BERLIN -- There can be few marriages quite as strange or as burdened by history as that of the German politician Vera Lengsfeld and her former husband, who spied on her for the East German secret police. “I have forgiven him,” the 54-year-old former dissident said. But she made it clear that personal forgiveness was as complex as the uneasy unification of Germany.

This, after all, was no conventional marital betrayal — no fling with a neighbour or office romance. Every halfway political conversation, every dinner with friends became the subject of a report to the Stasi.

“Now we have to see if he wants to meet me again,” she said. We are sitting in a corner of the high-walled Hohenschönhausen prison in Berlin, one of the most notorious of Stasi jails that is now an open museum. Ms Lengsfeld has just shown me her old cell and the exercise yard, seven paces long, five paces wide. Prisoners were deliberately subjected to radiation. “Thousands were psychologically destroyed,” she added.

In the wake of last year's controversy over the publication of cartoons of the prophet Mohammed, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad decided to launch an international cartoon contest. The objective: invite people from all over the world to question the reality of the Holocaust. The contest drew participants from all over the world and yielded more than 200 Holocaust-related cartoons.

The first prize went to Moroccan cartoonist Abdellah Derkaoui. His caricature features an Israeli crane building a high wall around Jerusalem. In the background, half hidden by the wall, lies the dome of the Al-Aqsa mosque. Painted on the wall is a picture of the entrance to a death camp.

The choice of Derkaoui's cartoon is somewhat surprising. The cartoon does not deny the Holocaust, for it uses the best-known symbol of the Nazi genocide to criticize current Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. This is not denial. The cartoon acknowledges that the Nazi genocide actually took place, that it was wrong, and that it remains an indisputable reality of Middle Eastern politics.

One might have expected much worse from the Iranian government. Since his election, Ahmadinejad has made a number of provocative statements, casting doubt on the awful realities of the genocide and reiterating the old Arab view that if the genocide occurred in Europe, then Europe should have offered the Jews reparation in Europe and not made the Palestinians suffer the consequences of its tragic policies.

However, the Iranian government refrained from choosing one of the rabidly anti-Semitic cartoons that drew on 20th-century European caricatures of Jews. Nor did it choose a cartoon that equated Israeli policies with the Nazis' quest for world domination. Nor did it choose a cartoon depicting Israel and the United States in cahoots to exploit the Palestinians. All these themes were depicted in various entries to the contest. The rejection of these more extreme representations might be a sign of moderation from an Iranian government seeking to change its strategic relationship with the U.S. government.

Of course, Derkaoui's acknowledgement of the Nazis' Holocaust does not represent an ideological epiphany. It is designed to draw a moral equivalence between what happened to the Jews in Europe under Nazi domination and what is happening to the Palestinians at the hands of Israel now....

An ancient Vishnu idol has been found during excavation in an old village in Russia’s Volga region, raising questions about the prevalent view on the origin of ancient Russia, the Reuters news agency reports.

The idol found in Staraya (old) Maina village dates back to VII-X century AD. Staraya Maina village in Ulyanovsk region was a highly populated city 1700 years ago, much older than Kiev, so far believed to be the mother of all Russian cities.

“We may consider it incredible, but we have ground to assert that Middle-Volga region was the original land of Ancient Rus. This is a hypothesis, but a hypothesis, which requires thorough research,” Reader of Ulyanovsk State University’s archaeology department Dr Alexander Kozhevin told state-run television Vesti .

CAMPAIGNERS against a planned £2 million bridge in Stratford say the money should be spent on the urgent restoration of the church where Shakespeare is buried.

An appeal to raise up to £3.25 million to repair the crumbling Holy Trinity Church has been launched by the Friends of Shakespeare Church.

Campaign group Stratford Voice say there is no need for the cycle bridge across the river Avon and say it will spoil the beauty spot.

They say the cash should instead be ploughed into preserving the 13th century church where the Bard worshipped with his family.

The Department of Interior has ruled that World War II-era burn pits at Hanford are eligible for listing on the National Register for Historic Places.

The ruling could lead to more careful excavation and study of the site by archaeologists as the pits are emptied as part of the cleanup of the Hanford nuclear reservation.

The burn pits have the "potential to provide important information otherwise unrepresented about the people who lived and worked at the Hanford Construction Camp during its period of significance -- 1943-1946 -- and about World War II-era culture and consumer culture and behavior," according to a report by archaeologist Erika Martin Seibert for the National Register of Historic Places.

The United States Marshals Service (USMS) has selected Fort Smith, Arkansas, as the host city for the Agency's new museum. Director John F. Clark made the announcement today after receiving recommendations from a 10-person museum committee that has been studying the issue for the past two years.

