Prime Minister John Howard has set himself on a collision course with his Japanese counterpart, Shinzo Abe, by declaring there should be no "quibbling" over the degree of coercion used to force thousands of women to act as sex slaves for the Japanese military during World War II.

On the eve of their talks in Tokyo today, Mr Howard has made it clear he will not tolerate an attempt by Japan to rewrite history. He is expected to raise the issue with Mr Abe this afternoon.

Mr Abe enraged surviving so-called "comfort women" two weeks ago when — after the US Congress called on Japan to accept historical responsibility for the sex slave practice — he suggested there was no evidence to prove that the Japanese Government or army had coerced women to work in brothels...

Mr Abe tried to quell the controversy last Sunday by reiterating his support for the 1993 Kono statement of apology.

Mr Howard yesterday welcomed the reaffirmation of the 1993 statement, but rejected any attempt to parse definitions.

"There can be no quibbling about what happened … Any suggestion there was not coercion is completely repudiated by me and it has been completely repudiated by other Allied countries," he said.

A rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike near Exit 8A in Middlesex County is named Molly Pitcher, but did she really exist?

Historical interpreter Stacy Roth of Burlington City answered that question in a re-creation of Molly's life based on historical research, story-telling, imagination and what she calls "plausible conjecture."

Roth sorted fact from fiction during "Over Here, Molly Pitcher," a Women's History Month event last week in Westampton at Peachfield Plantation, a colonial farmhouse operated by the New Jersey chapter of the Colonial Dames.

Based on recent research by historians and authors, Roth believes Molly was probably Mary Hays McCauley, a Revolutionary War camp follower and heroine who assisted her husband's artillery unit at the Battle of Monmouth in 1778.

Roth sang a Revolutionary War song to her audience of 20.

"Good day, to ya," Roth said, using Hays' Irish brogue.

She involved her audience in a simulated artillery crew and canon firing.

Roth was dressed as Molly in layers of clothing with long skirts, petticoats, an overcoat and hat carrying a water canteen, a pack and a rolled wool blanket over one shoulder.

She dispelled myths Molly's artilleryman husband was killed at Monmouth and she took over his canon position or that the water she carried was in pitchers.

"It was more likely she filled their canteens with water, but how would Molly Canteen sound?" she jokes....

When I was a kid, I thought that anything that happened before I was born was ancient history. It didn't matter if it was five years before I was born or 500 years. The year 1955 was the cutoff point. Events before then might be interesting but couldn't possibly have any real-world connection to my life, or so I thought.

As I get older, my time perspective keeps changing. Despite the passage of all those additional years, I now feel closer than ever to the events of World War II -- Hitler's extermination of six million Jews and our dropping of the atomic bomb now looming frighteningly large in life's rear-view mirror.

Even the Civil War stopped seeming so far in the past after I visited Gettysburg a few years back and saw the photos from the 75th anniversary reunion of the famous battle, held in 1938 and attended by 1,918 Civil War veterans, many of whom were pictured participating in a re-enactment of Pickett's Charge.

I guess that's why I'm not so quick to shrug off the discovery that my ancestors owned slaves as something that happened "a long time ago," just because it was more than a century before my birth.

If you missed Sunday's column, I told the story of learning from my mom last week that some of my forebears were slaveowners.

A section of the ancient walls of Masada, one of the country's most poignant symbols of survival, is in danger of collapse as a result of a heavy downpour that drenched the desert site three years ago, the Israel Nature and National Parks Protection Authority said Thursday.

The fortress, built as a palace by Herod the Great, who was King of Judea from 37 to 4 BCE, is situated atop an isolated rock cliff at the western end of the Judean Desert overlooking the Dead Sea, and was the site of the last stand of a group of Jews rebelling against Roman rule nearly 2,000 years ago.

Masada is used as a swearing-in site for some IDF combat units, who pledge that "Masada shall not fall again."

Several hundred meters of the 1,400-meter wall are in need of urgent repair as a result of the freak December 2003 winter storm, Masada Park director Eitan Campbell said.

"There is a growing danger that parts of the wall will collapse if they are not fixed," Campbell told The Jerusalem Post.

By 2020 the British Library reckons that 90% of books and research papers will be available in some kind of electronic format. Only 10% will be available in hard copy only.

Such stats makes some giddy with enthusiasm about the brave new digital world. Information will be so much more accessible and we can do away with filing all those dusty bits of paper, the theory goes. But others aren't so sure.

Family historians, for example, are concerned that we're in danger of wiping out our collective memory by over-relying on emails and other transient electronic formats.

