The people who work to find fallen warriors and return them to their families are part of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii.

About 75 percent of the people who work there are in the military, and though the services are struggling to fill some job slots because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon still is committed to staffing the command’s mission as best as it can, said Army Maj. Brian DeSantis, JPAC public affairs officer.

The command’s military personnel have a wide variety of jobs that are needed in-theater, including military intelligence specialists, engineers, quartermaster specialists, explosive ordnance disposal, infantrymen, medics, communications specialists and mortuary affairs specialists, DeSantis said.

Occasionally, recovery missions require medics or other personnel with jobs that are top priority in-theater to be brought in for a few months because they cannot be spared to join the command full-time, DeSantis said. But the command’s allotment of personnel has not changed since the wars began.

The Clinton campaign has nervously awaited publication of the books for fear they would include a bombshell revelation or, at the very least, revive memories of less-savory moments in the couple's rise to power. The books, both by longtime journalists and both obtained by The Washington Post yesterday, include a number of assertions and anecdotes that could confront her campaign with unwelcome questions.

"A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton," by Carl Bernstein, reports that Clinton as first lady was terrified she would be prosecuted, took over her own legal and political defense, and decided not to be forthcoming with investigators because she was convinced she was unfairly targeted. While in Arkansas, according to Bernstein, she personally interviewed one woman alleged to have had an affair with her husband, contemplated divorce and thought about running for governor out of anger at her husband's indiscretions.

"Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton," by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr., reports that during her husband's 1992 campaign, a team she oversaw hired a private investigator to undermine Gennifer Flowers "until she is destroyed." Flowers had said publicly that she had an affair with Bill Clinton while he was governor of Arkansas.

It really hit home when he overheard some of his summer students wondering why it's referred to as the 'Two-Four Weekend.'

"The one girl said, 'Well, it's the first weekend of summer and it's the first chance people get to buy a case of 24 beers.

"I thought, holy smokes, did she ever get that out of whack. And she was a history student!"

And so, despite the fact Victoria Day has come and gone, Jouppien will mark the Queen's actual birthday with a colourful banner draped across the restored Egerton Morden House on Corwin Avenue.

For several decades Czechs have disputed over whether the assassination of Heydrich was a heroic deed or a crime. Since 1947 there has never been enough political will to pay such honour to the paratroopers who sacrificed their lives for their homeland, the paper writes.

This situation has changed now, it says.

For decades after the rebellion, well into the 1800s, whiskey production here boomed, and we began making such a splendid variety of the stuff that they named it after the river that gave it life: Monongahela rye.

In 1810, while Kentucky produced 2.2 million gallons of primarily corn bourbon, Pennsylvania shipped 6.5 million gallons of distilled spirits, mostly Monongahela rye.

Old Overholt was born in Westmoreland County. The old Israel Shreve distillery still stands in Perryopolis, on a property once owned by George Washington; the original Michter's distillery was built in Pennsylvania Amish country and operated until 20 years ago.

It all would make for a nice little history trail, wouldn't it?

John Lipman and his wife, Linda -- Pennsylvania natives now living in Ohio -- have trekked this trail, giving themselves a self-guided tour of the state's old distilleries.

"Whiskey history and United States history are so intertwined," he said. From the early slave trade to the Whiskey Rebellion to Prohibition, whiskey was there, playing a role.

The club is folding because they're all getting older, said Pridham, and they wanted to call it quits while they could still attend meetings, like the one Tuesday night filled with toasts and camera flashes.

A story in Secrecy News (May 3) describing new restrictions on researchers was based on a misunderstanding by Lab personnel, Department of Energy and Lab officials said last week. Although there was a technical change in policy, access to the archives remains unaffected, the officials asserted.

The technical change occurred because Los Alamos National Security (LANS), the contractor that replaced the University of California as Lab manager, is not subject to the California Public Records Act (CPRA).

But "the actual practices at the [LANL] archives have not changed substantially due to this situation with CPRA," officials said, particularly since the California law did not affect federal records.

Despite the new assertions, however, the current access policy for private researchers at Los Alamos is significantly constrained compared to the recent past. And the latest statement of policy is crafted in such a way as to limit direct access to unclassified records to those that have been specifically marked for public release. In the past, Lab archivists would assist researchers by looking for relevant materials and making them available if they were unclassified. If the materials were classified, the archivists would assist with processing the records for review. That is apparently no longer the case.

Priscilla McMillan, author of the 2005 book"The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer," recalled that she had requested and received numerous archival records from Los Alamos over a period of two decades beginning in 1983 without ever filing a Freedom of Information Act request. She also performed research in the archive itself (usually but not always under supervision), a practice that is no longer permitted.

Today, according to an official statement, only records that are" clearly marked 'Approved for Public Release' may be released by the Lab archives without a FOIA request."

"When anyone requests something from the archives that has a classification issue, FOIA has always been required," the statement said, inaccurately.

