Archaeologists have made a sensational finding on Saturday, dated back to the first Bulgarian Empire (years 681-1018) in the ancient Bulgarian capital of Pliska.

The team of archaeologists found state seals, which belonged to the rulers Simeon and Petar.

Archaeologists have discovered the world's most ancient inscription in the Iranian city of Jiroft, near the Halil Roud historical site.

"The inscription, discovered in a palace, was carved on a baked mud-brick whose lower left corner has only remained,” explained Professor Yousof Majid-Zadeh, head of the Jiroft excavation team.

“The only ancient inscriptions known to experts before the Jiroft discovery were cuneiform and hieroglyph,” said Majid Zadeh, adding that,”the new-found inscription is formed by geometric shapes and no linguist around the world has been able to decipher it yet.”

Archaeologists have found many artefacts confirming the existence of a rich civilization dating back to the third millennium BCE, during the 5 previous seasons.

The perpetrators of some of the worst atrocities of the Second World War remain alive and unpunished in Japan, according to a damning new book.

Painstaking research by British historian Mark Felton reveals that the wartime behaviour of the Japanese Navy was far worse than their counterparts in Hitler's Kriegsmarine.

According to Felton, officers of the Imperial Japanese Navy ordered the deliberately sadistic murders of more than 20,000 Allied seamen and countless civilians in cold-blooded defiance of the Geneva Convention.

"Many of the Japanese sailors who committed such terrible deeds are still alive today," he said.

"No one and nothing has bothered these men in six decades. There is only one documented case of a German U-boat skipper being responsible for cold-blooded murder of survivors. In the Japanese Imperial Navy, it was official orders."

Former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin is back in fashion in Russia as the Kremlin condones history textbooks that honour the Soviet leader (1878-1953) as renovator of the country. "Children, learn to value Stalin," the Gazeta newspaper recently summed up the message by the textbook's authors. Stalin, the synonym for state-ordered terror and torture, still has his followers, especially among the communists.

However, even non-communists seem to long for someone like Stalin, public opinion polls suggest. Historians and human rights activists complain about an unprecedented misrepresentation of history and accuse President Vladimir Putin of ignoring it.

"Many now present Stalin as an efficient manager, who did a good thing with his collectivization, industrialization and the Second World War victory," the head of the Moscow Helsinki Group for Human Rights, 80-year-old Lyudmila Alekseyeva, said.

This "dangerously flattering picture" ridiculed millions of innocent victims of the regime, she said.

Tens of thousands of people who assumed they were Canadians have had their citizenship thrown into question by a court ruling on the status of Second World War brides and their children.

Yesterday, the Federal Court of Appeal overturned the decision of a lower court that in 2006 ordered Ottawa to grant immediate citizenship to the British son of a Canadian war veteran.

This latest judgment says brides of veterans, and their children born overseas - who had been granted citizenship by a special wartime order in 1945 - lost that status if they left Canada after 1947 and did not sign a form to have their citizenship reinstated.

A park to commemorate the Chinese soldiers and members of the U.S. "Flying Tigers" air squadron who fought in the Second World War is to be set up in southwest China's Yunnan Province.

The wooded park will cover 167 hectares and boast a peace gate, a friendship monument, a memorial wall and memorials to wartime figures.

The park would be near an abandoned military airport that hosted American planes during WWII, about 20 kilometers from downtown Kunming, capital of Yunnan, said Wang Chengzhong of the park's construction administration committee.

Andrew Mellon’s mansion in Pittsburgh was thought to have one of the first residential indoor pools — a space featuring the same kind of intricate, interlocking Gustavino tile work that one sees all over New York. In 1941, when the Mellons gave the mansion to the Pennsylvania College for Women (known today as Chatham University), the small pool continued to be used by students.

It closed in 2004, when the university built a new athletic facility. Over the years, the room had lost its luster. Humidity had begun to destroy the intricate woodwork in the building, and the tile grout had turned black from years of exposure to Pittsburgh’s sooty industrial air. In 2006, Chatham hired Rothschild Doyno Architects, a Pittsburgh firm, to help figure out a new use for the space.

