You wouldn't think that a rusty old barrel is much of an attraction. But the one that sits near the entrance of the U.S. National Second World War Museum in New Orleans manages to draw crowds. Why? Because it represents the death knell for Nazi Germany's attempt to make a nuclear weapon.

This particular barrel was one of 29 aboard a ferry crossing Lake Tinnsjo in Norway on its way to Germany. The "Hydro" was sunk by Norwegian saboteurs in 1944 and the barrel languished at the bottom of the lake until archeologists brought it to the surface in 2004. What did the barrel contain to warrant such a major salvage operation? Water. But not ordinary water, it was "heavy water"

Our story begins in December 1938 at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. Chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman were following up a piece of intriguing research carried out by Enrico Fermi in Italy. Fermi had bombarded some common elements with neutrons and discovered that they would sometimes be converted into other elements, although these were always close in mass to the originals. But when Hahn and Strassman subjected uranium to neutron bombardment, they found a result they could hardly believe. The reaction mixture contained barium, an element with about half the mass of uranium.

"Perhaps you can suggest some fantastic explanation," Hahn excitedly cabled Lise Meitner, the physicist he had worked with for many years before she was forced to flee Germany for Sweden because of her Jewish heritage. Meitner did not disappoint. Perhaps, she suggested, the uranium atom had been "split" apart. At that moment, the concept of nuclear fission was born. Further experiments by Hahn, Strassman and Meitner's nephew Otto Frisch not only confirmed the stunning results, but also revealed that such nuclear fission was capable of releasing tremendous amounts of energy. The military implication of the research became obvious on both sides of the Atlantic.

The German "uranium project" was led by theoretician Werner Heisenberg and army physicist Kurt Diebner. It was Heisenberg's calculation that slower moving neutrons would cause the uranium nucleus to split more readily that focused attention on "heavy water," a substance capable of slowing down neutrons. Furthermore, slow neutrons could also be captured by the uranium nucleus, which would then be converted into plutonium, another fissionable element.

As virtually every student knows, a molecule of water is made of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen. Good old H2O. But not every hydrogen atom in the universe is alike. Some hydrogen atoms are heavier because they have an extra neutron in their nucleus. We refer to these as an "isotope" of hydrogen, and use the specific term "deuterium (D)." When a water molecule has two deuterium atoms instead of two hydrogen atoms, we have "heavy water." Since the natural abundance of deuterium is low, only 1 in every 4,500 or so water molecules is "heavy."

By 1933, Gilbert Lewis at Berkley had a method of separating heavy water from ordinary water. His technique relied on the fact that under the influence of an electric current, a hydrogen-oxygen bond is broken more readily than a deuterium-oxygen bond. So when a current is passed through water, H2O is broken down more readily than D2O, leaving the sample enriched in D2O, or "heavy water."...

TULSA, Okla. - A concrete vault encasing a 1957 Plymouth Belvedere buried a half-century ago may have been built to withstand a nuclear attack but it couldn't beat back the natural onslaught of moisture.

At a Friday ceremony complete with a couple of drum rolls, crews removed a multilayered protective wrapping caked with red mud, revealing a vintage vehicle that was covered in rust and wouldn't crank.

There were a few bright spots, literally: shiny chrome was still visible around the doors and front fender, and workers were able to put air in the tires.

But the unveiling in front of thousands of people at the Tulsa Convention Center confirmed fears that the past 50 years had not been the kindest to Miss Belvedere.

"I'll tell you what, she's a mess. Look at her," said legendary hot rod builder Boyd Coddington, who was unable to start the thing up as planned.

Event organizer Sharon King Davis, a fourth generation Tulsan whose grandfather helped bury the Plymouth, joked that the car needed a little Oil of Olay to help it out.

In the trunk, organizers meticulously pulled out some of the objects buried with the two-door hardtop to celebrate Oklahoma's 50 years of statehood , a 5-gallon can of leaded gasoline, which went for 24 cents a gallon in those days, and rusted cans of Schlitz beer.

