A short walk through the rice and sugarcane fields that dot Yomitan village, 20 kilometers north of Naha, capital of Okinawa prefecture, leads to dark, dank caves where hundreds of civilians took refuge as United States troops invaded the island during World War ll.

More than six decades later, these caves are at the center of a bitter battle over what really happened there.

For Masayasu Oshiro, a historian who has documented the sufferings of poor farming communities that were caught in the only battle fought on Japanese soil between the Imperial Army and US troops, the facts are clear. "I have recorded countless stories told by aging Okinawan war survivors. They include horrifying accounts of how people committed mass suicide and murder under orders from the Japanese military. Their testimonies have been recorded at the Okinawan prefecture office to track our war history," he told Inter Press Service.

Such recordings are irksome for the Japanese government that is keen to whitewash this part of history. But local governments in Okinawa and the surrounding islands are determined not to let the Japanese Education Ministry have its way.

Stereotypical images of Japanese collectively in denial about the atrocities committed by the Imperial armed forces are grossly misleading and overlook the more prevalent view accepting wartime guilt and favoring atonement. In [JAPAN'S CONTESTED WAR MEMORIES: The "Memory Rifts" in Historical Consciousness of WWII] ... Hokkaido University's Philip Seaton persuasively argues that, "Japanese war memories are not nearly as nationalistic as they are frequently made out to be."

Seaton points out that war memory is fiercely contested among Japanese, and collective amnesia is impossible given this ubiquitous and robust discourse. History remains at the center of contemporary political battles and it is thus a "current affairs" issue. The author writes: "The ways that Japanese people interact with their Asian neighbors, attitudes toward conflicts in other parts of the globe, nuclear issues, and attitudes concerning the core symbols of Japanese nationhood — the flag, emperor, national anthem, constitution and Japan's wider global role — are all inextricably linked to memories and interpretations of Japan's wartime past. The war has not been forgotten. Quite the opposite, the Japanese seem unable to let it go."

"Japan's Contested War Memories" asserts that the English-language media consistently misrepresents the true state of war memory among Japanese by focusing too much on attempts by conservatives and the ruling elite to impose a vindicating and glorifying narrative of the war that emphasizes Japan's victimization. This "orthodoxy" of a nation in denial and shirking war responsibility overlooks the significance of memory rifts in Japan. In examining textbooks, other educational materials, television documentaries, films and printed media, Seaton finds that progressive views critical of Japan's wartime aggression and accepting responsibility are more representative of Japanese opinion. He writes, "typically 50 to 60 percent of people characterize the war as 'aggressive,' while anything between 50 and 80 percent . . . are either critical of the government's 'inadequate' treatment of war responsibility issues . . . or are supportive of additional compensation and initiatives acknowledging aggression."

Nixon Attorney General John Mitchell infamously threatened during Watergate to put the Washington Post's Katherine Graham's breast in a wringer if the paper continued to publish articles critical of the administration.

In a memo from 1972 that's just surfaced Charles Colson, a Nixon assistant, claims that George McGovern, commenting on Mitchell's threat, said that "based on Katherine Graham's figure, there's no danger in that."

McGovern, in an interview with Slate's Jack Shafer, denies making the comment.

If you stand in the middle of Auburn Avenue, outside the Queen Anne-style home in which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was born in 1929, and look past the King Center, past the trees leading into the National Park Service Visitor Center and past Ebenezer Baptist Church, toward the office buildings and hotels of downtown Atlanta, you can get some sense of what the precocious Martin might have felt standing in the same spot, before his family moved off the street when he was 12.

Tens of thousands of elderly survivors, children and dignitaries gathered at the Peace Memorial Park, to remember the more than 250,000 people who ultimately died on the 62nd anniversary of the blast. During the ceremony Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba, singled out the United States for “failing to halt nuclear proliferation”.