Today, the old pool area is Chatham’s newest conference room.

Did Saddam Hussein have weapons of mass destruction? No, he did not. We've known that for some time now. So where did the intelligence come from that he was building up his arsenal? Fantastically, the most compelling part came from one obscure Iraqi defector who came in and out of history like a comet. His code name, ironically, was "Curve Ball" and his information became the pillar of the case Colin Powell made to the United Nations before the war. Who is Curve Ball and how did he fool the world's elite intelligence agencies?

60 Minutes spent two years, and traveled to nine countries, trying to solve the mystery. We talked to intelligence sources, to people who knew Curve Ball and to people who worked with him. As correspondent Bob Simon reports, Curve Ball's real name has never been made public, nor has any video of him, until now.

Related Links

Declassified Documents and Key Participants Show the Importance of Phony Intelligence in the Origins of the Iraq War

A November 3 Newsweek article headlined "The Hillary Paper Chase: 3,022,030 to go" reported that "National Archives documents obtained by NEWSWEEK and interviews with Archives officials indicate that the vast majority of the Clintons' health-care task-force records are still under lock and key in Little Rock -- and might stay that way for some time." But the article did not report that approximately 10,000 pages of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's (D-NY) documents are already likely to become public in 2008. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has stated that it estimates it will have processed approximately 10,000 pages of documents by the end of January in response to a demand by the organization Judicial Watch for "First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's calendar." Under an executive order issued by President Bush in 2001 and a court decision, former President Bill Clinton would then have at least 30 days to object to the release of the documents. Politico senior political writer Ben Smith reported in a November 2 article that "according to a Clinton aide," Bruce Lindsey, whom Clinton has designated to review presidential documents for him, has so far not "challenge[d] the release" of any documents designated for release by NARA. Additionally, a November 4 New York Times article reported that Lindsey "issued a lengthy statement on Friday evening [November 2] saying that, contrary to some news reports, Mr. Clinton had 'not asked that records related to communications with Senator Clinton be withheld,' and that Mr. Clinton had not blocked the release of any presidential documents." Further, according to a post on the blog MyDD, Lindsey has stated that "over 1 million pages of the Clinton Administration records have already been released."

While the English-speaking Caribbean is this year commemorating the 200th anniversary of the end of the British transatlantic slave trade, communities like Accompong Town, made up of descendants of runaway slaves known as Maroons, stand as living reminders of the vicious yet empowering anti-slavery struggle.

But the Maroon legacy in the western Jamaican village of Accompong Town and three other runaway slave settlements remains controversial, because their peace treaty with the British obliged them to return new runaway slaves and suppress resistance to London's rule.

These days, Jamaica is challenging all of its citizens to celebrate their African ancestors, even the Maroons.

'We're saying, `Look, the Maroons' descendants live among us now. This is a different time. We cannot go on forward in this fractured state, so we should try and reconcile,' '' said Shepherd, who as chairwoman of the government-created Jamaica National Bicentenary Committee is sponsoring a conference here and in Montego Bay next month to recognize the significance of the Maroon communities.

''We are searching this year for a way forward, to let this bicentenary count for something and not [maintain] this division in our society. We need to understand Maroon history,'' she said. ``We have to forgive and move on.''

[David Price is author of Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists.]

Last December, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps published a new Counterinsurgency Field Manual (No. 3-24). In policy circles, the Manual became an artifact of hope, signifying the move away from the crude logic of "shock and awe" toward calculations that rifle-toting soldiers can win the hearts and minds of occupied Iraq through a new appreciation of cultural nuance.

