That little spat between Oliver North and the Smithsonian? Everyone kissed and made up -- and now North has permission to film in front of the Enola Gay and can talk about nuclear weapons, reports our colleague Jackie Trescott. The Smithsonian originally rejected his request to film in front of the historic bomber for a Fox News docu-series, claiming the production wanted more than "incidental use" of the plane and the site; North countered that the decision was fueled by the Smithsonian's deal with Showtime, which limits access of independent film crews.

But yesterday the two sides sat down and the application was accepted, said Claire Brown, National Air and Space Museum spokeswoman.

"We are respectful of the needs of the institution," said series producer Pamela Browne."And they understand the lighting and equipment we need to do a long-form documentary."

The University of Illinois was planning today to announce that it was ending the use of Chief Illiniwek — a student dressed as an Indian who performs at athletic events — but may be forced to change its plans because of a lawsuit, The Chicago Tribune reported. The mascot’s use has been controversial for years, with American Indian groups calling its use offensive and athletic boosters calling the American Indians and their supporters politically correct or overly sensitive. But Illinois officials, after long defending the mascot, may change their stance under pressure from the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The Tribune reported that two students who play the chief filed the suit to block the action, and that the university is awaiting the results of a hearing today before deciding whether to go ahead and end use of the mascot.

JERUSALEM -- Israel activated webcams yesterday at the site of a controversial building project in Jerusalem's Old City as part of an effort to refute accusations by Muslims that the work is threatening the Al-Aqsa Mosque...

Islamic leaders denounced the streaming video as" cosmetic," and said they would organize massive demonstrations in Jerusalem after prayers today...

Yechiel Zeligman, the Israel Antiquities Authority archeologist overseeing the excavation, said the three webcams would broadcast 24 hours a day, seven days a week on the authority's website, antiquities.org.

The live feed from three cameras shows workers from the Antiquities Authority digging to uncover ancient buildings and artifacts hidden beneath the surface.

"Really, we don't have anything to hide," Zeligman said as he supervised 40 workers at the site yesterday."We hope the presence of the cameras will show people that nothing here is threatening the mosques and things will quieten down so we can continue our work.

"The ramp ends more than 5 meters from the wall and the gate into the mosque compound, so we are nowhere near the Al-Aqsa Mosque and nothing we are doing here poses any threat to it," he said...

Yousef Natshe, chief archeologist at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, said the new webcams did nothing to allay Muslim fears.

"It's a cosmetic act designed to draw away the attention of the people who are concerned about this," Natshe said."Putting this online doesn't give Israel any legal rights -- the act itself is illegal."...

Natshe conceded that the Israelis were probably not excavating underneath the mosque, but he accused them of continuous encroachments.

" This work is being carried out on the approach to one of the historic gates entering the Haram. . . . Maybe it is not physical damage, but it is cultural damage. It is distorting the site," he said.

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Violent protests in Kashmir over al-Aqsa excavation

On the same grounds that once served as the Capitol of the Confederacy, the past seeped into the present yesterday as a House panel discussed Abraham Lincoln and slavery.

The House Rules Committee tabled a measure pushed by state Sen. Henry L. Marsh III, D-Richmond, that sought to establish a commission to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the 16th president's birth, which will occur Feb. 12, 2009.

"Lincoln is regarded by many as the most outstanding president of all time," Marsh told the committee, pointing out that the slain leader's parents were born in Virginia.

A Richmond resident spoke against the commission, charging it represents "historical myopia and amnesia at its worse" and "kowtowing to the leader of Virginia's enemies."

Robert Lamb, a lawyer and member of Sons of Confederate Veterans who said he was speaking as an individual, said Lincoln as U.S. president during the Civil War sent armies into Virginia who "laid waste to the land," among other grievances.

If anyone's 200th birthday should be honored, it should be that of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America, who was born on June 3, 1808, said Lamb, who was wearing a tie with a pattern of Confederate flags.

Congress created a federal commission seven years ago, and 10 states have established their own commissions to mark the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth, said spokesman David Early. Most states - including Virginia - have appointed liaisons to the federal panel to help coordinate their own celebrations.

If you were an African American in one of a number of predominantly white, Detroit-area towns in the late 1890s, you probably knew the tacit rule: Get out of town before sunset.
Today you'll still see the legacy of these so-called sundown towns, thousands of which sprang up all over the United States after Reconstruction and flourished through the civil rights era.

Such towns have been documented by sociologist James Loewen in his 2005 book "Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism." "I thought I'd find a few hundred across the country, but I found thousands," he said.

One of those towns was Wyandotte.

In 1955, when librarian Edwina DeWindt published her history of Wyandotte, the chapter labeled "Negro" didn't make the cut. But her research establishing the city as a sundown town remains on file at Wyandotte's Bacon Memorial District Library.

