As a rising St. Louis politician in the mid-1970s, Richard Gephardt was among a dynamic group of aldermen dubbed "The Young Turks." So perhaps it's not surprising that, 30 years later, the former Democratic minority leader of the House of Representatives has aged into an Old Turk. This spring, Gephardt has been busy promoting his new favorite cause--not universal health care or Iraq, but the Republic of Turkey, which now pays his lobbying firm, DLA Piper, $100,000 per month for his services. Thus far, Gephardt's achievements have included arranging high-level meetings for Turkish dignitaries, among them one between members of the Turkish parliament and House Democratic leaders James Clyburn and Rahm Emanuel; helping Turkey's U.S. ambassador win an audience with a skeptical Nancy Pelosi; and, finally, circulating a slim paperback volume, titled "An Appeal to Reason," that denies the existence of the Armenian genocide of 1915.

Ward Churchill's attorney is seeking a more sympathetic jury by taking the case of the fired University of Colorado professor to Denver District Court rather than to a federal judge.
Federal judges tend to defer to the personnel decisions of university governing boards, especially if the boards followed due process as set forth in their own operating procedures, legal experts say. But a local jury is less predictable.

"There's no way to know - some will, some won't (defer to the governing board)," said Denver attorney Martha Tierney, who practices civil rights law.

Churchill and his lawyer, David Lane, have been effective with Denver juries before. Lane won acquittals for eight activists, including Churchill, who were accused of disrupting a Columbus Day parade in 2004.

A US federal judge on Wednesday ordered Sudan to pay 7.9 million dollars to the families of the 17 sailors killed in the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole.

The bombing was carried out by two Yemeni militants with Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network who had trained in Sudan. The US destroyer was anchored in the Yemeni port of Aden at the time of the attack.

The Yemenis blew themselves up next to the Cole, punching a 12-meter (40-foot) hole in its side. Thirty-nine sailors were also wounded in the attack.

A much awaited human rights abuse trial is underway in Argentina. The accused is a catholic priest charged with carrying out human rights abuses while working in several clandestine detention centers during the nation's 1976-1983 military dictatorship. The priest was arrested four years ago while living under an alias in Chile. This is the latest human rights trial of accused torturers since the landmark conviction of a former police officer for genocide in 2006.

President Vladimir Putin said no one should try to make Russia feel guilty about one of the most notorious episodes of the Stalinist era -the so-called Great Purge of 1937 - saying that "in other countries even worse things happened."

Speaking at a televised meeting on Thursday with social studies teachers, Putin noted that 2007 is the 70th anniversary of a year that many Russians regard as a synonym for state-sponsored terror. It is an anniversary that has, however, gotten relatively little attention in Russian media.

"Yes, we had terrible pages" in Russia's history, Putin said in remarks broadcast on state television. "Let us recall the events since 1937, let us not forget that. But in other countries, it has been said, it was more terrible."

"No one must be allowed to impose the feeling of guilt on us," he said. "Let them think about themselves. But we must not and will not forget about the grim chapters in our history."

Speaking with the teachers, Putin suggested the United States' use of atomic weapons against Japan at the end of World War II was worse than the abuses of Stalin. He also cited the massive US bombing campaigns during the war in Vietnam, as well as the use there of the defoliant Agent Orange.

"We have not used nuclear weapons against a civilian population," he said. "We have not sprayed thousands of kilometres (miles) with chemicals, (or) dropped on a small country seven times more bombs than in all the Great Patriotic (war)," as WWII is known in Russia.

Dick Cheney may be a taciturn man, writes author Stephen F. Hayes, but the vice president can become animated discussing doomsday scenarios. In his new biography, "Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President" (578 pages. HarperCollins. $27.95), Hayes tells the story of the Cheney family, sitting around their new big-screen TV in Jackson Hole, Wyo., on a recent Fourth of July, watching the 1997 movie "The Peacemaker." Starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman, the film is about a plot to blow up New York with a nuclear bomb. Partway through the movie, Cheney's wife, Lynne, entered the room and asked what was happening. The question was directed at no one in particular, but the vice president launched into "a 10-minute, scene-by-scene synopsis of the action," according to Lynne's brother Mark Vincent. She interrupted to clarify her question: "What's happening now?"

Cheney, writes Hayes, woke up on the morning of September 12, 2001, asking: when is the next attack? A lot of Americans woke up that day asking the same question, but while many have been lulled back into semicomplacency, Cheney has never stopped worrying and wondering and—it must be said—trying to do something about it. The vice president has become a kind of modern-day prophet of doom. He is seen by many Americans as slightly creepy, if not sinister. Of course, he could be right: Al Qaeda may well be, as recent intelligence reports suggest, gearing up for another and possibly more catastrophic attack. But what makes Cheney so dire, so animated by gloom?

