The lives of Abner Mikva and Newton Minow have been intertwined since 1942, when they were 16 and competed for the editorship of their Milwaukee high-school newspaper. Now 82, they are still working together, energized by their latest passion: Barack Obama.

``It's the first candidate I've been excited about since Kennedy,'' Minow says, turning to Mikva. ``What about you?'' ``Same here,'' says Mikva, patting his friend's hand. Over the past 50 years, the two men sitting in Minow's Chicago office have dominated the city's political and legal scene. Mikva was a state legislator and U.S. congressman before serving as a federal judge and counsel to President Bill Clinton. Minow was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under John F. Kennedy and a Democratic activist stretching back to 1950s Illinois governor and presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson.

The two men have known Illinois Senator Obama, the 46- year-old presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, for more than two decades, and don't pretend to be objective about him. Mikva has manned phone banks, sits on his finance committee and has gone door-to-door campaigning in three states. Minow's children and grandchildren are involved with the campaign; great-nephew Adam Frankel is an Obama speechwriter.

For both, their first contact with Obama came while he was a student at Harvard Law School in the 1980s.

Retired Navy Capt. Ward Boston, who in 2002 broke 35 years of silence to say the US Navy Board of Inquiry long cited to clear Israel of wrongdoing in attacking a US Navy ship during the Six Day War was a sham, died June 11 in California. He was 84.

Emma Boston, his wife of 60 years, told Military.com that Boston had been sick for about six weeks before his death and had been hospitalized. She said he ultimately died of pneumonia, which he contracted in the hospital.

"He was sharp as a tack right up until they put him under sedation" because of his difficulty breathing, she said.

In 1967, Boston was a Navy lawyer and assigned as the legal adviser to the board, which was convened within days of the June 8 attack by Israeli air and naval forces on the USS Liberty, an American surveillance ship floating in international waters in the Mediterranean....

The CIA failed to identify the storage bunkers for Soviet nuclear warheads in Cuba during the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, despite obtaining numerous photographs of the sites, according to new materials -- including a selection of photos -- being published on the Web today by the National Security Archive.

The precise location of the Soviet nuclear storage bunkers at Bejucal and Managua is revealed for the first time in a new book by Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs based on interviews with Soviet veterans and raw U.S. intelligence film obtained from the National Archives. Declassified CIA documents show that U.S. intelligence analysts at the time concluded that the sites could not be used for the storage of nuclear weapons because of the lack of visible security measures such as guard posts and extra fencing.

This is the third of five postings looking at the new material in One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War, which draws on the National Security Archive's long-standing documentary work on the Cuban missile crisis. As part of this posting, Dobbs also tracks the dispersal of nuclear warheads from the Bejucal bunker to other sites in Cuba on the night of October 26-27, 1962, at the height of the crisis.

In coming weeks, the National Security Archive will publish more of the key primary sources behind One Minute to Midnight, including documents and other evidence on the "Eyeball to Eyeball" confrontation between U.S. and Soviet ships that never happened.

A massive fundraising campaign for a new History Museum in Montana is now underway, spearheaded by former First Lady Betty Babcock and former Attorney General Joe Mazurek.

The Capital Hill Mall in Helena will be the location for the new Montana History Center.

Governor Brian Schweitzer announced in May that he signed a letter of intent to buy the Mall property for $6.5 million, but before the state writes any checks, a massive amount of funds need to be raised. He's challenged supporters of the museum to raise $13 million for the project by November 15th.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says there are more displaced people in the world than at any time in history, with Afghanistan and Iraq the leading countries of origin.

Launching its report in London, the UN agency said 67 million people have been forced out of their homes by conflict, persecution and natural disasters.

In recent years, resettlement in Afghanistan had seen numbers drop, but in 2007 the total cared for by the UNHCR jumped by 3 million people, and the UN says the number is likely to rise.

Ruins of two large palaces dating back to the Shang and Zhou dynasties have been found at the Jinsha relic site in Huangzhong Village at the western suburbs of Chengdu. They both date back 3,000 years and are considered to be one of Sichuan's most important archaeological finds, according to archaeologists from the Chengdu Institute of Archaeology. The new discovery has contributed toward the identification of a large palace site inside the Jinsha relic area.

Archaeologists have hailed the excavation as the most important archaeological find from the Jinsha Ruins since 2001, based on discussions and preliminary assessments by well-known archaeologists affiliated with the Chinese Society of Archaeology, Peking University and Sichuan University.

The newly excavated site dates to the same era as other ruins of ancient palaces discovered in 1999 and 2006-2007. They have similar structures and they are adjacent to each other, so researchers speculate that they all belong to the same large group of ancient palace buildings. All these buildings were well organized on a large scale, which implies that they were all available for the supreme rulers of the area during ancient times.

"We can identify the site of large ruined palaces in the Jinsha area based on this excavation," said Zhang Qing, an archeologist with the Chengdu Institute of Archaeology. The Huangzhong Village is 700 meters north of the sacrificial site of the Jinsha Ruins. Up to now, ten sites of large ancient buildings have been found in an area of 130 meters long and 90 meters wide of the Jinsha Ruins.

It is learned that the excavation at the Huangzhong began in April 2007, and has so far unearthed seven sites containing ancient buildings of the Shang and Western Zhou dynasties and four sites housing ancient kilns along with pottery pieces and jade wares.

The discovery aids in studying the conditions of the ancient kingdoms in the Jinsha area, according to Zhang Qing.

"The palaces found in Huangzhong Village will be restored," he said, "and archaeologists will also make comparative study of the palaces and others of the Shang and Zhou dynasties."

Turkish President Abdullah Gul said on
Tuesday that Turkey opened to researchers its most secret archives regarding the incidents of 1915.