"It includes about 50 pages of oral histories, along with local newspaper accounts and minutes from City Hall," said library director Janet Cashin. "I think the publishers may have said, 'We don't need that chapter in the book because it doesn't shed the right kind of light on the city.' "

In the crystal-clear waters of a Florida spring, decades-old remains are defying identification, tantalizing experts who are trying to solve a Suwannee River mystery.

Local legend has it that the remains are all that's left of the steamboat Madison, a floating general store that chugged up and down the Suwannee in the mid-19th century...

The river touches eight Florida counties as it meanders from its source in the Okefenokee Swamp in southern Georgia to the Gulf of Mexico...Suwannee River steamers brought mail, supplies, and a few luxuries to backwoods residents during the 19th century.

When the U.S. Civil War began in 1861, the Union Navy imposed a blockade of southern ports that gradually eliminated steamboat traffic on southern coastal rivers.

By the fall of 1863, as the fighting got closer to the Suwannee region, [owner James] Tucker decided to scuttle his ship to prevent it from falling into Navy hands...

Whether it's actually the Madison, though, remains to be seen.

So far state archaeologists have found and are working to identify the remains of at least ten steamboats in the Suwannee River, three of which are accessible to divers.

In addition to the ruins in Troy Springs, divers can visit the David Yulee near the Suwannee's mouth, as well as the well-preserved ruins of the City of Hawkinsville, the last steamboat to operate on the Suwannee.

WASHINGTON -- Four decades after he was executed by Bolivian troops and 10 years after scientists claimed to have discovered his remains, doubts have been raised over whether the bones and skeleton interned in the mausoleum in Cuba are really those of Che Guevara.

An investigation carried out by a Spanish-Mexican magazine claims that Cuban specialists were not telling the truth when in, 1997, they said that they had discovered the revolutionary's remains, along with those of six of his fighters, buried alongside an airstrip in the remote jungle village of Villagrande, Bolivia.

The magazine, Letras Libres, argues that the specialists were under pressure from Fidel Castro, Cuba's leader, who wanted his comrade's remains identified for political reasons and to "relaunch the country's revolutionary fervour"...

For many years it was believed that the corpse of "El Che" - his hands having been cut off - was burned and his ashes scattered. But in the mid-1990s a number of retired Bolivian military officers said they had buried the remains alongside a nearby airstrip; the authorities had kept it secret to avoid the location becoming a site of pilgrimage.

Following those claims, a team of Cuban, Bolivian and Argentine experts launched a search that located the remains in Villagrande. The remains were flown to Cuba and, in October 1997, President Castro led a ceremony at which the remains were interred in a mausoleum in Santa Clara, a city captured in January 1959 by rebels led by Guevara in a battle that proved decisive for the revolution.

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- The more than 460 minors who disappeared in the 12-year combat between the guerrillas and the Army during the Salvadorian Civil War are searched for by the humanitarian organization Pro-Search, at the request of the relatives."We still have an unresolved matter with the families of those boys and girls who disappeared during the 1980-1992 armed conflict, assured Ester Alvarenga, general director of Pro-Search. The director pointed out that 323 of the 787 missing children registered by the organization have been found, noting Pro-Search does not have support in this task from State institutions. Of the children located, 150 were living with adoptive families in El Salvador, 130 with adoptive families abroad, and it is believed that 43 died. According to official sources, Honduras, United States, Italy, France, Belgium and Holland are some of the countries where these now young men and women live.

Related Links

DNA Matching Reunites Families Separated for Decades from War (PBS News Hour, with audio link

After years of complaints, Yale University is taking down a painting of Elihu Yale that shows the wealthy merchant being waited on by a black man with a silver collar around his neck - an unmistakable symbol of bondage.

Elihu Yale apparently did not own slaves but critics over the years have objected to the painting's racist overtones and the significant place it is displayed at the university named for him. The portrait hangs over an ornate fireplace in the Corporation Room in Woodbridge Hall, meeting place for the university's board of trustees.

The flap over the painting comes as some of the nation's oldest, most prestigious colleges confront a shameful side of their past. Important founding figures at Yale, Brown and other schools had ties to the slave trade, as did many of America's founding fathers. In 2001, several graduate students at Yale revealed that a majority of Yale's dorms were named after prominent people who owned slaves or at one time expressed pro-slavery views, including U.S. Vice President John Calhoun and inventor Samuel Morse.

Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain has been caught up in a political storm today over an apology he made in the United States about the slave trade.

He appeared to apologise in a BBC Wales television interview for Northern Ireland and Wales's role in the slave trade.

Mr Hain, who addressed an event on slavery, said: "I'm here on behalf of both Northern Ireland and Wales to say we have had a part to play in the slave trade.

