More than 250 years after the British expelled Acadians from the area now known as the Maritimes, the residence of the Queen's representative in New Brunswick played host to the launch of a new textbook that celebrates Acadian history.

Educators and members of New Brunswick's Francophone community gathered at the home of Lieutenant-Governor Herménégilde Chiasson Tuesday for the release of Histoire des Acadiens et des Acadiennes du Nouveau-Brunswick.

The glossy, 160-page book will be used as part of the social studies program for elementary francophone and French-immersion students in the province.

Maurice Basque of the University of Moncton said the book does not provide a complete, detailed history of the Acadians because it is aimed at elementary students, but he said it does go beyond just the events of history by detailing Acadian culture of the past and of today.

A leading historian wants 'Mein Kampf' to be republished in Germany. Copyright issues have kept it off the shelves since World War II, but in 2015 it will enter the public domain. Then, anyone will be allowed to print it -- including neo-Nazis.

A Munich historian has called for it to be republished in Germany -- as a pre-emptive strike against any neo-Nazis who might want to abuse the text for their own fell purposes.

Horst Möller, director of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, would like to see a "Mein Kampf" redux in the form of an academic edition with comprehensive footnotes. "As long as 'Mein Kampf' is not available in a carefully annotated edition, there will be no end to the oft simple-minded speculation about what is actually in the book," Möller said in an interview published Monday in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. "An academic edition could break the peculiar myth which surrounds 'Mein Kampf.'"

Möller said he has repeatedly asked the Bavarian Finance Ministry, which controls the copyright, for permission to produce a scholarly edition, but has always been turned down. The Bavarian government has in the past taken legal action against attempts to publish the book in other countries, such as in Sweden in 1992 and in Poland in 2005.

Files, which were collected by the Red Cross from concentration camps, hospitals and other parts of the Nazi regime after World War II and stretch out over 17 miles of shelves in the tiny German town of Bad Arolsen, have been nearly impossible to access. But now, Bad Arolsen has opened its doors to survivors. Digital copies of the archive will be circulated around the world, and one of the copies will be made available at the Holocaust Museum in Washington later this year or early in 2008.

Requests from historians were turned away, and requests from survivors and their descendants would go unanswered for years. As of 2006 there was a backlog of 425,000 requests from survivors and their families; while that number has been reduced, it's still substantial. As survivors reach the end of their lives, time is more and more of the essence.

The International Tracing Service, which runs the archive, was originally conceived as an organization to help family members who had survived the war and to inform them of others who had not.


Any modification to the archive for public consumption requires unanimous consent from the 11 countries that run it. Sometimes that consent takes a long time. The agreement to open the archives to the public was finally signed in May 2006, but only nine of the 11 member countries have ratified the changes. France and Italy now remain, and are expected to ratify it by the end of the year.

About 250 people who believe they are descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings learned more about their heritage and each other at a reunion in Charlottesville.

At the first Monticello Community Gathering over the weekend, attendees discussed family ties and toured downtown Charlottesville and Monticello.

Organizer Diana Redman calls the gathering "an opportunity to get beyond the racial issues." Redman is a descendant of Madison Hemings, one of Hemings' sons.

The Monticello Association has adamantly denied membership to Hemings' descendants, citing lack of evidence that Thomas Jefferson fathered her children.

Vietnam has announced it intends to seek UNESCO World Heritage status for the Hung Temple situated in its northern Phu Tho province.

Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has instructed the provincial administration and related agencies to do research and set up a data base on the temple and some other relics from the bronze and early iron ages.

FREDERICK, MD A bronze bust of Roger Brooke Taney stares sternly ahead, as if he were watching the two cherubs frolicking in the fountain in front of City Hall. Author of the inflammatory Dred Scott decision affirming slavery, Taney has been immortalized here for 75 years, largely ignored by passers-by.

But as Frederick has grown and become more diverse, a small band of residents is looking to move, or remove, this tribute to the Supreme Court chief justice who once resided in the city, saying his racism can no longer be condoned - even in the context of history.

