Egyptian Education and Culture Ministry official Dr. Radha Abu Sari'a announced that it had been decided to eliminate foreign history studies in international and foreign schools in Egypt. He said that starting with the next school year, the only history taught would be Egyptian history, in Arabic.

The change is aimed at preserving Egypt's cultural identity and preventing a recurrence of incidents such as that in which a schoolbook claimed that the Jews had built the pyramids.

A beautiful sunset was often the sign for African-Americans to get out of town. That was the rule in hundreds of towns in Illinois and Missouri. The author of a recent book called 'Sundown Towns' claims in some rare cases, it may still be the unwritten rule. FOX 2’s Chris Hayes visited one of those towns near the Missouri/Illinois border, a place called Anna. He discovered the name itself suggests African-Americans are not welcomed.

David Slone arrived in the small Kentucky town of Corbin in 2005, seeking a haven after Hurricane Katrina ripped through his hometown of Biloxi, Miss.

He was in a shelter in Gulfport, Miss., and saw a flier left by the Corbin church offering to house displaced families.

Slone didn't know until he arrived that he would be one of only a few blacks living in Corbin, a town still trying to come to terms with a troubled racial history.

In 1919, more than 200 black men worked in Corbin, expanding the railroad yard and paving streets.

But racial violence and labor strife were rampant across the country as soldiers streamed home from World War I.

In what came to be known as Red Summer, white mobs shot and lynched dozens of blacks in more than two dozen locales from Chicago to the Mississippi Delta....

Trouble came to Corbin the following fall, when reports surfaced that a white man had been mugged by two black men there.

Soon, a mob drove nearly all the town's black residents to the train station.

"They swore at us and said: 'By God we are going to run all Negroes out of this town tonight,'" said longtime black resident John Turner in a signed affidavit a few months after the incident. He and his wife were taken to the depot at gunpoint and forced to leave.

In Buried in the Bitter Waters, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Elliot Jaspin writes about racial cleansings from Central Texas through Georgia.

A national register is to be created to protect England's precious historic sites, bringing together everything from Stonehenge to Blenheim, from Canterbury cathedral to the wreck of the Hanover, an 18th century treasure ship breaking up on the seabed off Cornwall.

The culture secretary, Tessa Jowell...promised to beef up protection for World Heritage sites: Britain's range from the Tower of London to the old iron and coal works at Blaenavon in south Wales, but the honour which flags them up as among the world's most important brings no statutory protection.

The white paper includes the promise of"buffer zones" to protect the perimeters of some World Heritage sites from unsympathetic development...

English Heritage, the conservation quango which will take over responsibility for listing from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport -- in the past it has only recommended listings -- warmly welcomed the reforms...

Conservation groups cautiously welcomed the white paper, but were quick to warn more money will be needed to make it work...The National Trust welcomed the single register but also expressed concern over resources...

Conservation groups welcomed the government's acceptance of their passionate argument for new interim protection during the consultation process, to prevent owners flattening a building as soon as they learn of potential designation.

Related Links

Government reviews UK's heritage protection system (UKTV History)

Heritage Protection for the 21st Century -- White Paper (with links to several documents)

Contest to name Britain’s best-loved historic site

Four years ago, The Nation launched a Classroom Education Program as a way to encourage a healthy diversity of opinion by offering massively marked-down short-term subscriptions for students. One part of that program offers teaching aids and archival resources to educators which have been so popular that we're now making special history packs available to all students of history, whether you're in a classroom or not, at very reasonable rates.

Nation editors have combed the magazine's archives to collect and compile insightful articles that bring back to life the real stories behind the historic episodes that have shaped the American experience. As twenty-first century Nation readers know from our prescient coverage of the Iraq War, the story started well before the invasion and occupation that four years later threatens to inflame the entire region.