You won't find a psychological explanation in Hayes's new book. A writer for the conservative Weekly Standard, Hayes is largely uncritical and essentially buys into the picture of Cheney-as-Stoic, a throwback to an ancient Greek warrior who can see the Fates gathering but grimly and bravely soldiers on.

[Question]: Thirteen years ago when you returned from exile, you were disappointed to see the new Russia. You turned down a prize proposed by Gorbachev, and you also refused to accept an award Yeltsin wanted to give you. Yet now you have accepted the State Prize which was awarded to you by Putin, the former head of the FSB intelligence agency, whose predecessor the KGB persecuted and denounced you so cruelly. How does this all fit together?

Solzhenitsyn: The prize in 1990 was proposed not by Gorbachev, but by the Council of Ministers of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, then a part of the USSR. The prize was to be for "The Gulag Archipelago." I declined the proposal, since I could not accept an award for a book written in the blood of millions.

In 1998, it was the county's low point, with people in misery; this was the year when I published the book "Russia in Collapse." Yeltsin decreed I be honored the highest state order. I replied that I was unable to receive an award from a government that had led Russia into such dire straits.

The current State Prize is awarded not by the president personally, but by a community of top experts. The Council on Science that nominated me for the award and the Council on Culture that supported the idea include some of the most highly respected people of the country, all of them authorities in their respective disciplines. The president, as head of state, awards the laureates on the national holiday. In accepting the award I expressed the hope that the bitter Russian experience, which I have been studying and describing all my life, will be for us a lesson that keeps us from new disastrous breakdowns.

Vladimir Putin -- yes, he was an officer of the intelligence services, but he was not a KGB investigator, nor was he the head of a camp in the gulag. As for service in foreign intelligence, that is not a negative in any country -- sometimes it even draws praise. George Bush Sr. was not much criticized for being the ex-head of the CIA, for example.

The Dark Ages had a few more proverbial light bulbs on than once thought, at least when it came to issues of the body.

People living in Europe during early Medieval times (400—1200 A.D.) actually had a progressive view of illness because disease was so common and out in the open, according to the research presented at a recent historical conference.

Instead of being isolated or shunned, the sick were integrated into society and taken care of by the community, the evidence suggests.

"The Dark Ages weren't so dark," said University of Nottingham historian Christina Lee, co-organizer of the second conference on Disease, Disability and Medicine in Early Medieval Europe. "The question we should be asking is whether illness was actually seen as a problem. What was classified as a disability? What was an impairment? The answer can't be generalized."

Michigan schools don't spend a substantial amount of time on the riot. Some may not cover it at all.

"There isn't anything that mandates it," said David Hales, a social studies consultant with the Wayne Regional Educational Service Agency.

State standards for social studies allow plenty of opportunities for coverage of the civil rights movement, but they don't specifically mention either civil rights or the Detroit riot. Proposed new standards do, suggesting in part that discussion of riots in Detroit and other cities be part of lessons on tensions and responses to poverty and civil rights.

Israel's Education Ministry says it is offering a new textbook for Arab third-graders acknowledging for the first time that the creation of the Jewish state was a tragedy for Palestinians.

The textbooks for the upcoming school year give the Jewish narrative of the events of 1948 and 1949 when Israel's creation drew an invasion by Arab armies in a conflict that displaced some 700,000 Palestinians. They point out Jews' historical connection to the Holy Land and their need for a state because of persecution in Europe, said Dalia Fenig, an Education Ministry inspector.

But for the first time, the book also explains why the war was a tragedy from the Palestinian perspective, referring to the Arab defeat as "al-Naqba," Arabic for catastrophe and the common Arab term for the war.

"The new approach says, why should you hide anything? That won't make it disappear and ... the issues can be debated," Fenig said Sunday.

However, she said the Education Ministry has no plans to introduce the Arab narrative into textbooks for Jewish students.

Related Links

History Textbooks With Some Varnish Missing

NYT: In Arabic Textbook, Israel Calls ’48 War Catastrophe for Arabs

Michael Levy: Stalin Good, Putin Better? Politics, Education, and Indoctrination

Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány has asked historian János Kenedi to lead a seven member panel to draw up a list of secret service documents not yet transferred to the State Security Services Historical Archives. "The team will make recommendations on improving the conditions of accessing former state security documents for research and making them public," government spokesman Dávid Daróczi announced yesterday.