And the head of National Archives says we are facing a crisis in record keeping unless we get to grips with the switch from a paper world to a digital one...

MUNCIE, Ind. -- The Delaware County Office of Geographic Information System stumbled onto what scientists believe to be a well-preserved earthwork built by pre-historic, Woodland Indians.

The site, only 150 feet from Ind. 32 between Muncie and Yorktown, recently came to the attention of the Indiana Department of Transportation, which plans to widen that segment of the highway to four or five lanes.

"It's absolutely critical we keep this one," said Don Cochran, director of archaeological research at Ball State University. "This is one we don't know anything about."

With the exception of Mounds State Park, most of the 300-plus known mounds and enclosures built by the Hopewell-Adena people around 2,000 years ago in East Central Indiana have been completely or partially destroyed by agriculture, development and artifact hunters.

BERLIN -- As Germany's long, often-praised reconciliation with its Nazi past digs deeper, it brings forward characters such as Christian Nazi resister Helmuth James von Moltke.

On his centenary anniversary Sunday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel praised him as a symbol of "European courage" and for having a vision of a democratic Europe far ahead of its time.

Mr. Von Moltke, descendant of one of Germany's greatest military generals, was executed in 1945 for collaborating against Hitler, partly as the guiding spirit of the Kreisau Circle, a collection of German intellectuals, theologians, and aristocrats committed to ending Hitler's rule and rebuilding Germany.

His commemoration signifies Germany's persistent efforts to face its Nazi past, an effort now praised as a model of reconciliation...

Six decades after his death, the most notorious German of all times, Adolf Hitler, may be stripped of his German citizenship.

Deutsche Welle Online reported Monday that a low-ranking official in the state of Lower Saxony, Isolde Saalmann, had convinced her colleagues from the governing Social Democratic Party to file a request to check whether the German citizenship given to Austrian-born Hitler in 1932 can be rescinded.

Hitler's application to become a German national was granted in Braunschweig, the city where he had lived since 1912 and fought for Germany in World War I, a move that enabled his notorious future career in German politics.

Saalmann told a German newspaper it would be a strong symbolic signal if the state would take posthumous action.

Tucked away amid basement boxes and bookshelves in a handsome St. Paul house is a treasure trove that scholars say is rapidly becoming the world's largest repository of Hmong books, artifacts, photographs and recordings. There's a valuable qeej, a traditional Hmong instrument that looks like a wooden trombone and sounds like an accordion. There's a book written by a Chinese emperor in 1810, exploring the history of the oppressed people known in China as the Miao.

There are chipped plates from which refugees ate rice at the Ban Vinai camp in Thailand before immigrating to Minnesota. And there are even napkins and a water bottle retrieved from the 2002 victory party after Mee Moua was elected to the Minnesota Senate, becoming the nation's first Hmong-American legislator.

Welcome to the Hmong Nationality Archives...

Back in 1989, as a young graduate student at the University of Southern California researching a masters thesis, William Aceves asked the government for information about its"freedom of navigation" program involving international waters and air space.

The seemingly benign request, made under a 1966 law designed to let people find out what their government is doing, languished for years.

Just last month, Aceves, now a full professor at California Western School of Law in San Diego, got another batch of partially blacked-out papers, a staggering 18 years after his first request.

Aceves is among dozens of people whose requests for information have lingered in limbo at various agencies for more than a decade, according to a new audit by the National Security Archive, a public watchdog group. Thousands of requests take years. Many more take months.

The law says they are supposed to be processed within 20 days...

Related Links

Sidebar: What's behind the closed doors?

BAD AROLSEN, Germany -- Cornelis Brouwenstijn was forced to surrender his black leather wallet when he entered Neuengamme concentration camp in northern Germany in 1944. Inside it the 22-year-old, a handsome blond Dutch Jew, had tucked his passport, ration cards, some curly-edged photographs of family and friends and a love poem typed on two sides of an onion-skin page: "Ode to a Girl", whose "skin is clear as glass".

Brouwenstijn's now crumbling wallet is one of hundreds stored in brown envelopes marked "effects" at the Red Cross International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen, central Germany. Other envelopes contain everyday objects such as a bronze powder press, whose pale pink contents briefly cloud the air when opened, a tiny lipstick embossed with the words "kiss proof", and a white rosary.

These trinkets and bits of paper are, in thousands of cases, the only remnants of lives that ended, as Brouwenstijn's did, at the hands of the Nazis, the envelopes protecting their memories.

Before the end of this year, the fragmented stories of 17.5 million individuals held in concentration and slave labour camps during the second world war are due to be revealed to historians and academics for the first time.

