COPENHAGEN -- Danish member of parliament Morten Messerschmidt, 26, of the right-wing Danish Peoples Party (DVP) party has resigned after he was caught singing Nazi songs and engaging in Nazi salutes, the Danish BT newspaper reported Monday.

According to BT, Messerschimdt, who has been previously convicted for racist offences, resigned in order to spare his party any further aggravation...

BT reported the previous week that at a celebration to mark the opening of Copenhagen's Tivoli amusement park, Messerschimdt drunkenly sang a Nazi song and made the Nazi salute, saying "Heil Hitler" and "Sieg Heil" with his right arm raised.

The member of parliament denied the report, saying that he was so drunk that he remembered nothing.

Did the NSA lose a treasure trove of top-secret cryptographic equipment and material to the North at the end of the Vietnam war? Investigative journalist and NSA expert James Bamford has said so. But in 2002, official NSA historians refuted that in an internal essay. Of course, this being NSA, the rebuttal was classified.

Now that essay, SIGINT and the Fall of Saigon, April 1975, has been (mostly) declassified in a Mandatory Declassification Review initiated by attorney and journalist Michael Ravnitzky. Here's the NSA's side of the story...

Stone Age humans may have been as randy as some of their modern-day counterparts.

Research shows humans tens of thousands of years ago may have been having sex for fun as well as for procreation...

Bondage, group sex, transvestism and the use of sex toys were common in primitive societies as a way of building up social bonds, says archeologist Timothy Taylor of Bradford University.

A 30,000-year-old statue of a naked woman -- the Venus of Willendorf -- and an equally ancient stone phallus found in a German cave challenge the widespread belief that sex was mostly heterosexual and about making babies...

Mr Taylor is publishing his views in his book Handbook of the Evolution of Human Sexuality.

A painting of a naked, reclining woman, long described as being Nell Gwyn, the mistress of Charles II, is now thought to depict the King’s earlier mistress, Barbara Villiers, famed as a great beauty at court.

Considered to be a masterpiece by Peter Lely [1618-1680], official artist to Charles II, the painting is believed to have been concealed behind a secret sliding panel for the monarch’s private enjoyment in the royal bedchamber at the Palace of Whitehall...

Research undertaken by Christie’s, which will be auctioning the painting with an estimate of £2 million on July 5 -– has thrown new light on the sitter...

[Story includes photo of painting.]

BANGKOK -- For a moment, it appeared that $2,700 [in legal registration fees] might be enough to save the mass killers of the Khmer Rouge from going on trial...

Last week, the Cambodian Bar Association -- which had claimed an affront to its sovereignty -- lowered the fee to $500, and on Monday the foreign judges at the trial said they were satisfied...

But it remained unclear how long it would then be before the first indictments are brought. And even if all goes smoothly, it is likely to be months before the first defendant is brought into a courtroom to face charges.

"It comes down to time," said Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which has been gathering potential evidence for a trial.

"We need to use time wisely in order to catch up with the aging Khmer Rouge leaders," said Youk Chhang, who is a survivor of the Khmer Rouge years, from 1975 to 1979...

Two decades after President Reagan left office, we're given a new glimpse at his private thoughts, with the publication of the handwritten diaries he kept during his eight years in the White House.

He kept the diaries diligently, using clear orderly handwriting to take note of his daily events and activities and to shed a human light on the most dramatic chapters of his time in office.

"What the style tells you more than anything that … here is a man who is comfortable in his own skin," said Reagan biographer Lou Cannon.

Vanity Fair has published excerpts from Douglas Brinkley's forthcoming book, The Reagan Diaries, which include an entry days after he took office in 1981. The new president made it clear he would play to win the Cold War.

President Bush is coming to Jamestown. So is England's Queen Elizabeth II, albeit a week early.

The centerpiece of the 18-month commemoration of the 400th anniversary of America's first permanent English settlement finally is almost here after a decade of planning, and visits by those dignitaries will give organizers two of their biggest wishes.