In the Peace Memorial Park, close to ground zero of the blast, participants held a minutes silence at 8.05 local time when the B-29 Enola Gay bomber dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, August 6th 1945. On that day 140 thousand people died. Only three days later another American plane launched a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki killing a further 80 thousand. Six days later Japan declared defeat.

Sami Adwan is the very model of a soft-spoken professor. He measures his words, and listens carefully to what others have to say. Yet while pursuing an education Ph.D. at the University of San Francisco in the 1980s, Adwan not only refused to listen to Jewish students, he says he dropped out of classes if he knew they included Jews. A Palestinian born in the village of Surif, near Hebron, Adwan had grown up under the shadow of the Israeli occupation, hearing tales from his father and grandfather of how Jews had seized the family's orange groves and wheat fields in 1948. Returning to his homeland with his degree, Adwan joined the then outlawed Fatah Party and was thrown into an Israeli jail in 1993.

That was his real education. While awaiting charges, Adwan overheard two Israeli soldiers arguing over whether he should be made to sign a document in Hebrew that he couldn't read. Shocked to hear one of his enemies defending his rights, Adwan decided that he had some things to learn about the Jewish nation....

Together with Dan Bar-On, a social psychologist at Ben Gurion University in southern Israel, he now codirects the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East (PRIME). Since 2002 the group has produced three booklets for use in Palestinian and Israeli high schools that force each side to confront a contradictory vision of history.

ATLANTA — Three years ago, when Charles Steele Jr. became president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he worked out of a cramped headquarters without power or light. The embattled civil rights group's funds were scant, and so, too, was it's sense of mission.

Its fortunes have since changed, and the organization that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. co-founded is marking its 50th anniversary today with the opening of a $3-million international headquarters here. The building, which Steele says is debt-free, represents just half of the funds the SCLC has raised from corporate sponsors since he became president.

For Steele, 61, a former Alabama state senator, the group's new red brick home is a fitting emblem of its newfound stability. After decades of speculation about its future — factions fought so bitterly during the group's 2004 convention that police were called — the SCLC, he says, "is here to stay."

The planned New Mexico History Museum in Santa Fe received a $1 million gift from the Messengers of Healing Winds Foundation.

The gift is the largest ever made in New Mexico by the Santa Fe-based foundation, which focuses on supporting environmental programs, animal dignity and fine arts, education and social service projects in New Mexico, northwest Iowa, South Dakota and southern Florida.

The gift will help build exhibitions at the new 95,000-square-foot New Mexico History Museum in downtown Santa Fe, which is slated to open in 2009. The gift has launched the public phase of the Museum of New Mexico Foundation's (MNMF) $22 million endowment and capital campaign for the history museum and other state museums and monuments, called the "Shape the Future" campaign.

The future of history as an A level subject is at risk as pupils choose “soft options” such as media studies over traditional academic subjects, the head of an examiners’ body has said.

Katherine Tattersall, of the Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors, gave warning that the subject could disappear from some schools because it was no longer compulsory for pupils over 14.

Ms Tattersall said that history was one of the subjects that was threatened by alternative A levelss such as media studies and photography, which are perceived to be more likely to lead to a job. However, the Department for Children, Schools and Families rejected the claim.

A theory put forth by a group of 25 geo-scientists suggests that a massive comet exploded over Canada, possibly wiping out both beast and man around 12,900 years ago, and pushing the earth into another ice age.

University of South Carolina archaeologist Dr. Albert Goodyear said the theory may not be such "out-of-this-world" thinking based on his study of ancient stone-tool artifacts he and his team have excavated from the Topper dig site in Allendale, as well as ones found in Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.

The tools, or fluted spear points, made by flaking and chipping flint, were used for hunting and made by the Clovis people, who lived 13,100 to 12,900 years ago, and from the Redstone people who emerged afterwards. The two points are distinctly different in appearance, with Redstone points more impressively long and steeple-shaped.

"I saw a tremendous drop-off of Redstone points after Clovis," said Goodyear. "When you see such a widespread decline or pattern like that, you really have to wonder whether there is a population decline to go with it."