Most politicians would love a chance to edit their page in the history books. Gov. Mike Easley's staff actually did.

Last year, members of Easley's press office heavily rewrote an entry on him in a book by state-employed historians on North Carolina's governors. Over several drafts, they deleted a reference to a failed U.S. Senate bid, speculation that he dislikes campaigning and a note that he had a boyhood reputation "for making mischief." They added a quote from Easley about patriotism, a line about how he successfully led the state to a "new global economy" and the fact that USA Today once named him one of the country's top drug busters. In the end, more than two-thirds of the final draft came from the governor's office.

Representatives of Easley and the state Department of Cultural Resources, which published the book, said the press office was asked to review and edit "The Governors of North Carolina" before publication.

"We did what we were asked to do and that was to review and edit the book," said Sherri Johnson, a spokeswoman for Easley.

She said Easley did not know about the book until after it was published, and said then that he should have been left out until he had finished his second term.

"He said if we had told him about the book, he would have asked to leave him out," she said.

Harry Watson, a history professor at UNC Chapel Hill and an Easley appointee on an advisory commission for the Cultural Resources department, said he was disappointed by the tone of the governor's entry.

"It sounds like a campaign press release," Watson said.

Michael Hill, the book's editor -- and author of the entry on Easley -- said in an interview that Easley's section was the only entry that was indirectly reviewed by its subject.

Still, he said, "everyone was happy" with the final version.

Hill emphasized that he had final say over the wording of the entry. And at Hill's request, the introduction to the book noted that the Easley sketch "was written after consultation with his Press Office."

"It all came to a good resolution," Hill said.

However, a review of e-mail correspondence between Hill, his bosses and the governor's office -- released under a public records request by The News & Observer -- indicates that the revisions were a contentious subject with the historians at Cultural Resources....

Chinese archaeologists have found an ancient sunken ship in the South China Sea laden with Ming Dynasty porcelain, the Xinhua news agency said on Wednesday.

Divers used satellite navigation equipment to find the vessel, dubbed South China Sea II, which is about 17 to 18 meters (yards) long and lying at a depth of 20 meters.

"A preliminary study of the sunken ship shows it may have sunk 400 years ago after striking a reef," archaeologist Dr Wei Jun was quoted as saying.

The ship came to light when local police got wind of illegal salvage operations going on off the coast of Guangdong province.

"On May 25, police learnt that some fishermen had been recovering ancient porcelain objects from the sea," Xinhua said.

Police confiscated 21 pieces of porcelain from a fishing boat whose owner claimed that divers he had hired for deep-sea fishing had recovered the porcelain by accident.

On May 26, another 117 pieces of porcelain were confiscated from two fishing boats carrying out illegal salvage work.

According to several Internet sites, white supremacist groups around the country had called for "patriot" get-togethers over the three-day weekend. The one organized for the New York area included a Saturday barbecue and a Sunday visit to "the incomparable Metropolitan Museum of (White) Art." Visiting the preeminent art museum, these patriots believed, would be a terrific way to celebrate white culture.

But first, there was the barbecue, which a Voice reporter was now traveling to after contacting local white supremacists through one of the most active neo-Nazi websites on the Internet, Stormfront.org, which has more than 110,000 members. (About 10,000 are in the Northeast.) The field trip to the Met was being organized by Jamie Kelso, a former Mensa member and New York City native. It was also being promoted by NewSaxon.com, a Friendster-like "online community by whites for whites" that appeals to young and tech-savvy racists. Before mysteriously shutting down recently, NewSaxon claimed more than 50 New York members, some of whom posted images of themselves wearing Nazi uniforms and skinhead regalia.

"Nanyadoyara! Nanyaonasareno! Nanyadoyara!" the elderly women chant, clapping and spinning in careful circles in their white kimonos with orange sashes. They are performing a bon odori ritual summer festival dance in the farming village of Shingo, northeast of Tokyo. The scene is typical of similar pastoral celebrations throughout the Japanese countryside, as the geriatric audience on the town green pay more attention to the free-flowing sake and the glad-handing candidates trawling for votes in next month's legislative elections. But it's their chant that marks the Shingo dance as unusual.

