Over 50 years since they appeared on London's streets, the Routemasters are still running -- but not everyone is delighted.

The veteran vehicle with its curvy design and its open platform has been called "the last bus to be a proper bus".

Many Londoners remember fondly how they used to hop on and off them and pull the string to ring the bell.

But a Disability Rights Commission spokesman says it is "a bashed-up old relic from a bygone age" and the fact that it is still running on two central London heritage routes is "a disappointment".

A programme of repurchase and refurbishment -- begun after the election of Mayor Ken Livingstone in 2000 -- stopped in 2003-4, and the last full-scale route -- the 159 -- withdrew its Routemasters in December 2005.

What remained was the heritage routes - though only in the hours from 0930 to 1800 and only on the central part of two routes, the 9 (Albert Hall to Aldwych) and 15 (Tower of London to Trafalgar Square).

The image of Captain Cook stepping onto the shores of Botany Bay has been a staple of British history books for generations but now it seems the explorer may have been beaten to Australia by the Portuguese, who arrived 250 years earlier.

A new appraisal of 16th century maps offers evidence that a small Portuguese fleet charted much of Australia's coast as early as 1522.

It has long been known that Cook was preceded by Dutch navigators, whose ships were wrecked on the coast of western Australia as they made for their colony of Batavia -- present day Jakarta - in the 1600s.

The Portuguese thesis was put forward Monday by historian and journalist, Peter Trickett, in his book Beyond Capricorn. It describes how Portuguese adventurers secretly discovered and mapped Australia and New Zealand 250 years before Captain Cook.

Four thousand feet below the canyon rim, the Colorado River continues to slowly eat away at rock formations that created this vast and awe-inspiring canyon.

But this is not the Grand Canyon tourists have come to know and love. This is Grand Canyon West, 90 miles downstream from Grand Canyon National Park, on land owned by the Hualapai Indian Tribe.

Now, the Hualapai are about to do something no one has ever dreamed of before.

Later this month they will open Skywalk — a $40 million glass and steel platform that allows visitors to walk out 70 feet from the canyon's edge and look straight down into the canyon and river below.

"It's an engineering marvel of the world," said Robert Bravo, a Hualapai Indian who is the operations manager of Grand Canyon West....

Not everyone approves of this audacious feat of engineering. Environmentalists and some tribal elders condemn it as a desecration of a sacred American landscape.

"The Grand Canyon deserves much better," said Robert Arnberger, former superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park. "Skywalk is nothing more than a thrill ride, or thrill walk, hanging over the edge."

The museum's 138-million-page presidential archive could play an important role in determining how Hillary Rodham Clinton's controversial White House past will affect her attempt to reclaim 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

"I haven't received any documents or even a note indicating that they're searching the records," said Jeff Gerth, a former New York Times reporter who requested a wide range of the first lady's files for an unauthorized Clinton biography he's working on.

With the 2008 election looming, researchers are eager to unearth undisclosed details from eight years marked by controversy, scandal and high-wire politics.

The Clintons' longtime personal lawyer, Bruce Lindsey, who helped defend the couple in the 1990s, has veto power over the release of the most sensitive documents. Attempts to contact Lindsey weren't successful.

Among the documents requested: almost all of Hillary Clinton's files as first lady, eight years' worth of her daily White House schedules, office diaries, day planners and telephone logs, according to a list of Freedom of Information Act requests obtained by Newsday.

A proposed "General Records Schedule" (GRS) that would authorize the disposal and destruction of various CFO records is "fundamentally flawed," wrote one Archives analyst last year.

"I really cannot say anything positive about this proposed GRS," wrote another analyst, in internal comments. "It is flawed, troubling, and misleading." It is "unimplementable" and "will lead to the destruction of permanent records."

"This proposal is ill-considered, ill-conceived, and should be terminated with extreme prejudice," said a third.

But another Archives official said the "extremely aggressive tone to the argument" shows that those critics' judgment has been "clouded" because they were not consulted in advance.

As a general matter, no one doubts that the overwhelming majority of government records lack permanent historical value and are properly destroyed. What is at issue in this dispute is whether the proposed schedule for destruction of financial records properly recognizes the enduring value of some CFO records.

The functions of agency Chief Financial Officers "are not routine, administrative, housekeeping operations traditionally covered by a [General Records Schedule]," one internal NARA critic insisted. "Prima facie, it is doubtful that there should be a GRS for the office of Chief Financial Officer."