Herefordshire Council is implementing its plans to preserve the Rotherwas Ribbon archaeological find and protect it for future generations.

A full council meeting confirmed that work on the Rotherwas Relief Road had been stopped around the site since the discovery in April of the Bronze Age ribbon of fire-cracked stones.

The council also determined that no irreversible action be taken that could prejudice its preservation for future generations.

An important archaeological discovery has been made recently in the region of Batna (east of Algeria) which consists in prehistoric frescos that date back to some 3500 years.

Local experts are asking for the immediate intervention of the minister of culture to send international searchers to probe in the matter, because of the importance this unprecedented historical discovery. The province of Batna is famously known by its outdoor historical sites such as Timgad, Ouazana and Imedghassen.

Archaeologists have discovered a large group of ancient rock art in Perthshire, which they hope will shed more light on the area’s prehistoric inhabitants.

A team working on National Trust for Scotland (NTS) land as part of the Ben Lawers Historic Landscape Project found the previously undiscovered ‘cup-and-ring’ style markings on a hillside overlooking Loch Tay and Kenmore. The carvings could date back to Neolithic times and be up to 5,000 years old.

ANTI-M3 motorway protesters yesterday mounted a dawn vigil to defend a heritage site near the historic Hill of Tara.

Protect Tara supporters were triggered by speculation that the authorities were going ahead with plans to dismantle and “preserve as record” the so-called royal temple at Lismullin in Co Meath.

Feelings have run high, with heritage defenders claiming a priceless world treasure would be lost for ever if the motorway scheme goes ahead in its present form.

Heartless vandals have destroyed cave paintings dating back thousands of years with graffiti.

Fluorescent yellow paint was sprayed over carvings, thought to be around 8,000 years old, inside the Cova de la Clau in Palma de Gandia, last week.

However, they left a 16,000-year-old engraving of a horse in the Cova del Parpalló untouched.

On Aug. 26 U.S. women mark the 87th anniversary of the 19th Amendment giving them the right to vote. By some measures there is plenty to celebrate. Women have turned out to vote at a higher rate than men since the 1980s.

In the 2006 midterm election 2 million more young women voted than in the previous comparable cycle, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, which credits the rise in part to the Feminist Majority Foundation's "Get Out Her Vote" effort aimed at college women.

Moreover,55 percent of female voters cast their ballots for Democrats in House races, while only 50 percent of male voters did. In fact, female voters were responsible for key Democratic victories in the House and the Senate.

However, those figures do not reflect the fact that many women's votes are missing from the count.

In the last presidential election, 8 million women registered but did not vote; another 36 million potential female voters were not registered at all, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College is the new home for a rare collection of papers belonging to a central yet largely unknown figure in the effort to win women the right to vote. The papers of Mariana Wright Chapman, the president of the New York State Suffrage Association in the 1890s, had not been available to the public before their arrival at Swarthmore earlier this year.

Among the Chapman Collection are dozens of letters from famous women's rights advocates Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Carrie Chapman Catt. In addition, Chapman kept news clippings, photographs, and detailed journals. One journal entry describes a lunch at Stanton's house with Susan B. Anthony on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, N.Y.

"These women were among the most important figures in the movement," says Christopher Densmore, curator of the Friends Historical Library (FHL). "They literally made it their lives' work. One letter is a five-page strategy discussion. So there's a lot of substance in this collection that shows the tremendous organizational efforts needed to secure the vote for women."

The collection is a gift from Anne Chapman Booth, Chapman's granddaughter and a member of Swarthmore's Class of 1932. "It's very unusual to have this kind of material," says FHL archivist Pat O'Donnell, who met with Booth nearly two years ago. "She was literally bringing shoeboxes of letters out from under her bed."

The Chapman Collection nicely augments the complete records of the New York Yearly Meeting, also housed in the FHL. "Not only did Anne Chapman Booth have a love and loyalty to Swarthmore," O'Donnell says, "but she felt that the papers could be viewed in the most comprehensive light here."