By late last week, the fight between the Bush White House and Congress over the firings of nine U.S. attorneys seemed to be leading toward possible contempt charges for some former administration officials. The Bush administration had previously asserted executive privilege over certain documents and witnesses sought by Congress in its investigation of the firings, even directing former White House counsel Harriet Miers to disobey a subpoena ordering her to appear before Congress. Democratic legislators were left with the option of certifying a citation of contempt of Congress to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia in hopes of compelling Miers and former White House political director Sara Taylor to testify fully.

On July 19, however, the Washington Post revealed that the Bush administration was unafraid of contempt citations. Should Congress certify a contempt citation to U.S. attorney Jeffrey Taylor's office, it would be Taylor's duty under federal law to bring the matter before a grand jury -- but the White House will direct him not to.

Reaction from some corners was swift, severe and horrified. President Bush seemed to many to be enlarging an already expansive definition of executive privilege. Karen Tumulty, Time magazine's national political correspondent, said that with the Post article "the phrase [contempt of Congress] takes on new meaning ... There's no way to challenge the President's assertion of executive privilege, because, well, the President has asserted executive privilege." And in a statement given to Salon, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Pat Leahy, D-Vt., called the decision "deeply disturbing" and said that "this President and Vice President seek to override the independence of law enforcement and manipulate our valued system of checks and balances. This is another demonstration of the lawless and unchecked path the President, the Vice President and their loyal aides have taken us down."

All that may well be true. And it may be especially disturbing to some that the Bush administration's position seems to flow from the radical "unitary executive" theory, which exalts the power of the presidency over the other branches of government and has played a role in many controversial administration decisions. But if the White House's justification for its refusal to honor any congressional contempt citations is examined strictly on legal grounds, then in this case it is not appropriating to itself any novel idea of presidential power. The move itself was predictable, based on positions held for more than two decades during four different presidential administrations by the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel. In fact, though the Clinton administration never faced a similar showdown in its own executive privilege fights with Congress, it would almost certainly have taken a similar position in such a case. When contacted by Salon, even those legal scholars who served under Democratic administrations said that whatever their opinions about President Bush's prior assertions of privilege or of his order to Miers not to appear before Congress, they think the White House is correct -- or at least on legally defensible ground -- in this latest assertion of power. Congress may simply have to think of new ways to push back.

Sen. Ken Salazar played a key role in a nasty partisan spat on the Senate floor. So nasty that Senate leaders have rewritten history to get rid of it. The Senate purged from the Congressional Record a vote taken on legislation from Salazar, an amendment stating the Senate's opposition to President Bush pardoning Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

The Senate defeated that amendment 47-49. But there's no official record that vote ever occurred.

That's fine with Salazar, D-Colo.

"Everyone just kind of wants to forget that that night happened," Salazar spokeswoman Stephanie Valencia said.

Spokesmen for the Senate leaders said Monday they weren't trying to hide anything. They just wanted to end a fight.

A forgotten monument to Hitler's ideology has emerged from a 70-year time warp -- a castle built in the 1930s to train a new Nazi elite. Vacated by the Belgian army last year, it sheds light on the systematic brainwashing that churned out a generation of fanatics. Now it's being spruced up to teach visitors about the perils of indoctrination.

Deep in the Eifel region of western Germany, a stone-clad reminder of Hitler's racist ideology towers above the surrounding wooded hills -- the remains of a training college for aspiring Nazi leaders that was built in the style of a medieval castle.

"NS-Ordensburg Vogelsang" (Vogelsang National Socialist Castle) is a dour arrangement of barracks, community halls and sports arenas hugging a steep slope down to a scenic reservoir. It was built between 1934 and 1936 to give selected Nazi party members aged between 25 and 30 a solid grounding in the superiority of the German race and its need for "Lebensraum" in the east.

Vogelsang, which means "Birdsong," was off limits to the public until last year when it was handed back to the German government by the Belgian army, which had used it as a barracks and training area for almost 50 years after World War II.

The handover has confronted the German government with the difficult question of how to handle a sprawling 50,000 square meter site filled with an embarrassing wealth of more or less intact Nazi symbols, murals and statues including a monstrous five-meter high Germanic "Torch Bearer."

The whole place is Nazi ideology hewn into stone. It shows how the Nazis stole from ancient Greek and Roman styles, Christian symbols and Germanic legends and mixed them up with modern functional designs. The result was an architectural mishmash that was as ludicrous as the pseudo-religious philosophy it was supposed to represent.

