A federal appeals court is expressing skepticism about the CIA's claim that its technique for briefing presidents is so sensitive that it must be protected from public scrutiny, even 40 years after the fact.

Two judges considering a lawsuit seeking access to so-called Presidential Daily Briefs provided to President Johnson during the Vietnam War era cast doubt yesterday on the spy agency's assertion that the way it updates the nation's chief executive is itself an intelligence method entitled to blanket secrecy under the law.

"It just doesn't compute to me," Judge Pamela Ann Rymer of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said as a three-judge panel heard oral arguments on the case....

The suit was brought by a political science professor at the University of California at Davis, Larry Berman, as part of research he was doing on how political leaders in America responded to developments in the Vietnam War. At issue are just two PDBs he requested under the Freedom of Information Act, one from August 1965 and another from April 1968.

As part of his research, the professor discovered that the Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, released several briefs in part. The CIA now says that was a mistake, but Mr. Berman said in an interview that the release confirms that PDBs are more pedestrian than Langley acknowledges. "Even the reviewing archivists didn't recognize them as PDBs," the professor said in an interview. Last year, a federal district judge in Sacramento ruled against Mr. Berman. Judge David Levi upheld the CIA's right to withhold the entire series of presidential briefs without a document-by-document review. He based his ruling on a variety of grounds, including the claim that briefing techniques are protected intelligence methods.

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On July 10, the Senate Financial Services and General Government Appropriations’ Subcommittee approved its fiscal year 2008 appropriations bill. The bill includes $313.9 million ($1.1 million above the President’s request, $1.1 million less than the House recently approved in its bill (H.R. 2829) and $34.6 million above fiscal year 2007 budget) for operating expenses of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

As approved, the bill also includes $10 million for the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), for grants to states, local governments, universities, local historical societies, and others to help preserve and archive materials of historic significance. This is the same amount as in the House bill approved last month. This is a major victory for historians and archivists, since the Administration had targeted NHPRC for elimination in the President’s FY ‘08 budget request.

The Washington area suburbs of Virginia, befitting a state that supplied four of the first five U.S. presidents, has public high schools named after all of them, plus a nice sprinkling of famous Virginia generals.

Washington-Lee High School is in Arlington County. Jefferson, Madison, Lee, Marshall and J.E.B. Stuart high schools are in Fairfax County. Fredericksburg's only high school is named after James Monroe, and Prince William County has Stonewall Jackson High.

But over the past decade, even though 12 Northern Virginia high schools have opened to handle one of the fastest-growing populations in the country, not one of them has been named after a person, much less a president or a general. Instead, the various school-naming committees have embraced scenic, geographic or patriotic titles: Battlefield, Colonial Forge, Dominion, Forest Park, Heritage, Mountain View, Riverbend, South County, Stone Bridge, Westfield and two schools named Freedom.

Part of the problem, according to a recent study and some Northern Virginia school officials, is that presidents, particularly the more recent ones, and other well-known people tend to be controversial, whereas few Americans have bad things to say about rivers, lakes, forests or freedom.

Maryland is still naming high schools after people, but it appears to be out of sync with Virginia and much of the rest of the country.

Archaeologists sifting the ruins of a small cluster of slave cabins in central Alabama have unearthed an oft-forgotten facet of Southern slavery.

In the South, slavery has been most closely associated with antebellum plantation life. But here, on a hillside just a stone's throw from the massive blast furnaces of the Tannehill Ironworks, the remains of a cluster of simple cabins attest that slaves were also pressed into service in the South's first industrial labor force.

As technology makes it easier for students to cheat on exams or plagiarize papers, there has been no shortage of technology meant to deter and catch students who use cell phones, iPods and Google for a little extra help.

Turnitin and SafeAssignment are the two dominant technologies for comparing students’ submissions to databases of millions of student papers, articles and Web sites. But the educational software company Blackboard is today creating a new service, sort of — releasing SafeAssign, a repackaged version of MyDropBox’s SafeAssignment that will come pre-installed in future versions of the Blackboard Learning System, the leading course management software in the market.

Heading into the summer of 1967, Newark seemed primed for civil unrest.

In previous summers, what journalists started calling "riots" had been increasing in frequency and severity. In 1964, they touched 11 cities, from New York (in Harlem and in Brooklyn) to Cleveland. In 1965, the riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles resulted in the death of 34 people. In 1966, there were 43 civil disturbances of varying intensity across the nation.

A new manual for Russia's history teachers succinctly distills President Vladimir Putin's drive to rekindle patriotism, retelling events of the past six decades according to the Kremlin's preferred storyline: Russia is a great power that shouldn't be ashamed of its past.

Backed by support from the president himself, the book, which rails against U.S. hegemony, is raising fears among some historians that the Kremlin is -- quite literally -- trying to rewrite history in a way that risks breeding ultranationalism and whitewashing the darkest chapters of Russia's past.