World War II Gurkha hero Tul Bahadur Pun is now trying to get his Victoria Cross back from the British authorities, who took it away from him 30 years ago on the pretext that it required "safekeeping."

Eighty-four-year-old Pun, who came to Britain last week from his home in Nepal for medical treatment, recently went to see his medal on display in a case at the Gurkha Museum in Winchester.

Museum chiefs use a picture of Pun on their leaflet - but when asked if he could hold the medal, they refused.

A sad Pun was quoted by The Mirror as saying: "It is mine. I want it back. I must have it back."

The S.C. state flag is a tourism bureau's dream -- a palmetto tree that appears to be rustling in a nighttime breeze, illuminated by a perfect crescent moon.

But the flag, one of the most recognizable and best-selling state banners in the nation, has nothing to do with condos or beaches, smiling faces or beautiful places.

Because that's not necessarily the moon.

Nearly 150 years after it was adopted as the state flag, historians and scholars still can't agree on exactly what that doohickey in the top left corner of the flag means. It's a crescent, they concede, but what exactly it stands for is a subject of some contention.

"That's something that has been debated for years," said John Tucker, assistant director of the S.C. Historical Society. "A lot of people don't realize it goes back to the war."

Residents of Lower Providence Township who live next to Valley Forge are feeling like George Washington at the Battle of the Brandywine - completely outflanked.
"It's disturbing how secretive this has been," said Craig Crawford, whose home is next door to the park. "Why wasn't this in a township newsletter? The public is not aware of what's going on, and it seems like it's a done deal."

This anger, verging on rage, is directed at what many neighbors regard as dramatically expanded plans for the proposed American Revolution Center. The privately owned Revolutionary War museum would be the first in the nation to tell the entire history of the war, complete with an extensive collection of artifacts, documents, and other material.

Under the new plan, the complex, to be built on 78 privately owned acres within the official boundaries of Valley Forge National Historical Park, would include a 131,000-square-foot museum, a three-story hotel, a tavern and restaurant, a conference center, a dormitory for visiting scholars, a small campground, and other amenities.

"This is Valley Forge, for crying out loud," said Don Naimoli, a former officer of Girard Trust Bank and a longtime park volunteer. "What went on over there is still a national symbol, and we need to protect that heritage."

Center officials argue that much of the concern is unwarranted because it is based on misunderstandings and erroneous information. No harm is intended, they say.

"We have written an ordinance that allows a museum and the important things that go along with a museum," said Neil Sklaroff, the attorney for the project. "This is not commercialization."

A Bulgarian archaeologist announced Sunday that his team had found a gold mask that belonged to a Thracian king in the fourth century BC, near the eastern town of Sliven.

"The discovery of this mask proves that the Valley of the Thracian Kings stretches from the center of Bulgaria to the east of the country," archaeologist Georgi Kitov said.

The Thracians lived in southeastern Europe, the Carpathians and the Caucasus from about 4,000 BC to the 3rd century AD.

The world’s first atomic bomb test might have exposed unaware civilians in New Mexico to thousands of times the recommended level of public radiation exposure, according to reconstructed data in a new study.

The research, led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), found that ingestion of radioactive materials—primarily from irradiated rainwater and goat’s milk—might have been a substantial contributor to public radiation exposure that was largely not accounted for.

The findings come on the 62nd anniversary of the world’s first atomic explosion and were presented at the recent annual meeting of the Health Physics Society.

Only one out of 20 would-be teachers on a Cambridge University history and education course knew anything about Christopher Columbus, a conference was told yesterday.

The figure was revealed by Kate Pretty, pro-vice chancellor of Homerton College, as evidence of the decline in history in primary and secondary schools. Later this month, a report by Ofsted, the education standards watchdog, will reveal that seven out of ten pupils have ditched the subject by the time they are 14. Only 30 per cent go on to study it to GCSE level.