But the "America's Anniversary Weekend" extravaganza May 11-13 now will be taking place less than a month after a gunman killed 32 people, then himself, 270 miles across the state on the campus of Virginia Tech. And the weekend coincides with Virginia Tech's commencement on May 11, so the tragedy still will feel very fresh.

JEDDAH -— Saudi Arabia is replete with archaeological sites dating back to thousands of years, according to Dr. Mohammed Al-Ruwaished, deputy minister of education for antiquities and museums.

''There are nearly 100,000 historical sites in the Kingdom and we have already identified and registered 3,700 main sites. Some of these have 80 to 100 related sites in different localities,'' Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper quoted Ruwaished as saying.

The gripping black-and-white photographs of civil rights protesters in the South reflect the black-and-white morality tale that generally accompanies them. Hateful, jeering white mobs and attack dogs versus peaceful marchers asking to vote and to walk in the front door.

That story line is true, but so are others. A new generation of historians is exploring some of the untold stories of the civil rights movement and its legacies: the experiences not of heroes or murderous villains, but of ordinary Southern whites. And their research is challenging some long-held beliefs about the nation’s political realignment and the origins of modern conservatism.

"You want to pry below these great narratives of good and evil and black and white,” said Jason Sokol, 29, who wrote There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (Alfred A. Knopf). "For those of us who didn’t live through it, there's more of an effort to not simply celebrate the civil rights movement and how extraordinary it was, but to place it within the broader arc of the 20th century."

HEILIGEDAMM, Germany -- Looking for a cunning business venture after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Neumann had the foresight to go into fencing -- predicting the demand the new free market would create for chic enclosures to cordon off everything from private gardens to sports arenas.

Now, 18 years on, Neumann and his team of workers are putting the finishing touches to their biggest commission yet -- a 7.5 mile long, 2.5-metre (8ft) high steel fence topped with barbed wire, video monitors and sensors to detect movement. The daunting construction snakes through fields of rapeseed and contains enough steel -- 500 tonnes - to make a ship.

This barrier is transforming the elegant 18th century beach resort of Heiligendamm on Germany's Baltic coast into the tightest high-security zone the country has known for the G8 summit on June 6-8...

Its trademark white classical villas, modelled on those of British resorts, once played host to the Russian tsar and his family, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Queen Luise of Prussia and even dictators Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, who came here on the advice of their doctors...

The Kempinski Grand Hotel [was] renovated for €200m to house the likes of George Bush, Angela Merkel, Tony Blair and Vladimir Putin [and] €100m [is] being spent on security, including 16,000 policemen...

Conservationists also joined the fray after an 1854 villa -- once the summer residence of the Russian Tsar Nicholas I -- was torn down to make way for a press centre.

When Queen Elizabeth II visited Jamestown, Va., in 1957 to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the first British settlement in North America, she was 31 years old and had been on the throne for less than five years.

A lot has happened since, to her and to Jamestown.

On Friday, when the queen returns for the 400th anniversary of the settlement's founding, she will see a much different representation of the colony, complete with Indians and blacks whose fortunes crossed there.

"She got the sanitized version in 1957," said Peter Wallenstein, a Virginia Tech historian whose book Cradle of America focused on the convergence of Europeans, American Indians and black slaves at Jamestown. "Now she'll see a more inclusive view of all three of the great racial groups that met there. Jamestown represents the origins of democracy and slavery."

Related Links

From myth to history -- uncovering the real Jamestown

BERLIN -- One of the world's most renowned orchestras, the Berlin Philharmonic, said Tuesday it plans an investigation into its role during the Nazi era.

"We've never really come to terms with the history of the Philharmonic Orchestra under National Socialism," general manager Pamela Rosenberg said.

A book is to be published this year by Mischa Aster with the cooperation of the 125-year-old orchestra on the period between 1933 and 1945 and above all on the complex relationship that legendary conductor [1922-45, 1952-54] Wilhelm Furtwaengler had with top Nazis...

During the Nazi years, he was able to retain his position with an often deferential attitude toward the regime, which used him as a propaganda tool, while still working to protect his Jewish musicians...

