Donald H. Rumsfeld, the powerful defense secretary and architect of the Iraq War who left office two years ago as he faced ever-rising criticism, is working on a memoir to be published by Penguin Group (USA) in 2010.

"This will be a story that will span my lifetime," Rumsfeld, 75, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Monday from his office in Washington, D.C. "It will be something that I will try hard to have be very fair and honest and useful. I hope it adds to people's information about these times"

Books by such former Bush administration officials as treasury secretary Paul O'Neill and CIA director George Tenet have come out, but Rumsfeld's take is closer. A longtime friend and close ally of Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld was among the most influential defense secretaries ever and the most visible and controversial since Robert McNamara in the 1960s.

Rumsfeld met with several publishers and received "big bids" for his book, according to a publishing official who asked not to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the negotiations. But Rumsfeld decided to accept no advance, only money for expenses. Any profits will be donated to a foundation he established recently to fund such projects as grants for "promising young individuals" interested in public service.

Polish lawmakers honored the memory of the more than 200 young Jewish fighters Friday who led the Warsaw Ghetto uprising against Nazi soldiers in 1943.

In its resolution, the lower house of Poland's parliament said the ghetto fighters were defending human dignity. Lawmakers paid homage to "all the victims and heroes of the uprising, whose sacrifice merits the highest admiration, respect and memory."

Poland will hold national observances of the 65th anniversary of the event April 15 with international dignitaries, including Israeli President Shimon Peres and U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff scheduled to attend.

Russian officials on Friday unveiled a monument to Laika, a dog whose flight to space more than 50 years ago paved the way for human space missions.

The small monument is near a military research facility in Moscow that prepared Laika's flight to space on Nov. 3, 1957. It features a dog standing on top of a rocket.

Little was known about the impact of space flight on living things at the time Laika's mission was launched. Some believed they would be unable to survive the launch or the conditions of outer space, so Soviet space engineers viewed dogs' flights as a necessary precursor to human missions.

Spanish archaeologists collaborated with the Nazis in their attempts to prove the theory of Aryan supremacy and justify their claims of racial superiority over the Jews, according to a new book.

Spain wanted to promote the idea that the Aryan race could be traced to the Canary Islands, amid claims they were all that remained of the lost continent of Atlantis.

Scientists from the Ahnenerbe, an institute set up by Heinrich Himmler and funded by the SS, planned to travel to the Atlantic islands to carry out research but were forced to postpone the project when war broke out in September 1939.

They appointed archaeologist Julio Martinez Santa Olalla, a friend of the dictator General Franciso Franco, to conduct investigations on their behalf.

The extent of the collaboration between Franco’s archaeologists and those in Nazi Germany has been revealed in a new book by Francisco Gracia Alonso, professor of history at the University of Barcelona.

Prof Gracia reveals the close relationship between Santa Olalla and the Ahnenerbe, which was founded to investigate "the science of ancient intellectual history".

An island used as a naval base by the Germans in both world wars and flattened by the British Army is to rise again from the sea as a German tourist paradise.

Heligoland, a tiny North Sea island 40 miles off the German coast, was the target of reputedly the largest single non-nuclear explosion in history, when Britain detonated 6,800 tons of left-over ordnance there in 1947.

The aim was to shatter its reinforced submarine base and tunnel network, and end a colourful military history that stretched back centuries.

Instead, the explosion flattened a huge swathe of the island on one side of a cliff face that has become a celebrated tourist spot.

Now, a German investor wants to expand the area levelled by the "British bang" and link it to a nearby sandy islet known as Dune. Arne Weber, a businessman from Hamburg, said that the reclamation project would see Heligoland made whole again for the first time in 300 years.

With the opening today of a new, $103 million visitor center at Gettysburg National Military Park, Cemetery Ridge is undergoing the most radical change to its look and feel in a generation. The new visitor center, hidden in a hollow behind the ridge, has made both the old visitor center and the Cyclorama Building -- designed by the renowned architect Richard Neutra in the 1960s -- obsolete. And so, in an effort to return the battlefield to its original state, the National Park Service is about to tear down both structures, which have for decades sat squarely in the middle of the Union lines.

These changes are part of a rehabilitation project that has produced dramatic changes on the battlefield. In the early 1990s, power lines that ran along the Emmitsburg Road -- one of several historic roads that converge at Gettysburg -- were buried underground. In 2000, a hulking observation tower -- a tourist trap that offered paying visitors the chance to survey the battlefield from on high -- was demolished. And today, the Park Service continues to remove trees and build fences, in an effort to re-create the original sightlines of the 1863 battle.

It's not just physical changes. Exhibits and films at the new museum are focused on the context of the war, the issue of slavery, the economic challenges faced by North and South -- a shift in emphasis that is happening throughout the National Park Service's Civil War sites.

In 1662, the colonists of Hartford accused 39-year-old Mary Sanford of witchcraft. Based on evidence — drinking wine and dancing around a bonfire — the court pronounced her guilty “for not having the feare of God before thyne eyes.” Sanford was hanged, leaving behind five children and a shaken husband who was later acquitted of similar charges.

More than three centuries later, Sanford’s descendants, 14-year-old Addie Avery and her mother, Debra, of New Milford, Conn., have petitioned the State Legislature to exonerate their distant grandmother and 10 other people executed for witchcraft. The fight has taught them something, perhaps more than they wanted to know, about the mob mentality.

In the summer of 1996, President Bill Clinton delivered on his pledge to “end welfare as we know it.” Despite howls of protest from some liberals, he signed into law a bill forcing recipients to work and imposing a five-year limit on cash assistance.

As first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton supported her husband’s decision, drawing the wrath of old friends from her days as an advocate for poor children. Some accused the Clintons of throwing vulnerable families to the winds in pursuit of centrist votes as Mr. Clinton headed into the final stages of his re-election campaign.

Despite the criticism and anxiety from the left, the legislation came to be viewed as one of Mr. Clinton’s signature achievements. It won broad bipartisan praise, with some Democrats relieved that it took a politically difficult issue off the table for them, and many liberals came to accept if not embrace it.

Mrs. Clinton’s opponent in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Barack Obama, said in an interview that the welfare overhaul had been greatly beneficial in eliminating a divisive force in American politics.

After the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, the demise of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on a reconnaissance mission in World War II has long ranked as one of aviation’s great mysteries. Now, thanks to the tenacity and luck of a two amateur archaeologists, the final pieces of the puzzle seem to have been filled in.

The story that emerged about the disappearance of Saint-Exupéry, the French aviator, author and émigré from Vichy France, proved to contain several narratives, a complexity that would likely have pleased the author of several adventure books on flying and the charming tale “The Little Prince,” about a little interstellar traveler, which was also a profound statement of faith.