It was an Easter Sunday on 26 March 1967. At around 3pm that day Jim Thompson, already well known as the "Thai Silk King", walked out of Moonlight Cottage where he was holidaying with friends in Malaysia's Cameron Highlands and was never seen again.

It was not simply Thompson's fame and wealth that guaranteed his disappearance would become one of South East Asia's greatest modern mysteries -- it was his past.

He had spent World War II with the OSS, the US intelligence agency that was the precursor to the CIA.

After the war he settled in Bangkok and in 1948 started the Thai Silk Company...

It made Thompson a millionaire.

But it was also rumoured that Thompson maintained his links with American intelligence.

So when he vanished it was front page news and the theories about his disappearance started to multiply...

NAVAL STATION MAYPORT, Fla. -— And then she was gone.

After nearly 39 years of service, the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy was decommissioned the morning of March 23 at Naval Station Mayport.

"In my judgment, the legacy of this ship is the role she played in winning the Cold War,” said Adm. John B. Nathman, commander of the Navy’s Fleet Forces Command and himself a naval aviator. “This ship sent a powerful message to the Soviet Union and made them quit..."

Nathman recounted how the ship had also fought in Lebanon in 1983 and was the first aircraft carrier to arrive in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Shield and stayed to play a major part in Desert Storm.

Its final combat cruise took JFK again to the Persian Gulf, where its aircraft flew strikes against the Taliban in Afghanistan and finished up supporting the Marines during their November 2004 fight against insurgents in Fallujah, Iraq.

But the Kennedy will live on not only in the hearts and minds of former skippers and crew, but its in-port cabin, designed by Jacqueline Kennedy and outfitted by her with Kennedy family artifacts.

“It’s a one-of-a-kind captain’s in-port cabin,” said retired Vice Adm. Gerry Hoewing, a former Kennedy skipper who now heads the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation in Pensacola, Fla. "We have just gotten the word that we will be preserving that as an exhibit at the museum in Pensacola."

State Rep. Al Williams (D-Midway) sparked a fierce public debate this month when he announced that he would introduce a resolution that would ask Georgia to express "contrition" for its role in African-American slavery.

The resolution has been framed as a political issue, but it also raises a moral question that's divided people in countries as diverse as Japan and Australia: Should people apologize for something their ancestors did?

Similar debates are taking place abroad. In Japan, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ignited an emotional political debate recently when he said his country would not apologize to thousands of Asian women forced to work in army brothels during World War II. Australia's prime minister, John Howard, also sparked criticism when he rebuffed a similar call for his country's treatment of Aborigines. Howard said his generation shouldn't apologize for something their ancestors did.

But Robert Franklin, the Presidential Distinguished Professor of Social Ethics at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, disputes those arguments.

People routinely accept their connections to their ancestors when it benefits them, he says. People gladly accept prosperity passed down from previous family members.

Only in science could the discovery of something old and crusty be exciting.

And researchers are very excited about finding chunks of Earth's outer crust that are 3.8 billion years old. Most stuff that old has been folded back into the planet and lost forever or spat back out after being melted into unrecognizable magma.

The discovery, detailed in today's issue of the journal Science, provides solid evidence that Earth had crustal plates way back then that were banging into each other much as they do today in a process that drives earthquakes and reshapes continents. That activity, and the chemical changes to land, sea and air that accompany it, are thought to have been crucial to the instigation of life on Earth, an event that remains utterly mysterious in terms of timing and method.

John Bruton, former prime minister of Ireland, has been the European Union ambassador to the United States since November 2004. He spoke last week with reporter David R. Sands at the EU's Washington headquarters about the bloc's past, present and future.

Q. What do you consider the EU's biggest achievement in its first 50 years?

A. It's important to say at the outset that the European Union was conceived as a political project. The founders of the organization attempted to harness closer economic cooperation as a way to reconcile nations that had long been warring with one another. Certainly, other factors contributed to peace and security in Western Europe, including the alliance with the United States, but the EU was always seen as a political force for peace.