CHANGSHA, China — Someday, a great monument in Washington may bear the name of Lei Yixin. For now, you can find him down a pockmarked road in a grungy industrial suburb of this Chinese provincial capital.

The monument won't be built to honor Lei, who is scarcely famous in his own hometown, much less the United States. It is being built in memory of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and will rise along Washington's Tidal Basin, between the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials.

Lei's role will be to carve the statue of King that will be the centerpiece of the tribute. His selection as sculptor for the prominent memorial honoring the civil rights leader has outraged some who believe that an African American, or at least an American, should have gotten the job.

"This is an AMERICAN monument — not a Communist Chinese one!!" declared one entry in a website, kingisours.com, that is devoted to the controversy. Said another, "Can I just say one word? 'Outsourcing.' "

This July 25th marks the 130th anniversary of the Shamokin Uprising, when desperation and starvation drove railroad workers and miners to join the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, America's first nationwide strike.

Railroad workers and miners had perilous jobs in the late 1800's. More than 200 railroad workers and 1000 miners died in accidents every year. The companies often forced both to buy from company stores at inflated prices and work from sunup to sundown. Companies made engineers pay for all train damages, regardless of fault. Children tore their hands picking rocks from coal in collieries.

The first recorded strike in the anthracite coal region occurred in 1842. More followed in 1849, 1869, and 1872. During the Civil War, the mine owners even used cavalry platoons to arrest 8 miners and evict them from company homes for striking in Locust Gap. At that time, the workers in Locust Gap formed the Miner's Benevolent Society, to provide accident insurance and demand better pay. It was one of the first unions in America .

By 1872 the Reading Railroad was the biggest mine company in the Anthracite region. It used its monopoly on the railroads to take over 70,000 acres of the best coal lands. Places like Gowen City and Gowen Street in Shamokin were named after the company's president, Frank Gowen. Gowen even bought a police force from the government called the "Reading Coal and Iron Police." Between 1871 and 1875 Gowen borrowed $69 million to pay for his empire. But he and the other railroad barons had overestimated the demand for train service and over-invested. Debts forced them to fire many workers, resulting in a nationwide depression in 1873.

In 1874 a third of Pennsylvania's workforce was unemployed. The Reading Railroad cut train workers' wages by 10%, resulting in an unsuccessful strike. In 1875 only 1/5 of American workers had full-time jobs. Some people vented their frustration by damaging tracks, trains, and mines. On May 11, 1875 the trestle at Locust Gap Junction was exploded by drilling holes and filling them with gunpowder. The telegraph office at Locust Summit was burned. From 1860 to 1909 arson destroyed 25 collieries between Mount Carmel and Trevorton. Knoebel's Amusement Park has a Mining Museum with a beautiful mural of the twice burned Locust Gap colliery.

When Gowen lowered mining wages to 54% of their 1869 level, miners began the "Long Strike" of 1875, lasting 170 days. But Gowen stored enough coal to outlast the strike and crushed the miner's union by firing its members.

Gowen further accused leaders of the Irish community of running an alleged secret society called the "Molly Maguires" that killed mine officials. He used private police to investigate and company lawyers to prosecute. Catholics and Irish were excluded from juries. Beginning in June 1877, 20 "Molly Maguires" were executed- often despite strong evidence of innocence.

The Reading Railroad lowered miners' wages 10-15% twice between 1876 and 1877. Many workers' meals became bread and water. Some families ate pets.

As for the railroad workers, Gowen decreed they must leave their union and join the company's insurance plan, which they would lose if they stopped working. In response, the trainmen went on strike in April 1877. Gowen replaced them with scabs whose inexperience caused many accidents. Nevertheless, Gowen didn't rehire the fired workers, and destroyed the Brotherhood of Railroad Engineers.

In July 1877 America was deep in the depression. The previous year the total revenues of America's railroads fell by $5.8 million. But they raised profits to $186 million (up $0.9 million) by cutting wages. Most owners received 10% dividends. In July 1877 railroads across America conspired and lowered wages another 10%. Train brakemen and firemen's wages came to $30 per month.

When they found out on July 16, trainmen in Baltimore left work, sparking the Great Strike. More than 80,000 trainmen and 500,000 other workers from Boston to Kansas City joined them, despite the absence of unions. In Pittsburgh when the National Guard, invited by the railroad, shot 26 unarmed strikers and bystanders, crowds burned freight cars for 3 miles. In Pittsburgh and Saint Louis , Missouri the railroad workers were strong enough to take over management, run trains, and collect tickets. In Hornellsville, New York when scabs started a train up a mountain, strikers soaped the tracks. The train went up, slowed, stopped; the passenger cars were unhooked and slid back down the mountain.