Every half-century or so, Virginia throws a party to commemorate the arrival of English colonists on its shores. This year comes a biggie: the 400th anniversary. The whole world's invited, and the guest list is especially long and prestigious.

Even the queen of the mother country plans to cross the Atlantic to help mark the occasion.

Already, the cost of activities surrounding the bash is upward of $200 million. The trick has been how to celebrate something long buried under a mound of dirt: Jamestown. But major archaeological discoveries in recent years have helped Virginia piece together the outlines of the original settlement and how the colonists managed to survive.

ALCATRAZ ISLAND, Calif. —- For 150 years the lighthouse beacon here has alerted sailors to San Francisco's rocky, fog-shrouded coast. It beamed from the island when it housed a Civil War-era fort, a military prison, a maximum-security penitentiary and a national park.

Today, the public is free to roam the island's artillery batteries, prison cells and guardhouses —- virtually every building on the 22-acre island except its most recognizable structure, the towering lighthouse. The oldest on the West Coast, it has been under lock and key since 1854.

But that may change. The National Park Service is considering taking over five landmark Bay Area lighthouses from the U.S. Coast Guard and opening what aficionados call "American castles" to the public.

"Lighthouses punctuate our seascape," said Bob Trapani Jr., executive director of the American Lighthouse Foundation. "They strike a lot of emotional chords in a broad group of people. The sound, the night at light, that twinkle of light; if you grow up with that memory, it doesn't go away. Lighthouses are part of a romantic era, from a simpler time."

LONDON -- An article from 1937 under the name of Winston Churchill that blamed Jews for their own persecution has ruffled a long-held view among Britons of their wartime leader's pro-Jewish sentiments.

Some experts on the history of British Jews dismissed the article, saying its existence has been well-known and it had never been published because Churchill rejected the views of the ghost-writer who composed it...Accounts of the article were reported Sunday in several British newspapers, triggering a modest debate over the extent to which it broke new ground in explaining Churchill's feelings about Jews...

Geoffrey Alderman, a British historian who is a columnist for The Jewish Chronicle in London, said in an interview Sunday that "we have known about this for some time" because the article appears in a collection of Churchill's writings compiled by Martin Gilbert, Churchill's official biographer, that was published in the 1980s.

Alderman added: "It does not challenge" the prevailing view of Churchill as supportive of the Jews. "I think it's a flash in the pan."

But [historian Richard] Toye said Churchill had sought to publish the article in 1937 in Britain and the United States. Churchill "was apparently happy to put his name to this article in 1937" and was "happy to endorse sentiments contained in articles that were written for him," Toye said.

Gilbert said Churchill had refused to permit the article to be published. He identified the ghost-writer as Adam Marshall Diston, a member of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. It was not clear why Churchill commissioned him to write an article in his name. Both Toye and Gilbert are planning to publish new books about Churchill in the next few weeks or months.

The Hamas education minister has reversed an order to remove and destroy copies of an anthology of Palestinian folk tales in school libraries because it contains a few references to sexual body parts.

Nasser Shaer said Saturday that he had not been informed of the ban, which was implemented earlier this week.

"I have decided to correct the illegal measures that were taken regarding disposing the book," Shaer told the Associated Press.

Some 1,500 copies of Speak Bird, Speak Again had already been destroyed, sparking outrage among writers, academics and others who protested the move as a form of censorship...

The 400-page anthology, first published in English in 1989, is narrated by Palestinian women. It was put together by Sharif Kanaana, a novelist and professor at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank and Ibrahim Muhawi, a teacher of Arabic literature.

It wasn't published in Arabic until 2001, and that's when the Palestinian Culture Ministry requested copies to be distributed in schools.

Kanaana said two of the 45 tales contain colloquial Arabic words that refer to body parts.

LONDON -- The Second World War prime minister Winston Churchill argued that Jews were "partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer" in an article publicised for the first time Sunday.

Churchill made the claim in [a never-published] article entitled "How The Jews Can Combat Persecution" written in 1937, three years before he started leading the country.

He outlined a new wave of anti-Semitism sweeping across Europe and the United States, which was followed by the deaths of millions of Jews in the Holocaust under the German Nazi regime.

"It would be easy to ascribe it to the wickedness of the persecutors, but that does not fit all the facts," the article read...

"For it may be that, unwittingly, they are inviting persecution -- that they have been partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer."

The article adds: "The central fact which dominates the relations of Jew and non-Jew is that the Jew is 'different'."...

Elsewhere, Churchill praised Jews as "sober, industrious, law-abiding" and urged Britons to stand up for the race against persecution.

