Shortly before Rudy Giuliani left the New York mayor's office in 2001, close associates worked out an unprecedented and controversial deal to transfer his mayoral papers from City Hall to a private, tax-exempt foundation, the Rudolph W. Giuliani Center for Urban Affairs.

Billed as a leadership think tank, the center served as a conduit for Giuliani to copy and archive 2,100 boxes of documents from his time as mayor before returning the originals to the city.

That record, which includes the months after the Sept. 11 attacks when he was anointed as "America's mayor," serves as the foundation of Giuliani's presidential campaign today. Because he moved his papers through a private organization led by his political supporters, however, the integrity of that record has been called into question.

A vacant Manhattan building that played a part in an infamous Gilded Age murder case partially collapsed Saturday night, less than two weeks after city officials expressed concerns about the building's stability....

The building became a salacious footnote in a sensational 1907 trial involving a teenage showgirl, a jealous husband, and renowned architect Stanford White. He designed the original Madison Square Garden, the famous arch at Washington Square Park and several other city landmarks.

White rented part of 22 W. 24th St. and used it for trysts in 1901 with 16-year-old showgirl Evelyn Nesbit. She subsequently married, and her vengeful husband, Harry Thaw, shot and killed White on Madison Square Garden's rooftop garden in 1906. The trial revealed that White's 24th Street hideaway was outfitted with a red velvet swing, among other racy details. Thaw was eventually acquitted on the grounds of insanity.

19th-century newspaper reports ranging from the Battle of Trafalgar to the Jack the Ripper murders are now available online. The British Library has just launched a new site, featuring historic events from 1800 to 1900 and free for those in Further and Higher Education. New imaging techniques have allowed the digitisation of national and regional UK publications, previously only accessible in reading rooms. Reports on the Slavery Abolition Act, the Congress of Vienna and opening of the Suez Canal are amongst the one million pages included. The scheme is a joint venture with JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and Gale/Cengage Learning. Sir Colin Lucas, Chairman of the British Library, commented: ‘Research by UK communities relies on access to the very best publications and information sources for its survival.’

Edwin S. Grosvenor has purchased American Heritage from Forbes Inc. and will resume publication with the December issue. Grosvenor’s company, American Heritage Media, also plans to resume publishing Invention & Technology early next year. All subscriptions will be resumed where they left off, and Americanheritage.com will continue as usual. Further details about American Heritage Media’s plans will be announced soon.

HNN Editor: From the NYT: Edwin S. Grosvenor, the great-great-grandson of a founder of the National Geographic Society, has bought American Heritage magazine and its affiliated Web site (americanheritage.com) and book division from Forbes Inc. Forbes suspended publication of the bimonthly magazine after the April issue. Mr. Grosvenor, 56, who read about the magazine’s problems in The New York Times, will pay $500,000 in cash and assume about $11 million in subscription liabilities. Forbes will retain a 25 percent stake in the company. “As a publisher, I saw saving American Heritage the way a preservationist sees preventing Grand Central station from being turned into an office tower,” said Mr. Grosvenor, who published Portfolio, an art magazine, in the 1970s and ‘80s. He is putting together a group of investors to raise about $2.25 million to invest in the company. Mr. Grosvenor, who will be editor in chief, plans to publish his first issue in December. He has hired John F. Ross, a former senior editor at Smithsonian magazine, to be managing editor.

The Catholic Church is preparing to beatify 498 of its members killed during the Spanish Civil War, putting them on the path to possible sainthood but reviving memories of a conflict that still divides Spain.

Most of those to be honored at Sunday's ceremony in Rome, the biggest mass beatification ever and to be attended by thousands of Spanish pilgrims, were priests or nuns killed by left-wing militias at the outbreak of the 1936-39 war.

Many Catholic clergy and Church leaders sided with Francisco Franco in the conflict, which began when the general led a military coup against the left-wing government of the then Spanish Republic and ended with his installation as a dictator.

Over decades, the Church in Spain has gathered evidence that hundreds of its members died during the conflict for their faith, making them eligible for beatification. If the devout report miracles linked to praying to them, some could be considered for sainthood, a process which takes many more years.

Order of New Zealand recipient and New Zealand's most famous theologian Lloyd Geering is set to celebrate with colleagues, friends and interested members of the public 40 years since his landmark heresy trial began.

Lloyd Geering's heresy trial is being revisited at an all-day event in Wellington on November the 3rd, 40 years to the day since the trial began.

The trial of Geering who was then head of the Presbyterian Church's theological college shook New Zealand society and was widely reported internationally. It is also the subject of a forthcoming television documentary on "The Last Western Heretic".

"These celebrations mark an important point in New Zealand's history," said popular television presenter and Trust member Chris Nichol who will be conducting a live interview with Geering as part of the day's events.

"At the time people argued in bus stops about whether the resurrection really happened as its recorded in the Bible. That was 1967. The trial was a turning point. After the trial it seemed that people began to treat the institutional church with a great deal more caution."

Conservative commentator David Horowitz was forced to cut short his speech on “Islamo-Fascism” in the face of repeated interruptions, heckling and catcalls from some audience members in a packed lecture room in White Hall on Wednesday.

The event played out like a tug-of-war between two groups: protestors who shouted questions or anti-conservative taglines after every few sentences Horowitz spoke and another faction in the audience who became increasingly vocal about their desire to hear him speak uninterrupted.

When the disruptions peaked about 20 minutes into Horowitz’s speech, Senior Vice Provost for Community and Diversity Ozzie Harris stood up at the back of the room and cautioned protesters to sit or risk being forcibly removed. Immediately, one man shouted: “Everyone stand up! They can’t take all of us!”

Horowitz and his bodyguard left the stage at this point and waited in a room adjacent to the lecture hall. Meanwhile, more and more dissenters stood and began chanting: “Racist, sexist, anti-gay. David Horowitz, go away!”

"The United States Intelligence Community (IC) has an obligation to learn from its history and its performance and to document its activities," Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell wrote in a newly disclosed Intelligence Community Directive.

Towards that end,"each IC agency/organization shall establish and maintain a professional historical capability... to document, analyze and advance an understanding of the history of the agency or organization and its predecessors."

See"Intelligence Community History Programs," Intelligence Community Directive 180, August 29, 2007.

Essex — True to its name, the Turtle moved slowly through the murky waters of the Connecticut River, its rear propeller spinning smoothly on the manual power supplied by sole passenger and operator Roy Manstan.

On the dock above, Fred Frese, the principal builder of the unwieldy-looking contraption, looked on as it moved along, a wide grin on his face.

“It works,” he declared after the little boat turned around and made its way back to its starting point.

Frese was among some 25 people who turned out Monday morning for one of the first test launches of the Turtle, a reproduction of the first American submarine, which was built in 1776 by Old Saybrook patriot David Bushnell to help Colonial forces sink British warships.

The Turtle, so named because the 7-foot-tall, slightly egg-shaped ship resembles a turtle that's standing on end, was built over the last four years by Frese, the technology education teacher at Old Saybrook High School, with the help of two retired engineers and at least 50 of his students.

They called it the Great Hanging.

And for 145 years, Gainesville has tried to forget the largest mass lynching in American history.

Now, it is remembering those 14 deaths plus 28 other men executed amid the political tension of the Civil War.

A city park filled with 42 tiny crosses was dedicated Friday to remember the 1862 deaths. Most of the men were convicted and hanged as Union sympathizers. Fourteen were hunted down and lynched outright by a renegade mob angered by anti-war dissent.

"For the first time in nearly 150 years, we are remembering the sacrifice here," said Leon Russell, 78, of Keller, a Cooke County native opposing the "cult of secrecy" around the hangings.

The lynchings -- and, depending on your political point of view, the trials -- are considered among the most shameful abuses in the Confederate States. Yet they are rarely taught in local history lessons.

A number of German Nazi officials worked for the Czechoslovak communist secret services after World War Two, in exchange for not being punished for their crimes, the daily Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD) reported Wednesday.
A number of Nazis who took part in the search and torture of Czechoslovak paratroopers who killed wartime Nazi Reichsprotector Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942 went unpunished because they promised to cooperate with the communist secret services after the war, the paper writes.

Willi Leimer, officer of the Prague Gestapo anti-trooper section, was handed over to the Soviet Union shortly after the war, historian Jaroslav Cvancara, the third part of whose study "Death for someone, but life for someone else" (Nekomu zivot, nekomu smrt), is to be issued in the weeks ahead, told the paper.

Chancellor Angela Merkel Monday backed establishing a memorial in Berlin to the millions of Germans expelled from Eastern Europe in the aftermath of World War II. Speaking in Berlin at the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Federation of Expellees (BdV), Merkel said her government would soon put forward a concept.

Given the sensitivities in Poland and the Czech Republic in particular, she pledged that the memorial would be established in dialogue with Germany's eastern neighbours.

The sufferings of the millions of Germans thrown out of Eastern Europe were "part of our German identity and part of our culture of remembrance," the chancellor said.
But in reference to the Nazi atrocities that preceded the expulsions, she said: "We are not confusing cause and effect when we remember the expulsions."

Sometimes it can take a half-century to realize you’ve made a mistake. Homer Jacobson, a professor emeritus of chemistry at the City University of New York’s Brooklyn College, learned that lesson when he decided to Google himself and found that incorrect statements he made in 1955 had come back to haunt him.

To make amends, Mr. Jacobson retracted two statements from an article published in American Scientist magazine more than five decades ago. In a letter in the magazine’s November-December issue, Mr. Jacobson said he had made incorrect assessments of how improbable it would have been for processes on the early earth to bring about the first organisms.

Mr. Jacobson said that it is not normal to retract such old errors but that he was motivated because creationists were now quoting his article to support their cause. “I am deeply embarrassed to have been the originator of such misstatements, allowing bad science to have come into the purview of those who use it for anti-science ends,” he said.

The mystery thief of some of the rarest maps in the world has been unmasked after a worldwide investigation by Spanish police that led them to Britain, Australia, America and Argentina.

Spanish detectives flew this weekend to Buenos Aires after a man there admitted to stealing up to 19 valuable maps from a collection held at the Spanish National Library, some more than 500 years old.

The discovery in August that the cream of the Spanish cartographic collection had been stolen sparked a political storm that cost Rosa Regàs, the Catalan writer who was head of the National Library, her job. It also led to accusations against the Government that it had been cavalier with the nation’s priceless historical artefacts.

Thousands of eyewitness accounts recounting the bloodshed and violence of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 are to be made public for the first time.

More than 3,000 testimonies, which have been in storage at Trinity College, Dublin, for almost 300 years, are to be transcribed and digitised in a project to be launched on Tuesday that aims to shed light on one of the darkest moments in Ireland's past.

The Catholic uprising remains one of the bitterest controversies in Irish history, and led to centuries of sectarian hostility. Some argue that a bloodless rebellion by Catholics, who had been increasingly exploited by Protestant settlers, spiralled out of control. Others claim thousands of Protestants were deliberately massacred.

The North's first Minister, Dr Ian Paisley has said he will hold talks with the Taoiseach about developing a shared memorial for Irish people from North and the Republic who died in both world wars.

Dr Paisley said the time was right to remember those who gave their lives to save democracy.

He said Irish men and women contributed just as much as those from the UK.

He also added that he will gladly come south of the border more often if organisations are prepared to invite him.

About one-sixth of the books, monographs and bound periodicals at the Library of Congress weren't where they were supposed to be because of flaws in the systems for shelving and retrieving materials, according to a survey to be made public at a congressional hearing today.

Officials at the library say they believe most of the missing materials are misplaced, not stolen or lost.

Investigators for the congressional library have told lawmakers on a House oversight committee that its review of the retrieval system for the general collection concluded that a 17 percent of materials requested could not be found.

The National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) has announced it will open for the first time all of the individual Official Military Personnel Files (OMPFs) of Army, Army Air Corps, Army Air Forces, Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard military personnel who served and were discharged, retired or died while in the service, prior to 1946.

Collectively, these files comprise more than six million records. This is the second step in the progressive opening of the entire paper and microfiche OMPF collection of over 57 million individual files. Additional military personnel records will be made available to the public each year through 2067 until the entire collection is opened.

To view an original record, individuals may visit the NPRC Archival Research Room in St. Louis, MO. Research room hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Central Time Tuesday through Friday. Visitors are strongly encouraged to call ahead (314-801-0850) to make reservations.

The National Personnel Records Center, Military Personnel Records (NPRC-MPR) is the repository of millions of military personnel, health, and medical records of discharged and deceased veterans of all services during the 20th century (Records prior to WWI are in Washington, DC). NPRC (MPR) also stores medical treatment records of retirees from all services, as well as records for dependent and other persons treated at naval medical facilities.