Mr. Putin gave the manual a presidential boost last month, inviting its author along with a number of historians and teachers to his residence to talk history. Though he said students should be allowed to draw their own conclusions, he made clear that events should be portrayed in a way that fuels national pride.

A former police chaplain accused of involvement in torture, kidnapping and murder during Argentina's "dirty war" declined to testify on Thursday as he went on trial in the first case linking a clergyman to rights abuses.

Roman Catholic priest Christian Von Wernich tended to the notorious Buenos Aires provincial police force at a time when leftist dissidents of the 1976-1983 military dictatorship were routinely abducted, maimed and killed.

Rights activists accuse him of visiting clandestine detention centres and pressuring torture victims to talk.

The Federal Security Service has been assisting the United States in investigating crimes against humanity.

"Since 1994, 60,000 pages of documents dealing with Nazi crimes during World War II, kept at the FSB's Central Archives, have been handed over to the United States," Vasily Khristoforov, the head of the FSB's Register and Archives Department, said in an interview with Interfax.

Cooperation between American and Russian law enforcement and judiciary agencies led to a court ruling to deprive a Nazi accomplice in the extermination of the Warsaw Ghetto of American citizenship, he said.

Copies of trophy documents dealing with the Travniki training center have been sent to the American judiciary to be used in a trial of former Soviet and now U.S. citizens Stadnik and Dmitrenko as part of the work to investigate crimes against humanity, Khristoforov said.

The illicit traffic of cultural property is currently one of the most lucrative criminal activities in the world. Every civilisation's cultural heritage is universal and priceless, and the harm caused by illicit trafficking has disastrous repercussions, not only on peoples' understanding of their history, and thus on their cultural identity, but also with regard to the future of all humankind.

ICOM, UNESCO and INTERPOL are all the more concerned about this plague since illicit trafficking in cultural property has increased at an alarming rate over the past several years through the Internet, where it is difficult for the national authorities to effectively monitor all of the objects offered for sale.

Aware of the gravity of the situation, the three organizations co-signed a letter covering Basic Actions concerning Cultural Objects being offered for Sale over the Internet which they pledged to disseminate to all UNESCO and INTERPOL States parties, as well as to ICOM's national committees, regional and affiliated organizations. To this end, the letter has been translated into UNESCO's six official languages which are English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Chinese.

This letter, which you will find herewith, sets out a checklist of the Basic Actions to counter the Increasing Illicit Sale of Cultural Objects through the Internet. For this common initiative to prove effective, it is imperative to communicate the letter to the concerned authorities in each country.

Your participation is essential to enable us to carry out this awareness-raising campaign. We are closely committed to fighting the illicit traffic of cultural property, and we are very grateful for your support.

The UN body for culture on Sunday blasted a private initiative that drew nearly 100 million Internet and telephone voters to choose seven "new" wonders of the world.
"This campaign responds to other criteria and objectives than that of UNESCO in the field of heritage," said Sue Williams, the spokeswoman for UNESCO, the UN cultural body that designates world heritage sites.

"We have a much broader vision," she told AFP.

Voters chose the Great Wall of China; India's Taj Mahal; the centuries-old pink ruins of Petra in Jordan; the Colosseum in Rome; the statue of Christ overlooking Rio de Janeiro; the Incan ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru; and the ancient Mayan city of Chichen Itza in Mexico.

British actor Ben Kingsley and US actress Hillary Swank hosted a ceremony at Lisbon's Stadium of Light, broadcast in more than 170 countries to an estimated 1.6 billion viewers.

Minister for the Environment John Gormley is to review how the State protects its national heritage and landscape following the controversy over the planned construction of the M3 motorway over historic sites near the Hill of Tara.

Mr Gormley said today that Tara and "similar controversies" of recent years raised the "valid question" as to whether the current measures we have to protect our archaeological and natural landscape are adequate. However, he again insisted he had no power to review the decision of his predecessor Dick Roche on the route of the motorway.

"I recognise fully that we live in a dynamic and changing landscape and housing, commercial and infrastructure development is an important part of that dynamic. Yet we have a rich and amazing natural and archaeological heritage which we are duty-bound to protect," the Minister said.

The Ministry of Defence has sold off historic barracks and land worth more than £2.2 billion to fund the spiralling cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Figures show ministers have met about half the cost of the conflicts by selling armed forces assets, including accommodation, airstrips, sports fields, military hospitals and firing ranges.

The true cost of the invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein and driving the Taliban out of Afghanistan has never officially been released, but the respected Iraq Analysis Group has estimated that the MoD has spent in the region of £5 billion to fund the wars.

The Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda has long been the most kicked-around of presidential libraries, and nothing invited more ridicule than the dim, narrow room purporting to describe the scandal that drove its namesake from office.

Venturing into that room, visitors learned that Watergate, which provoked a constitutional crisis and became an enduring byword for abuses of executive power, was really a "coup" engineered by Nixon enemies. The exhibit accused Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — without evidence — of "offering bribes" to further their famous coverage.