The conductor was cleared on all charges but his reputation remained tainted by his proximity to the regime.

GIZA, EGYPT -– They have survived sandstorms and desert stillness, the fury of kings and the ravages of time, but the legendary Pyramids of Giza are endangered now – and the agent of their peril is a gloomy Egyptian stable-owner by the name of Hesham el-Ghabri.

Or so you might think.

"They forbid us to ride around the pyramids," grouses the owner of the TWA Stable ("Camel and Horse Riding"), one of countless such tourist-dependent operations clustered in the shadows of the brooding Sphinx and the three celebrated Pyramids of Giza. "They accuse of us being terrorists. They say we are going to bomb the pyramids."

"They" are high officials at Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities –- the government body responsible for administering the Pyramids of Giza along with the rest of this country's innumerable ancient monuments –- and they have not actually accused el-Ghabri and his ilk of being terrorists, although perhaps they might as well have.

Excavations at a pre-Bronze Age mound in Iran have led to the discovery of what may be the oldest commercial district in the Middle East.

Archeologist digging at the 7,000 year-old site named the Pardis Mound south of Tehran have unearthed dozens of brick kilns, pottery wheels and hand-made spindles, said Hassan Fazeli Nashli, the head of Iran's Archeology Research Center.

Ceramic jars and necklaces were also among the ancient artifacts discovered, Nashli said.

Pardis Mound is located in the city of Varamin and is one of the most archeologically rich sites in Iran.

The Queen's courtiers turned up their noses at souvenir handkerchiefs commemorating her wedding, previously unseen documents have revealed.
But Buckingham Palace officials failed to prevent "tasteless" memorabilia marking her marriage to the Duke of Edinburgh in 1947 going on sale.

The Home Office ruled the hankies were acceptable, since buyers were unlikely to blow their noses on them.

Their correspondence has been released by the National Archives in London.

A statue of a Red Army Soldier, which has been at the heart of deadly riots in Estonia, gazed somberly over dozens of Russian war graves yesterday in its new location at a military cemetery in Tallinn.

Authorities re-erected the Bronze Soldier at the Defense Forces burial ground -- which also holds remains of British, Estonian and German troops - three days after removing it from a downtown square, provoking protests by ethnic Russians.

In the next step of its contentious plan, the government plans to move the remains of Soviet soldiers believed to be buried near the statue's original site. Archeologists excavating the grave said they had found nine coffins, but had not yet opened them.

[The AP reported: A delegation of Russian MPs arrived in Estonia yesterday to try to defuse tensions between the two countries, which have traded harsh words, including Russian officials speaking of"blasphemous" acts, and Estonia accusing Russian media of spreading lies."The main purpose of the visit is to create dialogue," said an Estonian foreign ministry official.]

For the second time in a generation, the United States faces the prospect of defeat at the hands of an insurgency. In April 1975, the U.S. fled the Republic of Vietnam, abandoning our allies to their fate at the hands of North Vietnamese communists. In 2007, Iraq's grave and deteriorating condition offers diminishing hope for an American victory and portends risk of an even wider and more destructive regional war.

These debacles are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America's general officer corps...

[Conclusion] America's generals have been checked by a form of war that they did not prepare for and do not understand. They spent the years following the 1991 Gulf War mastering a system of war without thinking deeply about the ever changing nature of war. They marched into Iraq having assumed without much reflection that the wars of the future would look much like the wars of the past. Those few who saw clearly our vulnerability to insurgent tactics said and did little to prepare for these dangers. As at Valmy [Prussian defeat by France, 1792], this one debacle, however humiliating, will not in itself signal national disaster. The hour is late, but not too late to prepare for the challenges of the Long War. We still have time to select as our generals those who possess the intelligence to visualize future conflicts and the moral courage to advise civilian policymakers on the preparations needed for our security. The power and the responsibility to identify such generals lie with the U.S. Congress. If Congress does not act, our Jena [final Prussian defeat by France, 1806] awaits us.