"Nanyadoyara! Nanyaonasareno! Nanyadoyara!"— there's no translation, because even in Japanese, the words are gibberish. But, if local legend is to be believed, they express a secret that would rock Christianity to its foundations. The locals believe that Jesus wasn't crucified on Golgotha, but instead came to live in Shingo, where his remains are buried. I visited his "tomb," marked by a road sign that says "Tomb of Christ: Next Left."

The legend has it that Jesus — or as they call him in Shingo, Daitenku Taro Jurai — came to Japan at the age of 21, during the lost years when he was supposedly carpentering in Nazareth. Like many an eager gaijin student, Jesus became entranced with his adopted land's noble culture, learning the Japanese language and Shinto religion at the feet of a sage. At age 33, he went back home, where he preached about his experiences in Japan, which so annoyed the local authorities that he was promptly sentenced to death. From there, the story gets really weird. Instead of Christ being crucified, somehow his younger brother Isukiri ends up dying on the cross, while Jesus fled to Japan via Vladivostok and Alaska. (Such details as how Jesus had a younger brother and how the Romans got the wrong guy are not addressed in the legend.) Eventually he came to this tiny village, where he took up rice farming, married a local girl named Miyuko and produced three daughters before dying peacefully at the age of 106. In Shingo, Jesus kept a low profile — he didn't multiply any loaves or fish, although when the villagers were dying of starvation he did travel far to find them food.

You can read the story yourself, in Christ's last will and testament — which was supposedly discovered in nearby Ibaraki Prefecture in 1935. A copy of the will is on display at the Village of Christ Legend Museum, just a few steps away from the tomb itself. The final resting place of the Son of God might strike many as a bit of a letdown, just a humble mound of earth topped by a large wooden cross of suspiciously recent vintage, facing Isukiri's identical grave. (In addition to a lock of Mary's hair, Jesus supposedly brought his brother's severed ear back to Japan.)

An advertisement, signed by 44 members of Japan's parliament, appeared in the Washington Post newspaper seeking to share "the truth with the American people" about the 200,000 "comfort women" who were driven into brothels during WWII. The ad was signed by professors, journalists, political commentators and 29 members of the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan, 13 from the Democratic Party of Japan and two independents.

"No historical document has ever been found by historians or research organisations that positively demonstrates that women were forced against their will into prostitution by the Japanese army," the ad said under the title, in bold letters, "THE FACTS".

The advertisement says: "The ianfu (comfort women) who were embedded with the Japanese army were not, as is commonly reported, 'sex slaves'. They were working under a system of licensed prostitution that was commonplace around the world at the time."

It adds that many of the women made more money than field officers "and even generals".

The ad acknowledges that there were "breakdowns in discipline". "Criticism for events that actually occurred must be humbly embraced," it says.

Austria's foreign minister on Monday asked the United States to remove former president Kurt Waldheim from the "watch list" of people barred from US soil because CIA files opened on April 27 had no proof he was a war criminal who helped persecute Adolf Hitler's victims.

"Nothing against him has been found and I think for that reason it was a question of national respect to raise this here. Secretary Powell agreed to a review and that is what I could have expected," Foreign Minister Benita Ferrero-Waldner said after meeting Secretary of State Colin Powell.

But a senior state department official made clear she should not hold her breath. "She talked to the secretary in private about Waldheim and the secretary made clear we were not in a position to change our determination," he said.

He added, however, that the United States would certainly look at the aide memoire that she brought on the issue.

Waldheim conceded in a 1996 autobiography that he had concealed his service in the Nazi army from 1942 to 1945 but insisted his behaviour was above reproach.

Residents of the central Binh Dinh Province have recently unearthed the top of a tower dating back to the Cham Civilization over ten centuries ago, said vice director of a local museum Thursday.