Most conspicuous was a heavily edited, innocent-seeming version of the "smoking gun" tape of June 23, 1972, the resignation-clinching piece of evidence in which Nixon and his top aide are heard conspiring to thwart the FBI probe of Watergate....

In late March, however, workers roped off the Watergate gallery and methodically began to destroy it. Armed with hammers, a crowbar, a screw gun and a Sawzall, they yanked big display cabinets out of the floor, sliced through tough fiberboard panels, detached more than 100 fluorescent lighting tubes and removed the long strips of plexiglass that had sandwiched text transparencies....

"I can't run a shrine," says the man who ordered the demolition, Timothy Naftali, 45. Named last year as the library's first federal director, the Harvard-trained historian is guiding the library's shift from a privately run facility — the only modern presidential library not part of the federal system — to an institution that bears the National Archives' imprimatur....

A Finnish-Swedish research team has discovered a Soviet submarine at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.

The submarine, identified as SC305, was sunk in 1942 by the Finnish navy during a Second World War battle. Research team spokesman Bjorn Rosenlof says the eight-member team, using sonar equipment, found the vessel at a depth of 136 metres between the Swedish east coast town of Grisslehamn and the Finnish Aland Islands.

Rosenloft said the sub is "in very good condition, aside from a hole in the hull where it was hit."

He said the team actually found the ship late last year, but was not able to identify it until recently.

ACCORDING to popular belief, Nazi-era Germans flooded opera houses to be enthralled by Rhinemaidens and Valkyries.

But Richard Wagner, far from being the Third Reich's "house composer", actually became much less popular during Adolf Hitler's rule, according to new research.

Germans were much more keen on Carmen, Bizet's tale of a soldier's scandalous obsession with a Gypsy, and on Madama Butterfly, Puccini's opera about an officer's doomed liaison with a Japanese courtesan — neither particularly appropriate tales by the standards of Nazi ideology.

According to Jonathan Carr, author of the book The Wagner Clan, Hitler was obsessed by "the Master", but the party faithful were not and attended performances at Hitler's insistence.

New York art dealer Ira Spanierman's Raphael painting sold last night for 18.5 million pounds ($37.3 million) with commission, more than 100,000 times the price he paid for it.

The portrait of the Florentine ruler Lorenzo de' Medici set a record for the Italian painter at the Christie's International sale in London. Spanierman bought the work for $325 at a 1968 New York auction when scholars didn't believe it was by Raphael. Dealers said he tried and failed to sell it himself before consigning it to Christie's.

A contest between two telephone bidders took the price above the presale high estimate of 15 million pounds, showing how Christie's and rival Sotheby's are winning business from galleries for top works as new millionaires pitch bids from around the world.

Choho Zukeran was a schoolboy, mobilised to dig beachfront trenches, when US soldiers landed on his native Okinawa, sparking one of the bloodiest battles of the second world war. Over the next few weeks, some 200,000 Japanese and Americans would die, including more than a quarter of Okinawa's civilian population. Most died in the invasion, others killed themselves - on the orders of the army that was supposed to be protecting them.
"The army had given us two grenades each. They told us to hurl the first one at the enemy and to use the second one to kill ourselves," Mr Zukeran told the Guardian from his home in Okinawa, a subtropical island 1,000 miles south-west of Tokyo. Whole families and communities committed suicide together.

Yet if the government in Tokyo gets its way, Japanese children may never learn how hundreds of Okinawa residents, under direct or indirect pressure from the military, took their own lives.

This year the education ministry ordered publishers of seven high-school textbooks to be introduced next April to remove references to the forced suicides. The ministry said "it was not clear there were military orders [to commit suicide]" and that "recent studies suggest there were no such orders".

As a growing number of Colombian government
officials are investigated for ties to illegal paramilitary terrorists, a
1979 report from the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá raises new questions about the
paramilitary past of the current army commander, Gen. Mario Montoya Uribe.

The declassified cable, the focus of a new article being published today on the Web site of Colombia's Semana magazine, answers long-simmering questions about a shadowy Colombian terror ogranization responsible for a number of violent acts in the late-1970s and early-80s. Long suspected of ties to the Colombian military, the cable confirms that the American Anticommunist Alliance (Triple-A) was secretly created and staffed by members of Colombian military intelligence in a plan authorized by then-army commander Gen. Jorge Robledo Pulido.

Gen. Montoya was first tied to Triple-A by five former military intelligence operatives who detailed the group's operations in the Mexican newspaper El Día. The new evidence tying the Army's 'Charry Solano' intelligence battalion to the terror group is likely to refocus attention on Montoya's role in that unit. The new information follows the publication in March of a secret CIA report linking Montoya to a paramilitary terror operation in 2002-03 while commander of an army brigade in Medellín.

Along with previous Archive postings, the article, also published in English on the Archive's Web site, is part of an effort by the Colombia documentation project to uncover declassified sources on Colombia's armed conflict, particularly the illegal paramilitary terror groups now engaged in a controversial demobilization and reparations process with the government.