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Arguably, the letter played a part in changing English history - the split from Rome. The queen - Henry's first wife - miserable and at her wit's end, asks for help from her nephew Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor.

"There is no need for my relating to Your Highness the sufferings that I and my daughter undergo, as well in the treatment of our lives, as in the surprises and affronts which every day the King's Council puts upon us, for our troubles are matters of universal notoriety …"

Catherine wants Charles to use his influence to get Pope Clement VII to uphold her marriage.

A month later he did, to the anger of the king, who had already had the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, grant the annulment. The chain reaction and his subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn led to the break with the Catholic Church. "It is an extraordinary letter," said Marsha Malinowski of Sotheby's in New York. "It is so rare to have someone of such high standing write in her own hand, not using a secretary."

Catherine was 39 when she wrote the letter, which is one of only two by Henry's first wife to appear at auction for more than 20 years. It is expected to sell for between $US100,000 ($131,000) and $US150,000 on December 11.

On October 18, the legal affairs commission of the parliament finalized amendments to a draft law on the disclosure of information about former KGB agents, and decided to postpone the release of declassified data from November 1, 2006 until March 1, 2007.

The commission said it intends to publish all 4,500 names and aliases used by former KGB agents in Latviisky vestnik, an official government newsletter.

The discussion of the need to disclose information about secret KGB agents has been ongoing in Latvia since 1991, when the country gained its independence from the Soviet Union. In 2004, parliament officially endorsed disclosure.

According to Latvian law, former agents of the Soviet state security services may not vote in any elections or be elected, so the disclosure may deal a telling blow to Latvia's political elite.

Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga strongly opposed the disclosure, saying that publishing information about former KGB agents will endanger their privacy and personal security.

Commenting on the decision, well-known Latvian historian Pyotr Krupnikov said the disclosure makes little sense at present.

He said KGB leadership realized in 1990 that the Soviet rule may end soon and ordered to transfer the most sensitive part of the archives to Moscow.

"And now they [the Latvian authorities] want to publish the part [of the archives] that had been left, although it is clear that the most important data was taken to Moscow and, most probably, will never be made public," Krupnikov said.

Some 17,000 French servicemen were involved -- mostly at a distance -- in the failed offensive to seize the Suez canal back from Gamal Abdel Nasser, according to the Association of Veterans of Suez and Cyprus, but the government refuses to grant them the status of war veteran.

"The government says we were only 60 days in the war-zone -- so we don't qualify because the law says you have to be there 90 days to get social and pension rights as veterans," said the association's president Andre Painsecq, 72.

"But it is rubbish. Many of us were there for much more than 90 days -- and just after the crisis the defence minister even published a decree fixing the duration at 113 days. It is scandalous. Our British colleagues got far better treatment ," he said.

Enquiry at the ministry of veterans' affairs in Paris confirms that there is no record of those who took part.

Neither in France nor Britain is the Suez conflict a happy memory.

In 1956, following Nasser's nationalisation of the canal, Israel, France and Britain colluded in an elaborate plan under which Israel attacked Egypt, and France and Britain sent paratroopers to "separate the belligerents" but in practice to secure the waterway.

But the USSR threatened to intervene with nuclear weapons and US President Dwight D. Eisenhower refused to back Britain, leading to an abrupt end to the fighting after 10 days, withdrawal of foreign forces at the end of the year and the arrival of the first ever UN peacekeepers.

France and Britain had only a few dozen casualties, Israel around 200, and Egypt several thousand including 1,650 dead.

Widely seen as a fiasco, the crisis led to the resignation of British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, severely strained trans-Atlantic relations and undermined both France's and Britain's standing in the Arab world, where the invasion is still known as the "Tripartite Aggression".

But if in Britain the anniversary on October 29 is being marked by much historical comment and analysis -- as well as a three-part drama documentary on the BBC -- in France the forgotten servicemen reflect a general amnesia about a conflict that has all but slipped from the national consciousness.

"Perhaps in Britain people are more honest. They wanted the truth so they talked about what happened. After all even if it was a disaster, it is history. But here it is just forgotten," said Andre Jesupret, 71, who served an a mechanic on French aircraft in Cyprus.

The reasons for France's memory loss about Suez are various, according to historian Philippe Vial.

"In Britain Suez became the symbol of the end of the imperial destiny. It had huge resonance. But in France it was lost in the rush of events in the dying phase of the Fourth Republic," he said.

France joined the invasion just as its war in Algeria was intensifying. Indeed Paris's reason for wanting to topple Nasser was the belief he was aiding the Algerian rebellion. In early 1957 began the urban guerrilla war known as the battle of Algiers, and Suez disappeared from the headlines.

Another factor is that many of those involved in Suez -- for example defence minister Maurice Bourges-Maunoury -- disappeared from political history with Charles de Gaulle's Fifth Republic in 1958. "A generation of leaders simply vanished from the national memory," said Vial.

A third reason for official amnesia may be that Suez marked the high point of a close alliance between France and Israel, which could not be further at odds from Paris's current policy of engagement in the Arab world.

