly over that spot where we thought it might be and take photographs. We couldn't find it. So the director of the CIA came and told me that he had contacted a woman in California that claimed to have supernatural capabilities. And she went in a trance, and she wrote down latitudes and longitudes, and we sent our satellites over that latitude and longitude, and there was the plane.

The Scrapbook figures this woman is probably no longer alive. Otherwise they'd have found bin Laden by now.

Some 64 centuries ago, a prehistoric people of obscure origins farmed an area along Egypt’s Nile River. Barely out of the Stone Age, they produced simple but well-made pottery, jewelry and stone tools, and carefully buried their dead with ritual objects in apparent preparation for an afterlife. These items often included doll-like female figurines with exaggerated sexual features, thought to possibly symbolize rebirth.

Despite the simplicity of their possessions, a new study suggests these people, the Badarians, may have ultimately given rise to one of the world’s first major civilizations some 14 centuries later: the glittering culture of Egypt.

Indeed, the Egyptians seem to have been basically the same people from the end of the Stone Age through late Roman times, the research found.

In the study, Joel Irish of the University of Alaska Fairbanks analyzed similarities among teeth from almost 1,000 people from various eras of Egyptian history and prehistory and found, he wrote, “overall population continuity” over this roughly 5,000-year span.

Irish described the results in a paper in the Dec. 5 online edition of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. But he noted that while the finding backs up views that some archaeologists have voiced before, it’s partly at odds with some other studies of skeletal remains, so further tests are needed.

The different results might stem from different sample sizes or types of data used, he wrote.

It will be three years before George W. Bush becomes an ex-commander in chief, but he's already boning up on the post-retirement adventures of the original Cowboy President.

Bush is reading "When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt After the White House" by Patricia O'Toole while he relaxes at his Texas ranch during the week between Christmas and New Year's, the White House said Tuesday.

Roosevelt, who was 50 when his second term ended in 1909, lived unusually large after leaving the White House, even by presidential standards.

He published 11 books, bagged 500 animals on an African safari, led an exploration of Brazil's uncharted jungles, mounted an unsuccessful third-party presidential bid on the Bull Moose ticket, and survived a gunshot wound to the chest by a would-be assassin. He died in his sleep at age 60.

"TR is the perfect ex-president to study as a role model," said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, director of the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Tulane University in New Orleans. "He attained almost bigger stature out of the White House than within."

Brinkley said O'Toole's book would demonstrate "the potential for adventures after the White House," a subject that he said Bush was likely to contemplate.

Not so fast, said White House Deputy Press Secretary Trent Duffy, who insisted that Bush was not yet daydreaming about escaping the political landscape of Washington and retiring to the friendlier terrain of central Texas.

"The president knows full well that he's got a lot of time left in this second term, and he's going to accomplish big things as he has talked about repeatedly," Duffy told reporters in Crawford, a few miles from the Bushes' Prairie Chapel Ranch.

Another book Bush brought to the ranch this week is "Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground." The book, written by Robert D. Kaplan, describes the experiences of rank-and-file soldiers who are called on to carry out America's foreign policy objectives around the world.

THE belief that every Victoria Cross, Britain's highest military honour, is made from cannon captured during the Crimean War is nothing more than a myth, says a book marking the 150th anniversary of the medal.

John Glanfield, a historian and author of Bravest of the Brave, to be published next month, claims to have exposed the truth about the metal used to make the awards.

It has long been believed that all 1,351 Victoria Crosses awarded have been made of bronze taken from two Russian cannon captured at the siege of Sebastopol and kept in the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich.

The Victoria Cross was instituted on Jan 29, 1856, as the supreme gallantry award and the first to recognise servicemen's brave acts regardless of rank.

The priceless lump of metal, of which there remains enough for a further 85 crosses, is kept in a vault at the Royal Logistic Corps in Donnington, Shropshire. It can be removed only under guard.

By studying historical documents and scientific analysis, Glanfield claims that the Woolwich cannon were not used until 1914, 58 years after the first Victoria Crosses had been produced.

He also says that the precious ingot disappeared during the Second World War, so a different metal was used for five crosses awarded between 1942 and 1945.

"I was astonished,'' he said. ''There was an accepted legend and no one had researched whether it was true. When something has been the belief for 150 years it becomes accepted as the truth.''

Britain's biggest cads, rogues and evil-doers from the past 1,000 years have been given special recognition by historians. Academics have put together a list of 10 rogues whose deeds and behaviour they feel sets them apart as the worst of the worst. Kings, politicians, archbishops and mass murderers all feature in the run-down, which sees one villain nominated for each of the past 10 centuries.

