The reputation of a man whose name still could bring conversations to an icy halt in this city 50 years after he wrote a book about Grand Junction's leading residents may finally be rehabilitated here.

Author Dalton Trumbo, a renowned novelist who won two Academy Awards for his screenwriting, will be honored by a festival celebrating his career and the reprinting of the book that created such a ruckus in this Western Slope city.

Trumbo was born 100 years ago Dec. 9, an occasion to be marked by a party at the Avalon Theater in downtown Grand Junction.

But in his hometown, where his writing career got started on the high school newspaper and continued at the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, Trumbo was reviled for decades after the publication of his first novel, Eclipse.

Set in the fictional "Shale City," the book and its author were shunned after its printing in 1935. Children of leading residents whose names had been lightly disguised and who were disparaged in the book tell tales of their parents or grandparents ripping up copies of the novel.

Trumbo, who left Grand Junction in the late 1920s for Hollywood and never returned, would go on to write 72 screenplays and seven books, one of which, the anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun, was widely read on college campuses during the Vietnam War. Trumbo died in 1975.

The University of Colorado honored Trumbo, who attended the school for one year, by naming the fountain area on the Boulder campus after him.

He won Oscars for Roman Holiday in 1953 and The Brave One in 1957. He wrote those screenplays under pseudonyms because the House Committee on Un-American Activities had blacklisted him for joining the Communist Party.

"He went to one meeting and never went back," said Grand Junction historian Dave Fishell. "But the blacklist lasted and lasted, and Trumbo went to jail for 11 months rather than squeal on his friends."

AT the centre of Hungary's wartime history lies a gaping hole. Documentary evidence of the reign of terror by the notorious fascist Arrow Cross regime during World War II is missing and there are few surviving witnesses.

One building that should be a source of historical records is the Arrow Cross party headquarters at 60 Andrassy St, Budapest -- known as the House of Loyalty.

To Melbourne pensioner Lajos Polgar, it was the House of Fidelity. Now a war crimes investigation by Hungarian authorities into Polgar may fill some of history's gaps. And if the investigation results in an extradition request for Polgar, he will become the second Australian pensioner this year to face prosecution for alleged war crimes.

Perth pensioner Charles Zentai is facing extradition to Hungary accused of bashing 18-year-old Peter Balazs to death in a Budapest army barracks.

What is known of the House of Loyalty is that Jews were tortured and possibly killed in the building's basement. "It was a notorious building. It was the headquarters of the Arrow Cross," says Hungarian Holocaust historian Tom Kramer. "They used it basically as a torture chamber, as a means of intimidating potential opponents."

Polgar insists he's innocent of any war crimes and that he held the lesser role of secretary at the House of Loyalty to hanged party henchman Jozsef Gera. Polgar laughs when told the Hungarian authorities suspect him of genocide. "I am absolutely innocent. I never made any crime at all," he says.

Polgar hid his wartime history when he emigrated to Australia in 1949 and subsequently befriended the family of former prime minister Malcolm Fraser. He lived a quiet life until four months ago when Labor MP Michael Danby raised questions about his wartime history in federal parliament.

Court papers obtained by The Australian reveal Polgar was a key figure in the brutal Arrow Cross regime. Gera claimed he personally appointed Polgar as "commander of the House of Loyalty".

Whether Gera was telling the truth when he named Polgar as commander is likely to be critical to the Hungarian investigation, says Kramer, author of the book From Emancipation to Catastrophe: the Rise and Holocaust of Hungarian Jewry.

"There is no question at all in my mind that whoever was in command of the House of Loyalty was in fact a major war criminal," Kramer says. "Polgar is probably attempting to airbrush himself out of history, painting himself as an innocent bystander who was just shifting paper backwards and forwards, whereas the commander would be the one issuing the instructions."