Now you can travel back and read The Nation's reporting on The Roots of the Vietnam War, beginning with an article we published in 1947. Or learn about the civil rights movement as it was unfolding during The Montgomery Bus Boycott--years before Rosa Parks inspired the "Miracle in Alabama." Interested in the ongoing battle between evolution and creationism in schools? Go back to The Scopes Trial and read The Nation's coverage of the historic "Monkey Trial," including a piece by H. L. Mencken, one of the country's most legendary journalists. There are also packs on Sacco and Vanzetti, President Kennedy's assassination, Watergate, the Spanish-American War and much more.

WASHINGTON -- Federal US agents have seized disabled F14 fighter jets from museums in California because of fears that parts would be sold to Iran.

The raids reflect the nervousness that is driving policy towards the Islamic republic at a time when the US has stationed two aircraft carriers in the Gulf and is alleging that Iranian Revolutionary Guards are aiding attacks on its soldiers in Iraq. One European diplomat described the raids as evidence of American paranoia.

The F14 Tomcat fighters, made famous by the film Top Gun,had been sawn in half and welded together before being sold by the Ventura naval base as scrap metal in 2005 for as little as $2,000 (£1,000) apiece. Three ended up in museums at Chino Airport, while a fourth was acquired as a prop by producers of the TV show JAG.

Although there is no evidence that the aircraft had been plundered for parts, US customs conducted a 17-month operation to stop any components from entering the black market. Iran’s ageing squadron of F14s dates to before the 1979 Revolution and Tehran has become increasingly desperate to find spare parts despite a US arms embargo against it.

BERLIN -- The mayor of a small town in Germany on Thursday called on Google Earth to delete a reference to a nearby "Mount Hitler" from its geographic image service, saying it was misleading.

Andreas Wiedemann, mayor of Bad Toelz, south of Munich, said the peak near the Bavarian town had been known as Mount Hitler for a short time during the Third Reich but had been given back its original name of Heigelkopf after World War Two.

Google Earth users who call up a map of the area are given both names for the 1,205-meter (3,950 feet) mountain.

The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles is forming a scholarly group to study the origin of a disputed ancient statue known as "Aphrodite" that the Italian Ministry of Culture has claimed.

The Getty, the world's richest art institution, said in November that it was willing to transfer ownership of the "Cult Statue of a Goddess" to Italy after the sculpture is examined for as long as a year. The museum said today in a statement that it invited a group of scientists, archaeologists and art historians to a workshop on May 9 to begin a study of the statue's origin.

The group will analyze "small amounts of pollen and soil that were removed from the statue during its cleaning at the time of acquisition, as well as additional stone analysis to supplement the research," the museum said.

The 7-foot-tall Greek statue was made about 425-400 B.C. in southern Italy or Sicily. The limestone and marble sculpture, with traces of pigment, depicts the Greek goddess of love in flowing robes with her right arm extended. The Getty bought the statue in 1988 for an undisclosed price, museum spokeswoman Julie Jaskol said.

The Italian city of Pompeii is one of the best-known reminders of how deadly volcanoes can be. Mt. Vesuvius' eruption in 79 A.D. buried the city, entombing many of the dead in casts of hardened ash that remain today. Now, scientists say the destruction was even worse in an earlier incident -- a deadly day 4,000 years ago.

A group of scientists digging northwest of Vesuvius near Naples has found evidence that an enormous eruption during the Bronze Age covered the land almost 15 miles away from the volcano in hot ash and dust. The findings appear in the latest edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

One village was practically petrified in ash, with utensils and pottery still intact. The scientists also found 4,000-year-old footprints of people and animals running away from the destruction.

Sen. Sam Brownback wants Congress to apologize to American Indians for the egregious federal actions committed against them, while a freshman House member wants the same courtesy extended to black Americans.

Mr. Brownback said he has introduced the legislation in the 108th and 109th Congresses, the bill being passed out of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs both times, but he has never been able to get the bill to the floor.

"The arguments against the bill are always that there were atrocities committed on both sides and that apologies lead to financial remedies, but this bill doesn't deal with that, and it is specific to federal actions, not what happened in some town or village during the Western expansion," Mr. Brownback said...

