Tempers are flaring over a United States demand to open to scholars and researchers a huge repository of information about the Holocaust contained in the files of the International Tracing Service at Bad Arolsen, Germany.

Based in part on documents gathered by Allied forces as they liberated Nazi concentration camps, the stock of files held by the organization stretches for about 15.5 miles, and holds information on 17.5 million people. It amounts to one of the largest closed archives anywhere.

The collection is unique in its intimate personal detailing of a catastrophe, which is what makes the question of open access so delicate. The papers may reveal who was treated for lice at which camp, what ghoulish medical experiment was conducted on which prisoner and why, who was accused by the Nazis of homosexuality or murder or incest or pedophilia, which Jews collaborated and how they were induced to do so.

Since the end of World War II the Tracing Service, operating as an arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross, has used the files to help people trace the fates of relatives who disappeared into the murderous vortex of Nazi terror. Now, more than 60 years after the end of the war, the United States says that task is largely done and it is time to open up the archive, copy it so that it can also be stored in other countries and make it available to historians.

KLAMATH FALLS, Ore. — Part of a former World War II internment camp for Japanese Americans has been officially designated a National Historical Landmark.

The 42-acre landmark was part of the Tule Lake Relocation-Segregation Camp in a remote area of Northern California near the Lava Beds National Monument just south of the Oregon border.

More than 120,000 Japanese Americans were displaced from their homes across the West and put in 10 relocation camps during the war. Tule Lake was the largest center, with a peak population of 18,789 detainees.

Last year, a National Park Service advisory board unanimously recommended the designation for the area that was part of the 7,400-acre camp. It was designated as a relocation center in 1942 and converted to the nation's only segregation center in 1943.

From engaging in sexual relations with an intern to letting the Vietnam War escalate, U.S. presidents have been blamed for some egregious errors. So who had the worst blunder? President James Buchanan, for failing to avert the Civil War, according to a survey of presidential historians organized by the University of Louisville's McConnell Center.

The survey's top 10 presidential blunders were announced Saturday during a President's Day weekend conference called "Presidential Moments."

"We can probably learn just as much -- or maybe even more -- by looking at the mistakes rather than looking at why they were great," said political scientist and McConnell Center Director Gary Gregg.

Scholars who participated said Buchanan did not do enough to oppose efforts by Southern states to secede from the Union before the Civil War.

The second worst mistake, the survey found, was Andrew Johnson's decision just after the Civil War to side with Southern whites and oppose improvements in justice for Southern blacks beyond abolishing slavery.

"We continue to pay" for Johnson's errors, wrote Michael Les Benedict, an Ohio State University history professor emeritus.

Lyndon Johnson earned the No. 3 spot by allowing the Vietnam War to intensify, Gregg said.

Where does Bill Clinton's Monica Lewinsky scandal rank? Many scholars said it belonged at No. 10, saying that it probably affected Clinton's presidency more than it did American history and the public.

Arizona Senate panel -- following complaint over "The Ice Storm" -- votes to give students right to demand alternative books.

When faculty leaders talk about the various versions of the Academic Bill of Rights circulating among state legislators, many single out a bill in Arizona as the worst of all.

The legislation there would require public colleges to provide students with “alternative coursework” if a student finds the assigned material “personally offensive,” which is defined as something that “conflicts with the student’s beliefs or practices in sex, morality or religion.” On Wednesday, the bill starting moving, with the Senate Committee on Higher Education approving the measure — much to the dismay of professors in the state.

Germany's Dresdner Bank AG financed Nazi arms makers and owned a stake in a company that built crematoriums at the Auschwitz concentration camp, authors of a bank-commissioned study said Friday.

The 2,400-page, four-volume study is the result of seven years of work by a team of historians who scoured a huge number of the bank's files to detail its involvement with Adolf Hitler's regime before and during World War II.

The report "calls things by their proper names, and we accept these truths, even if they are painful," Wulf Meier, a member of the bank's management board, said at a news conference in Berlin.

Dresdner Bank, which was government-owned during the early years of the Nazi regime in the 1930s and remained under strong government influence after it passed back into private hands in 1937, was long known to have done business with the Nazi government — as did German big business in general.

Now a part of German insurer Allianz AG, it is the country's third-largest bank and does business in 50 countries.

What emerged from the study, the historians said, is that Dresdner was a part owner of Huta Hoch- und Tiefbau AG, a Breslau-based construction firm that built the crematoriums used to dispose of bodies at the Auschwitz death camp in occupied Poland.

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Some 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, died at the camp from gassing, shooting, hanging, beating, starvation, disease or mistreatment.

According to Johannes Baehr, an economic historian at the Free University of Berlin, it was "the most extensive involvement by a bank in an accomplice firm in Auschwitz."

The company also financed Nazi arms plants and did extensive business with Nazi occupation authorities in Eastern Europe, for example in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Ukraine.

Two top bank executives, Emil Meyer and Karl Rasche, were members of Hitler's SS, or Schutzstaffel, a paramilitary organization whose involvement in Nazi crimes included running concentration camps.

The report said the majority of the bank's top managers were not Nazi Party members but nonetheless sought to take advantage of the business opportunities presented by close cooperation with the regime.

Meyer committed suicide at the end of the war in 1945 and Rasche was sentenced to seven years in prison by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal for his activities.

The bank commissioned the study itself in 1997 amid public debate about the role of German big business during the Nazi era.

Dresdner Bank said it gave the scholars a free hand to probe the bank's archives and reveal what they found.

The bank was one of the business contributors to a 5.1 billion euro ($6 billion) business-government fund that began paying out compensation in 2001 to people forced to work as slave laborers to the Nazis.

Dresdner Bank's Meier said the bank would conduct internal discussions about any further steps today's bank needed to make in response to the findings.

Soil tests in Germany have revealed no evidence whatever that Adolf Hitler tested a nuclear weapon just two months before losing the Second World War, government scientists said Wednesday.

A Berlin historian, Rainer Karlsch, published a book last year on Nazi nuclear research and offered circumstantial evidence that the Germans may have tested a bomb on March 3, 1945 at the Ohrdruf army training camp in central Germany.

The site, near Gotha, is currently used by the German armed forces. Germany's main nuclear-research agency, the PTB, based in the northern city of Braunschweig, conducted soil tests there at the expense of German public television channel ZDF.