The vilest character of the 20th century was said to be Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists. Professor Joanna Bourke of Birkbeck College, London, said Mosley still had a "pernicious impact" on British society as an inspiration for far-right groups. "On his death in 1980 his son Nicholas concluded that his father was a man whose 'right hand dealt with grandiose ideas and glory' while his left hand 'let the rat out of the sewer'," she said.

Jack the Ripper got the vote as the 19th century's worst rogue, although his real identity is still unknown. He is believed to have murdered at least four prostitutes in Whitechapel, east London, in the second half of 1888. Others on the list, which was compiled for BBC History Magazine, included King John and two archbishops of Canterbury.

Marc Morris, writer and presenter of Castle on Channel 4, described King John, who died in 1216, as "one of the worst kings in English history. John committed some wicked deeds and was a deeply unpleasant person. He was untrusting, he would snigger at people while they talked and couldn't resist kicking a man when he was down."

With the approach of Munich's US opening today - a month before its premiere in Israel - media coverage has only intensified, putting those on both sides of the debate on guard. In a short telephone interview, the film's Israeli public relations representative slammed the "anti-Spielberg rumors" he says have been circulating in the Israeli press. Israel's consul-general in Los Angeles, not normally looked to for his views on film, generated international headlines after attending a pre-release screening and calling Munich "pretentious" and "presumptuous" in interviews with Voice of Israel radio and The New York Times.

With the film still unavailable for viewing by general audiences, the frenzy itself has become a source of satire, with an Israeli journalist writing in mock outrage last week that he was the basis for Munich's lead character, and that the film had erred unforgivably in not casting to play him "a Jake Gyllenhaal type with the body of Brad Pitt."

But while the media have arguably been the first and biggest beneficiaries of the controversy thus far, genuine concerns remain about the film's factual basis and portrayal of its protagonist, who some have claimed is a historical phantom and an unacceptable figure to place at the story's center. Complicating the issue is that the film is intended, according to Spielberg spokesman Marvin Levy, to be "a historic thriller."

"We weren't making a documentary," Levy said by phone from his Los Angeles office, "and there's always a degree of literary or cinematic license."

Whether that's appropriate in this case, however, is a source of debate. Munich's connection to Middle East history and politics will only endure more scrutiny as it opens to the general public and gains eligibility for Academy Awards consideration - Spielberg's stated ambition and his reason for rushing the film through an unusually short production and marketing schedule.

That Spielberg made Munich at all is something of a surprise. Budgeted at $70 million, the film opens with the capture and killing of 11 Israeli athletes, coaches and athletic judges at the 1972 Summer Olympics, one of the first major international events hosted by Germany following World War II.

With the Dachau concentration camp just 10 kilometers from the Olympic stadium, the games had been designed in part to wash away the stain of Germany's recent past. An official memorial service recalling the Holocaust was attended by Israelis and representatives of most of the European athletic squads, while the hours before the fateful pre-dawn attack saw members of the Israeli team attending a local production of Fiddler on the Roof. In an attempt to avoid recalling the overt militarism of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, security was provided by 2,000 unarmed guards dressed in light blue suits.

The 1972 Games produced no shortage of iconic images and memories. Gymnast Olga Korbut charmed her way into the consciousness of millions of worldwide television viewers, putting a new face on the Soviet Union with her emotional reactions to her competitive successes and failures. In the swimming pool, Jewish American swimmer Mark Spitz won an unprecedented - and still unmatched - seven gold medals, a feat made all the more significant by the event's German location.

But the enduring image of those Games was to become that of an armed, ski mask-wearing Palestinian terrorist stalking the walkway outside the Israeli residence in the Olympic Village. As one of the terrorist leaders would later boast, the saga was followed by a massive worldwide audience before ending in the early morning of September 6 with the deaths of the Israeli team members, five Black September terrorists and one German police officer.

The bloody drama, the focus of the Oscar-winning 2000 documentary One Day in September, serves as the backdrop to the new Spielberg film, which focuses instead on the Israeli response to the attack.

WHEN Channel 4 recently polled its viewers to find the Britons We Love To Hate, the list was led by politicians and television personalities from Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher to Jordan and Jade Goody. The latest list of Britons we like to hiss is, however, more Blackadder than Big Brother.

Chosen by professional historians who nominated a villain from each of the past 10 centuries, the list includes a king, a serial killer, several lawyers and, more controversially, a saint.

According to Prof John Hudson, of St Andrews University, St Thomas Becket (c. 1120-1170) should be accorded a place in the roll of dishonour, published today by the BBC's History magazine.