Fort Smith, located in the western part of the state, was chosen as the future home for the new museum over the other finalist city, Staunton, Virginia. "This was a tough decision, as we were very pleased with the enthusiasm of both finalists," said Director Clark. "Now that we have selected Fort Smith, we are excited about this new opportunity to tell the story of the U.S. Marshals Service's 217-year history to the country."

Among the treasure trove of historical papers that adorns the walls of the Raab Collection's new [Philadelphia] Center City office are: a letter from King George IV to Czar Alexander I; another from General George Washington to one of his spies; and the executive order signed by President William McKinley appointing Jacob Trieber to the federal bench, the first Jew to achieve the position. And that's just the beginning.

The Raab Collection, which moved last month from Ardmore to Center City, is a family business that deals in historical letters, autographs and documents, often acting as the conduit between buyer and seller. The business made headlines last month when it facilitated the sale of more than 140 letters written by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to his brother Edgar to a private collector who founded the Web site Americanhistory.org.

The Berlin Film Festival unveiled Thursday the first entries competing at next month's Berlinale, with the batch of movies seeking to shed light on major historical events through personal and often deeply emotional stories.

One of the world's three top film festivals, Berlin festival organisers said this year's line-up of films will include entries from the US, South Korea and Germany and star a raft of big names in the movie business.

This includes America's George Clooney, Robert De Niro, Matt Damon Tobey Maguire and Angelina Jolie as well as Britain's Joseph Fiennes and Australia's Cate Blanchett.

Weak winter monsoon rains may have contributed to the decline of both China's Tang Dynasty and the Mayan civilisation in Mexico, suggests an article published in Nature.

The image is grainy, but it's clear: Saddam Hussein plummets through the trapdoor and dangles in death, his vacant eyes open and his snapped neck almost at a right angle to the line of his shoulders.

By now, the illicit video of Saddam's execution, reportedly recorded on a camera phone, has spread throughout the Internet and aired internationally, including on American television stations.

It alternately has caused outrage, celebration and offense, and led to the Iraqi government arresting two guards and a supervisor who were present at the hanging, as part of an investigation into how Saddam's death was filmed.

But it also marks a cultural truth: Anyone can now capture history.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation appears to have quietly given up pursuing the archives of Jack Anderson, the well-known Washington muckraker.

In a November 30 letter to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee -- a response to a series of questions that committee members issued after a hearing last May -- the Department of Justice said that "at this time the FBI is not seeking to reclaim any documents" from the archive, which is now held at George Washington University.

Anderson, who died in 2005, investigated, hassled, wrote about, and sparred with government agents and officials throughout his career. One of his many nemeses was J. Edgar Hoover himself.

The news from the Justice Department was in keeping with the journalist's legacy, said friends and family members. ...

Rajasthan’s state government plans to 'correct imbalances' in its official history, chronicled by colonial officials. It will do so by revisiting all 41,000 villages and 186 cities and towns in this western Indian state to collect fresh historical material and set the record straight.

The decision has however caused controversy and criticism. Professional historians but also the Catholic Church have said that the project is unscientific; instead, they view it as another attempt by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to impose its Hindutva-centred nationalism.

Under the plan, called Aapno Dharti, Aapno Log (our land, our people), starting January 4 school teachers are to talk to village leaders and elders to check for any errors in the histories of local villages, towns and cities.

.. Never realizing all the time that you were cutting, you were defining how you saw yourself, taking in the images of what the mass producers of toys told you was the standard of beauty.

Arabella Grayson knows what it was like for children to take in those images. And it is what led her to begin collecting paper dolls, black ones, and trying to understand their place in history. Her efforts are on display at the Smithsonian's Anacostia Community Museum in "Two Hundred Years of Black Paper Dolls: The Collection of Arabella Grayson."

The show, on view through April 29, traces the emergence of the paper dolls. There are dolls that date to the 1800s and others of current well-known faces.

The dolls produced from the 1800s to the 1960s show black people in subservient roles. The mammies, the butlers, the pickaninnies in torn clothing, grinning with their paper-doll smiles. There is Topsey, based on the stereotypical character in "Uncle Tom's Cabin." And Aunt Jemima, and Little Black Sambo....

THE STRATFORD church where William Shakespeare worshipped and is buried urgently needs up to a million pounds worth of repairs.

The Holy Trinity Church attracts thousands of visitors annually but needs the cash to stop the oldest church in the town from crumbling.

It dates back to the 13th century and was where Shakespeare was baptised, where he worshipped with his family and where he lies buried in the chancel.

The Queen Mary luxury liner, which went from monarch of the sea to tourism tool over the years, has become a royal headache.