A statement Wednesday said radioactive material was found at the site, but this could be explained by the fallout all over Europe from the 1986 explosion of a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, Ukraine.

Around 85% of US Civil War soldiers suffered from ill health after the conflict, a University of California study has discovered.

The researchers examined 15,000 records in the Archives of General Psychiatry and found heart, stomach and mental health problems affected the lives of combatants after the 1861-1865 war. Poor health was likely to affect soldiers under 17 in 93% of cases compared with those aged over 31 years. Prisoners-of-war and those in high-risk regiments also had a greater incidence of ill-health later in life. Researcher Professor Roxane Cohen Silver commented: ‘For the first time, we have objective records indicating that horrific war experiences are associated with a lifetime of increased physical disease and mental health difficulties.’ She added: ‘Unfortunately, it's likely that the deleterious health effects seen in a war conducted more than 130 years ago are applicable to the health and well-being of soldiers fighting wars in the 21st century.’

For years, Cahokia Mounds' administrators longed to snatch up more property near the ruins of the prehistoric city but lacked the money to do it, fearing all the while that artifacts on the coveted private land could be forever lost to development.

Their concerns eased a bit Thursday, when the state finally released funds -- $837,800 -- earmarked years ago for expanding the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, now spanning 2,200 acres of the 4,000 that comprised the once-thriving city of up to 20,000 American Indians.

"We're so proud of Cahokia," Bob Coomer, the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency's director, said during a news conference at the historic site just west of this St. Louis suburb. Land-acquistion "funds have been extremely difficult to come by; we feel very fortunate to get these funds at this time."

--Monuments honoring Civil War soldiers from Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts were damaged late Wednesday or early Thursday morning, Gettysburg National Military Park officials said.

The head of a sculpture was stolen on Devil's Den, a rocky part of the battlefield, and a sword was taken from a second memorial. A third marker's sculpture landed on a decorative iron fence, which also was damaged.

"It's terribly sad, and the monuments were put there by the veterans and survivors of this battle. So what's happened is, it's their memory that is vandalized," said park spokeswoman Katie Lawhon.

The bronze sculpture of an artilleryman from the monument to Smith's Battery, also known as the 4th New York Battery, was dragged from its place and its head was removed and is missing, Lawhon said.

The top stone and sculpture from the 11th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Monument were toppled, and a sword was stolen from it.

Also, the vandals pulled down a bronze sculpture of a Zouave infantryman from the 114th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry Monument, and a fence was damaged when it fell.

Archaeology professor Brian Rose wants to make sure ancient artifacts stay in their rightful homes -- even if those homes are in war zones.

Rose, who has worked on excavation sites around the world, is trying to ensure that military personnel on duty treat valuable artifacts with respect.

He was struck by the problem after hearing of famous museums and archeological sites in Iraq and Afghanistan being looted by locals in the aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban.

Priceless works of art, Rose said, were showing up around the world, many of them being sold on the auction Web site eBay.com.

"A lot of the pieces [on eBay] may be from the Baghdad Archaeological Museum, but if no inventory number is written on them, you can't prove it," he said. "And if you can't prove it, then [selling them] is legal."

He realized, he said, that he should go straight to the troops themselves.

Thousands of Armenian Americans are protesting the Public Broadcasting Service's planned panel-discussion program about Turkey's role in the deaths of Armenians during and after World War I. The 25-minute program has generated an outcry because the panel will include two scholars who deny that 1.5 million Armenian civilians were killed in eastern Turkey from 1915 to 1920.

The program is scheduled to air April 17, a week before the annual Armenian Remembrance Day commemoration, and will follow a one-hour documentary, "The Armenian Genocide," which describes the events surrounding the deaths, as well as denials of complicity by successive Turkish governments.

Armenian Americans have publicized an online petition that asks PBS to drop the discussion program. As of last night, more than 6,000 people had electronically added their names to the petition, making it one of the largest organized protests of a PBS program.

"We strongly feel that debating the Armenian Genocide is akin to arguing about the Jewish Holocaust in order to project a sense of balance," the petition reads. "Would PBS ever contemplate such a program?" Noting that the film already includes Turkish denials, the petition concludes that the panel discussion "would serve to emphasize the Turkish state's official position and undermine the non-political nature of [PBS] programming."

The events surrounding the deaths of Armenians in Turkey by factions of the ruling Ottoman Empire remain emotionally charged and politically contentious. Armenians have long contended that the killings were government policy designed to suppress an Armenian uprising and Armenian support for invading Russian forces. Armenians also call it the 20th century's first genocide, a view that has gained acceptance among Western scholars and governments.

Successors to the Ottoman Turks have acknowledged that there were a substantial number of Armenian deaths -- Turkish estimates range from 300,000 to 600,000 -- but Turkey maintains that the deaths resulted from warfare, starvation and epidemics that affected all segments of Turkish society.

The controversy continues to resonate in Ankara and Washington. Turkish prosecutors last year indicted the country's best-known novelist, Orhan Pamuk, on charges of denigrating the country's national identity after he asserted, in an interview with a Swiss magazine, that Turkey was denying the extent of Armenian killings. His indictment became an issue with European countries that are considering Turkey's application to join the European Union; the charges were dropped this month.

For decades, U.S. administrations have dealt tentatively with the issue, not wishing to offend Turkey, a key political and military ally. In its Remembrance Day message last year, the Bush White House noted "the forced exile and mass killings" and "horrible loss of life" of Armenians but avoided referring to the events as genocide.

As the title implies, "The Armenian Genocide," a documentary by New York filmmaker Andrew Goldberg, is unequivocal in its take on history. PBS agreed to air the film -- whose $650,000 budget was partly funded by Armenian Americans -- without major changes, said Goldberg and Jacoba Atlas, a top PBS programming executive.

In the course of reviewing rough cuts of the film, however, Atlas said PBS officials agreed to add the panel discussion to explore other views, particularly the question of why denial exists. "It's a terrific documentary, and while we believe [the genocide] is settled history . . . you still get dissenters," she said in an interview yesterday. "We said, 'Let's approach this head-on and say why this is still contentious.' We thought it was a good thing to have both sides talking to each other. We felt the more you can shed light on an argument, the more the truth becomes clear."

"This remains a contentious piece of history," Atlas added. "There are just questions around it. Rather than have those questions dismissed, it seemed like a good idea to have a panel and let people have their say."