"We acknowledge that. We take responsibility for it and we now are going to try and at least say that historical legacy must be recognised and we are sorry for it," Mr Hain said.

The Northern Ireland Secretary's comments puzzled historians in the North, who insisted that there was no sympathy for slavery in Belfast.

Democratic Unionist MP Sammy Wilson said: "I think a lot of people would love Peter Hain to apologise for the things he has done while he has been in charge of the Northern Ireland Office rather than for him to delve into the past and apologise for things we had no responsibility nor sympathy for," he said.

"If you look at slavery, Belfast and the people of Belfast were at the cutting edge of enlightened attitudes, and there was no association between Northern Ireland and the slave trade."

The Northern Ireland Office insisted Mr Hain had praised Belfast's stance against slavery in the speech he made in New York to the event organised by the Welsh Office.

Editors Note: The addition onto class reading lists of a novel written by a Japanese American depicting her experiences in wartime Korea has led to a bitter dispute between supporters of the novel and the Korean American community, who say their history being distorted. Aruna Lee is a writer for New America Media.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Korean American parents in Los Angeles, New York and Boston are protesting the addition of a novel in school reading lists that they say inaccurately depicts Koreans as egregious wartime abusers. Many say their children are being forced to learn a distorted version of history.

"So Far from the Bamboo Grove" by Yoko Kawashima Watkins is a fictionalized autobiography based on Watkins' experiences. It tells the story of the flight of Japanese families from Korea after World War II and the many atrocities they suffered at the hands of Koreans.

A seventh-grade student at Westchester Country Day School in New York, Bo Un Heo is one of several students who refused to attend class while the novel remained on the school's reading list."I wasn't nervous about missing class because I knew it was the right thing to do," Heo said. Parents charge that the novel is not only historically inaccurate, but that it also fails to address the decades of abuse Koreans suffered at the hands of Japanese colonial administrators.

One example they point to is the fact that no mention is made in Watkins' novel of the many Korean women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military. The issue remains a major point of controversy between the neighboring countries. Survivors of Japanese abuse, so called" comfort women," still stage weekly protests in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul.

In the novel, Watkins instead writes about Japanese women who were raped by Koreans and other atrocities following the surrender of Japan to Allied forces.

Koreans in the United States and in Korea have challenged the authenticity of these and other accounts in the novel, however, arguing that the rape of Japanese women by Koreans could never have occurred as the Japanese military presence remained throughout the country until well after American and Russian forces arrived in the area. They also contend that Watkins' accounts of U.S.-led bombing in Korea never occurred during the period covered in the novel, and, for example, her descriptions of removing the uniform of a dead Communist soldier are false since the Communist army did not exist until 1948, years after the events in Watkins' tale....

As one of the most famous Holocaust deniers goes on trial in Germany, the EU takes steps to criminalize denying the Shoah.

German prosecutors in Mannheim demanded a five-year jail sentence Friday for one of the most high-profile figures in the Holocaust denial movement, Ernst Zündel, in closing arguments at his trial.
 
Zündel, a 67-year-old German citizen, stands accused of inciting racial hatred for disputing the historical fact that Nazi Germany systematically slaughtered six million European Jews during World War II.
   
German authorities say Zündel operated a website from Canada on which he expressed anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi views and presented "revisionist" history. He left Germany for Canada at the age of 19 but was deported in March 2005 on a German arrest warrant.
   
Denying the Holocaust is a crime in Germany and if convicted, Zündel faces up to five years in jail. 
 
The trial began almost a year ago but has run into several legal hurdles. It follows a high-profile case in which controversial British historian David Irving spent 13 months in jail in Austria for questioning the Holocaust before being released last month.

A campaign to honour Britain's first woman doctor, who was forced to pretend to be a man for 53 years in order to practise medicine, has been launched in the Capital. Miranda Stewart had to don the disguise in the early 1800s to gain entry to the exclusively male world of Edinburgh University.

The teenager adopted the name James Barry, later becoming a pioneering Army surgeon and keeping her elaborate deception a secret until she lay on her deathbed in 1865.

Now an amateur historian wants to recognise her unique achievements with a plaque on the Lothian Street house where she once lived.

Barry, who was rumoured to be the granddaughter of the 11th Earl of Buchan and niece of the famous painter James Barry, arrived in the city in around 1805. She secretly became Edinburgh University's first female graduate while still a teenager.

During her extraordinary life, she travelled the world as an Army surgeon, still keeping up the pretence of being a man. She also gained a reputation as a controversial and sometimes ill-disciplined officer. In 1819, the year she joined, Lord Albemarle was critical of the doctor's "unmistakably Scotch type of countenance", as well as a "certain effeminacy in his manner".

Barry retired from the services in 1859, having earned a reputation as a medical pioneer through her work to prevent disease spreading in dirty, overcrowded field hospitals.