The arrival of the Chapman Collection is one highlight among many this year for the FHL. Later this month, curator Densmore will be featured on PBS' "History Detectives" in a segment on area Quakers. In September, he will lecture on Quakers and the Underground Railroad at conferences in Georgetown, Kentucky, and Rochester, N.Y. Also in September, FHL will sponsor a visit by Nat and Yanna Brandt, authors of In the Shadow of the Civil War (2007), a book about the rescue of Jane Johnson from slavery in Philadelphia in 1855. This is the same incident that was the basis for Lorene Cary's The Price of a Child. Lucretia Mott, a Swarthmore College founder and key figure in the abolitionist movement, was one of the people involved in the rescue.

Established in 1871, the Friends Historical Library is located on the campus of Swarthmore College and is open to the public. Its mission is to document the history of the Society of Friends (Quakers) and its concerns from the 17th century to the present.

Located near Philadelphia, Swarthmore is a highly selective liberal arts college whose mission combines academic rigor with social responsibility. Swarthmore, with an enrollment of 1,450, is consistently cited among the top liberal arts colleges in the country.

Excerpt from the letters:

"In addition to burdens and trials, I have an insurrection brewing in my kitchen that is likely to compel me to wield my own dishtowel and fry pan in the near future. I am much of the opinion that professional reformers should be old maids or widows without encumbrances." - Carrie Chapman Catt, Jan. 5, 1896

Leading up to the Spanish-American War in 1898, Susan B. Anthony complained that the Civil War had resulted in the emancipation of the slave, that the coming war was to supposed to liberate the Spanish colonies, and asked, "When will there be a women's hour? We must be patient again."

Building an assembly plant in southeastern Indiana is no problem for Honda. But staffing it is another matter.

The Japanese automaker's challenge is hiring a diverse work force in an almost completely white rural area.

Honda wants to attract minority workers to a community known as one of about 10,000 "sundown towns" in the United States. Such towns once warned blacks not to "let the sun go down" on them -- meaning blacks could work but not live there.

The plant, called Honda Manufacturing of Indiana, plans to begin hiring 2,000 workers this fall. The automaker has contacted minority leaders and groups to help it find minority employees within 65 miles of Greensburg. The hiring area includes Marion County, or Indianapolis.

"It's a fine first step, but it doesn't even get them to first base," says James Loewen, the Washington, D.C., author of Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism.

Greensburg is known for the big tree growing out of the top of the Decatur County Courthouse tower, not for its racial diversity. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Greensburg had only eight black residents in 2000, or 0.08 percent. Of the city's 10,260 residents, 97.6 percent were white. Asians made up the city's largest minority group, at 1.4 percent. Greensburg's population today is about 10,500....

Art historians had known of the Van Gogh drawing, stored at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. But they had always wondered whether it was a copy of a completed painting.

Now, at last, the painting itself has been discovered - concealed under another painting in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Van Gogh Museum said Friday.

The work, "Wild Vegetation," painted in June 1889, was discovered in an x-ray of "The Ravine," which Van Gogh painted on the same canvas four months later, the museum said.

"One of our specialists looked at the x-ray and recognized it as resembling a drawing from the museum," said Natalie Bos, a spokeswoman for the Van Gogh Museum.

The museum called the discovery important for researchers and said it would display the drawing, done in brown reed pen, in Amsterdam starting next week as part of an exhibition of Van Gogh's drawings running until Oct. 7.

Historians at Cambridge University have taken seven years to painstakingly extract 320-year-old stories of freak weather, bishops behaving badly and prisoners being held without trial. The 900,000-word eyewitness account of life in Restoration England is taken from a diary which required a specialist code-breaker to decipher and some have claimed rivals Samuel Pepys.

The Entring Book diary of Roger Morrice, a Cambridge alumnus and former clergyman, was written in his own 17th Century shorthand and shows the topics in the news were remarkably similar to today (Tuesday, 07 August).

It was discovered in a London research library, having been left for 300 years and then examined by a research team led by Cambridge's Dr Mark Goldie.