The report will also reveal that time allocated for history is now being swallowed up by the new compulsory lessons in citizenship - which aim to instil in UK children the concept of "Britishness".

Hundreds of elderly Germans are being confronted with the revelation that they were recruited into the Nazi party during the second world war.

Historians researching Nazi party archives in Frankfurt have discovered that a string of prominent Germans were among those automatically granted membership to celebrate Adolf Hitler's birthday.

Writers, a cabaret artist, scientists, journalists and politicians, including former cabinet ministers, are among those whose names are on the list.

According to records, they were part of a group of Germans born between 1925 and 1927 recruited en masse on the Führer's birthday on 20 April 1944.

A German historian has called for Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler's anti-Semitic hate book Mein Kampf to be reprinted and put back on sale in German bookshops with notes on its errors, saying this would be preferable to a flood of unrefuted editions.

Horst Moeller, director of the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, said Monday this would be better than waiting until 2015 when anybody could publish it after copyright in Germany lapses on the book.

The newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung quoted him saying it would be better to issue a edition now, with footnotes explaining page by page how Hitler was wrong.

The alternative would be a rush of cheap commercial editions without comments when the 1924 book enters the public domain 70 years after Hitler's death.

The legal rights to the book are held by the Bavarian Ministry of Finance, which seized all the Nazi Party publishing assets after their 1945 defeat.

For decades, Munich has used those powers to ban any re-publication of the book, which was revered by the Nazis.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton on Sunday labeled President Bush's tenure in the White House "the most radical presidency" in U.S. history, as she and four other Democratic presidential contenders courted the support of the nation's influential trial lawyers at a meeting in Chicago....

"We need to continue America's forward motion toward progress, toward that more perfect union," Clinton told a large, crowded convention room at the Hyatt Regency Chicago, addressing the political action committee of the American Association of Justice, formerly known as the Association of Trial Lawyers of America.

"In the last six and a half years we have seen a dangerous experiment in extremism in the White House," she said. "President Bush campaigned as a compassionate conservative. It turns out he is neither. He has proven that time and time again. I would argue that his is the most radical presidency we have ever had. You can look at nearly any aspect of our life here at home, in the nation or around the world."

Preparing a story for The Evening News, we played some of the [new Nixon] tapes for Senator George McGovern. He was in Washington to celebrate his 85th birthday this weekend in a reunion with friends and former staff members.

"I do think it's kind of sad that the president of the United States in the moment of his greatest triumph was so angry, so peevish about the whole situation," he said. "I have no malice towards him. I didn't then, and I don't today."

[Click on the SOURCE link to watch McGovern's interview.]

The U.S. commanders in Iraq seem to sense some new horror for the country is near. On July 7, Gen. David Petraeus predicted that insurgents would lash out with spectacular attacks in the coming weeks, as the clock runs down on time ahead of the September progress report due in Washington. And yesterday Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the commander of U.S. forces in southern Iraq, echoed the fear when talking to reporters in the Green Zone."We're concerned about some kind of Tet offensive that's going to affect the debate in Washington," Lynch said, harking back to the pivotal 1968 push by communist forces in Vietnam.

Today the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk witnessed one version of what an Iraqi Tet offensive might look like. At midday, a car bomb shook the city. Then came another blast, followed by one more. The coordinated trio of explosions left at least 75 people dead and offered a horrifying glimpse of the kind of organized assaults that American officials fear could unfold nationwide. Imagine a day in Iraq when catastrophic car bombs rip through not just one Iraqi city but several. Explosions coordinated to go off nearly simultaneously in places like Baghdad, Baqubah, Ramadi, Fallujah and Mosul, all places where insurgents are actively pursuing bombing campaigns, could bring about the highest death daily death toll seen yet and leave no question about the insurgency's ability to hold the entire country in a deadly grip more or less at will. That's one version.