Some view the Manual as containing plans for a new intellectually fueled "smart bomb," and it is being sold to the public as a scholarly based strategic guide to victory in Iraq. In July, this contrivance was bolstered as the University of Chicago Press republished the Manual in a stylish, olive drab, faux-field ready edition, designed to slip into flack jackets or Urban Outfitter accessory bags. The Chicago edition includes the original forward by General David Petraeus and Lt. General James Amos, with a new forward by Lt. Col. John Nagl and introduction by Sarah Sewell, of Harvard's JFK School of Government. Chicago's republication of the Field Manual spawned a minor media orgy, and Lt. Col. Nagl, a counterinsurgency expert, became the Manual's poster boy, appearing on NPR, ABC News, NBC, and the pages of the NYT, Newsweek, and other publications, pitching the Manual as the philosophical expression of Petraeus' intellectual strategy for victory in Iraq. ...

[Yale educated] Montgomery McFate and an unnamed "military intelligence specialist" co-wrote the Manual's chapter 3, the Manual's longest and the key chapter on "Intelligence in Counterinsurgency." Chapter 3 introduces basic social science views of elements of culture that underlie the Manual's approach to teaching counterinsurgents how to weaponize the specific indigenous cultural information they encounter in specific theaters of battle. General Petraeus is betting that troops working alongside Human Terrain System teams can apply the Manual's principles to stabilize and pacify war-torn Iraq.

When I read an online copy of the Manual last winter, I was unimpressed by its watered-down anthropological explanations, but having researched anthropological contributions to the Second World War, I was familiar with such oversimplifications. But some in the military found the Counterinsurgency Manual to be revolutionary. McFate claims the Manual is so radical that it "is considered 'Zen tinged' not just by the media, but also by many members of the military who felt that the Manual, and chapter 3 in particular, was 'too innovative' and 'too politically correct.'" Like any manual, the Counterinsurgency Field Manual is written in the dry, detached voice of basic instruction. But as I re-read Chapter 3 a few months ago, I found my eye struggling through a crudely constructed sentence and then suddenly being graced with a flowing line of precise prose:

"A ritual is a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects performed to influence supernatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors' goals and interest." (Counterinsurgency Manual, 3-51)

The phrase "stereotyped sequence" leapt off the page. Not only was it out of place, but it sparked a memory. I knew that I'd read these words years ago. With a little searching, I discovered that this unacknowledged line had been taken from a 1972 article written by the anthropologist Victor Turner, who brilliantly wrote that religious ritual is:

"a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and designed to influence preternatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors' goals and interests." (See full citation in the concluding "comparison" section of this article.)

The Manual simplified Turner's poetic voice, trimming a few big words and substituting "supernatural" for "preternatural". The Manual used no quotation marks, attribution, or citations to signify Turner's authorship of this barely altered line. Having encountered students passing off the work of other scholars as their own, I know that such acts are seldom isolated occurrences; this single kidnapped line of Turner got me wondering if the Manual had taken other unattributed passages. While I did not perform exhaustive searches, with a little searching in Chapter 3 alone I found about twenty passages showing either direct use of others' passages without quotes, or heavy reliance on unacknowledged source materials. ...

A MOBILE phone rings as Chicka Dixon is talking on the land line.

"What's that? That's bloody ASIO [Australian Security Intelligence Organisation], is it?" the 79-year-old says.

He is only half-joking.

With a 30-year embargo now over, Mr Dixon has in his hands 150 often tedious, sometimes frightening and occasionally humorous pages of his ASIO file from the 1960s and '70s, when he was one of the leaders of the indigenous rights movement.

Mr Dixon was instrumental in the decade-long campaign for the 1967 referendum to include indigenous people in the census, the erection in 1972 of the tent embassy in Canberra, and in setting up the first Aboriginal legal and medical service.

In pages and pages of typed agents' reports, however, the man they called "The Fox" is painted as a "popular, well-dressed and strongly anti-European" dissident.

"Dixon could be a communist or is certainly very close to becoming one," one item says, because of his union background.

"He is an Aborigine," it adds, almost as an afterthought.

About 2,000 books, magazines, photo albums, video tapes, movie and audio CDs relating to homosexuals fill the small room that is the country's only library dedicated to documenting the local gay community.

Called the Thai Queer Resource Centre (TQRC), it was founded by Australian scholar Assoc Prof Peter Jackson with the aim of preventing the history and voice of the Thai GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender) community from erosion by the state.