Polgar rejects Kramer's version of events saying "there is no such thing, commander. Of course, anything I wanted there from the rest of the people in the House of Fidelity, they had to obey that. This is not commander, I never have been. Commander was Dr Gera. I was an assistant. My job was the working order, I looked over everything."

Veterans of the US boat that destroyed a Japanese submarine off the Oahu coast on December 7, 1941 met at Pearl Harbour this weekend to revisit the day when the first shot of the Pacific war was fired.

Almost an hour after the USS Ward attacked the midget sub, 40 Japanese torpedo bombers made their first successful and unhindered run on Pearl Harbour's Battleship Row.

Veterans, their families and government and military officials are remembering the Ward in anticipation of Wednesday's observance of the 64th anniversary of the attack, which pushed the United States into World War II.

The Ward, then a newly recommissioned World War I destroyer, shot the Japanese vessel in the harbour's defensive area, where submarines were required to sail above water.

Will Lehner, 84, whose battle station on the Ward was as ammunition handler on the destroyer's afterdeck, said the vessel sailed over the 78ft black Japanese sub after it sunk.

"It looked like it was covered by moss," said Lehner, who now lives in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. "I had never seen anything like it before."

However, proof of the attack did not appear until 2002, when University of Hawaii researchers found the missing sub submerged in about 1,200ft of water.

"Every time we would tell someone about it, they would say 'You have no proof'," Lehner said. "It was a closure for me to see that sub. I saw it when it got hit, I saw it when it was going down, and then, 60 years later, I saw it laying on the bottom."

The Japanese sub sunk by the Ward was one of five launched on December 6, each carrying a two-man crew and armed with two torpedoes. One of them washed up on the beaches at Bellows after the 1941 attack; three, including the one attacked by the Ward, were believed to have been sunk; the whereabouts of the fifth have never been verified.

The remains of a skeleton found underneath a medieval ship discovered buried in the banks of the River Usk in Newport are that of an Iron age man. Tests carried out on the bones which were found in December 2002, have shown that they date back to 170BC.

It makes the skeleton about 1,500 years older than the 15th century ship.

Dan Rypma, a history major at Colorado State University and formerly of Whitehall, found himself making history this summer after discovering at an ancient site in Israel what may be the earliest form of the Hebrew alphabet.

“The Tel Zayit Inscription,” now sparking discussion and controversy among biblical and language scholars around the world, is two lines of 24 inscribed letters. It’s an alphabet, resembling both Phoenician and Hebrew, on a 38-pound limestone boulder which dates to around the 10th century B.C.E. - the time some biblical historians believe Kings David and Solomon reigned over a united kingdom of Judah.

Tel Zayit, located southwest of Jerusalem in the lowlands of what was believed to be ancient Judah, has been undergoing excavation by a team of archaeologists sponsored by Pittsburgh Theological Seminary since 1999.

Rypma learned about the excavations from one of his professors at Colorado State who was a former colleague of the director of the dig, Dr. Ron E. Tappy, associate professor of Bible and Archaeology at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Rypma applied for the 2005 dig, and was soon on his way to Israel.

It was on the second-to-the-last day of the five-week dig when Rypma uncovered the stone in the wall of a 3,000-year-old two-story home. The limestone boulder had incised scratches on it that Rypma said he knew were man-made, but could it be writing? Rypma wasn’t sure. It was his first archaeological dig, and he said he felt “sheepish” about bringing it to anyone’s attention. But that night he told his supervisor who went out the following day - the final day of the dig - to take a look at it.

The supervisor called Tappy to the location of the stone. Rypma saw his eyes instantly light up.

“By God, I think it’s an inscription,” Rypma recalled Tappy saying. “Next thing I knew everyone was shaking my hand. I was a bit taken aback. I realized it was important, but I didn’t realize how important it was to them.”

“I realized as soon as I laid eyes on the stone that the inscription was very old and very important, not only to the history of the alphabet and of writing, but to the history of the region in the biblical period,” said Dr. Tappy in an emailed response last week.