"There is no virtue in a tame acquiescence in evil. To protest against cruelty and wrong, and to strive to end them, is the mark of a man," he wrote.

The article was discovered by Cambridge University historian Richard Toye in the university's archive of Churchill's papers.

Related Links

Uncovered: The 'lost' paper Churchill kept from publication (U.Cambridge press release, 3/9/07)

Reaction: 142 comments (and counting) at Ha'aretz (Tel Aviv)

TOKYO -- Prime Minister Shinzo Abe sought on Sunday to contain fallout from his remarks about women forced to act as wartime sex slaves for Japanese soldiers as the furor threatened to cloud summits with Chinese and U.S. leaders.

Abe sparked outrage abroad when he said in February there was no evidence that Japan's government or army had forced the mostly Asian women to work in military brothels during World War Two.

Abe has endorsed a 1993 government apology to the "comfort women", as they are euphemistically known in Japan, but has also said Tokyo would not apologize again even if U.S. lawmakers adopted a resolution calling for a new and unambiguous apology.

On Sunday, Abe repeated that the 1993 apology remained in effect. "We have stated our heartfelt apologies to the 'comfort women' at the time who suffered greatly and were injured in their hearts," Abe said in an interview with NHK television. "I want to say that that sentiment has not changed at all."

MILAN -- Pope Benedict XVI plans to bring back the celebration of mass in Latin, overriding a rare show of protest from senior cardinals.

With a papal decree said to be imminent, Catholic publishers in Rome are preparing new editions of the Latin missal. They have sent proofs to Vatican authorities for approval, the Rome newspaper La Repubblica reported yesterday.

Vatican sources said Benedict, who is fluent in Latin, is considering publication of a papal “motu proprio” (literally, on his own initiative), which does not require the approval of church bodies. This would enable Benedict to ignore opposition from several cardinals.

The decree would officially declare the Latin, or Tridentine, mass an “extraordinary universal rite”, and the vernacular mass, with which most Catholics are familiar, an “ordinary universal rite”.

SALINAS, Calif. -- The National Steinbeck Center, at the top of Main Street in this farming community, exhibits an array of artifacts from John Steinbeck's life and works...Downstairs, in a climate-controlled vault, is the original manuscript of "The Pearl," his novella published in 1947...

Steinbeck aficionados wishing to examine the manuscript of "The Pearl"...have to travel here -— after making an appointment with a part-time archivist, who is in on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

The center takes great care to preserve these relics of Steinbeck, a Nobel laureate, yet it has no plans to take the collection a step further, to adapt to a digital age...

These Steinbeck artifacts are not the only important pieces of history that are at risk of disappearing or being ignored in the digital age. As more museums and archives become digital domains, and as electronic resources become the main tool for gathering information, items left behind in nondigital form, scholars and archivists say, are in danger of disappearing from the collective cultural memory, potentially leaving our historical fabric riddled with holes.

"There's an illusion being created that all the world's knowledge is on the Web, but we haven't begun to glimpse what is out there in local archives and libraries," said Edward L. Ayers, a historian and dean of the college and graduate school of arts and sciences at the University of Virginia. "Material that is not digitized risks being neglected as it would not have been in the past, virtually lost to the great majority of potential users."...

In Colonial Boston, Henry Knox's bookstore on Cornhill Street was a fashionable gathering place for British Army officers and members of the town's Tory elite.

Knox developed an interest in the science and tactics of artillery that he furthered by reading the books he imported from England and carried in his store.

That knowledge would shortly be turned against his customers in the military surprise that led to the events celebrated on Evacuation Day, March 17.

In the early days of the American Revolution, Knox joined the Colonial artillery and convinced General George Washington that he could haul cannons from recently captured Fort Ticonderoga overland to Boston.

Under cover of darkness on the night of March 4, 1776, the cannons were mounted on Dorchester Heights in South Boston, bringing the British garrison and fleet within range of their fire. Within two weeks, the British evacuation of Boston was underway.

Knox, the bookseller-turned-artilleryman, will be the focus of this year's Evacuation Day celebrations in Boston, sponsored by a coalition of community groups.

It could be shrugged off as an argument over fish, but in fact it is a classic dispute over ancient rights and local pleasures, over privileges and prerogatives, which stretches back centuries into the Celtic mist.

A few unemployed southern Irish anglers are taking on a scion of Britain's high nobility in the person of the 12th Duke of Devonshire, Peregrine Andrew Morny Cavendish, friend of the Prince of Wales and inheritor of fabulous wealth. And some prize salmon are at stake.