In Reading on July 22, with the Reading Railroad 2 months in arrears of paying wages, crowds of women and children watched as strikers blocked tracks. The railroad called in the National Guard. A few people threw bricks and the soldiers opened fire in all directions, killing 10 and wounding 40, including 5 local police.

That evening in Sunbury, rumors circulated that the National Guard would pass through to crush Pittsburgh's strike. An agitated crowd gathered at the railroad junction at 3rd and Chestnut streets. The soldiers took another route, but when a freight train tried to leave, the railroad workers took it over and sent it back.

On July 23rd the trainmen met at Red Men's Hall. They decided to join the national strike and continue blocking freight trains until the railroads took back the 10% reduction. The next morning they ordered the shop mechanics to leave work too.

In Danville on the morning of July 23, the workers appointed a group to ask the Commissioner of the Poor for bread or work. The Commissioner "passed the buck" to the mayor. At 3 PM a large crowd gathered at the weigh scales on Mill Street in the middle of Danville . One speaker said "We will give the borough authorities until tomorrow at 10:00 to devise some action to give us work or bread. If at that time nothing is done for us, we will take [explicative] wherever we can find it." John Styer discussed their poverty and demanded government aid. The town newspaper reported unless the borough council banished starvation, "disorder would ensue. Men would take the law into their own hands."

The next day there was almost a bread riot. Citizens were on the verge of starvation. Grocers brought their flour inside for safety, and farmers left markets with half their goods sold. At noon crowds led by Ben Bennet and former constable Frank Treas took a few old muskets from an abandoned storehouse. Next they rushed for the weapons stored in the Baldy building on Mill and Northumberland Streets. Police met them. One policeman tried to arrest Treas, for using incendiary language. But he could not get to Treas in the crowd. A sign on Bloom Street proposed a meeting of workingmen in Sechler's Woods on July 26. Following these events, the authorities gave food to those in need.

In Shenandoah on July 25, 800-1000 workers paraded down the streets with flags and a drum corps. When they got to the baseball field at 10 PM, they could see that arsonists had set fire to the mining stables in nearby Lost Creek. On July 27, Shenandoah's miners brought business of all kinds to a standstill.

In Shamokin on the morning of July 24, miners struck at the Big Mountain Colliery. 10 families in a row of houses had no food for 3 weeks, except a few scraps from their gardens. At 2 PM a large meeting of workers on Slope Hill demanded work or food.

On July 25 they repeated their demands at Union Hall on Rock Street . William Oram, the attorney for both the borough and the Mineral Railroad & Mining Company told the crowd the borough and wealthy citizens would give them street work for 80 cents a day.

The crowd appointed a Workingmen's Committee to negotiate with the borough council that night for a higher rate. The committee demanded $1.00 a day, and the borough agreed. But when the committee returned to Union Hall, the crowd rejected the $1.00 offer.

Then 1000 men and young people marched down Rock Street and Shamokin Street . When someone threw a stone through Shuman & Co.'s Store, the crowd could restrain itself no longer. They surged into the Reading Railroad station and depot on Shamokin and Independence Streets, where the parking lot now stands. They broke the windows and doors, took the freight from the cars and everything in the building, and gutted it. Next they crossed Liberty Street toward the Northern Central Depot on Commerce Street .

Meanwhile Mayor William Douty gathered vigilantes outside City Hall in response to a prearranged signal - a bell ringing at the Presbyterian church where he belonged. Douty managed his family's coal mines and collieries at Big Mountain, Doutyville, and Shamokin. He also participated in persecuting the Molly Maguires. Douty's vigilantes marched down Lincoln and Liberty Streets armed with muskets and revolvers. They told the crowd to leave, and when that failed, shot into it. 12 people were wounded and 2 killed, neither one involved in the uprising. Mr. Weist was shot dead while closing his candy store on Liberty and Independence Streets; Levi Shoop was the second victim. The crowd escaped to the town's outskirts. The vigilantes captured the train stations and patrolled the town. According to rumors, after retreating, people tore up the tracks a few miles east of town.

In November a wounded victim named Phillip Weist was tried for leading the riot. Despite receiving serious wounds, he was imprisoned for 8 months in the Northumberland County jail. In addition, James Richards, Peter Campbell, Christin Neely, and James Ebright were imprisoned 7, 6, 4, and 3 months respectively for rioting and burglary.