Atlas acknowledged that such an approach is rare for PBS and said that the Alexandria-based service has not had other panels to discuss opposing views of documentaries during her five-year tenure. She declined to say whether a documentary about the Holocaust or about the genocides in Rwanda or Cambodia would require a similar post-documentary discussion. "Those are hypothetical questions," she said.

The panel discussion, hosted by NPR's Scott Simon, was taped last week. Colgate professor Peter Balakian, an adviser on the documentary, and University of Minnesota professor Taner Akcam supported the film's view. University of Louisville professor Justin A. McCarthy and Turkish historian Omer Turan offered an alternative perspective.

Balakian, an Armenian American who wrote the best-selling "Tigris Burning: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response," said that he did not want to participate in a panel with "two bona fide deniers" but that he felt "backed into a corner" by PBS. If he had boycotted the panel, he said, it would have jeopardized the broadcast of the documentary, which Balakian called "a major and comprehensive piece of work."

Goldberg, the filmmaker, said he did not think the panel was necessary, "but I didn't fight it. It wasn't up to me and I had nothing to do with its production."

In an interview yesterday, McCarthy said the history of the period is complex and does not lend itself to simple judgments and labels. He said that he could not find evidence of 1.5 million Armenian deaths. He also said 3 million Turks died during the same period.

"If saying that both sides killed each other makes me a genocide denier, then I'm a denier," he said.

Titling the documentary "The Armenian Genocide," he said, "is a false description of a complicated history."

PBS said it is up to its 348 member stations to decide individually whether to air either the panel discussion or the documentary.

DAVID Irving, the British revisionist historian, revealed last night that he would plead guilty to charges of Holocaust denial when he appears in a Vienna court next week. Mr Irving, 67, who has been held in an Austrian prison since last November, said he did not consider himself to be a Holocaust denier but had no choice but plead "guilty as charged''.

"Under the law I've got no alternative,'' he told the television channel More4 News.

But he added: "I deny that I'm a Holocaust denier. This is a filthy smear.''

The charges date back to 1989, when the Right-wing author of books such as Hitler's War gave speeches in Vienna and Leoben in which he disputed the existence of the gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps. Under Austrian law, denying the Holocaust is illegal and punishable with a prison sentence of up to 10 years.

Mr Irving said he had been labelled a Holocaust denier by Austrian and German journalists and deliberately misunderstood. "It means they've not read anything I've written since the actual offence was committed, which is 1989 - 17 years ago,'' he said.

"If they read that, they'll see I describe in great detail what Hitler and his troops were doing to the Jews behind the Eastern front ... I'm very angry indeed about it.''

Mr Irving was arrested in Austria in November, where he was to give a lecture to a Right-wing student fraternity.

He accused Austria of acting like a "Nazi state'' for allegedly burning books of his that the authorities found - to their embarrassment - in the prison library.

Mr Irving, who lives in London and Florida, said his lawyer had advised him to plead guity.

Mr Irving lost a high-profile court case in London in 2000 in which he sued the US academic Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier. The judge described him as a "falsifier of history''.

Regnery Publishing has put out the following press release, which claims that "A coalition of professors, students, and organizations has launched a smear campaign to discredit David Horowitz’s newly-released book, The Professors."

PRESS RELEASE

Using the misnomer, “Free Exchange on Campus,” the group blatantly distorts the content of The Professors and unscrupulously impugns the Academic Freedom Campaign launched by Horowitz through his organization, Students for Academic Freedom.

Among the spurious charges alleged by the group is that The Professors attacks faculty for their political associations and beliefs, rather than for their political advocacy and indoctrination of students in the classroom.

Notably, the introduction to The Professors addresses this criticism directly and states explicitly that the purpose of the book is not to condemn university faculty for their political views: “This book is not intended as a text about left-wing bias in the university and does not propose that this bias is necessarily a problem. Every individual, whether conservative or liberal, has a perspective and therefore a bias. Professors have every right to interpret the subjects they teach according to their individual points of view. This is the essence of academic freedom.”

“The statement condemning The Professors is a naked attempt by a coalition of leftwing groups including the ACLU, the National Education Association, the pro-Castro United States Students Association and People for the American Way to censor my book before the public has a chance to read it,” commented Horowitz. “The statement is a malicious smear of my book and of the academic freedom campaign. I have not ‘retracted’ any claims about indoctrination in the classroom as the document says.”

Members of the coalition also made statements unfairly linking Horowitz to Andrew Jones who offered UCLA students money in exchange for reporting on their professors, and falsely claimed that Horowitz has retracted allegations of classroom indoctrination.

“In McCarthyite fashion, the ACLU statement accuses me of guilty association with Andrew Jones who is conducting a campaign at UCLA,” stated Horowitz. “I am not associated in any way with Andrew Jones nor is he my ‘protégé’ as the statement claims. Andrew Jones did work for me once but I fired him two years ago and have publicly denounced his campaign as the signers of this malicious statement know but choose to ignore. This is exactly the kind of attempt to suppress dissenting views that exists on our campuses today and that my book exposes.”

David Horowitz is the chairman of Students for Academic Freedom, author of the Academic Bill of Rights, and leader of a national movement to promote intellectual diversity and restore educational values to America’s institutions of higher learning. His most relcent book, The Professors, was released Monday, February 13, by Regnery Publishing.

A Washington Post researcher dug up this notice that ran on page 3 of the July 18, 1804 edition of the Gettysburg Centinel: "By a gentleman from Philadelphia we learn, that last week a duel took place at New York, between Colonel Aaron Burr, Vice President of the U. States, and General Alexander Hamilton, in which the latter was mortally wounded, and expired in a short time after he was taken from the field. The cause of the duel, or who was the challenger, we did not learn."

