The British National Party has the UK's most visited political website, a study shows.

The far-Right group received 51 per cent of all hits to party sites last year - seven times more than the online pages run by Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

It was also twice as popular as the Conservatives' main website.

The report, for the Centre for Policy Studies, claims the site has flourished because it allows visitors to leave messages and interact with one another.

Has the Amber Room, the 18th-century chamber decoration the Nazis stole from the Soviet Union in World War II, finally been found? German treasure hunters say they may have solved the decades-old mystery.

Treasure hunters in Germany claim they have found hidden gold in an underground cavern that they are almost certain contains the Amber Room treasure, believed by some to have been stashed away by the Nazis in a secret mission in the dying days of World War II.

The discovery of an estimated two tonnes of gold was made at the weekend when electromagnetic pulse measurements located the man-made cavern 20 meters underground near the village of Deutschneudorf on Germany's border with the Czech Republic.

An unusual, well-preserved burial chamber that may contain the mummy of an ancient warrior has been discovered in a necropolis in Luxor.

Scientists opened the tomb—found in Dra Abul Naga, an ancient cemetery on Luxor's west bank—on Wednesday.

A suspect transcript of a conversation between John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, the man who killed Oswald, are among the treasure trove of items found in an old safe at the Dallas County District Attorney's Office.

Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins presented the items at a news conference Monday. Watkins says they were locked in a safe for nearly two decades and that investigators had made him aware of them after he took office in 2006.

Much of the attention focuses on the transcript purporting that Ruby and Oswald met at Ruby's nightclub on Oct. 4, 1963, less than two months before the Nov. 22 assassination. In it, they talked of killing the president because the Mafia wanted to "get rid of" his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

[HNN: It's believed the transcript was made for a planned movie. There is no evidence that Oswald and Ruby met.]

More than two million people have registered as descendants of Confucius, tripling the size of the celebrated Chinese philosopher's family tree, state media reported Monday.

The new list, which was last updated in 1930, has rocketed by more than 1.3 million, the Confucius Genealogy Compilation Committee (CGCC) said, according to a report in the China Daily.

The updated list, which includes overseas and female relatives for the first time, will be published next year to coincide with the 2,560th anniversary of the thinker's birth, the report said.

A museum has been opened in Arras, France to commemorate the astonishing work of 450 New Zealanders who built a network of tunnels between Arras and the German front lines during World War 1.

The Associate Minister of Arts, Culture and Heritage, Mahara Okeroa, and the NZ Ambassador to France, Sarah Dennis, represented New Zealand at the opening ceremony in the weekend (Saturday evening, France local time).

A few days ago, the Associated Press reported that the small Israeli town of Kiryat Yam is suing Google for slander, after a Google Earth user "inserted a note on the map" saying that the town was built "on the location of Ghawarina", a Palestinian village destroyed in 1948.

A town official said this was impossible, as Kiryat Yam was founded in 1945, while Google emphasised that their service "depends on user-generated content that reflects what people contribute, not what Google believes is accurate".

The user in question, a Palestinian from Jenin called Thameen Darby, has already made other, similar, notes, though in this specific case he said if the location is "proven wrong by reliable sources, I will be quick to reallocate it". Apparently even cyberspace is not immune from the competing claims to the landscape of Palestine/Israel.

The tragic story of a Croydon family who lost four of their sons during World War I has been revealed by a local historian.

In a tale which echoes the storyline of the Hollywood blockbuster film Saving Private Ryan, Brian Roote has unearthed the tragic tale of the brothers who were all killed in action during a two-and-a-half year period in the Great War.

Albert, Stephen, Charles and Frank - the sons of Elijah and Mary Ann French - are all on Croydon's Roll of Honour after dying in combat.

This was despite two of them having emigrated to Canada before the outbreak of war.

A WORLD War One underground shelter built by Scottish troops has been discovered in Ypres, Belgium.
The Vampire Dugout was found by a team of archaeologists on the site of the 1917 Battle of Passchendaele.

French archaeologists in Sudan say they have uncovered the oldest proof of human sacrifice in Africa, hailing the discovery as the biggest Neolithic find on the continent for years.

The tomb of a 5 500-year-old man surrounded by three sacrificed humans, two dogs and exquisite ceramics were exhumed north of Khartoum by Neolithic expert Jacques Reinhold and his 66-year-old Austrian wife.

"This is the oldest proof of human sacrifice in Sudan, in Egypt, in Africa," Reinhold told reporters next to the remains in El Kadada village, a three-hour drive north of the Sudanese capital.

Eastern Utah's Nine Mile Canyon holds more than 10,000 known American Indian rock-art images. But they may be no match for 800 gas wells.

A Denver-based energy company's proposal to drill at least that many wells on the West Tavaputs Plateau threatens the thousand-year-old Anasazi ruins, where dust and chemicals are already corroding peerless rock art.