Dr. Dinh Ba Hoa, Vice director of the Binh Dinh Museum, said that while collecting stones on Xuan My Mountain, residents of Phuoc Hiep Commune, Tuy Phuoc District, discovered the top of the tower. The top of the tower is 1.8m-high, made of stones, and decorated with lotus petal-shaped patterns. A document by the French published in the 1930s makes mention of a Cham tower called Xuan My at the site, Hoa said.

More than 200 ancient items and 300 paintings were found inside sealed containers in a royal stable and in the basement of the main residence at Tatoi, some 25 kilometres (15 miles) northwest of the Greek capital, culture ministry officials said during a media tour of the site on Tuesday.

"It's a real treasure hunt, we are in the process of removing these marvellous items from boxes stacked in disorderly heaps," restoration supervisor Nikos Minos told AFP.

A team of 21 archaeologists and restorers started work at the crumbling, 19th-century estate three months ago as part of a bid to catalogue its contents before restoration work starts to find a new role for the site.

When they were told to get off their western Kentucky farmland in 1941 to make room for a sprawling World War II training camp, hundreds of families were given as little as two weeks to get everything out. Over the years, they say, they were cheated out of an agreement to buy back their land after the war and denied a stake in a government windfall: the discovery of massive deposits of gas and oil.

Now, those same families and their heirs are battling the U.S. government for what they say is their fair share of more than $30 million in profits. A judge's preliminary ruling in their favor raised the prospect of a settlement two years ago, but even a famed mediator — former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor — was unable to resolve the conflict.

"They don't get around to paying you quickly when they owe you money," said 83-year-old William Griggs, who had just graduated from high school in May 1942, when his grandfather and other small farmers were told to move off their land.

"Everybody was disappointed," he said. "But we were patriotic."

Interviews with residents, historical documents and court records tell the story behind what attorneys say may be the nation's last remaining land dispute from World War II, a huge expanse of farmland that became Camp Breckinridge.

The camp, spanning 36,000 acres across Union, Henderson and Webster counties, was one of a handful of inland camps built to train soldiers far from the threat of coastal attacks.

More than 1,000 people were forced off the land, either through negotiated sales or through condemnation proceedings. Their 522 properties ranged in size from 50 acres to 250 acres...

After months of intensive research, Samuel Huneke from Lawrence High School in Lawrence, Kansas, earned The History Channel(R) Award for "Best Senior Entry for an Individual Documentary" at the National History Day (NHD) ceremonies today for his documentary titled "Democracy in the Heart of Europe: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Czechoslovak Republic."

National History Day, Inc. is a nonprofit education program that presents an annual national history contest. Students present the findings of in-depth historical research in the form of documentaries, performances, exhibits, and papers and are judged by a panel of experts. More than half a million students nationwide participate in National History Day. The national finals are held at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Last Sunday night, as millions of Americans tuned in to the two Tonys—the final episode of “The Sopranos,” to see whether Tony Soprano lived or died, and the Tony Awards, celebrating the best in American theater—actor Stanley Tucci (who played “Nigel” in “The Devil Wears Prada") was in an off-Broadway theater, the Culture Project, watching high school students perform a play about war.

The production, “Voices in Conflict,” moved the audience to tears, ending with a standing ovation for the teenage actors, still reeling from a controversy that had propelled them onto the New York stage. Their high school principal had banned the play.

Bonnie Dickinson has been teaching theater at Wilton High School in Connecticut for 13 years. She and her students developed the idea of a play about Iraq, initially inspired by the Sept. 3, 2006, death of Wilton High graduate Nicholas Madaras from an IED (improvised explosive device) blast in Baqubah, Iraq. The play uses real testimonials from soldiers, from their letters, blogs and taped interviews, and Yvonne Latty’s book “In Conflict,” with the students acting the roles. The voices of Iraqis are also included.