So you see there's a long and noble tradition of delaying disclosure when the Vice President shoots someone. Then, as now, the White House understood that the proper way for the public to learn about a shooting involving the Vice President is through rumor and gossip.
[By the way, forget the wild notions you've heard bandied about the Internet that Cheney might have been drinking heavily when he blasted his buddy. He talked to the Sheriff's Office just 18 hours after the shooting incident, and he would still have been measurably intoxicated at that point if he'd had, for example, 24 beers.]
Back to Burr and Hamilton: And as in the Deadeye Dick case, there was much confusion about what exactly transpired shortly after dawn on July 11, 1804 on the bank of the Hudson River. Burr had challenged Hamilton to the duel after taking extreme umbrage over reports that Hamilton had disparaged his character and had referred to certain "despicable" conduct by Burr. Gore Vidal, in "Burr," speculated that Hamilton had alleged that Burr had an incestuous relationship with his daughter. Ron Chernow, in his recent biography of Hamilton, writes:
"But Burr was such a dissipated, libidinous character that Hamilton had a rich field to choose from in assailing his personal reputation. Aaron Burr had been openly accused of every conceivable sin: deflowering virgins, breaking up marriages through adultery, forcing women into prostitution, accepting bribes, fornicating with slaves, looting the estates of legal clients." [And they said even worse thing about him in the blogosphere.] The precise slur didn't matter, however: "Their affair of honor was less about slurs and personal insults than politics and party leadership."
So Burr called him out. They would settle the matter like gentleman, face to face, with pistols. Complicating matters was that Hamilton had declared an aversion to shedding blood in private combat and insisted that he would "waste" his shot, intentionally missing Burr. Was this suicidal? Henry Adams and various psychobiographers have argued just that: Hamilton was depressed and wanted to die. [New theory: Texas billionaire intentionally lunged into Cheney's line of fire.] Hamilton wouldn't practice with a pistol, while Burr practiced regularly. It was going to be a slaughter.
On a ledge above the river, the seconds of the duelists marked off ten paces. The two sides drew lots and Hamilton won. He chose the position that would require him to stare directly into the blinding morning sun.
The sequence of events remains controversial. Hamilton's second, a certain Pendleton, claimed that Burr fired first and Hamilton's shot was a reflexive spasm. But Burr and his second both claimed that Hamilton fired first. Indeed they claimed that several seconds elapsed before Burr returned fire. What's indisputable is that Hamilton missed far wide of his target -- severing a tree branch high above the ground -- while Burr hit Hamilton in the abdomen. Hamilton pitched to the ground and said, "I am a dead man," an accurate prognosis. Chernow believes that Hamilton intentionally fired first, wasting his shot in the most obvious manner, believing that Burr would have the chance, as Hamilton had written the night before, "to pause and to reflect." Wishful thinking. Burr was as sentimental as a copperhead.

A US journalist whose broadcasts from London helped rally American public opinion to Britain's side during World War II, has been commemorated.

A blue plaque has been unveiled at Edward R Murrow's old home, Weymouth House in Hallam Street, central London.

Murrow, who reported from London at the height of the Blitz, would begin with his "This is London" call sign.

He famously took on Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954, with his television programme "See it Now".

His on-air conflicts with the anti-Communist crusader McCarthy are portrayed in the Bafta and Oscar-nominated film "Good Night and Good Luck", directed by George Clooney.

Murrow, born in 1908, was a renowned figure in the history of American broadcast journalism, making more than 5,000 broadcasts.

He lived in Weymouth House from 1938 to 1946, while European director for Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS).

He was a pioneer of on-the-spot reporting, and delivered one broadcast at the height of the Blitz from the roof of BBC Broadcasting House in central London as well as flying on 25 bombing raids over Europe.

Regular broadcasts for the BBC, including "Meet Uncle Sam" which promoted America to the British public, made his voice a familiar one in the UK.

He later returned to frontline broadcasting in the US.

BBC Chairman Michael Grade described Murrow as "the most distinguished figure in American broadcast journalism".

He was appointed a Knight Commander of the British Empire in 1964 as well as receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

He died from lung cancer in 1965.

The heat over China's media censorship was turned up Tuesday after a baker's dozen of senior Chinese officials warned that preventing freedom of expression would "sow the seeds of disaster for political and social transition." The government's decision to shut down "Freezing Point," an investigative section of the China Youth Daily, came in response to an article written by professor Yuan Weishi, Al Jazeera reports. In the piece, Mr. Yuan questioned the official Chinese line on the 19th-century Opium Wars and the 1900 Boxer Rebellion.

Yuan told Aljazeera.net: "Since 1949 Chinese historians have said that the Boxer Rebellion has been an important event in the forming of modern China."

Referring to a Marxist based historiography that has portrayed the rebellion as a struggle against colonialism, Yuan says that from his research, "the Boxers were simply an army bent on destruction".

Yuan suggested Chinese textbooks were factually incorrect and fostered prejudice and resentment among young Chinese.

In a statement, officials said the article had "seriously contradicted news propaganda discipline; seriously damaged the national feelings of the Chinese people ... and it created a bad social influence".

Russia today marked the 50th anniversary of Nikita Khrushchev's "secret speech," in which he denounced the crimes committed under dictator Josef Stalin and the cult of personality surrounding the deceased Soviet leader. Today was an occasion for Russians to reexamine the impact of this legendary speech on their country's history.

Khrushchev's speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union -- held 14-25 February 1956 -- entered history as the first step toward de-Stalinization.

In this speech, Khrushchev accused his predecessor, Josef Stalin, of creating a regime based on "suspicion, fear, and terror." Khrushchev added that he wanted to break the cult of Stalin, who had died three years before.

He condemned the mass repressions that took place between 1936 and 1938, lashed out at Stalin's foreign policy during World War II, and accused him of nationalism and anti-Semitism.

Khrushchev was the first official publicly to denounce Stalin's policies, and his sensational speech stunned the senior party officials gathered at the congress.

According to delegates who witnessed the speech, it provoked deep shock among the audience -- many delegates were reportedly crying, others were holding their heads in despair, and several even had heart attacks in the conference hall.

Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalinism became known as the "secret speech," since it was delivered behind closed doors and was not made public until 18 March 1956.

Roy Medvedev, a historian who in 1956 was a school director in a provincial Russian city, describes how he first heard the content of the speech.

"They gathered activists, all the party members, all the Komsomol members, the directors of kolkhozs [communal farms[ and sovkhozs [state farms]," Medvedev says. "The instructor of the district Communist Party arrived, took out a red book, and told us: 'I am going to read you the secret speech of Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev at the 20th congress.' For four hours, we listed to this report. There were people present who had fought in World War II and worshipped Stalin. There were people like me, whose father was repressed and died in prison and who knew about torture and camps."

In the aftermath of the speech, tens of thousands of political prisoners were set free. Khrushchev's words also had huge repercussions in Eastern Europe, where it fuelled hopes of political change, particularly in Poland and Hungary.

Secrecy, however, shrouded the speech for many years -- the full text was not published in Russia until 1988, some 32 years later.