The resonances echo down the centuries: James I makes an appearance in the legal dispute, as does Magna Carta, Henry VIII and Sir Walter Raleigh. So, in more modern times, do Fred Astaire and Tiger Woods.

The origins of the tussle go back a long, long way. It centres on properties and rights that the Devonshires have held for 400 years or so. Among many other assets the family owns Lismore castle in Waterford and fishing rights on the river Blackwater in Cork...

THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- The old chestnut tree that comforted Anne Frank while she was in hiding during the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands is to be cut down.

Amsterdam city council said the diseased tree behind the building in which the Jewish Frank family took refuge has been attacked by a fungus.

But after protests by environmental groups and the Anne Frank Museum, a cutting of the tree will be replanted.

The chestnut tree is listed as a monument and is at least 150 years old.

FEROKE, Kerala, India -- [Kerala] Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan has said that India is sliding into the grip of neo-imperialism because of the economic and cultural regime that globalisation has brought about.

Inaugurating the 67th Session of the Indian History Congress at Farook College here on Saturday, Mr. Achuthanandan said the celebration this year of the 150th anniversary of the revolt of 1857 had a special significance in the prevailing situation in India because it gave the people an occasion to express the country's opposition to neo-imperialism. 'The dissemination of the anti-colonial message of the revolt has contemporary significance,' he said and called upon the historians participating in the conference to 'celebrate the year of the great revolt.'

The Chief Minister said he had noticed that history as a discipline had been in turmoil during the last few years. 'The information that I have gathered is both alarming and encouraging. Alarming because it is reported that there has been an attempt to subvert secular historical writing and supplant it with communal interpretation. Attempts were made to rewrite textbooks on communal lines and to use institutions like the Indian Council for Historical Research for propagating communal interpretation. Manuscripts of well-known historians were suppressed and Hinduised and mythified history was propagated...I highly appreciate the consistent and courageous fight put up by the members of the Indian History Congress against this nefarious move,' Mr. Achuthanandan said.

Earlier, J.V. Naik, Professor of History, took over as General President of the Indian History Congress. Historian Irfan Habib proposed his name for the post. Calicut University Vice-Chancellor Anwar Jahan Zuberi released a souvenir brought out to mark the 67th session of the IHC, which is the fourth to be held in Kerala and the first to be held under the auspices of a college. Hundreds of delegates from all over India and neighbouring countries are attending the three-day conference, which would see around 600 papers on Ancient India, Medieval Indian, Modern India, Countries Other Than India and Archaeology being presented.

The Canadian War Museum, refusing to bow any further to demands from several veterans' organizations, has announced it will not change a controversial display that raises questions about the morality and military value of the Allied bombing campaign in Germany during the Second World War.

The decision quickly prompted the Royal Canadian Legion to renew calls for a public boycott of the museum and to ask a Senate committee on veterans affairs to "investigate the matter" -- ensuring a new round of debate in the long-running dispute over the Allies' aerial bombardment of wartime Germany.

A single panel at the heart of the conflict...[reads,] "Mass bomber raids against Germany resulted in vast destruction and heavy loss of life," the disputed panel reads. "The value and morality of the strategic bomber offensive against Germany remains bitterly contested. Bomber Command's aim was to crush civilian morale and force Germany to surrender by destroying its cities and industrial installations. Although Bomber Command and American attacks left 600,000 Germans dead, and more than five million homeless, the raids resulted in only small reductions in German war production until late in the war."

The decision not to alter the panel -- which some Canadian veterans have charged depicts them as "war criminals" -- follows the submission of separate reports on the controversy by four of Canada's leading historians: McGill University's Desmond Morton, Margaret MacMillan of the University of Toronto, the University of Calgary's David Bercuson and Serge Bernier, head of history and heritage at the Department of National Defence.

CHINO, Calif. -- Federal agents dismantled two F-14 Tomcat fighter jets Thursday afternoon at Chino Airport, leaving only metal skeletons on the tarmac.

It was unclear if a third jet seized from a Chino museum two days earlier had been moved or stripped.

The former military aircraft were taken from the Yanks Air Museum and the Planes of Fame Museum after a 17-month investigation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Defense Criminal Investigation Service and the Naval Criminal Investigation Service...

According to an ICE news release, the government agencies had determined that the three aircraft from the Chino museums, as well as a fourth one in Victorville, could have contained sensitive military equipment that should have been removed before they were transferred to private parties.

In the late 1990s, the aircraft were decommissioned at the Naval Air Station at Point Mugu, then moved to a scrap metal company.