West Virginia disability rights groups are fuming after the owners of a pre-Civil War mental hospital in Weston renamed the property the "Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum."

Several mental health organization leaders have fired off letters this week to the contractor who now owns the former Weston Hospital.

They say the new name - which was the name of the hospital in the 19th century - is discriminatory and promotes misunderstandings about mental illness.

"It's very derogatory," said Scott Miller, director of the Mountain State Direct Action Center, a disability rights group. "We don't call people lunatics. Asylum is just not the term anymore."

The Adams County Historical Society provided tourists in Gettysburg a great opportunity Saturday to tour the [ Lutheran Theological Seminary] cupola, which is closed save for two times of the year.

"Until recently, nobody was allowed to go into the cupola," said Tim Smith, research assistant with the historical society. "The stairway leading up to the cupola was not safe. Our liability was insane."

In fact, the cupola was closed from 1964 to about three years ago when the historical society decided to open it for tours on a limited basis.

SAN FRANCISCO—As Spain shrugs off the last cobwebs of Gen. Francisco Franco's fascist regime 70 years after it hatched amid civil war, Americans are also looking back, honoring their own who fought there and the ideals for which they stood.

The faces of some of the approximately 3,000 men and women who broke American isolationism to volunteer in the 1936-1939 Spanish war look out from the translucent onyx squares of a monument recently inaugurated on this city's touristed Embarcadero.

"I wasn't about to watch another country go to hell," said veteran David Smith, 92, recalling that Italy and Germany were already controlled by Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler when he left the U.S. to join the Jarama front in 1937.

Prehistoric treasures unearthed in the Alps as melting glaciers recede are under threat from looters who are removing many of them.

Such is the concern for the newly revealed objects - which include weapons, clothing and tools - that a task force of archaeologists, anthropologists, mountain climbers and Alpine rescue teams has been formed in an attempt to salvage them.

Franco Nicolis, an archaeologist from Trento, said: “We must be ready to intervene as if we were dealing with a public calamity.”

Evidence linking him to the ex-leaders of the Weather Underground is thin. But a YouTube video is making noise.

Democrats have tried to heal their party's angry passions ever since violent protesters disrupted the Democratic National Convention here in 1968, a shock to America's collective psyche that helped Republican Richard Nixon capture the White House.

But some of the old fault lines were visible again Thursday as Sen. Barack Obama's suddenly defensive presidential campaign sought to distance him from Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, aging academics who planted bombs in the Capitol, the Pentagon and other buildings to protest U.S. government policy. They are now widely respected community figures here.

Imagine President Barack Obama is preparing his first State of the Union message. Would he want Vice President Hillary Rodham Clinton tut-tutting with edits or suggesting how she could write it better? Would he want to hear Second Spouse Bill Clinton wax on and on about favorite lines from his own speeches?

Alternatively, would the poll-obsessed Clintons want to wake up in the White House residence in 2009 and read about Vice President Obama’s sky-high popularity ratings, and how they make her look like his stern old lady?...

“There’s not a chance,” Jon Ausman, an uncommitted superdelegate from Florida, said of a get-together by the two campaigns. “This has turned into a battle of egos, and strong personal animosity has slipped into this. Not to mention, the veep is usually a half-step or step in stature below the presidential candidate, and in both cases neither of them falls into that mold.”

But history has shown that politicians are willing to put aside animosities for the sake of victory. In 1960, John F. Kennedy found his running mate in Lyndon B. Johnson, the sitting Senate majority leader and an unrivaled force in Democratic politics. The ticket seemed unlikely up until the 1960 convention: Johnson’s allies had been critical of Kennedy and his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, and the nominee’s brother Robert F. Kennedy loathed Johnson. But Kennedy decided at the 11th hour that Johnson could help him in the South and among the party’s senior statesmen.

More recently, Ronald Reagan picked George Bush in 1980 and Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts chose former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina in 2004, even though the two sets of running mates were not great fits as ideological soul mates or personalities (and in Mr. Kerry’s case, associates say, he would probably have preferred former Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, or Senator John McCain of Arizona, now the presumptive Republican nominee). But Reagan and Mr. Kerry saw their choices as bringing balance and strengths to the ticket — and the first President Bush and Mr. Edwards did not fight their rivals to the convention.

“All of the arguments about how rivals don’t like each other would fall away if either thinks the other could help them win,” said Doris Kearns Goodwin, the biographer of Johnson and other presidents. “And Obama and Clinton do fit in a jigsaw-puzzle way. She brings women, older voters, blue-collar workers, Hispanics, and he brings elites, liberals, the young and the crucially necessary black vote.”