Medvedev says it took a long time for him to realize its full impact.

"The press was not reporting anything," Medvedev says. "There was no television back then, no information. Very serious processes were set in motion about which we knew nothing. Two days or so after the congress, Western Communist parties protested. They asked why this had to be done. A secret correspondence immediately started with the Chinese Communist Party, which resolutely condemned the 20th congress. It was an event of colossal historical significance."

While most communists still view it as an act of treason and say it has done more harm than good, many observers hail it as the beginning of the end of the repressive Stalinist era.

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev said yesterday that Khrushchev's speech had much wider implications than just demolishing the cult of Stalin.

He said it laid the foundation for perestroika by addressing, in his words, "not only the cult of personality, but also democratic problems and ways to manage the country."

Historians have often described Khrushchev as a liberal reformer. They stress, however, that this "liberalism" soon showed its limits. Just nine months later, in November 1956, Soviet tanks were crushing an anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary, killing thousands of protesters.

Many art historians and anthropologists believe Paleolithic cave wall art was done by accomplished shaman-artists, but mixed in with the finer paintings are graffiti-like scenes of sex and hunting.

An analysis of thousands of paintings from the late Pleistocene epoch suggests the graffiti artists back then were likely the same as today—teenage males.

Most cave art from 10,000 to 35,000 years ago was done by hand, quite literally. Artists would chew up a bit of red ocher, place their hand against a wall, and spit over their hand.

"It was like kids taking a pencil and drawing an outline around their hand," said Dale Guthrie, a paleobiologist from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Men and women have different hand proportions—men have thicker thumbs and palms—so by analyzing the dimensions of the hands in European cave art, and comparing them to 1,000 photocopies of modern hands of men and women of different ages, Guthrie determined just who painted what.

Men and women and boys and girls of all ages left their marks but, statistically, teenage males dominated, contrary to popular belief.

Most of the paintings are of large game, such as bison, horse, ibex, and red deer. Cave bears and lions, which would have inspired fear, were also depicted.

Many of the hunting scenes, although sloppily done compared to the fine, finished work of an adult artist back then, are full of graphic detail.

"Lots of the wild animals in the caves have spears in them and blood coming out of their mouths and everything that a hunter would be familiar with," Guthrie told LiveScience. "These were the Ferraris and football games of their time. They painted what was on their minds."

And as with modern teenagers, the ancients had more on their minds than just cars and sports.

"In the graffiti, there is a lot of below-the-belt-art," Guthrie said. "The people in the art are predominantly women, and not a single one has any clothes on."

But these weren't just any women, they were Pleistocene Pamela Andersons adorned with ludicrously huge breasts and hips. The walls were also decorated with graphic depictions of genitalia.

"These were not the type of paintings that make it into the coffee table art books," Guthrie said.

While female artists accounted for less than 20 percent of the cave art, they were being creative in other ways, researchers say.

"What we find in the fossil record doesn't always represent what was going on," Guthrie said. "Prior to the pottery age, women in all societies are working in things that don't preserve very well, such as skins and braiding fiber."

Persian speaking websites have published a letter from Haaroon Yashayayi, the president of Tehran’s Jewish Association, to the Iranian President. Following is an English translation provided by Hossein Alizadeh, Program staff of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Iran Initiative.

Dear Mr. President,

Our apologies for interrupting your busy schedule and your around-the-clock efforts to solve the people’s problems, but we felt compelled to discuss a series of concerns that in the past few weeks have become a major preoccupation for the people of the world, the Iranian people and the Jewish community.

The small community of Iranian Jews is deeply horrified by the daily denial by the Iranian public media of the genocide of the Jews by Nazi Germany, one of the saddest incidents of the 20th century. This denial has also brought disbelief and shock to world public opinion.

How can anyone try to justify the crimes of Hitler’s Fascist regime and dismiss the devastating effects of World War II, which resulted in the death of 50 million people and caused so much damage to many nations, including our homeland Iran? Those who try to do so are undoubtedly viewing events through the lens of their political prejudice, a prejudice that has its roots in Western secularism and not in Islamic values.

How can anyone forget the charter of the Nazi party and their racist philosophy of ethnically cleansing Europe of Jews? Those who can’t recall these events can pick up Hitler’s Mein Kampf and listen to the speeches by Goebbels and Himmler to refresh their memories …

How can anyone, on the basis of a few comments by a few godless people, dismiss all this hard and undeniable evidence about the mass murder and mass displacement of European Jews during WWII? Even worse, how can anyone use the [fabrications], and make up more stories around them, and sell them to their unsophisticated audience as the honest truth?

Mr. President:

There is no doubt about the fact that some 50 million people lost their lives to WWII. Debating whether the Jews made up six million or only one million of the victims is beside the point … Don’t you think that denying the victimization of the Jews is a step toward diminishing the value of those 50 million human lives? Don’t you think that such a position only undermines the core values of the Islamic revolution, the teachings of the late Imam Khomeini, and the ancient traditional beliefs of Iranians? And all of this because of some fleeting political sentiments?

Mr. President:

The Holocaust is not a fairy tale; it is a horrible event that will remain a blemish on the face of the Western Civilization, an infected, dirty wound. You should be aware that the leaders of the Neo-Nazis in Europe, who are now busy burning houses of black people and vandalizing Muslim neighborhoods, may commit something worse than a Holocaust on the Muslims.

Your Excellency Dr. Ahmadinejad:

The Holocaust is not a fairy tale, in the same way that Saddam Hussein’s genocide in Halabjeh was not a fairy tale, as the murder of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians by Sharon’s thugs in Sabra and Shatila was not a fairy tale, as the Muslim genocide in the Balkans was not a fairy tale, and as current events in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Sudan are not a fairy tale.

Your Excellency:

There are doubts about the number of innocent Jews who were killed during the Holocaust, but these debates are only about the exact number and not a debate about whether the Holocaust ever took place or not.

It is true that the Zionists have been exploiting the Holocaust to pose as victims and there is historic evidence about some radical Zionist groups collaborating with the Fascists and Nazis to intensify the Holocaust. But no one can ever doubt that millions of Gypsies, Jews, Polish and Slovak citizens, and even Muslims were murdered by Nazis and the Red Army. We honor the innocence of all those poor victims, of whom Jews were only a small part.