"We want to do a congressional delegation trip to Sand Creek, Colorado, to raise awareness of the atrocities that have been committed," Mr. Brownback said. Sand Creek was the site of an 1864 massacre of an encampment of Cheyenne women, children and elderly at the hands of 700 state militia...

Freshman Rep. Steve Cohen, Tennessee Democrat, has introduced a House resolution of apology for slavery and the 100 years of Jim Crow policy after the post-Civil War Reconstruction...

Mr. Cohen said he was inspired by President Clinton's sentiments of apology 10 years ago. "When Virginia did it last month with bipartisan, unanimous support, that gave me a sense that this could be done," he said.

March is Women’s History Month, and for the occasion the Library of Congress is honoring a variety of women from U.S. history on their Women’s History Month site. The site contains an abundance of resources on influential women as well as links to related web sites, like the American Memory site on women, the Women at War project, and more. The Women’s History Month site gives visitors access to images of women in a range of situations: fighting for suffrage, living through the Depression, acting as First Lady. There are also audio and video files available to allow visitors to hear these women speak for themselves. And teachers will find a link to the LOC’s learning page for “ready-to-use lesson plans” on women’s history, and other classroom resources. Visit the Women’s History Month web site and see how the Library of Congress is celebrating “the wisdom and tenacity of women throughout U.S. History.”

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- The city of Palo Alto has agreed to issue a demolition permit for the city's oldest home after losing a nine-year legal tussle.

Preservation groups and city officials had sought to maintain the 160-year-old Juana Briones House, built by one of California's early settlers, which is to be leveled and could make way for a luxury home.

After a trial court and appeals court both ruled that the city's heritage ordinance was unenforceable, Planning Director Steve Emslie issued a letter Wednesday to property owners Jaim Nulman and Avelyn Welczer saying they "should immediately be granted a demolition permit pursuant to their original application."

Before demolition begins, the owners have agreed to allow the Juana Briones Historical Foundation to have an architect and photographer survey the property and home.

The faculty senate of Southern Methodist University split down the middle Wednesday on whether the campus should consider dissociating from a partisan institute that would be part of the George W. Bush Presidential Library.

The senate voted 13-13 on the resolution, which called on SMU to consider two options: reject any affiliation with the institute, to the point of not allowing it on campus; or make the institute nonpartisan and bring it under SMU's control. Three senators abstained; the measure failed to pass, because it lacked a majority vote.

About 40 senators and other faculty members attended the meeting, which was closed to the press.

The divided vote echoes the larger debate on campus over the Bush library, with most discord focused on its accompanying public-policy institute. As proposed by a library selection committee, the institute would report to a Bush foundation, not SMU.

"There is a genuine division in the faculty," said Professor David Freidel, who wants SMU to oversee the institute but could not vote because he's not a senator.

He said that on one side are professors who want more clarity on the role of the institute, with many fearing it would bring partisan politics to campus. On the other side, he said, are those who worry that the continued debate could make SMU lose the library, damaging the university's reputation and ability to raise money....

Also Wednesday, SMU filed a court motion to keep documents related to its library bid under wraps. The university is being sued by lawyer Gary Vodicka over the University Gardens condos, which SMU might use for part of the Bush library....

SYDNEY, Australia, March 7 — Wu Hsiu-mei said she was 23 and working as a maid in a hotel in 1940 when her Taiwanese boss handed her over to Japanese officers. She and some 15 other women were sent to Guangdong Province in southern China to become sex slaves.

Inside a hotel there was a so-called comfort station, managed by a Taiwanese but serving only the Japanese military, Ms. Wu said. Forced to have sex with more than 20 Japanese a day for almost a year, she said, she had multiple abortions and became sterile.

The long festering issue of Japan’s war-era sex slaves gained new prominence last week when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe denied the military’s role in coercing the women into servitude. The denial by Mr. Abe, Japan’s first prime minister born after the war, drew official protests from China, Taiwan, South Korea and the Philippines, some of the countries from which the sex slaves were taken....