The Antiquities Department has included an ancient synagogue where Biblical prophet Nahum is purportedly buried in its 2008 renovation plans. “The Antiquities Department has added the tomb of Prophet Nahum, peace be on him, to its 2008 preservation plan,” said department’s chief, Abbas al-Hussaini. The synagogue and the tomb are situated in the northern Christian Iraqi town of al-Qoush, 40 kilometers north of Mosul. Al-Qoush, a major Christian center in northern Iraq, had a large Jewish community before the Jewish exodus to Palestine in 1948....

This year marks a computing milestone, but it’s not one that will have IT officials popping any corks: The computer virus has turned 25, according to Scientific American.

And boy, has it matured. The first computer virus to spread in the wild, Scientific American says, was “Elk Cloner,” a relatively simple piece of software created by a high-school student in Pittsburgh. Cloner didn’t attempt to destroy the data of Apple II users; it merely serenaded them with a poem:

It will get on all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips
Yes it’s Cloner!

It will stick to you like glue
It will modify RAM too
Send in the Cloner!

Thirty years ago tonight, the lights went out in New York City. Unlike the placid blackout of 2003, the 1977 blackout plunged a weary, wary city into inky mayhem. Fires burned in Bushwick. Looters tore into Crown Heights. A significant chunk of Broadway was ablaze. Damages went into the hundreds of millions. And no one got shot. In a special issue on the blackout published on August 1, 1977, New York's Thomas Plate wrote about what the cops did and didn't do that dark night.

Today on NBC's Meet the Press, columnist Robert Novak revealed one of his most secret sources: Sen. Tom Eagleton (D-MO) gave him the quote that labeled 1972 Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern as the candidate of "Amnesty, Abortion and Acid." This is reported for the first time in his new memoir: The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington (Crown Forum).

Following McGovern's stunning victory in the '72 Massachusetts primary, Novak began calling Democratic politicians to get their reaction. The April 27, 1972 Evans & Novak column reported an anonymous source as saying "people don't know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion and legalization of pot. Once middle America -- Catholic middle America, in particular -- find this out, he's dead." This sent Washington into a frenzy to try to figure out which Democrat was bad-mouthing one of his own.

Ironically, several months later Eagleton would be tapped as McGovern's running mate, only to be replaced after it was learned that Eagleton underwent electro-shock therapy for depression.

In his memoir of the 1972 campaign, McGovern's press secretary Richard Dougherty made a comment that implied Novak had fabricated the quote. In an attempt to set the record straight, Novak asked Sen. Eagleton for permission to disclose his name. Eagleton replied that he made the comment off-the- record and he intended it to stay that way. Mr. Novak contacted Sen. Eagleton as he was writing The Prince of Darkness and, thirty years later, still would not allow his identity to be revealed.

Former Sen. Tom Eagleton died on March 4, 2007, thus freeing Mr. Novak to reveal the source of one of the most memorable quotes in presidential campaign history.

Robert D. Novak is one of the longest-running syndicated columns in the nation and the editor of the "Evans-Novak Political Report." Now a FOX News contributor, he spent twenty-five years as a political commentator for CNN, pioneering such shows as Capital Gang, Crossfire and The McLaughlin Group.

Thirty-five years ago, with the United States riven by an unpopular armed conflict in a faraway land, the Democratic Party responded by nominating for president its most vocal antiwar candidate: George McGovern.

Friday night, not far from the Capitol where debate over another war is an almost-daily occurrence, veterans of the McGovern campaign and others gathered at a reception to pay homage to him.

The parallels between the fight he led against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the effort now being waged by many in the room to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq was a major theme of the evening.

"Don't stop fighting for peace in Iraq!" activist Medea Benjamin shouted at one point above the din of chatter among the crowd of about 200.

Japanese conservatives protested Friday against US congressional demands for a clear apology over wartime military brothels, saying the women were not sex slaves but camp followers.

Lawmakers and academics gave the US embassy in Tokyo a letter saying they were "surprised and shocked" by the pressure for a fresh apology to the "comfort women."