Dear Mr. President:

We are worried that current debate over the Holocaust will undermine the core values of our Islamic Revolution— to defend the right of all underdogs and protect their freedom—and instead will promote ultra-nationalistic and racist sentiments that can only fuel senseless ethnic and religious tensions.

How is it possible to set up a scholarly investigation into a social phenomenon, without even examining the arguments of the other party? How scientific can such an inquiry be if its results are already decided?

It is a shame that there are those who want to waste our youth’s time and energy to figure out whether six million Jews died during the Holocaust or only one million. Such a discussion only glorifies the most worthless aspects of Western civilization’s heritage, namely racism and ethnic violence.

Dear Mr. President:

Orchestrating endless show-trials to deny the Holocaust accomplishes nothing for Iranians, Muslims or Palestinians. The only purpose that these shows can serve is to please bigots and racists.

We write this letter with the best intentions, hoping that you can put an end to this unprecedented Holocaust-denial propaganda and demonstrate to world public opinion that our Islamic civilization does not tolerate racism and genocide under any circumstances.

PBS is planning to air immediately after the April 17 broadcast of Andrew Goldberg's "The Armenian Genocide" documentary, a 25-minute long panel discussion that includes two genocide deniers, Asbarez reported last week. A petition is now circulating to protest PBS's plan.

Goldberg told this writer that he did not agree with the PBS decision to hold a panel discussion on the Armenian Genocide. "I don't believe such a panel is necessary. I had absolutely nothing to do with it," he said.

Prof. Fatma Muge Gocek, a Turkish American scholar who opposes the Turkish government's denials of the Armenian Genocide, explained to this writer why she refused to be on the panel: "I felt that I had said what I wanted to say in the documentary and I did not understand what additional discussion was going to contribute to it, other than give Justin McCarthy and Omer Turan a chance to articulate the Turkish state view. I see this as PBS politicizing the issue and giving in to Turkish State pressure. It sets a bad precedent and it is bound to be hailed as a victory by the Turkish State and their nationalist Diaspora. I would rather not have the documentary aired at all under such conditions."

The panel discussion, pre-taped by PBS on Feb. 6, included Prof. Peter Balakian (Colgate Univ., NY), Prof. Taner Akcam (Univ. of Minnesota), Prof. Justin McCarthy (Univ. of Louisville), and Prof. Omer Turan (Middle East Technical Univ., Ankara). The moderator was Scott Simon of NPR (National Public Radio). Balakian is the author of "The Burning Tigris" and "Black Dog of Fate." Akcam is a Turkish scholar who is a staunch defender of the facts of the Armenian Genocide. McCarthy and Turan are genocide deniers.

In a lengthy letter dated Nov. 28, 2005, Balakian wrote to David Davis, the Vice President of National TV Production at PBS, explaining why he strongly objected to the post-documentary panel discussion. Saying, "this would be a serious mistake for both intellectual and ethical reasons," Balakian made the following arguments:

"First, it seems to me that there is no need for it. My understanding is that post-show discussions are tagged on to documentaries that lack balance. The Armenian Genocide documentary is well-balanced, and is ground-breaking because there are more than a half-dozen Turkish voices in the film -- both Turkish scholars discussing the Armenian Genocide and some Turkish voices denying it. If this were not the case, I could see that there might be a reason to follow it with a discussion about Turkish perspectives, but here, at last, we have an extraordinary number of Turkish voices already incorporated.

"Second, from a scholarly perspective, I think it's important for PBS to understand that the Armenian Genocide is not a controversial issue. What happened to the Armenians in the last days of the Ottoman Empire is genocide - this is the mainstream consensus worldwide....

"Third, I believe it is ethically wrong to privilege deniers by giving their position equal weight. This is the conclusion the New York Times, Boston Globe, Chronicle of Higher Education and other media have come to....

"Fourth, with all due respect to the pressures on PBS, this is still the United States of America - our country and culture -- and our own Public Broadcasting System. There is no reason why fear of protests by a foreign government should inform our culture's programming. In the struggle for truth in the face of coercion and cover-up, it is vitally important for distinguished institutions, particularly public ones, to hold their ground in the face of Turkish government intimidation. By giving Turkey additional airtime following a fair documentary on the Armenian Genocide, PBS in effect would be supporting Turkey's well-funded denialist campaign."

I agree with all of Prof. Balakian's well-reasoned arguments. Even though I am quite confident that Balakian and Akcam could easily demolish McCarthy's and Turan's baseless conjectures, I find it offensive that PBS is providing to genocide revisionists a platform from which they can spew their denialist venom. As Prof. Gocek suggested earlier, this panel discussion would create an unwelcome precedent for all future programs on the Armenian Genocide.

Furthermore, the holding of such a panel is an insult to both the victims as well as the survivors of the Armenian Genocide. Since PBS executives would never think of including neo-Nazis in a panel discussion following the airing of a Holocaust documentary, why would they do it in the case of an Armenian Genocide documentary?

As I had stated in an earlier review, Goldberg's documentary is already excessively fair and balanced. It includes remarks by several Turkish revisionists. There is no need to further balance it by adding more denialists in a panel after the show.

I suggest that all those who disagree with the PBS decision to provide a platform to genocide revisionists take the following actions: Send an e-mail to Jacoba Atlas, Senior Vice President of PBS programming, asking her to cancel the airing of the panel discussion. Her e-mail address is: jatlas@pbs.org;

Contact your local PBS station and urge the programming director not approve the airing of the panel discussion (each station, independently of PBS, decides whether or not to air this optional panel discussion); Advise your station manager that if he goes ahead with the airing of the panel discussion, you would neither watch nor financially support the station. Furthermore, you would urge the station's corporate and foundation sponsors to cease their support;

If no satisfactory action is taken by PBS, then contact your Congressional representative, asking that Congress cut back the funding to PBS because of its insensitivity to viewers' concerns;

If the panel discussion is aired, whenever PBS broadcasts a Turkey-related documentary in the future, demand that a panel discussion be held after each show to balance the Turkish propaganda.

All those who care about upholding the truth should not allow PBS to question the veracity of the Armenian Genocide under pressure from the Turkish government and its hired guns.

Gregory Pappy Boyington, a graduate of the Univeristy of Washington (went to High School in Tacoma), winner of the medal of honor, who shot down 28 enemy aircraft and was a prisoner of war for 20 months, has been refused a memorial by the student senate.