Elsewhere railroads crushed the strike using coal and iron police, vigilantes, and the National Guard. Across America, these "forces of order" killed more than 100 people. It was not a complete defeat for the strikers, however. The strike showed the conflict of interests between working people and management. If corporations pushed people too far, they would react out of desperation. And it showed that if workers acted together, they could challenge the corporate system. The future growth of unions would make workers stronger than an unorganized mass.

More than 100 Holocaust scholars and Jewish leaders --including top leaders of Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Judaism-- have signed a petition urging the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to change its main exhibit so as to include acknowledgment of the 1940s Holocaust rescue activists known as the Bergson Group.

During the Holocaust years, some American Jewish leaders opposed the Bergson Group for being too forthright in its criticism of the Roosevelt administration’s failure to rescue Jewish refugees. But in recent years, most Jewish leaders have come to recognize the Bergson Group’s crucial contribution to the rescue effort.

The petition was organized by The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and internationally-known Jewish leader Seymour Reich, who is president of the Israel Policy Forum and former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

The petition follows a recent public statement by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel, at the Wyman Institute’s national conference, urging the Museum to add the Bergson Group to its exhibits.

The 110 signatories on the Wyman petition include:

* Jewish leaders from across the spectrum, including David Ellenson and Charles Kroloff, president and vice president of Reform Judaism’s Hebrew Union College; Rabbi Dr. David Golinkin, president of Conservative Judaism’s Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies; and Dr. Norman Lamm, chancellor of Orthodox Judaism’s Yeshiva University. Joel Kaplan, honorary president of B’nai B’rith, and prominent California rabbi David Wolpe are also signatories.

* prominent Holocaust scholars, including David Wyman, Deborah Dwork, Richard L. Rubenstein, Dalia Ofer, Hubert Locke, Franklin Littell, Stephen Feinstein, and Monty Penkower; and editors of leading Holocaust publications, including Prof. Henry Huttenbach (Journal of Genocide Research), Prof. Paul L. Rose (Archives of the Holocaust), and Prof. Zev Garber (Studies in the Shoah);

* former Israeli cabinet ministers Shimon Shetreet and Moshe Arens; former U.S. Senator Rudy Boschwitz and former U.S. Rep. Stephen Solarz;

* two former senior officials of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Walter Reich and Micah Naftalin;

* other noted public figures, including journalist Marvin Kalb; scholar and novelist Thane Rosenbaum; and Eleanor Roosevelt biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook.


In recent months, there has been growing public interest in the work of the Bergson Group. U.S. Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, said in a message to the Wyman Institute’s recent national conference that she is “deeply proud” that her father, then-Congressman Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr. “actively supported the Bergson Group in its campaigns to save Jews from the Holocaust and help establish the State of Israel.”

The petition declares, in part:

“We urge the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to include the Bergson Group in its Permanent Exhibit. Doing so is important for the sake of historical accuracy. It is also important because the Bergson Group's work demonstrates the possibility of ordinary citizens taking action, through the democratic process, to bring about humanitarian action by the government. The American public, and especially young people, need to hear that message, which fits perfectly with the Museum’s admirable focus on learning the lessons of the Holocaust and applying them today.”

The Bergson Group, also known as the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, was a maverick activist group that raised public awareness of the Holocaust and campaigned for U.S. rescue action, through theatrical pageants, lobbying on Capitol Hill, placing more than two hundred full-page newspaper advertisements, and organizing a march in Washington by 400 rabbis (which was the only rally for rescue held in the nation’s capitol during the Holocaust).

The Bergson Group also initiated a Congressional resolution in 1943, urging creation of a U.S. government rescue agency, which played an important role in bringing about the creation of the War Refugee Board. The Board helped rescue more than 200,000 Jews from the Holocaust in 1944-45, including future U.S. Congressman Tom Lantos (D-CA), current chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee.

The House of Representatives recently adopted a resolution, sponsored by Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), recognizing that the 1943 resolution helped bring about the creation of the War Refugee Board.

For years Flossenbürg has been regarded as one of the "forgotten concentration camps" of World War II. Now, a new exhibition has opened which tells the story of those who were incarcerated and who lost their lives there.

A postcard in one of the first display rooms of the new museum reads: "Greetings from Flossenbürg." The friendly greeting is positioned under a picture of the historic castle ruins for which the small town on the German-Czech border is still well known for. In fact, while the postcard is from the 1920s, it could be from the present day.