In mid-March, after students spent months preparing the play, the school administration canceled it. Superintendent Gary Richards wrote: “The student performers directly acting the part of the soldiers ... turns powerful material into a dramatic format that borders on being sensational and inappropriate. We would like to work with the students to complete a script that fully addresses our concerns.” (The students have modified the script; they perform Richards’ letter, its cold, condescending bureaucratese in stark relief with the play’s passionate eyewitness testimonials.)

The story struck a chord with Tucci. He was already producing a video piece about his high school alma mater, John Jay High School in Cross River, N.Y., where high school girls were suspended for performing an excerpt of Eve Ensler’s play “The Vagina Monologues.” Their crime: uttering the word “vagina” after being warned not to.

Following the performance of “Voices in Conflict,” Tucci participated in a public conversation with the student actors, noting that “Cross River and Wilton are only 15 miles apart. There’s obviously something in the water.”

After The New York Times published an article on the Wilton High censorship scandal, Ira Levin, the author of “The Stepford Wives,” wrote the paper a letter: “Wilton, Conn., where I lived in the 1960s, was the inspiration for Stepford, the fictional town I later wrote about in ‘The Stepford Wives.’ I’m not surprised ... that Wilton High School has a Stepford principal. Not all the Wilton High students have been Stepfordized. The ones who created and rehearsed the banished play ‘Voices in Conflict’ are obviously thoughtful young people with minds of their own.”

BAGHDAD, June 13 -- Early morning blasts Wednesday destroyed two minarets at the same Shiite shrine in Samarra where an attack last year demolished the mosque's gilded dome and plunged the country into a wave of deadly sectarian violence.

No one was injured in the 9 a.m. explosions at the revered Askariya shrine in Samarra, about 65 miles north of Baghdad. But officials said it was just the sort of event that could spark a spiral of retaliatory attacks and make it harder to reduce the violence that has brought the addition of thousands of extra U.S. troops stationed at high-profile posts on the streets of Baghdad and elsewhere.

The Feb. 22, 2006, attack on the shrine -- historically known as the Golden Mosque because of its brilliant dome -- was a seminal moment in the four-year Iraq war, sparking a vicious cycle of bloodshed that has never fully stopped. In the 16 months since, thousands of Iraqis -- and perhaps tens of thousands -- have been killed in Sunni-Shiite fighting.

Immediately after the 2006 attack, Shiite death squads accelerated their killings, dumping thousands of mutilated bodies -- most of them Sunni Arabs -- around the capital. More than 100 Sunni mosques were damaged in counter strikes. Tens of thousands of Sunnis and Shiites were driven from their homes in bouts of ethnic cleansing, including in Samarra, which was always predominantly Sunni, but now almost exclusively so.

Fearing a backlash from the latest attack, the Iraqi government imposed an indefinite curfew across Baghdad starting 3 p.m. Wednesday. U.S. military officials said Samarra remained quiet in the hours after the attack.

At his weekly public audience on Wednesday, June 13, Pope Benedict XVI (bio - news) spoke about Eusebius of Caesarea, the bishop and scholar whose "Christocentric approach to history" enriched his accounts of the early Church.

Speaking to about 30,000 people in St. Peter's Square, the Holy Father said that Eusebius lived in an era of change; his life spanned the time from the last persecutions of Christians by the Roman empire through the Council of Nicea, in which he was an active participant.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and higher education as a whole have enjoyed a decidedly un-cozy relationship since the Vietnam War – a fact that many in academe have found to be just fine with them, thanks.

But if the FBI and higher education still aren’t the best of friends, they appear to be interacting a lot more. Reports this week about a nationwide FBI outreach program in which agents set up meetings with college leaders to discuss strategies for safeguarding academic research from unfriendly foreign interests have fueled growing concerns that the two entities are cozying up in uncomfortable ways these days in the name of national security.

And yet the reports have also raised awareness of the agency’s potential value as a resource as colleges confront the vulnerability inherent in an open system producing reams of research on topics intimately tied to America’s economic and physical security.

And yet the reports have also raised awareness of the agency’s potential value as a resource as colleges confront the vulnerability inherent in an open system producing reams of research on topics intimately tied to America’s economic and physical security.