Apparently he "is not the type of person we want to honor" and some even went so far as to liken his duty in WW2 to murder. One of the biggest antagonists of the proposal was apparently the leader of the student Democratic Party.

A Dutch expert has confirmed that two paintings, part of Warsaw's royal palace collection, are authentic works by the famous 17th-century artist Rembrandt, a Polish art official said on Tuesday.

The conclusion reached by the expert, Ernst van den Wetering, puts an end to the uproar over whether they were genuine works by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), which art historians have been insisting on since 1969.


"Polish art historians, convinced that they were Rembrandt paintings, still wanted to get the opinion of professsor van den Wetering, who is considered the top Rembrandt expert," said Regina Dmowska, who is in charge of restoring the artworks.


The Dutch expert made two visits to Warsaw and this week reached a positive conclusion that "they were indeed Rembrandt works," she said.


She said the two paintings were signed but that was not the basis for declaring the authenticity of the works. "It was the style of Rembrandt's painting," she said.


Once the restoration is completed, the paintings will be sent to Amsterdam to be displayed in the Rembrandt House Museum starting April 1. Afterwards they will be shown in Berlin at the Gemaldegalerie der Staatlichen Museum.


A number of exhibits have been organized this year to mark the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt's birth, starting with the opening a few days ago at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

New book names the "101 most dangerous academics in America." Some included feel honored, and others see McCarthyism.

Caroline Higgins is 66 years old, and at 5’2” she’s not a daunting figure. Walking on the Earlham College campus last week, she ran into one of her students, a football player who very much towers over her. She mentioned that she was about to be named to a list of the “101 most dangerous academics in America.”

Higgins said that her student just started laughing — and that for anyone who knows her, “dangerous” just isn’t the word that comes to mind. She teaches peace studies.

But today, with the release of David Horowitz’s new book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, Caroline Higgins finds herself in elite company. She makes the list along with such big name academic stars as Derrick Bell, Michael Bérubé, bell hooks, Noam Chomsky and Eric Foner. Horowitz, a one-time ’60s radical, includes plenty of ’60s radicals who didn’t have the conversion experience he did, so Angela Davis and Bernadine Dohrn make the list, of course, along with the likes of Ward Churchill and a who’s who in Middle Eastern studies.

Most of the 377-page book consists of short essays on each professor – they are in alphabetical order and are not ranked according to their relative danger levels, although there are cross-listings so a reader can jump to scholars with similar ideas.

Whether to laugh at the book, like Higgins’s student, or to take it seriously, has been the subject of much discussion among academic groups and those who made the list in recent weeks. Some fear taking Horowitz too seriously will only legitimize his sometimes breathless attacks. (The book jacket promises information about professors who “say they want to kill white people,” “support Osama bin Laden,” and “defend pedophilia.”)

Some professors worry that they really don’t gain much by discussing a book that can have them explaining that, no, they are not murdering, pro-terrorist, child molesters. And several said that they hoped the press would just ignore the book. Others who are named — and academic groups that represent them — disagree. They say that a book with blurbs by Harvard professors, a Congressman, and a talk show host is going to cause a splash. With Horowitz‘s list likely to outsell Derek Bok’s new book, academics who just view The Professors as a joke risk having their ideas distorted and losing credibility as Horowitz defines their work for large audiences of the people who don’t frequent faculty clubs.

On Friday, a new coalition of academic groups — called Free Exchange on Campus — issued a joint denunciation of The Professors as “a blacklist” that was attempting to intimidate leading thinkers on campuses. The coalition includes the three groups that represent more faculty members than any other organizations: the American Association of University Professors, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Education Association. Others involved in the coalition include the American Civil Liberties Union and the United States Student Association.

At 68 years old, Beatrice Goodwin wants to know where she came from, reports CBS News correspondent Trish Regan. Her grandfather, Clarence Tilley, was born in Portsmouth, N.H., in 1870, and she can trace her family as far back as her great-grandmother, who died the day Beatrice was born.

"I think sometimes the older you get, the more interested you get in who you are or who you were, where you came from," says Beatrice.

Now, a recent discovery in the small seaside town of Portsmouth may provide Beatrice with a crucial link to her past and at the same time, force this community to confront a largely forgotten part of its history.

During a routine construction project, workers stumbled onto a 300-year-old colonial slave cemetery — one of just two discovered buried beneath cities in the North. The other was found in Lower Manhattan in New York City, 15 years ago.

Archeologists Kathleen Wheeler and Ellen Marlatt excavated the Portsmouth site. From beneath these streets, they removed eight coffins and examined the remains of 13 people. They believe as many as 200 graves remain.

"It was kind of a social amnesia involved in that whoever this community of African Americans was, at some point they were forgotten and then the street was built over them," says Wheeler.

Slavery ended throughout New England by 1800 according to historian Valerie Cunningham. Sixty years later, it had become a distant memory.

"By the time of the Civil War slavery was not an issue in the North," Cunningham says. "The issue was in the South and so it was very easy to continue to demonize the South after the Civil War."

Geneticist Bruce Jackson is testing samples from those buried in Portsmouth to see if he can make a DNA link to residents like Beatrice Goodwin — and also to people living in Africa hundreds of years earlier.

"It's very likely they came from the Congo, or what's now the Republic of the Congo. And that is what we're focusing on," Jackson says.

If DNA results do eventually confirm a link between Beatrice and the slaves buried deep beneath Portsmouth, Beatrice says it will be a painful truth for her to recognize. However, it will also be a necessary journey — one that will give her children and grandchildren the answers she has sought most of her life.

Former President Jimmy Carter, who publicly rebuked President Bush's warrantless eavesdropping program this week during the funeral of Coretta Scott King and at a campaign event, used similar surveillance against suspected spies.

"Under the Bush administration, there's been a disgraceful and illegal decision -- we're not going to the let the judges or the Congress or anyone else know that we're spying on the American people," Mr. Carter said Monday in Nevada when his son Jack announced his Senate campaign.

"And no one knows how many innocent Americans have had their privacy violated under this secret act," he said.

The next day at Mrs. King's high-profile funeral, Mr. Carter evoked a comparison to the Bush policy when referring to the "secret government wiretapping" of civil rights leader Martin Luther King.