A rock carving dating back to the bronze age has been uncovered by forestry workers clearing trees which fell during the recent storms.

The mysterious rock art had been hidden by a huge tree in Forestry Commission Scotland's Achnabreac Forest, in West Argyll, until it was blown down around three weeks ago.

AN AUSTRALIAN payroll plane that went missing at the end of World War II with 19 people on board might have been found in just 20 metres of water in Papua New Guinea.

Divers in Milne Bay have reported seeing the remains of a twin-engined plane in the exact same spot pinpointed by documents that were recently uncovered by an aviation historian in Canberra.

Now a diving boat skipper, who has found other plane wrecks in PNG waters, is planning an expedition to find the missing plane.

In time for the upcoming tourist season, Gettysburg officials are on schedule to approve an ordinance that places a 26-person limit for guided walking tours in the borough.

Controversy about a potential limit - which affects the town's many ghost-tour companies - was sparked last summer, when the borough's public safety committee proposed a 15-person cap.

Objections from the owners of ghost-tour companies prompted the committee to increase that number to 26, including the tour guide.

It's a mystery going back more than 140 years. Many have searched, but no one has found the millions of dollars in gold lost during the Civil War in Elk County.

Now, one treasure hunting team from Clearfield says it knows where the gold is [but the state of Pennsylvania won't allow him to dig it up.]

Richard Nixon's partisans always resented the charge that there was a New Nixon, but his supporters at the Nixon Foundation have now started a blog in his name called,"The New Nixon Blog." Perhaps they are showing they have an ironic sense of humor. John Taylor, executive director of the Foundation, explained the purpose of the blog:

[T]oday, many years after President Nixon has died, as President Nixon’s library prepares to become fully comparable to the other Presidential libraries — because we believe that by 2009 all of President Nixon’s records will be here in Yorba Linda — we are preparing to welcome a new new Nixon. A new Nixon who will be the creature of the scholars who will come to Yorba Linda, study these records without fear, or favor, or bias, and begin to tell the truly nuanced story of the 37th President’s life and times, his statesmanship and his legacy.

So there is about to be another new Nixon, thanks to the good work of scholars who will come to Yorba Linda and do that work.

Initial comments posted on the blog were mixed. Apparently, a decision has been made not to censor critical posts. Ronald Walter wrote:"The rehabilitation of both his, and Ron Reagan’s legacies, without regard for the truth, is sickening, and dishonest in the extreme."

Far and away, Abraham Lincoln is ranked by Americans as the nation's greatest president, according to a poll conducted by Harris Interactive and released this week, just ahead of Presidents Day. What's surprising is that President George W. Bush, whose approval rating has plunged to just 30 percent, also sneaks into the top ten list.

The Harris poll points out that recent presidents tend to be listed more often as both the best and the worst. In a separate poll asking Americans to name the worst commander-in-chief since World War II, Bush won in a landslide, netting 34 percent of the vote.

The online survey posed this question to 2,302 adults in the U.S.: Which one of the following presidents do you think was the best overall president in our history?
[#1: Lincoln, #2 Reagan, #3 FDR, #4 JFK, #5 GW, #6 Clinton, #7 Jefferson, #8 Truman, #9 TR, #10 GW Bush.

France's education minister on Monday softened a proposal by President Nicolas Sarkozy to make French 10-year-olds honor child Holocaust victims, amid heated criticism of the sensitive idea.

Education Minister Xavier Darcos said Monday the plan could be adjusted so that an entire class could collectively honor an individual victim.

"Is it necessary to do one by one, for each pupil? Perhaps we could find other solutions," such as choosing one victim per class, he said on RTL radio.

He said he would meet Wednesday morning with teachers and Holocaust historians to work out how best to implement the plan.

The minister confirmed that something would be in place for the next school year that would "respond to the president's intuition."

The mystery surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has taken a dramatic new twist following the discovery of new documents in an old safe at the Dallas County district attorney's office.

Most intriguing among the new material is a transcript perportedly recording a conversation between assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and his own killer Jack Ruby, in which the two discuss how to eliminate the president.

While the district attorney's office dismissed the document as a fictional account intended for use in the making of a movie, conspiracy theorists will leap on the new material.

Much of the attention is bound to focus on the transcript purporting that Ruby and Oswald met at Ruby's nightclub on Oct. 4, 1963, less than two months before the Nov 22 assassination.

In it, they talked of killing the president because the Mafia wanted to "get rid of" his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

Historians at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library say they have identified an ax long housed at the Springfield facility as the last one ever used by "The Railsplitter."

Illinois State Historian Thomas Schwartz says the ax that's been part of the library's collection since 1955 was wielded by Lincoln on April 8, 1865, while he was visiting wounded Union troops at City Point, Va.

That was just one week before he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre.