Shoichi Watanabe, history professor emeritus at Tokyo's Sophia University said: "If America keeps saying this is a human rights issue, then what were the indiscriminate bombings on Tokyo and other cities? What were the atomic bombings? Compared with that human rights issue, prostitution in battlefields is only a commercial act."

A HOLOCAUST survivor has hit out at the insensitivity of traders selling a Hitler T-shirt in Camden Town.

George Clare is furious the £5 T-shirt, which displays the dictator making a Nazi salute and a map of Europe with the heading Hitler's European Tour 1939-1945, is being sold at the area's markets.

The 86-year-old, who lives in College Crescent, Swiss Cottage, escaped the Holocaust but lost both his parents in the atrocity.

He said: "The T-shirt glorifies the biggest criminal of the last century. And why? And for what?"

Two old steamer trunks sit in the rare-book room at the Virginia Historical Society, looking worn and forlorn. The smaller one was once red but the paint has faded to a dull rust. The larger one is brown with a piece of tin patching a hole in the top. On one side, a name is stenciled: "M. LEE."

That's Mary Custis Lee, Gen. Robert E. Lee's adventurous eldest daughter. In 1917, she stored these wooden trunks in the "silver vault" in the basement of Burke & Herbert Bank & Trust in Alexandria. A year later, she died at the age of 83. Her trunks sat in a dusty corner of the vault for 84 years, unclaimed, until E. Hunt Burke, the bank's vice chairman, discovered them in 2002....

A few weeks ago, [Lee Shepard, the Virginia Historical Society's senior archivist] opened the Mary Custis Lee papers to the public.

The Brown University Library has acquired the library of the late David E. Pingree, an internationally renowned historian of the exact sciences in antiquity and a member of the Brown faculty from 1971 to 2005. Pingree was chair of Brown’s Department of History of Mathematics and a University Professor.

John Nelson Black was a three-year enlisted man in the Union infantry. History remembers his regiment for its hard luck, with its ranks decimated at Antietam, Maryland, and its men captured in the siege of Plymouth, North Carolina. But Black himself would have remained virtually anonymous, save for a quirky gent named McNutt and a discovery worthy of a Dan Brown novel.

In October 2004, C. Nelson McNutt passed away at the age of 105 on the very acreage where he was born in June 1899. Living in a ramshackle cabin among neighboring mega-mansions in Weston, McNutt, who was the grandnephew of John Black, had two passions: saving everything and tending his vegetable garden. The rail-thin figure - a ringer for the farmer with the pitchfork in Grant Wood's American Gothic - thrived on engaging passersby with a cheery wave. He was quick to inform them that he remembered driving a Stanley Steamer, that he had been drafted into both world wars, and that a lawyer in the Sacco-Vanzetti case had been his lawyer, too. But McNutt never mentioned the stash of letters gently yellowing in the house he had built in 1934 - letters handed down to him from his mother's mother, a direct link to America's charismatic past.

This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of the riots that ripped through Plainfield's working-class West End, when black civil unrest erupted in violence from July 14 to 20, leaving one white police officer dead and businesses burned. More than 100 National Guardsmen were sent in to quiet the streets.

The riot's effect left a deep gash in Plainfield that some say has not completely healed....

More than an explosion of anger, the riots were a rebellion by a disenfranchised portion of the population, said Thomas Sugrue, professor of history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is co-author of "Plainfield Burning: Black Rebellion in the Suburban North," which appeared in the May issue of "Journal of Urban History," a scholarly periodical about the history of cities and urban societies throughout the world.

The riot thrust Plainfield into national prominence, Sugrue said. The overwhelmingly white power structure that existed "tried to brush the problems of blacks under the rug. They couldn't do that in the aftermath," he said.

Starbucks closed its store in Beijing's Forbidden City on Friday after months of controversy over the U.S. coffee-shop chain doing business there.

The decision followed the Forbidden City's announcement that it wants to operate all stores inside the former imperial palace, which is now a museum.

"[W]e have respectfully decided to end our lease agreement," the Seattle coffee chain said.