But the proposal is nevertheless moving forward.

In a February 22 Federal Register notice, NARA announced the availability for public comment of a disposition schedule for CFO records. A copy is here:

http://www.fas.org/

As a result of the debate of the past several months, the revised proposal adds several new caveats. It acknowledges that some CFO records are permanent, not temporary, and that they must be preserved; it specifies that the proposed schedule would apply to certain types of CFO components and not to others; and it notes that some CFO records are already subject to existing schedules that take precedence over the new proposal.

Under the circumstances, then, the remaining question is whether the proposed schedule will provide increased clarity and flexibility, as intended, or whether it will generate new confusion and inadvertent loss of historically valuable records.

A cross-section of internal NARA comments on the proposed schedule as of September 2006, only some of which were resolved by the latest draft, is posted here:

http://www.fas.org

Some basic financial records of the United States Government have already been lost to history.

"We are unable to locate a document containing, or a series of documents from which we may deduce, the aggregate U.S. intelligence budget figure for Fiscal Year 1947 [or Fiscal Year 1948]," wrote the CIA's Kathryn I. Dyer in 2003 in response to a Federation of American Scientists lawsuit.

http://www.fas.org

ATLANTA —- More than 140 years after slavery was abolished, Congress and a growing number of elected officials in states and cities are wrestling with whether to formally apologize.

The movement began in the former Confederate capital, Richmond, Va., with state legislators last month unanimously passing a resolution expressing "profound regret" over Virginia's role in slavery and the Jim Crow era.

Now, lawmakers in Georgia, Maryland, Delaware, New York, Missouri, Massachusetts and Vermont are considering similar measures that would express regret, apologize or create commemorative days.
The wave of contrition has spread to cities too...

There is wide agreement that such apologies would be largely symbolic political gestures, but there appears to be little consensus on what exactly they would mean.

Some believe official legislative remorse could be cathartic to the nation, showing that it is mature enough to confront its past. But others accuse lawmakers of picking an easy battle: Apologizing for blatant historical wrongs such as slavery, they say, only detracts from addressing present-day injustices.

A film is to be made about a woman whom Italy's fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, tried to airbrush out of history.

Ida Dalser and her son by Mussolini both died in mental institutions after she tried unsuccessfully to force the dictator to recognise their marriage and his son, also named Benito. "Not Even Nero or Caligula would have done what you have done," she once wrote to him.

The story has considerable current relevance because of efforts by the Italian right to rehabilitate the dictator and portray him as a good family man and an essentially harmless, if occasionally misguided, authoritarian...

Although it was known Mussolini had had a relationship with Ida Dalser before the first world war, the evidence for a marriage and the existence of their son was only brought to light in 2001 by a local historian in northern Italy...

In 1926, she was arrested and committed to a mental hospital. The rest of her life was a nightmare of escapes, re-arrests and attempts to trace her son, who had been adopted by the former Fascist police chief of Sopramonte. Ida Dalser died of a "brain haemorrhage" in 1937 at a Venetian institution. Her son died five years later, also in an institution, near Milan.

BEIJING -- China commenced a nearly two-year-long enlargement project of the National Museum at the heart of its capital on Saturday.

The National Museum, standing to the east of the Tian'anmen Square in central Beijing, used to be one of the ten celebrated constructions after the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949...

According to the project plan, south, north and west wings of the existing buildings will be repaired and reinforced. New buildings will be constructed eastwards...

The National Museum with new buildings will be completed in 2009 and it will cover a land space of 70,000 square meters [750,000 square feet] and 40.3 meters [132 feet] high.

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.

They're toiling 8 to 5, trying to rescue history. Occasionally, occupants of cars yell hostile words about the strangers in their midst.

Still, the angry are the exception.

Most New Orleans residents tolerate the presence of two UNCG professors and 12 graduate students in history and interior architecture.

They're devoting their spring break to helping rescue historic buildings damaged by Hurricane Katrina or years of neglect.

Using Web sites and pod casts as teaching tools was one of the ideas discussed at a meeting yesterday to start planning Pennsylvania's 150th, or "sesquicentennial," commemoration of the Civil War...

[Sen. John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center President Andrew] led the discussion that looked at how and when events from the Civil War era should be remembered.

The 100th commemoration of the War Between the States gave short shrift to such topics as slavery and the role of women, he said. The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission is making sure those subjects get the coverage this time, he said.