It was France in the 1950s that was Israel's main arms supplier -- providing Mirage jets as well as the technology for the Israeli nuclear programme.

"It is ironic because what everyone has forgotten is that France was much more gung-ho about Suez than the British were," said Vial.

"All the historical interpretation has come from the British side, so there's the impression that -- to quote the title of the BBC series -- this was a 'very British crisis'. But that is not accurate. It was a very French affair too," he said.

The project, which began in 1996, was organized by Lucia "Cinder" Stanton, Shannon Senior Historian at Monticello. Stanton said she and a team of University graduate students compiled the information from Thomas Jefferson's "Farm Book" --personal records containing his farming, personal finances and slave accounts--as well as Jefferson's letters and other written accounts.

According to Stanton, the database includes records of over 600 slaves. It also answers questions about slavery at Monticello, such as how slaves were acquired, and offers several text biographies of individual slaves, Stanton said.

The database is different from other current online resources, she said, because "it's grouped by individuals ... there's nothing quite like it available."

Stanton said she created the database in order to "bring into focus the whole nature of slavery at Monticello."

She hopes it will "both create curiosity about topic generally, and also show that the people who were in slavery were not just nameless victims, that they had lives as fathers and mothers."

"The human dimension is missing from so much about slavery, but it is recoverable, and I think this Web site will help with that," Stanton said.

Scot French, associate director at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, said the Web site will allow researchers to see the full scope of Jefferson's original Monticello holdings.

According to French, Jefferson's original property was "much bigger than what you see today. The Monticello historic site is just a portion of one of Jefferson's Albemarle County farms."

French added that the Web site is part of a recent trend of making research materials more accessible for public use. He noted that online resources like the Library of Congress Web site and the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery are making information more readily available.

"If you put together these resources, I think you see that more and more material is being made available to the public," French said.

French commended Monticello for its increase in online materials and research on the history of slavery.

"I'm very excited that Monticello has added to their growing collection of digitized materials, particularly on the subject of slavery, which for many years had not been addressed by curators of Monticello," he said. "Since the 1980s Monticello has been working to address this very painful subject head-on."

Delphi, which draws tourists by the thousand each year, lies on the almost sheer side of Mount Parnassus in central Greece. Great fissures in the cliff overlooking the site mask deep geological faults through which toxic gases seep to the surface, reducing oxygen in the cave — the Navel of the Earth — where the priestess de- livered her often obscure political oracles.

The priestess, known to the ancients as Pythia, would thus be in a state of mild anoxia — a partial lack of oxygen in the brain — inducing the ecstatic trance that classical writers said brought forth the oracles. They, however, claimed that Pythia entered her trance by chewing laurel leaves while sniffing the vapours of hallucinogenic herbs.

Two years ago a team headed by George Papatheodorou, Emeritus Professor of Geology at Patras University, and Giorgio Etiope, of Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology, detected traces of methane, ethanol and carbon dioxide in the narrow cave where the Pythia is believed to have sat on a tripod while uttering her messages, often in high-pitched shrieks.

“There is a close relationship between the site of the Delphic Oracle and its geology,” Dr Papatheodorou told Kathimerini newspaper. “The site lies on a fault where gases leak out. These gases cause an oxygen reduction that induces a mild hypnotic state that could well produce hallucinations.”

The gases were detected in the summers of 2004 and 2005 by a sensor placed on the floor of the cave where the Pythia reputedly sat. “We have formulated a scientific hypothesis that we believe is a credible scenario,” Dr Papatheodorou said.

The historian Plutarch, who himself served as a priest at Delphi, wrote that a sweetish odour inundated the premises while the Pythia was in her trance. This, according to Dr Papatheodorou, could have been ethylene gas, though no trace of it was found during the recent search. “Nothing can be ruled out, as geological changes could have taken place since ancient times,” he said.

To the ancient Greeks the Delphic Oracle was the supreme divine word. But its often ambiguous pronouncements were shamelessly reinterpreted to suit particular policies and interests. Some modern writers speculate that the Pythian trance was an elaborate fraud, and that the priestesses were highly alert and well informed about Greek affairs thanks to a network of agents.

Blocher claims that freedom of expression is more important than protecting the sensibilities of minority groups, NZZ wrote.

Blocher just returned from a trip to Turkey where a public discussion of the Armenian genocide is de facto punishable by a court of law.

Upon his return home, Blocher said that he believes that Swiss laws needs to be a beacon for other nations.

As far as the minister is concerned, a ban on free speech in Turkey has made an effective public discussion of the Armenian genocide and Kurdish issues there impossible. In effect, he claims that widening the possibilities for freedom of speech in Switzerland might entice other countries to do the same.

The move torpedoed efforts to use the 50th anniversary to unite the country in the spirit of the 1956 uprising, when a peaceful student protest spontaneously turned into a mass upheaval against Stalinist oppression.

But on hand to remember the uprising were 18 European presidents and two prime ministers, the kings of Spain and Norway, and the heads of the European Commission and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.