I think the biggest recent triumph of the EU has to be the steady process of enlargement. We went from six nations to 10 to 15 to 27 today, and at all stages, this was done with the unanimous support of the existing members. When you consider that each round of expansion means a dilution of power for existing members and a larger sharing of financial resources, that is quite an impressive achievement.

And simply by the fact of its existence, the EU has made historically difficult relationships between neighbors easier to manage -- and not just with France and Germany. My own country, Ireland, has long had an inherently unequal and difficult relationship with Great Britain, but when we both joined the European Union, that all changed. We were equals within the EU, and the British actually found Ireland could be a useful ally in the context of discussions with other EU members. ...

Either the ancient Greeks loved grape juice, or they were making wine nearly 6,500 years ago, according to a new study that describes what could be the world’s earliest evidence of crushed grapes.

If the charred 2,460 grape seeds and 300 empty grape skins were used to make wine, as the researchers suspect, the remains might have belonged to the second oldest known grape wine in the world, edged out only by a residue-covered Iranian wine jug dating to the sixth millennium B.C.

Since the Greeks influenced the Romans, who in turn influenced virtually all of Europe, it is possible that a drink made in a humble, post-framed house in eastern Macedonia influenced much of the world’s wine.

"For the Neolithic or the Bronze Age, we have no evidence for markets and a market economy," lead author Tania Valamoti told Discovery News..."Production was on a household or communal basis."

Valamoti and her team excavated four homes at a Neolithic site called Dikili Tash.

Four years after the looting of the Iraqi National Museum during the fall of Baghdad, frustrated antiquities experts say untold thousands of Mesopotamian artifacts have been stolen from other vulnerable historical sites across the nation.

Though the museum is now safe--its doors bricked shut and collections entombed behind welded cellar doors--the country's 12,000 archeological sites are mostly unprotected and the Iraqi government is hard-pressed to stop their plunder....

Concerned and unable to get into the country, Mesopotamia scholars from around the world have been forced to rely on satellite images that show the cratered landscape left by thieves at southern Iraqi sites where important cities once stood nearly 2,000 years ago.

The images show holes as small as a few feet in diameter spreading across sites throughout the autumn of 2003, a pattern that continued in some places through 2005. The destruction appeared to slow in the last satellite photos available, in early 2006, but the impact of the damage is clear.

Seymour Hersh reports in this week's New Yorker Magazine that in 1972 President Richard Nixon told National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger he wanted the Air Force to begin the all-out bombing of Surface to Air Missile (SAM) sites in North Vietnam. The rules of engagement previously permitted bombing the sites in response to attack. Nixon can be heard on a newly-released White House tape saying he wanted the SAM sites bombed whether attacks were launched from them or not. When Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird approved the court martial of a general who had informally been told to go after the SAM sites and did so Nixon was livid.

BRIDGEPORT, Conn. -- A volunteer safecracker opened a 450-pound, Victorian-era safe in front of Connecticut news crews, but the treasure inside wasn't quite headline-grabbing.

"Like we need this now," laughed Nancy Zorena, president of the Monroe Historical Society, as she held up a slip of paper with the combination to the safe, the Connecticut Post reported.

The safe, discovered behind a Monroe church furnace in December, also contained some newspaper clippings, a poem and four wooden tokens from Missouri.

A thin beam of X-rays scans the writings of the legendary Greek scientist and mathematician Archimedes, a hidden text that may be the most important ancient scientific document discovered since the Renaissance. As faint lines emerge on a large computer monitor at Stanford's Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory, I can just barely make out the ghostly image of the Greek letter lambda.

As a Webcast producer for the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco, I have been documenting this experimental use of one of the most sophisticated tools of modern science, to decipher a 1,000-year-old book made of goatskin. Known as the Archimedes Palimpsest, dubbed Archie for short, it looks terribly fragile. The edges of most of the book's 174 pages are burned, and tears, holes and spots of purple mold dot their surface. The parchment is smaller than I thought it would be, not much larger than a hardback novel.