Schwartz says Lincoln spent most of April 8 shaking hands with more than 5,000 wounded soldiers at a field hospital, and then, to show that he wasn't tired, he picked up the ax and chopped a pile of wood.

Silbertal | The mayor of this tiny Alpine village, where Ernest Hemingway once skied down majestic slopes, has started an unprecedented project that most Austrians would rather forget: confronting the nation's Nazi past.
Mayor Willi Saly is intent on finding out whether there's anything in the historical record that would provide a clue to what drove a village farmer named Josef Vallaster to become one of the most brutal concentration camp guards of World War II. The records, which surfaced last summer, show that Vallaster was a mass murderer. The data say he participated in the deaths of 250,000 Jews at the Sobibor and Belzec death camps in Poland, and of 20,000 mentally and physically disabled persons at a clinic in Nartheim, Austria.

For Saly, 62, who has been mayor of this picturesque ski resort of 900 residents for 23 years, it makes no difference that Vallaster died 65 years ago or that the Austrian media has ignored his efforts.

It's taken days of number-crunching, nights of scientific analysis and the objective advice of a panel of experts. But Comment Central has finally shortlisted ten of the greatest mistakes in British history.

Now it's over to you. Here are the contenders. Which do you think did the greatest harm to our island nation? Voting will close at midnight on Monday 18 February....

The Lucasville School opened in 1885, just south of Manassas on a small plot owned by a former slave. It was an austere one-room building with a cast-iron stove and a blackboard and probably had portraits of Frederick Douglass, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln on the walls.

For the next 40 years, black students in grades one through six took classes there in subjects such as domestic science, nature study and agriculture. It wasn't fancy, but for children whose parents and grandparents had been forbidden from reading under pre-Civil War Virginia laws, it was a symbol of hard-fought dignity.

Today, the Lucasville School is the last black schoolhouse in Prince William County. It opens to the public this weekend along Godwin Drive outside Manassas, not far from its original location.

Over the course of 100 days in the fall of 1896, William Jennings Bryan gave more than 500 speeches. He was the Democratic nominee, and his presidential campaign was so broke, he took his message directly to just about every Midwestern town with a train station and a soapbox. Several million people showed up.

He was a fantastic orator. Picture him with 10,000 screaming Nebraskans behind him, and you can imagine what his Republican rival was up against.

"You had William McKinley," says historian Jennifer Burns, "who knew right away that he was going to lose in any head-to-head battle if it came down to personality [and] oratory.

"[McKinley] said, 'I might as well put a trapeze on my front lawn and go against a professional gymnast if I go up against Bryan.'"

So he didn't.

While Bryan thrilling crowds with his charisma and his rousing speechifying, McKinley relied on a well-funded, highly-skilled network of political operatives and entrenched party loyalists. Then he just sat back and let the machine work for him.

"He simply sat on his front porch," says Burns, "and let people come to him."

Welcome to the world of pre-modern presidential campaigns. A time when, if you wanted to know what William McKinley or James Garfield or Benjamin Harrison thought about trade policy or international affairs, you could literally get some friends together, knock on the candidate's front door and ask him.

But he wasn't going to come to you.

"It was essentially this idea that you were trying too hard," says Burns. "If you want the presidency, there was something inherently problematic about that."

It may be a new image of Lizzie Borden: An angelic 8- or 9-year-old girl with a hint of baby fat still noticeable in her creamy white cheeks. In the black-and-white photograph, she seems proud of the feather in her straw hat and her wool coat with a satin lined collar.

That is far from the prevailing impression of Borden. Despite her acquittal at trial, she is commonly depicted as an ax-wielding spinster who got away with the murder of her father and stepmother in Fall River in 1892.

The photograph, which does not identify the girl, was found last month in the collection of the Swansea Historical Society by Stefani Koorey, publisher of ''The Hatchet: Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies."
“I’ve been staring at her face for about 20 years,” Koorey said yesterday from her home in Orlando, Fla. “I know those eyes.”

It would be the youngest known photograph of Borden.

The Kanagawa Prefectural Board of Education has announced plans to make Japanese history mandatory at its 152 prefecture-run high schools as early as the academic year beginning 2012.

Prefectures across the country reportedly have been considering making Japanese history compulsory at high schools, but Kanagawa Prefecture will be the first to do so. Japanese history is currently an elective subject, in line with the government's teaching guidelines.

The guidelines stipulate that high school students are required to study world history in a geography-history category, with students allowed to choose between Japanese history or geography.

The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History is delaying its reopening from this summer to the fall.
Museum Director Brent Glass said the museum has received inquiries from visitors making travel plans, and wanted to provide them with a more realistic time frame for the reopening. An exact date has not been set.
The museum closed in the fall of 2006 for a $85-million renovation. Some of its most popular artifacts, such as Dorothy's ruby slippers from "The Wizard of Oz," are on display at the nearby National Air and Space Museum during construction.