“Much of the nation’s intellectual property is produced in universities, in which they have a culture of sharing and openness. Yet, there are countries and there are intelligence services that would exploit these types of studies,” said Bill Carter, a spokesman at FBI headquarters in Washington. Academic freedom, Carter said, must “coexist with government concerns.”

“Now that the world has changed, it’s more open. We have business delegations coming into the country, we have thousands and thousands of foreign students that an intelligence service could penetrate or utilize … for intelligence-related purposes,” Carter said. “We have direct evidence that’s taking place.”

The FBI’s Counterintelligence Domain Program, which charges field offices across the nation with identifying vulnerable entities, including colleges and businesses, and with briefing their leaders about resources to strengthen security, is nothing new, Carter said...

On June 28, 2007, Profiles in History lives up to its name and reputation as the nation's leading dealer of guaranteed-authentic original historical documents by presenting for auction two of the most rare and historic documents that have ever been made available for purchase. The first document is a proclamation signed on July 4, 1876 by President Ulysses S. Grant, his entire cabinet, all members of both Houses of Congress along with all members of the United States Supreme Court, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The second document, a proclamation signed on July 21, 1892 by President Benjamin Harrison along with his entire cabinet, all members of both Houses of Congress and the entire United States Supreme Court, celebrates the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' discovery of America. These are the only documents known to exist in private hands that carry the signature of the leaders of all three branches of the Federal Government and bear the Great Seal of the United States as well as the Seals of the Supreme Court, Senate and House of Representatives. The expected selling price for each is expected to top $60,000-$80,000. The auction begins at 11:00am PT.

Five hundred pages of files kept by the Polish police on Lech Walesa when he was leader of the striking Gdansk shipyard workers in the early 1980s have just gone up on the internet. Walesa - who went on to become president of Poland - put them there himself to confound those who have spread rumours that he was a police informer in the old days before Communism collapsed in Poland in 1989.

"I got sick and tired of the constant accusations, doubts and insinuations being peddled by these people and decided to publish these materials for all to see," he said. It is the most dramatic move yet in an argument that has been raging in Poland for months, over whether all the old police files should be made public so that everyone who spied on colleagues or neighbours for the secret police can be identified.

It is called the Lodge, and for 105 years it has been the first stop for any school group, tourist, or history buff visiting the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown. Entering the mausoleum-like structure at the base of the famous obelisk, visitors dutifully passed a marble statue of an imposing Revolutionary War general and three dioramas from the 1970s with tiny figurines doing battle on a faux-grass hill. Created as a majestic gateway, the Lodge had become a cramped, overheated choke point, woefully inadequate for 200,000 annual visitors, officials said.

No longer. The National Park Service, after rethinking the way it presents the history of one of America's the most pivotal battles, has culled artifacts from local archives and hired a local muralist. Tomorrow, the result, an airy new Bunker Hill Museum, will open to the public. Across the street from the monument and no longer confined to the stone Lodge, the exhibits sprawl across two floors of a building that until 1970 housed the Charlestown branch of the Boston Public Library.

Inside, big colorful panels describe the battle and the building of the monument, and display cases show weaponry wielded in the bloody fight. Upstairs, in a circular painting overhead, known as a cyclorama, Arlington muralist John Coles presents images of black and Native American soldiers largely excluded from previous histories.

"The facilities were inadequate to tell the stories both of the battle and of the history of the commemorative efforts," said Martin H. Blatt, the Park Service's chief of cultural resources in Boston. "Everything was cramped into a space that was supposed to be contemplative. Now, you can come here and have a full museum experience and hear about the Battle of Bunker Hill, which really is the launching battle of the American Revolution."

Extensive archaeological remains of an old guard house dating to the Tudor and Jacobean periods have been uncovered at the Tower of London.

Staff were relaying a cobblestone path across Tower Green to conform with disability regulations when they found evidence of walls, which turned out to be the remains of a substantial building.