Tappy said only one other inscription from the time period has been found in the last 100 years. Pottery and other findings from the Tel Zayit site securely date the inscription found there to the 10th century B.C.E., according to Tappy.

Following two fairly high profile incidents regarding the anonymous editing of articles on the popular open-source online reference tool Wikipedia, the site said that it would make changes to how it operates to prevent future problems.

On November 29, an op-ed piece appeared in USA Today penned by John Seigenthaler, a former aide to Robert Kennedy. Seigenthaler said that for 132 days, the Wikipedia entry under his name falsely accused him of being a suspect in Kennedy's assassination.

Two days later, former MTV VJ and podcasting pioneer Adam Curry was caught anonymously editing people out of an article on the history of podcasting while hyping his own role in the effort.

So far, Curry has publicly refuted such claims, saying he was only trying to ensure the article correctly portrayed the history of podcasting.

The capability of anonymous editing has people like Seigenthaler upset, and he says that it opens the door for malicious or blatantly incorrect information being posted to the service without accountability.

"Wales, in a recent C-SPAN interview with Brian Lamb, insisted that his website is accountable and that his community of thousands of volunteer editors corrects mistakes within minutes," he chided in the op-ed piece. "My experience refutes that."

Furthermore, Wikipedia articles like Seigenthaler's can go unnoticed for long periods of time as they may be less frequently linked to, and thus not often checked for errors by editors like popular articles.

In reponse to such complaints, anonymous authors will no longer be permitted to create new articles on Wikipedia. Instead, users will be required to create accounts in order to do so.

However, the process of changing articles will still be open to anonymous editing, which may disappoint some. While Curry's editing of the podcasting article was eventually traced back, in most cases edits may be practically impossible to trace without some form of registration.

The New York Times five best non-fiction books of 2005 includes four works of history: George Packer, The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq; Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swann, De Kooning: An American Master; Jonathan Harr, The Lost Painting; and Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. At Ghost in the Machine, Kevin Murphy points out that Columbia's Eric Foner recently listed the five books that most influenced his work. There were three works of history: E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, and Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition. His fiction choices: José Saramago's The History of the Siege of Lisbon and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

Two centuries ago, the president of the United States sent an odd, obsessed, and self-destructive man to the Mediterranean to lead what amounted to the nation's first war against terror.

Two new books—one by Richard Zacks of Pelham, New York, and the other by Joshua London of Washington, D.C.—tell the story of this campaign against North African pirates in 1805.

At the center of the story is William Eaton, who accomplished his task against staggering odds and then was abandoned by the president who'd sent him on the mission.

London is the author of Victory in Tripoli: How America's War with the Barbary Pirates Established the U.S. Navy and Shaped a Nation, published in September by John Wiley and Sons.

London said Eaton "had the grace and bearing of a rough-and-tumble zealot" and was a man who didn't allow "gray areas in his patriotism."

"I saw Eaton as a hero and a patriot and a tragic figure," said Zacks, author of The Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, the First Marines, and the Secret Mission of 1805, published in June by Hyperion Books.

Zacks said he'd been interested in the story since he first read about the Barbary pirates in elementary school. Many years later he realized that the history books hadn't touched on one intriguing angle.

"I realized that no one had told the story from the standpoint of it being a covert operation," he said.

British diplomats in Jakarta and the Foreign Office lied about their knowledge of Indonesia's 1975 invasion of East Timor and worked with the US and Australia to cover up details of atrocities committed by Jakarta's troops during the attack, declassified documents have revealed.

The duplicity led relatives of two British journalists killed by Indonesian troops in East Timor in the run-up to the invasion yesterday to intensify their demands for a judicial inquiry into their deaths. British officials knew well in advance that Jakarta was almost certain to attack the former Portuguese colony, and determined that it would be in London's best interests to let it proceed, the documents indicate. They also detail how the British embassy in Jakarta and the Foreign Office lied about their knowledge of atrocities, particularly the killing of three Australian and two British newsmen in a house in the town of Balibo shortly before the main invasion.