The owner of the lease to operate the 72-year-old ship and her 365-room on-board hotel was forced into Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year in a dispute over $3.4 million in back rent with the city of Long Beach. The city purchased the Queen Mary in 1967 to help it compete for visitors.


Now, a court-appointed trustee is trying to sell the 66-year lease and rights to develop 45 acres of land near the ship, which once carried Winston Churchill, Fred Astaire and Bob Hope in Art Deco elegance across the North Atlantic.

"The ship has been pilfered," said Traci Wilson-Kleekamp, a former Long Beach activist. "It's falling apart."

Researchers say their discovery of a 2,000-year-old toilet at one of the world's most important archaeological sites sheds new light on whether the ancient Essene community was home to the authors of many of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

In a new study, three researchers say they have discovered the outdoor latrine used by the ancient residents of Qumran, on the barren banks of the Dead Sea. They say the find proves the people living here two millennia ago were Essenes, an ascetic Jewish sect that left Jerusalem to seek proximity to God in the desert.

Qumran and its environs have already yielded many treasures: the remains of a settlement with an aqueduct and ritual baths, ancient sandals and pottery, and the Dead Sea Scrolls — perhaps the greatest archaeological find of the 20th century.

The scrolls, which include fragments of the books of the Old Testament and treatises on communal living and apocalyptic war, have shed important light on Judaism and the origins of Christianity.

Thanks to an Israeli anthropologist, an American textual scholar and a French paleo-parasitologist, researchers can now add another find: human excrement.

The discovery is more significant than it may seem. The nature of the settlement at Qumran is the subject of a lively academic debate.

The traditional view, supported by a majority of scholars since the site was first excavated in the 1950s, is that the settlement was inhabited by Essene monks who observed strict rules of ritual purity and celibacy and who wrote many of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The second school says the people living at Qumran were farmers, potters or soldiers, and had nothing to do with the Essenes. The scrolls, according to this view, were written in Jerusalem and stashed in caves at Qumran by Jewish refugees fleeing the Roman conquest of the city in the first century.

The researchers behind the latrine finding, which is being published in the scholarly journal “Revue de Qumran,'' say it supports the traditional view linking the residents of Qumran with the Essenes.

A description of Essene practice by the Jewish historian Josephus Flavius in the first century notes that Essene rules required them to distance themselves from inhabited areas to defecate and “dig a trench a foot deep'' which was to then be covered with soil.

Joe Zias, a Jerusalem-based anthropologist, and James Tabor, a Dead Sea Scrolls expert from the University of North Carolina, decided to look for the Qumran latrine. If it was far from the settlement ruins and if the excrement was buried, it would offer evidence the people living at the site were Essenes.

Zias and Tabor identified an area behind a rock outcropping, took soil samples and sent them to Stephanie Harter-Lailheugue, a French scientist specializing in ancient parasites. The samples tested positive for pinworms and two other intestinal parasites found only in human feces. Samples from locations nearer the settlement tested negative.

The excrement traces were found underground — meaning the feces had been buried, as required by Essene law — a nine-minute walk uphill from the settlement.

“A lot of people were concerned with what went into the body, but the Essenes were perhaps the only group in antiquity concerned with what came out,'' Zias said. “No one else would have gone to the trouble of walking this far.''

Still, there is no way to date the fecal parasites, which could have been left by Bedouin who are known to have inhabited the area. To counter this, the paper quotes a Bedouin scholar as saying the nomadic tribespeople do not bury their feces.

Another problem is that archaeologists have already identified a toilet at Qumran — inside the settlement. But Zias believes it was for emergencies: In some cases, divine commandments notwithstanding, nine minutes outside the camp was too far to go.

Norman Golb, a history professor at the University of Chicago and a critic of the link between Qumran and the Essenes, called the new paper “an outrageous claim.''

“There's no plausible connection between what they found and the conclusion that the Essenes lived at Qumran,'' Golb said. “Anyone living at the site would have done the same.''

Golb maintains that Qumran's residents had nothing to do with the Essenes or the Dead Sea Scrolls. Those who claim a connection do so because “they're committed in their writings to it,'' Golb said.

Dead Sea Scrolls scholar Stephen Pfann, of the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem, said questions about the parasites' age have to be cleared up, but the find is potentially significant.

Qumran, he says, could have been inhabited at different times by different groups: first by Jews of the Hasmonean dynasty in the second century, then by a monastic group of Essenes who left after an earthquake and were replaced by a lay group of Essene date farmers, then again by Essene ascetics, before being finally taken over by Jewish rebels fighting the Roman legions and abandoned when Judea fell.

“Qumran isn't one thing, it's many things,'' Pfann said. “This makes it more exciting, but also more complicated to understand.''