“The work we were doing was resurfacing for compliance with the Disability Discrimination Act,” explained Jane Spooner, Historic Buildings Curator at the Tower.

“There were some 19th century cobblestones put down in a crazy paving style so we were taking them out and relaying them in a more even way, so we were doing very shallow excavations.”

“On day two we found a wall at a very shallow level, about 20cm below the old surface. Whilst we knew about it from discoveries made in 1975 we hadn’t anticipated finding it so close to the surface.”

Historic views and plans of the Tower show a building in this location from at least 1570, variously known as the ‘Old Main Guard’, the ‘Warders’ Guardhouse’ or the ‘Warders’ Houses’, likely to have been used by soldiers and the predecessors of today’s Beefeaters.

A controversial conference with former top level East German spies has been cancelled in Berlin. Organizer Thomas Wegener Friis said the event was to focus on the so-called HVA, the foreign intelligence branch of the secret police Stasi in the former East Germany (GDR).

"Espionage was an important part of the Cold War and we need to understand foreign intelligence in order to understand this period in history," said Friis, an assistant professor at the Center for Cold War Studies at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense.

But the Stasi archives authority BStU in Berlin withdrew its participation in the conference at short notice, sparking its subsequent cancellation. BStU director Marianne Birthler said in a statement that no expert from her office would be allowed to take part.

According to Birthler, previous public remarks by former high-ranking Stasi officers about their tasks and activities disqualified them from being serious discussion partners or even contemporary witnesses.

The Max Planck Society, which was to host the conference, pulled out of the event as a result of Birthler's decision. According to Friis, without her participation, the conference could have no longer presented a balanced view of the issue.

Veterans who claim a display at the Canadian War Museum makes them look like war criminals have misinterpreted it, but the panel should be changed anyway, says a Senate subcommittee on veterans affairs.

The panel on the allied bombing raids in Germany during World War II titled Enduring Controversy questions the morality and value of the raids, which it says killed 600,000 Germans and left millions homeless while providing the allies with little strategic advantage.

The subcommittee headed by Senator Joseph Day consulted four historians, read letters from veterans and history buffs, and ruled that the panel had been misinterpreted and is the subject of "clear misunderstanding."

However, Day said, the museum has a public responsibility to change the display.

American Heritage, the nation’s preeminent magazine of history and the parent of this website, has stopped publication, at least temporarily, with the April/May 2007 issue, now on newsstands. The website will continue to publish.

American Heritage, a bimonthly, was founded in 1954. It was bought by Forbes Inc. in 1986 and has suffered financially in recent years amid hard times for magazines in general. Forbes put it up for sale earlier this year and has not yet found a buyer.

China has become the land of 1,000 identical cities, a senior government official has warned in an outspoken attack on the country's rush towards modernity.

Qiu Baoxing, the vice-minister of construction, said the damage to the country's heritage was similar to that wrought during the cultural revolution of 1966-76.

In the early stages of that period, Red Guards ransacked temples and burned ancient scripts in the name of revolutionary politics. Today, the damage is more likely to be done by urban developers in the name of economic progress.

Historical sites and cultural relics have been devastated by "renovation" projects, Mr Qiu was quoted as saying by the China Daily. In an unusually fierce criticism of the architectural landscape of modern China, the vice-minister said that too many local governments were guilty of a "blind pursuit of the large, the new and the exotic".

"This is leading to a poor sight," he said. "Many cities have a similar construction style. It is like a thousand cities having the same appearance." He said such "senseless actions" were the fault of local officials, who were "totally unaware of the value of cultural heritage".

His comments underscore concerns that China, one of the world's oldest civilisations, is paying too high a price for its economic expansion.

Newly released documents have shown that the US military was considering the development of a chemical weapon to turn enemy soldiers gay.

Edward Hammond, of Berkeley's Sunshine Project, used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a copy of the proposal from the Air Force's Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio and passed it to CBS 5.

According to the document the Air Force requested $7.5m for the development of such a weapon, but the proposal was rejected.