"No official library in Thailand is collecting this material. Also, the police are out to destroy them. It's therefore essential that the Thai GLBT community, and researchers such as myself work together to save these important records of Thai queer history," explained Jackson, senior fellow in Thai history at the Australian National University's Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies.

The surprisingly contentious confirmation process of Michael Mukasey, President Bush's pick for attorney general, has come down to one issue: waterboarding. Mukasey has called waterboarding personally "repugnant," but said he did not know enough about how it has been used to define it as torture.

The Washington debate over the simulated-drowning technique may be new, but the practice is not. It predates the Inquisition and has been used, off and on, around the world ever since.

Its use was first documented in the 14th century, according to Ed Peters, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania. It was known variously as "water torture," the "water cure" or tormenta de toca — a phrase that refers to the thin piece of cloth placed over the victim's mouth.

The Coca-Cola Company announced a US $2 million donation to the Hellenic Olympic Committee (HOC) toward the restoration of its site in Ancient Olympia, the cradle of the Olympic Games and the ultimate symbol of Greek and international cultural and sports heritage. The site was severely damaged by the recent forest fires that scorched the grounds of the Peloponnesus in Greece over the summer.

Dominique Reiniche, president of The Coca-Cola Company's European Union Group, met with Minoas Kyriakou, president of the Hellenic Olympic Committee, at the HOC offices in Athens to present the donation, confirming the Company's commitment to supporting Olympic ideals by helping to restore the affected area.

The Coca-Cola Company is the longest-standing supporter of the Olympic Games, since 1928, and its $2 million donation will help restore the forest area around the Pierre de Coubertin monument, among other sites. This donation is in addition to fire relief efforts announced earlier by the Coca-Cola Foundation in conjunction with Coca-Cola Hellas and Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company (CCHBC).

Sen. Barack Obama, trailing in the polls among black Democratic voters, whirled through South Carolina Friday to talk about civil rights and racial disparities, picking up the endorsement of the state's first black Supreme Court justice since Reconstruction along the way.

Ernest Finney, a former state Supreme Court chief justice endorsed Obama Friday, saying the Illinois senator's views on education helped him make up his mind.

Speaking at the Clarendon County Courthouse in Manning, S.C., where families first sued the state over unequal education opportunities for blacks and whites in South Carolina in the 1940s, Obama spoke confidently about his presidential candidacy.

Students at a Kyoto girls school dressed in schoolgirl sailor suits at an explanatory meeting for prospective students and their parents on Saturday, after research showed that the school was the first in the country to introduce them.

The Heian Jogakuin St. Agnes School in Kamigyo Ward re-created the uniforms that the nation's schools first adopted during the Taisho era (1912-1926).

An investigation by Okayama-based school uniform manufacturer Tombow Co. confirmed that the school introduced the uniforms in November 1920--earlier than the Fukuoka Jogakuin school in Fukuoka, whose 1921 introduction of the uniform was previously thought to have been the first.

It emerged this week that Karl Marx, the father of communism, suffered from a chronic and excruciating skin disease with known psychological effects that might have had an impact on his political theories.

The 19th-century revolutionary thinker had a condition called hidradenitis suppurativa, in which the sweat glands in his armpits and groin become blocked and inflamed and his skin covered in boils and carbuncles.

Or so argues Sam Shuster, a professor of dermatology at Britain's University of East Anglia.

"In addition to reducing his ability to work, which contributed to his depressing poverty, hidradenitis greatly reduced his self-esteem," writes Shuster in the current British Journal of Dermatology.

"This explains his self-loathing and alienation, a response reflected by the alienation Marx developed in his writing."

But does it also explain communism? Could Marx's anger over the class struggles of history and the ongoing oppression of the proletariat have been fuelled by his disease?

Marx published Das Kapital in 1867, the same year in which he wrote to his Communist Manifesto co-author Friedrich Engels that "the bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles until their dying day."

Though hardly known for it, was Marx joking? Entirely?