According to historians, the military established the stations to boost morale among its troops, but also to prevent rapes of local women and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases among soldiers.

Japan’s deep fear of rampaging soldiers also led it to establish brothels with Japanese prostitutes across Japan for American soldiers during the first months of the postwar occupation, a fact that complicates American involvement in the current debate.

PARIS -- A court in Turkey on Wednesday ordered blockage of all access to YouTube, the popular video-sharing Web site, over a video deemed insulting to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.

The ban followed a week of what the media in Turkey dubbed a "virtual war" of videos between Greeks and Turks on YouTube and came as governments around the world —- including France — grappled with the freewheeling content now readily posted on the Internet.

The ban also coincides with a Turkish struggle to prove its human rights credentials to the European Union.

What they didn't want you to know: A list of intriguing facts disinterred by the [UK] Freedom of Information Act.

*Ministers and MPs were claiming thousands of pounds on taxis as part of £5.9m in expenses for travel

*The Thatcher Government concocted a plan to search for the Loch Ness monster using a team of dolphins

*Foreign diplomats – who have diplomatic immunity – were accused of rapes, sexual assaults, child abuse and murders while working in Britain

*The Government agreed a £1.5m bailout of one of the most troubled schools in its flagship city academies programme ten days before the 2005 general election

*People charged with certain criminal offences in Warwickshire are 30 per cent more likely to be convicted than those in Bedfordshire. The figures showed huge variations in performance of the Crown Prosecution Service

*Politicians are spending £2.2bn a year of taxpayers’ money on private management consultants

*Ted Heath was once offered concert work by Idi Amin of Uganda. The eccentric dictator made his offer in a 1977 telegram ....

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe may order a reinvestigation into the wartime sex slaves -- a move that could lead to a revision of Tokyo's 1993 statement admitting the military's involvement in running frontline brothels across Asia for Imperial Japanese Army soldiers during the 1930s and 1940s, government and ruling bloc sources said Wednesday.

Abe, who last week unleashed a storm of criticism by claiming there is no evidence that the wartime army "coerced" women in Japanese-occupied territories into sexual slavery, thinks the state needs to look again at whether there was coercion by the Japanese military because "new documents and testimonies have emerged" in the 14 years since then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono issued the apology statement, one ruling coalition lawmaker said...

One idea being floated is for Abe to commission historians and other experts to again look at the "relevant facts," the sources said.

Related Links

Yesterday: Japan stands by but won't expand on sex slaves apology (Sydney Morning Herald)

Sex slaves of Japanese again endure old pain (International Herald Tribune)

Prague's Olsanske cemetery is by far the largest graveyard in the city. It is the final resting place of over a million people, including many of the leading figures of the Czech national revival and scholars and artists. You can also find there the graves of Czech legionaries from the First World War, as well as Commonwealth and Russian soldiers who lost their lives on Czechoslovak territory during the Second World War.

However, this burial ground is often the target of vandals and some of oldest parts of Olsanske cemetery are in very bad repair. Among the greenery, sandstone tombs, a couple of centuries old, are nearly falling apart, their roofs caved in. Some of them have their doorways bricked up to stop unwanted guests from using them as toilets or places to sleep...

But in the oldest part of the cemetery, the view is a little more optimistic. The eye is attracted by small white tablets scattered among the graves with photos and texts paying tribute to some of the long departed. That's the work of Roman Catholic priest Milos Szabo and his parishioners from the nearby district of Zizkov.

"I had this idea that a history trail could lead through the graveyard with signs telling the visitor which notable people are buried here. Anyone would be able to find the particular grave and pay their respects to the dead. Or for example, professional groups, such as mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers could find their great predecessors. Or teachers could tell their pupils about famous writers."

The first dead were buried in Olsany in 1680 during a plague. A chapel, now outside the cemetery, commemorates the epidemic. In 1787, Emperor Joseph II made Olsany the central cemetery for Prague. Located outside the city walls, it was a safer burial place than the old graveyards in an already overcrowded city.