What Flossenbürg is less famous -- or notorious -- for is that it was the location for one of the Nazis' 12 largest concentration camps; the camp where German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer died along with tens of thousands of other victims. After the war, the camp and its history slowly slipped into oblivion.

But the new exhibition, which opened to the public on Sunday, more than 60 years after the camp was liberated, aims to commemorate those who lost their lives at Flossenbürg and its surrounding camps and return its role in the "Final Solution" to the modern history books.

"Two thirds of the prisoners were Eastern Europeans," said Christian Omonsky, the press coordinator of the Flossenbürg exhibit, adding that the process of recounting the stories and compiling the evidence could only begin after the Iron Curtain fell and the former prisoners were able to visit the camp in 1995, on the 50th anniversary of its liberation.

People living in Europe during early Medieval times (400—1200 A.D.) actually had a progressive view of illness because disease was so common and out in the open, according to the research presented at a recent historical conference.

Instead of being isolated or shunned, the sick were integrated into society and taken care of by the community, the evidence suggests.

"The Dark Ages weren't so dark," said University of Nottingham historian Christina Lee, co-organizer of the second conference on Disease, Disability and Medicine in Early Medieval Europe. "The question we should be asking is whether illness was actually seen as a problem. What was classified as a disability? What was an impairment? The answer can't be generalized."

The views presented challenge traditional views of Dark Age attitudes being unenlightened and guided by the unscientific doctrines of the church.

Religion and other spiritual practices may have guided the way for Medieval populations in their quest to keep themselves and each other healthy, but people didn't always put blind faith in God.

"There are some Medieval texts out there that try to convince you that health was connected to spiritual goodness," Lee said, but "there was always a certain amount of propaganda by the Church."

Some of the most forward-thinking science in the Dark Ages was actually going on in monasteries, where monks trying to understand all of God's works—including the mysteries of the body—toiled with healing methods.

An expert panel in Canberra will consider a report tomorrow that several mass graves have been discovered holding the bodies of about 400 Australian and British soldiers killed in the Battle of Fromelles, in what might have been the most calamitous day in Australian history.

The battle, in July 1916, was a bloody introduction for Australians to the horrors of the Western Front. Fred Kelly, one of the last Gallipoli veterans, said Gallipoli was a picnic compared with Fromelles, where he also fought.

In 27 hours an estimated 5533 Australians were killed, wounded, taken prisoner or went missing. Of these, at least 1719 were killed. The casualties equalled the number of Australian casualties of the Boer, Korean and Vietnam wars combined.

Historians believe this might be the largest mass grave found in western Europe since World War II. Of the estimated 400 remains, about 160 are thought to be from the Australian 5th Division and the rest from the British 61st Division.

Australian Army historian Roger Lee said yesterday that the Australians were likely to have been from the 15th Brigade. He thought the figure of 1719 dead was conservative.

A 3-foot-by-10-foot section of brick wall, painstakingly preserved from a 175-year-old building in lower Manhattan, is raising some interesting questions. The brickwork symbol is part of a tantalizing historical whodunit. The setting conjures both New York's mercantile past and its future, and those who may be involved include a prominent, deeply Christian businessman.

Could the design be a cryptic marker of mystical beliefs? A tradesman's signature? A bit of architectural shorthand? A creative way to patch a hole?

Speculation, some backed with scholarly authority, has generating enough gravity to pull in community leaders and persuade a developer to spend $13,000 to save the artifact from demolition.

It sat unheralded for years in a building on Pearl Street, at the edge of the financial district. Solomon, who works for a vintage-lumber dealer, spotted it several years ago while engaged in an effort to save the 1832 building.

Most of the building was demolished to make way for an apartment tower's parking garage, financed in part with tax-exempt bonds intended to spur redevelopment after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But the facade and the brick symbol were saved.

City tax records show the building, a onetime warehouse, was built for William Colgate - the civic-minded, deeply Christian soap entrepreneur who founded what is now Colgate Palmolive Co. and helped establish the American Bible Society. A spokesman says Colgate Palmolive has no record that the company, then headquartered elsewhere in Manhattan, used the Pearl Street building. But Colgate prized it enough to make special note of it in his will, Solomon said.

To Solomon and some historians, Colgate's ties to the building suggest the brickwork pattern has religious resonance.

W hen the First National Bank of Ipswich closed a branch office in Rowley several months ago, staff members made quite a find in the vault. The stamp on a canvas money bag, dated 1966, indicated that the bag contained $1,000 in dimes. Its actual contents turned out to be worth a pretty penny more.