Critics of a speaker widely viewed as one of the nation’s most prominent deniers of the Holocaust say they will counter his talk in Eugene on Friday with a competing event and a later symposium.

Mark Weber, director of the Institute for Historical Review, will speak on “The Israel Lobby.” His visit comes at the invitation of the Pacifica Forum, a local discussion group founded by retired University of Oregon professor Orval Etter.

Weber, a historian who grew up in Portland, describes himself as a Holocaust revisionist. But detractors point to Weber’s own writings in labeling him a white supremacist, racist and anti-Semite.

“People may think I’m wrong or I’m right, but they should have a chance to hear what I have to say,” Weber said in a telephone interview from his institute’s office in Newport Beach, Calif.

Local critics affiliated with Community Alliance of Lane County have scheduled a free speech vigil to be held just outside the UO hall where Weber will speak. “We are operating under the theory that the best response to hate speech is more speech,” volunteer Michael Williams said. “We want an opportunity for the community to show its opposition to the kinds of things that Mark Weber stands for.”

To the end of his days, Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr. believed that dropping the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima was a justifiable means of shortening World War II and preserving the lives of hundreds of thousands of American servicemen who military experts said might have died in a final Allied invasion of Japan.

For Tibbets, the pilot whose bombing run unleashed the devastating explosive force and insidious nuclear radiation that leveled two-thirds of the city and killed at least 80,000 people, there was never any need to apologize.

"I never lost a night's sleep over it," Tibbets said of the Aug. 6, 1945, attack.

The Army Air Forces officer died Thursday at his home in Columbus, Ohio. He was 92 and, according to his longtime friend Gerry Newhouse, had been in declining health over the last few years and died of heart failure.

Related Links

HNN Hot Topics: Hiroshima ... What People Think Now

Saudi Arabia could have helped the United States prevent al Qaeda's 2001 attacks on New York and Washington if American officials had consulted Saudi authorities in a "credible" way, the kingdom's former ambassador said in a documentary aired Thursday.

The comments by Prince Bandar bin Sultan are similar to the remarks this week by Saudi King Abdullah that suggested Britain could have prevented the July 2005 train bombings in London if it had heeded warnings from Riyadh.

Speaking to the Arabic satellite network Al-Arabiya on Thursday, Bandar -- now Abdullah's national security adviser -- said Saudi intelligence was "actively following" most of the September 11, 2001, plotters "with precision."

"If U.S. security authorities had engaged their Saudi counterparts in a serious and credible manner, in my opinion, we would have avoided what happened," he said.

A little-remarked feature of pending legislation on domestic surveillance has provoked alarm among university and public librarians who say it could allow federal intelligence-gathering on library patrons without sufficient court oversight.

Draft House and Senate bills would allow the government to compel any "communications service provider" to provide access to e-mails and other electronic information within the United States as part of federal surveillance of non-U.S. citizens outside the country.

The Justice Department has previously said that "providers" may include libraries, causing three major university and library groups to worry that the government's ability to monitor people targeted for surveillance without a warrant would chill students' and faculty members' online research activities.

"It is fundamental that when a user enters the library, physically or electronically," said Jim Neal, the head librarian at Columbia University, "their use of the collections, print or electronic, their communications on library servers and computers, is not going to be subjected to surveillance unless the courts have authorized it."

Pisa is famous for its leaning tower, but archeologists there are now uncovering an amazing fleet of ancient ships, some complete with crew and cargo.

The San Rossore train station on the edge of Pisa, Italy, is a lonely stop. Tourists who visit this city to see its famous leaning tower generally use the central station across town. But San Rossore is about to be recognized as one of the country's most significant archeological digs. For nearly a decade archeologists have been working near and under the tracks to unearth what is nothing short of a maritime Pompeii.

So far the excavation has turned up 39 ancient shipwrecks buried under nine centuries of silt, which preserved extraordinary artifacts. The copper nails and ancient wood are still intact, and in many cases cargo is still sealed in the original terra cotta amphorae, the jars used for shipment in the ancient world. They have also found a cask of the ancient Roman fish condiment known as garum and many mariners' skeletons—one crushed under the weight of a capsized ship. One ship carried scores of pork shoulder hams; another carried a live lion, likely en route from Africa to the gladiator fights in Rome.