The documents include a top secret telegram from the embassy in October 1975, two months before the attack, assessing that an invasion was inevitable. It continues by saying: "The American ambassador said ... Timor was high on [secretary of state Henry] Kissinger's list of places where the US do not want to comment or get involved. I am sure we should continue to follow the American model."

Peru has formally warned Yale University that it will be sued if relics taken from Machu Picchu by famed U.S. explorer Hiram Bingham nearly a century ago are not returned, the Foreign Ministry said Friday.

"Peru has notified Yale University President Richard Levin that a lawsuit is prepared if its rights to the archaeological pieces are not recognized," the ministry said in a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press.

"We are convinced that we have sufficient proof to win in court," Foreign Minister Oscar Maurtua said in the statement, noting that Peru still preferred a settlement to a long, expensive legal fight.

The threat was delivered to Yale in a letter written by Peru's ambassador to the United States, Eduardo Ferrero, according to the statement. The letter's date was not specified.

Yale spokesman Tom Conroy said the university has been "having discussions with the government of Peru and we are hoping for a resolution that is satisfactory to all involved."

While the full impact of the tragic events following Hurricane Katrina will not be fully understood for some time, historians and curators at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History have begun collecting artifacts and photographs to preserve the impact of the disaster and its aftermath on the nation.

The museum is working to build a focused collection of objects and photographs that reflects specific aspects of the hurricane's impact along the Gulf Coast, the rescue of survivors and the recovery of local communities. In addition to the more than 20 objects collected and more than 900 photographs taken by museum staff during the week of Sept. 26 - 30, the museum is still seeking tools used to escape from homes (such as sledgehammers and axes); homemade floatation devices and hand-lettered signs calling for help and rescue. A second collecting trip to the Gulf Coast region, including New Orleans, is planned for early December.

"As the only national history museum, the museum recognizes its responsibility to collect, preserve and document this episode in the country's history," said Brent D. Glass, museum director. "Just as the National Museum of American History became the official repository of artifacts related to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, collecting from Hurricane Katrina continues to fulfill the museum's national mission and is our first concerted effort at documenting a natural catastrophe."

Emily Read, a Year 9 student at Bellerive's Clarence High, received the title of Young Historian of the Year at a ceremony in Canberra.

The 15-year-old said she was both astounded and thrilled.

"I had seen the other entries and they were all so good -- so I was very surprised when I was chosen," she said.
...
She won top honours for her outstanding essay on the Snug District Disaster Appeal Committee.

The committee was formed two years after the 1967 bushfires to help raise money for other natural disasters around Australia.

The group gave to the Canberra bushfires in 2003.
...
She wins a Commonwealth medal and plaque as well as $500.

The total number of doctorates awarded by universities across the United States has increased in 2004, though the number of history PhDs awarded continues to decline slightly. The total number of doctorates awarded is the largest one-year increase since 1992, according to the annual Survey of Earned Doctorates.

Over the past 40 years, the total number of doctorates awarded has increased by an annual average of 3.5%, although in recent years, the number has been flat or even on the decline. The increase of 3.4% in 2004 was the second consecutive year that more doctorates were awarded, primarily due to an influx of international students.

The report indicates that there were 42,155 new doctoral recipients in 2004. While there have been increases in all broad fields of study, 5,467 of the recipients received doctorates in the humanities, approximately 12.5% of the total number. Specifically, 975 were in the field of history, reflecting 17.8% of the humanities doctorates and 2.3% of the total doctorates awarded. Ten years ago, the number of history doctorates awarded was 2.4% of the total, indicating a minor decline in the number of history PhDs in the overall totals. Some thirty years ago, in 1974, the total number of history doctorates comprised 3.5% of the total number of doctorates awarded.