Dr Goldie said: "The Entring Book has such an enormous scope that it tells us far more than the politics of the time. It covers publishing, plays, business, military and religious matters.

"We hear about foreign affairs, public opinion, London life, gossip and rumour and books and censorship. Morrice could have been arrested for sending newsletters and information around the country at the time."

The book, which is the longest diary of public life in England during the later part of the Stuart age, is now set to appear on bookshop shelves for the first time.

Spanning the years 1677 to 1691 it covers the latter part of Charles II's reign, the rule of James II and the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 that heralded the start of English parliamentary government.

A new analysis of the dental fossils of human ancestors suggests that Asian populations played a larger role than Africans in colonizing Europe millions of years ago, said a study released Monday.

The findings challenge the prevailing"Out of Africa" theory, which holds that anatomically modern man first arose from one point in Africa and fanned out to conquer the globe, and bolsters the notion that Homo sapiens evolved from different populations in different parts of the globe.

The"Out of Africa" scenario has been underpinned since 1987 by genetic studies based mainly on the rate of mutations in mitochondrial DNA, a cell material inherited from the maternal line of ancestry....

The paper was written by researchers at Spain's national center for research into human evolution in Burgos and appears in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

North Americans have always taken the heat for killing off millions of American bison during the early 1800s. A new study, however, pins the blame on Europeans.

Europe's advanced tanning expertise drove the large, iconic mammal to near extinction in the United States, according to a a review of international trade records, diaries and other historical documents conducted by University of Calgary environmental economist M. Scott Taylor.

"The story of the buffalo slaughter is surprisingly not, at bottom, an American one," Taylor said.

Taylor says the guilty party sat on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. The swift bison extermination was a result of an expertise in tanning heavy hides into leather developed in Europe, he wrote in a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research earlier this year. The innovation, not practiced in the United States at the time, sustained European's high demand for bison hides.

"These market forces overwhelmed the ability of a young and still expanding nation, just out of a bloody civil war, to carefully steward its natural resources," Taylor said.

About 6 million bison hides were exported from 1871 to 1883, Taylor wrote. This represents almost 9 million dead bison.

Adolf Hitler, the most notorious champion of Richard Wagner and “racially pure” German music, banished Jewish and Russian musicians from the concert halls of the Third Reich — but apparently listened secretly to their work.

New light has been shed on the Nazi leader’s musical tastes by the discovery of what are said to be a hundred of his gramophone records found in the attic of a former Soviet intelligence officer, Lev Besymenski.

“There were classical recordings, performed by the best orchestras of Europe and Germany with the best soloists of the age,” Mr Besymenski said in a document explaining how the records came into his possession.

The 86-year-old, who helped to interrogate captured Nazi generals, died this summer. The document and the record collection have now been made available to Der Spiegel magazine.

The Soviet intelligence officer had found them in Hitler’s Chancellery in Berlin in May 1945, still packed in crates. Hitler’s staff were counting on an evacuation to the Nazi leader’s Alpine hideaway on the Obersalzberg and it was known that he could only relax with his music.

One day after President Bush signed into law a bill that requires public disclosure of the national intelligence budget, the House of Representatives adopted an amendment to prevent that requirement from taking effect.

The budget disclosure provision appeared in legislation enacting the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, which was passed by Congress last month and signed by President Bush on August 3.

If implemented, it would mark the first time that Congress successfully asserted its authority to compel disclosure of currently classified information over the objections of the executive branch. Since 1998, the intelligence bureaucracy has consistently refused to divulge the intelligence budget total. The White House stated on February 28 that budget disclosure" could cause damage to the national security interests of the United States."

The opposing view, adopted by the 9/11 Commission and endorsed by Congress last month, is that budget disclosure is an indispensable precondition to broader accountability and that it is essential to restoring the credibility of a defective classification system.

But despite the fact that the requirement to disclose the intelligence budget has finally passed into law, it may not happen after all.