Inside the bag was a fragile leather-bound book stuffed with hundreds of pages of cramped handwritten notes. To all appearances, the book contained records of the First Congregational Church of Rowley dating to the mid-1600s -- and missing for decades

Five years ago, Stanford Makashule Gana quit the African National Congress, the storied anti-apartheid movement of Nelson Mandela that has come to dominate politics and government in South Africa.

It was a brave move. But then the 18-year-old college student did something even bolder for a poor, black villager: He joined the Democratic Alliance, the small but vociferous opposition often dismissed as the "white party."

"Coconut," he vividly recalls party comrades calling him. "Sellout." His family feared that the decision could affect his future, since friends of the ANC run every public agency and many companies. They were also hurt. Gana's family, after all, had expected him to carry forward the ANC torch his parents' generation held in the 1980s-era struggle against white minority rule.

But Gana hasn't wavered.

ALMOST exactly 65 years after a World War Two plane crashed at Pawlett, killing its crew, the aircraft has been recovered - thanks to a ten-year labour of love by a Somerset man.

Plane enthusiast Tim Hake confesses to being "obsessed" with aviation archaeology, finding, researching and sometimes recovering aircraft from war-time crash sites.

A young German soldier poses proudly with his parents in a crumpled and torn old photograph.

It is typical of the type of photo thousands of soldiers would have had taken during the early days of Second World War to remind them of family and home.

But this particular snapshot holds a secret that could unlock a 60-year-old mystery – the whereabouts of a fabled hoard of looted Nazi gold worth 20 million pounds.

For scrawled in fading blue ink on the back of the photo is a code which investigators hope will pinpoint Rommel's Treasure – a cache of ingots, jewellery and works of art hidden by the SS as they retreated at the end of the war.

Terry Hodgkinson, the British investigator leading the chase for the treasure, said: 'We have now worked out the code and are pretty confident of where the treasure is. We feel certain that the latest techniques can be used to retrieve it.'

Archaeologists have confirmed that artefacts found in Buon Rau village, Hoa Tien Commune, in Krong Pak (Dac Lac) are as much as 3,000 years old.

Local farmers first unearthed what they thought to be antique ceramics and stone tools in 2001 while planting coffee and pepper. They passed them to Dac Lac museum and archaeologists began excavating a 1.5ha site in Buon Rau in 2003.

THE government is set to reject a 500m pounds road scheme which is seen as vital to preserving the status of Stonehenge as a World Heritage site.

A tunnel more than a mile long would have taken the A303 trunk road under the extensive prehistoric landscape in which the stone circle stands. A new visitor centre had also been planned.

Despite 20 years of work by English Heritage, which manages Stonehenge, and several planning inquiries costing 25m pounds, a senior government source said last week that the scheme was “simply far too expensive”.

Instead, the culture and transport departments are planning a far cheaper scheme for a new bypass road.

We are planning an exhibit on the ongoing looting of sites in Iraq that will open in the Oriental Institute next April 10, the 5th anniversary of the looting of the Iraq Museum. Although the special exhibit gallery at the OI is of modest size, we hope that the exhibit will significantly increase public awareness of the issue. We have contacted a number of interested scholars, and wanted to make sure this announcement went out to a broad audience to invite your suggestion and commment.

The curators of the exhibit will be McGuire Gibson and Katharyn Hanson. Our planning for the exhibit is in its early stages, but we are considering five themes:

--looting of sites (perhaps 5-10 photographs showing progressive looting over time)

--the importance of context (illustration from the OI's excavations, perhaps one of the Diyala sites)

--looted artifacts (we are hoping to get some pieces that have been seized and are now in the US, including fakes)

--an update on the looting of the museum (perhaps 5 more photographs)

--what is currently being done

Other possible topics include the art market, antiquities law, and military destruction of sites in Iraq.

Please pass this note along to anyone you think may be interested.

Thanks.

Geoff Emberling
Museum Director
Oriental Institute

During the latter half of World War II, the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) undertook a massive clandestine operation of which the full, extraordinary details are only now coming to light.

Between 1942 and 1945, a section of SIS - known as MI19 - secretly recorded no fewer than 64,427 conversations between captured German generals and other senior officers, all without their knowledge or even suspicion. The 167 most significant of these are about to be published for the first time.

Together, they provide us with a goldmine of information about what the German High Command privately thought of the war, Adolf Hitler, the Nazis and each other.

They also explode the post-war claim of the Wehrmacht that they did not know what the SS were doing to the Jews, Slavs, mentally disabled and others among what they termed "untermensch" (sub-humans).