Despite his canonisation following his murder in Canterbury Cathedral, Becket was a founder of "gesture politics with the most acute of eyes for what would now be called the photo opportunity'', said Prof Hudson.

More tellingly, he said, Becket carried over his personal greed and arrogance as Henry II's chancellor into his role as Archbishop of Canterbury, where he caused as much trouble as he could between Church and State. He was also a lawyer.

The second archbishop in the list, Thomas Arundel (1353-1414), was nominated by Prof Miri Rubin of Queen Mary, University of London, for introducing a crackdown on religious dissent in England which had otherwise escaped the Inquisition.

Another on the list of Worst Britons is Hugh Despenser (c. 1290-1326), the favourite of Edward II who took over as the apple of the king's eye after the deposition and murder of Piers Gaveston. Despenser took apparent delight in torturing noblewomen in order to get them to sign over their lands to him.

The treachery of Eadric Streona, ealdorman, or earl, of Mercia (d. 1017), earns him a place on the list. He repaid the kindness of Aethelred the Unready , who raised him from "ignoble birth'', by betraying him and his heir Edmund Ironside to Cnut (Canute) of the Danes.

King John (1167-1216) breezes into the list, of course. Described by the historian Marc Morris as "clearly one of the worst kings in English history'', he is singled out for opprobrium for his murder, possibly carried out in person, of his nephew Arthur....

An education watchdog asked history teachers in the UK to expand their teaching about German history beyond the current concentration on Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), a non-departmental public body, which maintains and develops the national curriculum in the UK, found "widespread disquiet over what is seen as the gradual narrowing and 'Hitlerization'" of history teaching in Great Britain.

In its widely trailed annual report on curriculum and assessment, the QCA, which is sponsored by the British Department of Education and Skills, issued guidelines on teaching pupils about the progress Germany made while moving from being an occupied, divided country to a reunited, democratic nation.

The "Hitlerization" of history teaching was, according to the QCA, affecting pupils' knowledge of other events in Britain's past and that of other European countries.

The focus on Germany's Nazi past attracted criticism from the outgoing German ambassador to London, Thomas Matussek, earlier this year.

Matusek had been concerned about the stereotypical portrayal of Germans in the British media and the fact that 80 percent of history students in England chose to study Nazi Germany in their finishing years of secondary education.

"It is very important that people know about it and study it in depth, but they also need to know that history does not stop in 1945," Matussek said.

"They need to know that the lessons drawn from this dark era of our past are being implemented and that German democracy is a success story which could also be taught," he said.

The Vatican has opened up to German historians the secret records associated with the Catholic Church's former Index of Forbidden Books, revealing that well-loved books of the 19th century nearly came under bans.

The Index, which was abolished in 1967, was a directory listing thousands of books that the church considered as theologically wrong or immoral.

The historians discovered that both a guide to good manners and the classic 19th century novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe were scrutinized by the inquisitors in Rome, who formed a department known as the Sacred Congregation of the Index.

One of the Vatican readers in 1853 considered Uncle Tom, a story of slavery in the United States, to be a coded appeal for revolution. But when a second opinion was sought from other inquisitors, they did not consider it very harmful and no ban was ever pronounced.

Another title that was nearly proclaimed insidious was a book on human relationships by Adolph Knigge, a German baron, which became a celebrated 19th century primer on the foundations of etiquette.

The church has never before revealed that the Knigge book landed on the inquisitors' desk in 1820, with critics saying its philosophy encouraged selfishness and concentrated on personal happiness in a way that contradicted Catholic spirituality. But no ban was passed.

The historians, from the University of Muenster in northern Germany, were granted access several years ago to the records of more than 400 years of literary censorship by the church.

Thousands of titles were placed on the Church's guide to bad books, among them books by writers as diverse as Martin Luther, Jean- Paul Sartre and Immanuel Kant. The historians believe about double the number of works that were banned came under scrutiny.

"As a matter of principle, the church never disclosed the 'not guilty' verdicts," said Wolf, whose research is bringing the sometimes random nature of the assessments to light.

The historians were surprised that certain books did not figure in the Congregation's records at all.

"We looked everywhere for a mention of Charles Darwin, for example. There was nothing," said Wolf, referring to the British scientist who proposed the theory of evolution and enraged those who believe literally in the biblical story of creation.

Adolf Hitler's hate-filled ideology, "Mein Kampf", was also never put on the Index, though Wolf and his team did discover evidence that the censors considered what to do about Hitler, with discussions in the office going on for years and a decision constantly postponed. ...