After years of discussion and one false start, work begins Friday on a "Remembrance and Documentation Museum" in Berlin - on the site of the former Prince Albrecht Palais where the Gestapo and the SS had their notorious interrogation and torture cells during World War II. Unlike the city's 2005-built Holocaust Memorial honouring the murdered Jews of Europe, and Daniel Libeskind's daringly designed 1999 museum dealing with Berlin's Jewish tradition and history, the "new" museum - when completed in 20 months' time - is to focus attention on the gruesome machinery of espionage, torture and liquidation used by the Nazis to enforce their 1933-45 reign of terror in Germany.

"Here, the emphasis will be on the perpetrators of Nazi crime, not the victims. Here we speak about the centre of evil," says Andreas Nachama, director of the Topography of Terror Foundation in Berlin.

"This was where Nazi terror across Europe was conducted. We don't talk about one victim group here, we talk about terror and about how a democracy was, in the period between January and June 1933, turned into a totalitarian dictatorship, able to subordinate all of the institutions of the state to its purpose."

Udine, Italy - Shot down by American fighters on January 30th, 1944

After the rescue of the Messerschmitt BF-109, occured the last October 20th, in the city of Concordia Saggitaria (Venice), also the remains of the German pilot shot down by US fighters on January 30th, 1944, have been identified.

After a first and difficult reading of the pilot's ID, which made think to a different name and grade, now finally there are no doubts anymore. After the necessary cleaning and restauration of the document, since Monday the deadly remains discovered after 63 years have got a name again.

It is the Obfdw (Major Marshal) Kurt Niederhagen, ace of the Luftwaffe with 17 shooting-downs to his credit and officially declared missing, deceased at the age of 28, born in the town of Mettmann, in the nearings of Düsseldorf, and holder of the Iron Cross decoration.

Then-national security adviser Henry A. Kissinger colluded with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to keep the U.S. Secretary of State in the dark about ongoing secret discussions between the Soviets and the Nixon White House, according to newly released Soviet-era documents, published this week by the Department of State.

In February 1972, with the Moscow summit approaching, Kissinger met with Soviet ambassador Dobrynin, who was scheduled to meet with Secretary of State William Rogers, to talk about what the Secretary knew and did not know about "the state of U.S.-Soviet relations." Commenting on the meeting in his memorandum of conversation forwarded to Moscow, Dobrynin observed that it was a "unique situation when the Special Assistant to the President secretly informs a foreign ambassador about what the Secretary of State knows and does not know." This memorandum appears for the first time in an extraordinary State Department collection of U.S. and Soviet documents on the Dobrynin-Kissinger meetings, produced through a U.S.-Russian cooperative effort, with selections posted on-line today by the National Security Archive.

On October 22, 2007, the State Department's Office of the Historian released 'Soviet-American Relations: the Detente Years, 1969-1972,' edited by David C. Geyer and Douglas E. Selvage. Over a thousand pages long with 380 documents and introductions by Dobrynin and Kissinger, this volume (initially released in CD form by the office of the historian) includes the most secret and sensitive U.S.-Soviet exchanges of the superpower detente, the so-called "back channel" or "confidential channel" Dobrynin-Kissinger meetings. Besides Kissinger's records of his meetings with Dobrynin, which had already been declassified, this extraordinary volume includes translations of previously secret cables and memoranda of conversations reporting on Dobrynin's meetings with Kissinger as well as President Richard Nixon.

Simultaneously, the Russian Foreign Ministry's History and Records Department is publishing a Russian language edition of the documents under the title, 'Sovetsko-Amerikanskie Otnosheniia: Gody Razriadki, 1969-1976, Tom I, 1969-Mai 1972.' The Foreign Ministry will release this volume in a few weeks, during a conference in Moscow. A successor U.S.-Russian volume, covering 1972-1976, is now in the planning stages.