Additionally, the study found that 41.6% of history doctorate recipients were female ­ a number that reflects a 12.8% increase of female recipients over the past ten years. 402 of the 975 history doctorates were specifically in American history, reflecting 41.2% of the total.

The report is sponsored by several agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Departments of Agriculture and Education, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The full text of the report “Doctorate Recipients From United States Universities: Summary Report 2004,” is available in PDF format online at http://www.norc.uchicago.edu/issues/sed-2004.pdf .

The largest U.S. intelligence agency, the National Security Agency today declassified over 140 formerly top secret documents -- histories, chronologies, signals intelligence [SIGINT] reports, and oral history interviews -- on the August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident. Included in the release is a controversial article by Agency historian Robert J. Hanyok on SIGINT and the Tonkin Gulf which confirms what historians have long argued: that there was no second attack on U.S. ships in Tonkin on August 4, 1964.

According to National Security Archive research fellow John Prados, "the American people have long deserved to know the full truth about the Gulf of Tonkin incident. The National Security Agency is to be commended for releasing this piece of the puzzle. The parallels between the faulty intelligence on Tonkin Gulf and the manipulated intelligence used to justify the Iraq War makes it all the more worthwhile to re-examine the events of August 1964 in light of new evidence." Last year, Prados edited a National Security Archive briefing book which published for the first time some of the key intercepts from the Gulf of Tonkin crisis.

The National Security Agency has long resisted the declassification of material on the Gulf of Tonkin incident, despite efforts by Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer Carl Marcy (who had prepared a staff study on the August 4 incident); former Deputy Director Louis Tordella, and John Prados to push for declassification of key documents. Today's release is largely due to the perseverance of FOIA requester Matthew M. Aid who requested the Hanyok study in April 2004 and brought the issue to the attention of the New York Times when he learned that senior National Security Agency officials were trying to block release of the documents. New York Times reporter Scott Shane wrote that higher-level officials at the NSA were "fearful that [declassification] might prompt uncomfortable comparisons with the flawed intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq." The glaring light of publicity encouraged the Agency's leaders finally to approve declassification of the documents.

Hanyok's article, "Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2-4 August 1964," originally published in the National Security Agency's classified journal Cryptologic Quarterly in early 2001, provides a comprehensive SIGINT-based account "of what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin." Using this evidence, Hanyok argues that the SIGINT confirms that North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked a U.S. destroyer, the USS Maddox on August 2, 1964, although under questionable circumstances.

The SIGINT also shows, according to Hanyok, that a second attack, on August 4, 1964, by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on U.S. ships did not occur despite claims to the contrary by the Johnson administration. President Johnson and Secretary of Defense McNamara treated Agency SIGINT reports as vital evidence of a second attack and used this claim to support retaliatory air strikes and to buttress its request for a Congressional resolution that would give the White House freedom of action in Vietnam.

Hanyok further argues that Agency officials had "mishandled" SIGINT concerning the events of August 4 and provided top level officials with "skewed" intelligence supporting claims of an August 4 attack. "The overwhelming body of reports, if used, would have told the story that no attack occurred." Key pieces of evidence are missing from the Agency's archives, such as the original decrypted Vietnamese text of a document that played an important role in the White House's case. Hanyok has not found a "smoking gun" to demonstrate a cover-up but believes that the evidence suggests "an active effort to make SIGINT fit the claim of what happened during the evening of 4 August in the Gulf of Tonkin." Senior officials at the Agency, the Pentagon, and the White House were none the wiser about the gaps in the intelligence.

Hanyok's conclusions have sparked controversy among old Agency hands but his research confirms the insight of journalist I.F. Stone who questioned the second attack only weeks after the events. Hanyok's article is part of a larger study on the National Security Agency and the Vietnam War, "Spartans in Darkness," which is the subject of a pending FOIA request by the National Security Archive.