But in 1977, Mr. Carter and his attorney general, Griffin B. Bell, authorized warrantless electronic surveillance used in the conviction of two men for spying on behalf of Vietnam.
The men, Truong Dinh Hung and Ronald Louis Humphrey, challenged their espionage convictions to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which unanimously ruled that the warrantless searches did not violate the men's rights.

In its opinion, the court said the executive branch has the "inherent authority" to wiretap enemies such as terror plotters and is excused from obtaining warrants when surveillance is "conducted 'primarily' for foreign intelligence reasons."

That description, some Republicans say, perfectly fits the Bush administration's program to monitor calls from terror-linked people to the U.S.

The Truong case, however, involved surveillance that began in 1977, before the enactment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which established a secret court for granting foreign intelligence warrants.

A red-faced auction house was forced to withdraw a letter it believed was written and signed by the late President Ronald Reagan while he was suffering from Alzheimer's disease after it discovered it was a forgery.

The autographed letter was supposed to be auctioned off this month, but Bill Panagopulos, president of Alexander Autographs in Greenwich, Conn., told CBSNews.com the letter was withdrawn after the forger came forward and admitted his handiwork.

Originally it was believed Reagan wrote the note to a friend in February of 1998, about four years after he mostly disappeared from public view following his announcement that he had Alzheimer's Disease. In the letter he told a friend, "Individuals like you give me the courage and inspiration to move forward, and with your prayers and God's grace, we'll know we will be able to face this long latest challenge." He adds a P.S: "I didn't write this with Nancy's help."

But Panagopulos said the letter was actually a form letter that Reagan wrote in 1994 to thank those who expressed sympathy for his affliction. Reagan had hundreds copied onto his official letterhead.

The Virginia Historic Resources Board has approved a new historic highway marker in Prince Edward County, Virginia. The Board meeting was held in June 2005 and voted to authorize a marker to commemorate the birthplace of United States Senator Blanche Kelso Bruce.

A dedication ceremony will be held on March 1, 2006 at 12 p.m. for the unveiling of this historical highway marker on the 165th birthday of Senator Bruce. This historical highway marker will be unveiled at the intersection of highway 360 and 623 near Green Bay, Prince Edward County, Virginia. The public is invited to attend this dedication.

Blanche Kelso Bruce was born into slavery two miles south of Green Bay, Prince Edward County, on 1 March 1841, son of Polly Bruce, a slave, and a Virginia planter. Bruce spent his childhood years in Virginia on the plantation of Pettus Perkinson where he received his earliest education. He worked as a field hand and printer's apprentice as his master moved him from Virginia to Mississippi and Missouri.

At the beginning of the Civil War, Bruce escaped slavery and eventually settled in Lawrence, Kansas where he organized the state's first school for African Americans. At the end of the Civil War, Bruce moved to Hannibal, Missouri where he established and taught in the first school for African Americans in the state. In 1866, Bruce entered Oberlin College in Ohio where he remained for one year as a result of financial difficulties and was forced to leave. The following year, he was employed as a porter on the steamer Columbia, which traveled between St. Louis, Missouri and Council Bluffs, Iowa.

In 1869, Bruce moved to Mississippi and established himself as a prosperous landowner. In subsequent years, during Reconstruction, he was appointed registrar of voters in Tallahatchie County and was elected Sergeant-At-Arms of the new State Senate. In 1871, Bruce assumed several political positions. He was appointed tax assessor and superintendent of education in Bolivar County and elected sheriff and tax collector of Bolivar County. Bruce gained the attention of powerful white Republicans who dominated Mississippi's Reconstruction government. These Republicans secured more appointments for Bruce and made him the most recognized African American political leader in the state.

In February 1874, the Mississippi legislature elected Bruce to the United State Senate. Bruce formally entered the Senate on 5 March 1875, and was elected to three committees: Pensions; Manufactures; and Education and Labor. On 14 February 1879, during the debate on Chinese exclusion bill that he opposed, Bruce became the first African American senator to preside over a Senate session. On 7 April 1879, he was appointed chairman of the Select Committee to Investigate the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company.

Following the close of his Senate service on 3 March 1881, Bruce rejected an offer of the ministry to Brazil because slavery was still practiced there. In May 1881, Bruce was appointed as Registrar of the Treasury and served until 1885. Bruce served as Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia from 1891-1893 and again as Register of the Treasury from 1897 until his death. Bruce served as a trustee of Howard University, which conferred on him the degree of LL.D. in 1890. He also served as a trustee of the District of Columbia public schools. Senator Bruce died on 17 March 1898 in Washington, DC and was interred in Woodlawn Cemetery in Washington, DC.

Blanche Kelso Bruce became the first African American U.S. Senator to serve a full six-year term.

The historic highway marker was proposed and sponsored by the African American Heritage Preservation Foundation, Inc. in Washington, D.C. The African American Heritage Preservation Foundation, Inc. (AAHPF), a not for profit 501©(3) organization, that is dedicated to the preservation of African American history and historical sites was established in June 1994. AAHPF has been primarily engaged in activities that include the preservation, maintenance, and awareness of endangered or little-known African American historical sites primarily in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast Regions.

Financial support was also provided by Longwood University and Hampden-Sydney College. Funds for new highway markers come from private organizations, individuals, and local jurisdictions.

The Virginia highway marker program is one of the oldest in the nation. Currently there are 2,000-plus official state markers, mostly installed and maintained by the Virginia Department of Transportation.

“Virginia's historical highway marker program for more than 75 years has been providing history lessons to the traveling public along Virginia's scenic roadways,” said recently retired Secretary of Natural Resources W. Tayloe Murphy, Jr. “These markers help educate the public about the important people, places, and events of our state and country's history.”


E. Renee Ingram
President and Founder
African American Heritage Preservation Foundation, Inc.
420 Seventh Street NW Suite 501
Washington, DC 20004-2211

The 2006 National Conference on Cultural Property Protection will be conducted at the Crystal Gateway Marriott in Arlington, VA, from February 26 to March 1, 2006. Included: presentations by Bonnie Magness-Gardiner and Matthew Bogdanos.

The future of heritage railways is being threatened by new safety requirements, according to steam enthusiasts.

Under Health and Safety Executive regulations, volunteers could have to pay bills running into thousands of pounds to keep their cherished schemes alive.

"Many of us feel that nothing would make safety authorities happier than to see us all closed down," David Morgan, the chairman of the Heritage Railway Association," told The Daily Telegraph yesterday. "The safest railway must be one on which a train never moves."