'Soviet-American Relations: the Detente Years, 1969-1972' is not yet available in print form yet or on-line, but the Office of the Historian released a special CD with the volume on it. To give interested readers a flavor of the material, the National Security Archive is publishing on its Web site some illuminating examples of the new documents. This sampling includes:

* a unique record of Dobrynin's first "one-on-one" back-channel meeting with Kissinger,

* accounts of Kissinger's September 1970 demarche to Kissinger on the Soviet submarine base at Cienfuegos, Cuba,

* Nixon's unsuccessful attempt to discourage the Soviet leadership from meeting with Democratic presidential aspirant Senator Edmund Muskie (D-Me) to preserve the White House's political advantages,

* Dobrynin's initial reactions--from the notion that Beijing and Washington would exploit the "factor of U.S.-Chinese relations in order to exert pressure on us," to the disclosure of Henry Kissinger's secret trip to China in July 1971,

* Kissinger's briefing to Dobrynin on what he should and should not tell Secretary of State Rogers about more sensitive issues that only Nixon and Kissinger had discussed with the Soviets,

* initial White House and Soviet reactions to the North Vietnamese 1972 Spring Offensive,

* and Dobrynin's mistaken estimate that the pressures for a successful summit would hold Nixon back from approving major military action against Hanoi during the spring of 1972.

The construction of a large police barracks close to the Great Mosque of Samarra and its famed spiral minaret is imperilling another of Iraq's precious historical sites, Unesco and senior archaeologists have warned. Work on the building and a training centre for 1,500 Iraqi policemen is continuing in Samarra, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, despite the addition this summer.

Broad classification restrictions on the disclosure of historical intelligence information are making it difficult or impossible to accurately represent the record of U.S. foreign policy, an official advisory committee warned the Secretary of State last summer.

By law, the Department of State is obliged to publish"a thorough, accurate and reliable documentary record" of United States foreign policy in its official Foreign Relations of the United States series.

But due to official secrecy,"the credibility of the series... remains in the balance," according to the newly disclosed report of the State Department's Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation.

For example,"The blanket denial by the CIA of the right to quote or cite from the President's Daily Briefs of the Nixon years and beyond will make it difficult to give a full and accurate rendering of the effect of intelligence assessments on the foreign relations of the United States.... [T]he continued exemption of the President's Daily Briefs may cause serious harm to the intellectual integrity of the Foreign Relations series." Similarly, the Committee complained, the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board"has not allowed the historians of the [Foreign Relations] series access to its records [which] need to become accessible to the staff of the [State Department] Office of the Historian and be made available for inclusion in appropriate volumes of Foreign Relations of the United States."

In short,"Committee members believe that unless policies consistent with respect for the right of the American people to be fully informed about their government's conduct of foreign policy are adopted and implemented by the Executive Branch, it may become impossible for The Historian [of the State Department] to carry out his duties or for the committee to carry out its Congressionally mandated obligations."

See"Report of the Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation, January 1-December 31, 2006," transmitted to the Secretary of State on June 19, 2007:

Two pink triangles, the symbols of Hitler's hatred towards homosexuals, are up for auction in Shropshire this week.

They are expected to fetch hundreds of pounds when they go under the hammer at the Mullock's Auctioneers at Ludlow Racecourse on Thursday.

Also being sold at the auction are other rare items including a description of a Spanish flu pandemic that killed millions and an apologetic letter from composer Edward Elgar.

A top secret document outlining Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s concerns about the Vietnam War to the American president was left lying around a high street bank, newly released papers have revealed.

The fax, sent by the Labour leader to Lyndon B Johnson in 1967, voiced his fears that Britain was in danger of being portrayed as America’s “stooge”.

It was accidentally left in the Bank of Scotland on London’s Regent Street by an official of the Foreign Office and later discovered by a member of the diplomatic service before a major security breach occurred.

The document, released by the National Archives at Kew, was written after the Soviet premier Yuri Kosygin came to Britain for talks with Mr Wilson about the US bombing campaign in communist North Vietnam.