Genetic testing will not be performed on the bones of Jewish inmates discovered in a Holocaust-era mass grave during construction on a U.S. military camp near Stuttgart, according to a decision by Ulrich Goll, justice minister of the German state of Baden-Wurttemberg.

On completion of the police investigation, the remains will be transferred to the Jewish community of Stuttgart for burial.

The Israel Police, which had initially been asked to assist the Germans in identifying the remains, announced on Tuesday following Goll's decision that the search for relatives of the inmates, from whom DNA samples were to have been taken to try to identify the remains, was called off.

Goll's decision was made in response to requests by Jewish organizations to bury the remains without conducting the tests to avoid desecration of the dead. The spokesman for the Baden-Wurttemberg Justice Ministry, Stefan Wirz, told Haaretz that the Rabbinic Center of Europe (RCE), an umbrella organization headquartered in Brussels, had requested the genetic testing not be performed.

"The request by the rabbis was one consideration in the minister's decision not to perform the tests, but the main consideration was that the purpose of the investigation was to discover the identity of the murderer and the means of the murder, not the identity of the victims."

Wirz said the investigation was now seeking eye-witnesses who knew the commander of the camp near the murder site.

Construction workers digging at the site in September discovered skeletons and quickly called local police, who found the remains of 34 bodies during their search. German police determined that the mass grave probably dated back to World War II.

Two hundred years ago, Napoleon's victory at the Battle of Austerlitz sealed his reputation as a military genius. Today, his country seems undecided as to whether he was a hero or a villain.

In period uniforms, and thermal underwear, military enthusiasts from all over the world will gather on Saturday to re-enact one of the greatest victories in French history. They will come from the United States, from Australia, from Canada, from Russia, from Britain, and even some from France. They will converge on an obscure village in the Czech Republic which was once called Austerlitz.

Two hundred years ago tomorrow, a valley and a plateau near the village were the scene of a bloody six-hour battle which, above all others, sealed the reputation of Napoleon Bonaparte as a military genius and brought the Emperor Napoleon to the apogee of his power. The part of the emperor in Saturday's re-enactment will be played by an American Napoleonophile, Mark Schneider from Virginia.

In Paris, tomorrow night, on the actual bicentenary of the battle, a discreet ceremony and son et lumiére will be organised by the French army in the Place de Vendôme. President Jacques Chirac will not be present. Neither will the Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, (even though he has written poetically about Napoleon and, according to some of his colleagues, believes himself to be the direct, spiritual descendant of the Great Man).

As of yesterday, the French army could not say who would represent the French state at its Austerlitz party tomorrow. "We have been promised a minister but we don't yet know which one," a spokesman said, bravely.

Comparison is inevitable with the elaborate and joyful British commemorations of the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, which began last summer and are still going on. So far the French press has been slow to make this comparison but a cannonade of media protests is expected today and tomorrow.

THE Pope is set to abolish the concept of Limbo, overturning a belief held by Roman Catholics since the Middle Ages.

Limbo has long been held to be the place where the souls of children go if they die before they can be baptised. However, a 30-strong international commission of theologians summoned by the late John Paul II last year to come up with a “more coherent and illuminating” doctrine in tune with the modern age is to present its findings to Pope Benedict XVI on Friday.

Vatican sources said yesterday that the commission would recommend that Limbo be replaced by the more “compassionate” doctrine that all children who die do so “in the hope of eternal salvation”.

In Christian doctrine, Heaven is a state of union with God, while Hell is separation from God. Christians have long wrestled, however, with the thorny question of what happened to those who died before Jesus, who “brought Man salvation”, as well as the fate after death of children who die in the womb.

Although there is no basis for it in Scripture the traditional answer is Limbo, from the Latin limbus, meaning a hem, edge or boundary. It is described as the temporary resting place of “the souls of good persons who died before the resurrection of Jesus” (limbus patrum) and the permanent home in the afterlife of “the unbaptised who die in infancy without having been freed from original sin” (limbus infantium).