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Kew Palace slotted an important piece of its royal history back into place yesterday when it unveiled a cabinet of jigsaw maps used to teach King George III's children.

This jigsaw map of Scotland used to teach geography to King George III's children, on show at Kew Palace
This jigsaw map of Scotland is one of many used to teach geography to King George III's children

The mahogany cabinet houses a collection of dissected maps –- precursors of the jigsaw puzzle –- and was a main feature in the nursery at Kew, the King's main home, in the mid-1700s.

It was through assembling the carved wooden pieces that a young George IV and William IV first learned the geography of Europe, the Empire, Africa and the American colonies they believed they would one day head.

Last Friday, at a hotel, thousands of miles away in Bloomsbury, London, Ghana's Minister of Justice, Joe Ghartey said something that perhaps only a classroom of Ghanaians knew.

The young and very promising politician told his audience that Paa Grant, the founder and sponsor of the group that formalised the struggle for independence from 1947, Paa Grant was in fact first to have called for Positive Action, a phrase more associated with the man who did more with other's ideas than the originators could have ever imagined, Kwame Nkrumah.

Paa Grant said in 1947, "The time for negative resistance is over. This is the time for positive action."

As Ghana celebrates its 50th anniversary of Independence, we are now celebrating Positive Change. Yet, the historical reflections have been many; as Nkrumaists take the opportunity to revere their founding father, freedom fighter hero, and Pan-Africanists sing of the progress he brought to the continent.

Yet 50 years since the Independence of Ghana is also 60 years since that freedom ball was fully set in motion...

TOKYO -— Japanese and Chinese academics in a joint history study committee on March 20 agreed to take up contentious issues such as the 1937 Nanjing Massacre and visits by Japanese premiers to Yasukuni Shrine in their future discussions, Japanese panel members said.

But the committee members, during their two-day meeting in Tokyo through March 20, failed to discuss this time whether they will deal with the issue of Japan’s forcing women to provide sex for its soldiers before and during World War II and responsibility for the 1937-1945 Sino-Japanese war, Japanese Foreign Ministry officials said.

About 10 experts from each side formed the Japan-China Joint History Research Committee in an effort to narrow the bilateral gaps over the interpretation of history, which has been a source of bilateral diplomatic disputes.

The group lobbying for the re-routing out of the M3 motorway is hitting out at the removal of a series of ancient underground buildings from the site in the past week.

A team of archaeologists removed the souterrains this week, which date back to the early Christian era. ['Souterrain is a name given by archaeologists to a type of underground structure associated with the Atlantic Iron Age. Regional names include fogous and Pictish houses and they appear to have been brought northwards from Gaul during the late Iron age.'--Wikipedia]

The National Roads Authority says historical buildings like this were relatively common in Ireland.

Siobhan Rice of the TaraWatch lobby group says she is heartbroken over the works.

"We have asked time and time again that independent archaeologists be allowed to inspect these sites -- and to no avail. All of our pleas have fallen on deaf ears. I don't think it would happen in any other country in Europe -- it's an absolute disgrace," she said.

“Let her paintings go!”

That’s the Passover eve appeal issued by fifty prominent attorneys and legal scholars to Polish museum authorities, urging the return of seven paintings that California artist Dina Babbitt was forced to paint in Auschwitz in 1943.

Mrs. Babbitt, 83, was forced by the infamous Nazi war criminal, Dr. Josef Mengele, to paint portraits of Gypsy prisoners on whom he was performing sadistic medical experiments. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, in Poland, later acquired seven of the paintings from a private source but has refused to return them to Mrs. Babbitt. Museum officials have suggested that they regard Mengele as the legal owner of the paintings.

The petition says it is “shocking and offensive” to suggest that the paintings belong to Mengele, since “a war criminal does not deserve to enjoy the fruits of his crimes ... If this matter goes to court, we are horrified at the thought that the director of a museum dedicated to teaching about the Holocaust might take the stand in defense of the right of a Nazi war criminal or his heirs to claim paintings that were created because of his war crimes.