It is of course understandable that some kind of formal review would be required prior to release of any classified records. But the wording of the current policy now requires researchers to file a FOIA request for any document -- even an unclassified or previously declassified document -- that is not" clearly marked 'Approved for Public Release'."

Notwithstanding official insistence that the current restricted access policy is"not new," this is a departure from past practice that does not correspond to the recent experience of Ms. McMillan or other scholars and researchers.

If Erwin Rommel, lauded as a master military tactician even by his enemies, had managed to fight his way through North Africa, he would have sealed the fate of thousands of Jews who had fled to Palestine from the Nazi terror in Europe.

A new documentary broadcast on Germany's ZDF television channel this week seeks to correct Rommel's image as a gentleman warrior whose campaigns in North Africa weren't connected with the murderous wars of destruction Nazi Germany unleashed in Europe.

Separately, recently published research by two Stuttgart-based historians, Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, claims that Hitler had worked out plans to extend the Holocaust to the Middle East, and that the Nazis had forged an alliance with Arab nationalists who wanted to drive the Jewish refugees out of Palestine -- a murderous version of German-Arab friendship founded on common hatred of Jews. Jews living in the Middle East were petrified by Rommel's victories. After seizing the British fortress of Tobruk in Libya in June 1942 he set his sights on the Suez Canal, on Palestine and the oil fields of the Middle East.

JIM LEHRER: Now, what the war in Iraq is costing. Democrats in Congress are still trying to pass a war funding bill the president will sign. That legislation will provide money for military operations, but those funds are only part of the larger price tag. The NewsHour's economics correspondent, Paul Solman, has our report.

PAUL SOLMAN, NewsHour Economics Correspondent: The cost of the Iraq war, it's a far cry from the original estimates.

DONALD RUMSFELD, Former U.S. Secretary of Defense: The Office of Management and Budget estimated it would be something under $50 billion.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, Host, "This Week": Outside estimates say up to $300 billion.

DONALD RUMSFELD: Baloney.

PAUL SOLMAN: The $50 billion estimate turns out to be a modest fraction of what the war has actually cost thus far, the out-of-pocket, mainly military costs.

GREG SPEETER, National Priorities Project: We're averaging, over the period of the war, about $275 million a day.

PAUL SOLMAN: Greg Speeter runs the National Priorities Project and its costofwar.com Web site, which tracks the spending per second. At this point, says Speeter, the total is close to $450 billion.

GREG SPEETER: That gives you some indication of just how expensive this war is.

PAUL SOLMAN: But, no, it really doesn't, according to those who've looked at the numbers more broadly. As economist Linda Bilmes explains...

LINDA BILMES, Harvard University: Even if we withdrew all of our troops from Iraq tomorrow, the war would still keep costing us money for many, many years to come, because there are several long-term costs which are not included in the running costs of the war.

PAUL SOLMAN: With Nobel laureate economist and former Bill Clinton adviser Joe Stiglitz, Bilmes did a cost study that's received a lot of attention for its bottom line.

LINDA BILMES: The total cost of the war would be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion.

“I was upset to learn that the book could not be distributed at the right time,” said Than Win Hlaing. “What I was trying to do is preserve our history for the next generation.”

Than Win Hlaing this year completed a 7-year prison sentence for his previous book about historic sculpture in Burma and its preservation of the history of the country’s most prominent historical figures.

The history of U Nu was designed to preserve the memory of one of Burma’s best-known nationalist politicians and the first prime minister of an independent Burma.

U Nu was a student leader and independence activist in the final decades of British rule in Burma. He co-founded the influential Nagani, or “Red Dragon,” book club, which circulated Burmese-language translations of international works in the fields of literature, history, economics politics and science.

Following the assassination of Gen Aung San and fellow cabinet ministers on July 19, 1947, U Nu led the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League to secure the Nu-Atlee Treaty, a pre-independence agreement later in the year.

History professor Nathan Citino agreed that every year there are fewer students who arrive on campus with advanced ability in the written word.

Citino speculated that writ-ing ability, along with analytic ability, is suffering because students aren’t reading as much as they once did.

“There’s a huge range in the survey classes from students who can stand toe to toe with any undergraduate institution in the country to people who don’t belong on a university campus,” he said.

Mary Custis Lee, the unofficial family archivist, stowed the trunks at the bank because she had an account there, said Lee Shepard, the Virginia Historical Society's director of manuscripts and archives. She died in 1918, and the trunks were not rediscovered by family members and bank officials until 84 years later.

"One of the great things about this collection for me is it's very broad in terms of what we can learn about Lee," said Shepard. "It's not just the Civil War, though there is good Civil War content."

Other subjects covered in the writings, he said, include Lee's time on the Texas frontier before the war and his presidency of Washington College — now Washington & Lee — in Lexington, Virginia, after the war.

The collection includes materials from other Lee family members, Shepard said, including "many of the female members of the family, who were interesting in their own right." The oldest item dates to 1694, he said.