A weekend storm kept Linda Shopes, the commission's director for "Telling Pennsylvania's Civil War Stories," in Harrisburg. She sent a statement, however, outlining the four key themes of the state's "New Narratives" project. They are "Slavery and Freedom," "The War's Impact on Local Communities," "Women and the Home Front" and "Commemoration and Memory."

Topics discussed yesterday included when commemorative activities should begin. While the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter, S.C., on April 12, 1861, its roots and causes went back many years.

Sam Black, curator of the Heinz Center's African-American collection, argued for an event as early as 2008, which marks the 200th anniversary of U.S. abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. [Britain is marking that anniversary in 2007.]

Others proposed 2009, which will mark the 150th anniversary of John Brown's Raid at Harper's Ferry. Mr. Brown and a small group of abolitionists attacked a U.S. arsenal in what is now West Virginia, seeking to spark and arm a slave rebellion. Mr. Brown was captured by federal troops led by Robert E. Lee, convicted of treason and hanged.

It’s just one of many bomb-damaged villas on the outskirts of Kabul. But it is, perhaps, the most important building in Afghanistan, as it houses the rich history of this war-torn country. The museum in Kabul houses what’s left of the artifacts that have survived the fighting...

Afghan and Italian experts have painstakingly put back together hundreds of priceless statues, carvings and other artifacts that had been damaged or even smashed to pieces by thieves and the Taliban...

I learned later that many of the statues had been found in pieces in the storeroom of the museum, which had been ransacked many times but still gave up such priceless artifacts when the experts managed to work their way through the debris.

Others had been left in pieces in the grounds of the museum...

This past weekend 1,400 artifacts protected from looters and the Taliban in far-off Switzerland have been returned to the Kabul museum.

News reports say one of the first items to be placed in the museum was a small Buddah statue from Bamiyan, where the Taliban had blown up the giant statues.

Ernest Hirsch was a scared 9-year-old in a French children's home the last time he heard from his mother...

Shortly after Hirsch got that letter, his parents were forced onto a train headed for death. When they arrived at Auschwitz, "they were marched directly to the gas chambers and killed," he said.

Hirsch, 75, is one of more than 100 Americans who have joined a groundbreaking legal action here against the French railway Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer (SNCF), which transported thousands of Jews during World War II to transit hubs on their way to their deaths. It's the same state-owned train system that now carries commuters to their jobs. Some 76,000 Jews in France were transported to Nazi death camps; only 2,500 of them survived.

In a first-of-its-kind ruling last summer, 62 years after the war ended, an administrative tribunal in Toulouse, France, fined the SNCF and the French republic $80,000 for their role in transporting a Jewish family. The railway is appealing. [The Toulouse finding is the first such ruling against the French republic or one of its agencies.]

The case could be one of the last significant legal actions on behalf of Holocaust survivors, many of whom have already died of old age...

On St. Patrick's Day, everyone feels a little bit Irish. Officially, 34 million Americans can trace some of their ancestry to Ireland. But did you know how many can claim royal Irish blood? Well, using DNA tests, scientists at Trinity College in Dublin discovered some very regal results.

With its ancient castles and folklore, many in Ireland had long claimed royal descent. Never from an English king, of course. That would be cultural sacrilege. But rather, many traced their line back to a 5th-century Irish ruler named, dauntingly, Niall of the Nine Hostages.

"You get that feeling just being here," said Brendan Rohan, a resident of Donegal, Ireland, the historical home of King Niall. "Something in the land, something in the air and something in the bones of the people has a connection."

For four decades there have been rumours that Marilyn Monroe's death was not a simple suicide. Now a Los Angeles-based Australian writer and director, Philippe Mora, has uncovered an FBI document that throws up a chilling new scenario.

Bobby Kennedy's affair with the screen idol Marilyn Monroe has been documented, but a secret FBI file suggests the late US attorney-general was aware of -- and perhaps even a participant in -- a plan"to induce" her suicide.

The detailed three-page report implicates the Hollywood actor Peter Lawford, Monroe's psychiatrist, staff and her publicist in the plot...

The document, hidden among thousands of pages released under freedom-of-information laws last October, was received by the FBI on October 19, 1964 -- two years after her death -- and titled simply"ROBERT F KENNEDY"

. It was compiled by an unnamed former special agent working for the then Democrat governor of California, Pat Brown, and forwarded to Washington by Curtis Lynum, then head of the San Francisco FBI...

Related Links

FBI file 'Marilyn Monroe Cross References, 66 pages'