"Keeping record of history is not a business of politicians and/or parliaments. It should be a business of historians and scholars,"
Gul told the 11th International Congress on "Social and Economic History of Turkey" held at Ankara's Bilkent University.

A first edition of the Nicolaus Copernicus book that puts forth the theory that the sun — not the earth — is at the center of the universe has fetched more than $2.2 million at an auction, nearly double the expected price.

The 1543 copy of Copernicus' "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) was among more than 300 books offered Tuesday at Christie's auction. It was expected to sell for up to $1.2 million.

One hundred years after the first Japanese immigrants arrived in Brazil, the country as a whole has been reflecting on an anniversary that has left a significant legacy.

Second generation Brazilian-Japanese are known as Nisei
Numbering an estimated 1.5 million, there are more people of Japanese descent in Brazil than anywhere in the world outside of Japan itself.

The celebrations are a chance to pay tribute to the pioneering immigrants that first arrived at the port of Santos near to Sao Paulo - and, the organisers say, to thank Brazilian society for making them welcome.
The 165 families who arrived here on 18 June 1908 came to escape poverty and lack of job opportunities in Japan, and to meet the demand for workers in Brazil's coffee plantations.

But there is plenty of evidence at the Museum of Japanese Immigration in Sao Paulo that this was not always a comfortable story.

Politico's Ben Smith reports that Stephen Mansfield, whose sympathetic 'The Faith of George W. Bush' spent 15 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in 2004, will be out this summer with 'The Faith of Barack Obama.' Ben says the book could help 'lend credibility to Senator Obama's bid to win Evangelical Christian voters away from the Republican Party: 'Its tone ranges from gently critical to gushing, and the author defends Obama-and even his controversial former minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright-from conservative critics, and portrays him as a compelling figure for Christian voters.

Related Links

Bush backer pens pro-Obama book - Yahoo! News

The latest Harris Poll finds the nation in a foul political mood. President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice all register their worst ratings ever. More people than ever also think the country is on the wrong track.

But this does not seem to help the Democrats. The Democratically-controlled Congress gets even worse ratings than the President and Vice-President, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s ratings have also fallen to their lowest point.

These are some of the results from the latest Harris Poll of 1,001 U.S. adults surveyed by telephone between June 4 and 8, 2008 by Harris Interactive (registered copyright).

Some key findings are:

President Bush’s latest ratings are 24 percent positive and fully 75 percent negative. Previously, his worst numbers were 26 percent positive and 72 percent negative in April of this year. His ratings are substantially worse than those of any president, except for Jimmy Carter (22%-77% in July 1980), since Harris first started measuring themin 1963.

Vice President Cheney’s ratings are even worse, 18 percent positive and 74 percent negative, compared to his previous low of 21 percent positive, 74 percent negative last July.

Secretary of State Rice’s ratings are much better than those of the President and Vice President, but also have fallen to their lowest point ever, 39 percent positive and 54 percent negative, compared to 42 percent positive and 51 percent negative last October.
Only 14 percent of the public think the things in the country are going in the right direction and fully 80 percent think they are on the wrong track. These compare to the previous worst numbers in President George W. Bush’s term, 75 percent thought things were on the wrong track in April. The highest number of people who said the country was on the wrong track was 81 percent in June of 1992 during the term of the first President Bush.

However, this dismal news for the administration has done nothing to help the Democrats. Most people seem to wish "a plague on all your houses". Congress, which of course is controlled by the Democrats, gets its worst ratings ever, only 13 percent positive and fully 83 percent negative. Its previous low point was in December of last year when it was rated 17 percent positive and 79 percent negative. And, Speaker Pelosi’s ratings have fallen to 24 percent positive, 57 percent negative compared to her previous low of 25 percent positive and 61 percent negative in February.

Clearly the economy and record gas prices are a big part of the problem. When asked, without being prompted or shown a list, which are the two most important issues for the government to address, the economy (38%) gets the most mentions, followed by the war (25%, but another 9% mention Iraq) and gas and oil prices (20%) Those mentioning gas and oil prices have jumped from only 1 percent in February and 10 percent in April to 20 percent now. The only other issue mentioned by more than 9 percent is health care (17%).

A conference to plan the prosecution of President Bush and other high administration officials for war crimes will be held September 13-14 at the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover .

"This is not intended to be a mere discussion of violations of law that have occurred," said convener Lawrence Velvel, dean and cofounder of the school. "It is, rather, intended to be a planning conference at which plans will be laid and necessary organizational structures set up, to pursue the guilty as long as necessary and, if need be, to the ends of the Earth."

"We must try to hold Bush administration leaders accountable in courts of justice," Velvel said. "And we must insist on appropriate punishments, including, if guilt is found, the hangings visited upon top German and Japanese war-criminals in the 1940s."

Velvel said past practice has been to allow U.S. officials responsible for war crimes in Viet Nam and elsewhere to enjoy immunity from prosecution upon leaving office. "President Johnson retired to his Texas ranch and his Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was named to head the World Bank; Richard Nixon retired to San Clemente and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was allowed to grow richer and richer," Velvel said.

In the last days, a team of archaeologists headed by Ruth Shady has discovered a number of anthropomorphic figures believed to be some five thousand years old near the district of Vegueta in the province of Huaura on the coast north of Lima.

These relics have been unearthed in the archeological site of Vichama, or "hidden city", a place that belongs to the same civilization of Caral and which is located 159 kilometers north of Lima. Caral is considered the oldest city of America with around 5000 years old.

The figures represent a woman nursing and a person of high social status. It was reported that Carbon 14 dating will soon determine how old these relics are.

It has been a source of enduring fascination for archaeologists and amateur Egyptologists everywhere: what exactly happened to the sarcophagus of Menkaure, one of Egypt's greatest Pharaohs? