When the Neolithic farmers and hunters of Skara Brae first built their stone houses on Orkney, they were careful to place their settlement more than a mile from the coast to avoid their homes being pounded by the harsh winter storms that sweep across the Bay of Skaill.

Some 5,000 years later, the custodians of Europe's most complete prehistoric village no longer have the luxury of land to shelter them from the sea. Slowly but surely, erosion has brought the sea ever closer to the grey rock-built dwellings and now spray from the wind-whipped Atlantic regularly soaks the World Heritage Site.

The discovery of an adze fashioned from Hawaiian basalt on a Tuamotu atoll in French Polynesia provides the first material evidence that ancient voyagers made an 8,000-kilometre round trip from the South Pacific to Hawaii and back again.

More than 2,000 years ago, seafarers from Samoa and Tonga ventured eastward to settle on more remote archipelagos in the Pacific Ocean, including the Cook Islands, Tahiti, and the Marquesas Islands, colonizing most of these places by 900 AD. Eventually, the travellers set foot on Hawaii.

Officials at Grambling State University were meeting Monday after the school newspaper ran photographs of adults at a campus-run elementary school putting a noose around at least one child's neck.

Kindergarten and first-grade students at Alma J. Brown Elementary School were being taught why nooses are a symbol of racism, an article from the historically black university's student newspaper said.

The article said the children also were being taught about the "Jena Six" — black high-school students who are accused of beating a white schoolmate.

Nazi hunters have tracked a suspected World War II concentration camp guard to Lawrenceville.

Members of the Justice Department's elite Nazi tracking force said Paul Henss, 85, served as a prison guard and attack dog handler at the notorious Dachau and Buchenwald Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany.

"It is not 100% true, what they charge me," said Henss Monday afternoon. Henss appeared confused as he tried to answer a barrage of questions from reporters Monday afternoon.

The Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security have asked an immigration judge in Atlanta to deport Henss.

Adolf Hitler was plotting to make Northampton his northernmost outpost in an invasion of Britain, according to secret war documents unearthed by Oxford University academics.
The Nazi leader hatched a plan to land his forces on the south coast in 1940.

They were then expected to take all the major towns and cities in their path, as far north as Northampton.

Once they had conquered the town, Hitler expected the rest of the demoralised nation would crumble and quickly succumb to German occupation.

The details of Hitler's doomed masterplan, known as Unternehmen Seelowe – which translates as Operation Sealion – are revealed in a book published this week by Oxford's Bodleian Library.

German Invasion Plans for the British Isles, 1940 is a compilation of three Nazi portfolios which have been stored deep in the library's archives for decades.

Last week the National Archives announced the release of the final report to Congress on implementation of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, which is said to be the largest single-subject declassification program ever performed by the U.S. government. Millions of pages of records from World War II and the early Cold War years relating to Nazi war crimes have been released as a result.

But the lessons learned from declassifying the"extraordinary collection" of documents may prove even more important than the documents themselves, wrote Steven Garfinkel, the chairman of the interagency working group (IWG) that led the program.

In particular, he said, the effort"has demonstrated that disaster does not befall America when intelligence agencies declassify old intelligence operations records."

"Before the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, intelligence agencies, supported by the President, the Congress, and the Federal courts, routinely and consistently exempted files containing intelligence sources and methods from declassification, regardless of the age or actual sensitivity of the information."

The Act deliberately rejected that policy of absolute denial and authorized the publication of intelligence sources and methods, albeit historical ones.

And so the newly disclosed records do"indeed reveal the vast interrelationship between British intelligence and the OSS [Office of Strategic Security, a U.S. predecessor to the CIA]."

Yet"it is preposterous to suggest that releasing OSS records under the [Act] is a threat to our current working relationship with the United Kingdom," Mr. Garfinkel wrote in the preface to the new report.

"The declassification lessons learned during the implementation of the Disclosure Acts can and should be applied to other intelligence records of similar age, and may even be applied to records of somewhat more recent vintage, no matter how sensitive the information within these records once was," said Mr. Garfinkel, who served as director of the Information Security Oversight Office from 1980 to 2002.

It is essential that such lessons be learned, he said, because in practice the declassification process is arbitrary, unpredictable and subject to the whims of individual declassifiers.

"Whether a request for declassification is answered with a yes or a no is essentially determined by whoever happens to make the disclosure or non-disclosure decisions," Mr. Garfinkel candidly stated.

"All of the laws and orders and regulations, all of the classification and declassification guides and guidance can be cited to support either answer this person cares to give."

"The individual in charge makes the call based on his or her experiences, biases, proclivities, knowledge, or ignorance, and for many years thereafter, all of us may be stuck with it," he wrote.

In light of this unsatisfactory situation, Mr. Garfinkel expressed the hope that classification officials throughout the government might learn that"government secrets, even intelligence secrets, are finite," and should be subject to ultimate declassification.

European Neanderthals, modern man's ill-fated cousins who died out mysteriously some 28,000 years ago, migrated much further east than previously thought, according to a study released Sunday.

Remains from the slope-browed hominid have previously been found over an area stretching from Spain to Uzbekistan, but the new study extends the eastern boundary of their wanderings another 2,000 kilometres (1,250 miles) deep into southern Siberia, just above the western tip of what is today China.

The fossils underpinning the study are not new, but the techniques used to analyse them are.

Today the National Security Archive publishes a collection of documents concerning U.S. policy with regard to acknowledging the "fact of" U.S. satellite reconnaissance operations--particularly satellite photoreconnaissance. It was 29 years ago today that President Jimmy Carter, in a speech at the Kennedy Space Center, acknowledged that the U.S. was operating photoreconnaissance satellites.

As the documents illustrate, the perceived need to persuade segments of the public that the U.S. would be able to effectively monitor Soviet compliance with the strategic arms limitation agreements served as the catalyst for the acknowledgment. They also show that the Nixon administration had also considered acknowledging U.S. satellite reconnaissance activities in 1972 as a means of providing reassurance that any Soviet cheating would be detected, but the idea was rejected by national security adviser Henry Kissinger.

The documents published include memos stating the positions of various individuals and institutions on the issue in both the Nixon and Carter administrations, assessments of the risks and benefits of declassification, an assessment of the reactions to President Carter's disclosure, and presidential directives from the Carter, Reagan and Clinton administrations specifying the classification associated with the "fact of" different types of satellite reconnaissance.

One hundred years ago today, the first guest checked into the Plaza Hotel, signing the register with a flourish. He was Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, the heir to a famous fortune.

His arrival was orchestrated by the Plaza’s first manager, who wanted the new hotel to open with a splashy, attention-getting stunt.

The Plaza will celebrate its anniversary tonight with another stunt, a party in its front yard — Grand Army Plaza, on Fifth Avenue at Central Park South — as this storied New York institution enters its second century with a new look and fresh challenges.

Germany's federal police is admitting that most of its founding members had blood on their hands as active members of Hitler's brutal security apparatus. It's the first time one of Germany's security services is examining its own history. But there may be more to come.

Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) President Jörg Ziercke has launched a series of conferences to shed light on the history of the BKA. At one such conference last month at the BKA's headquarters in Wiesbaden, he said the aim wasn't to point fingers but to analyze what role former Nazi organization members played in setting up the new force and to what extent it was damaged in the process.

Only if the BKA takes responsibility for its history "can it fulfil its role in the democratic legal state and live democracy with conviction each day," he told the conference, the first of three such meetings which may be followed by a research project.

The recruitment of Nazi police officers and agents into the security apparatus of West Germany after World War II is a well-known fact -- the country lacked personnel with the relevant experience who hadn't been involved in the Nazi machine.

The BKA is the first of Germany's security organizations to own up to its past in this way. The foreign and domestic intelligence services, the Bundesnachrichtendienst and Bundesverfassungsschutz respectively, also drew heavily on Nazi personnel in their early days.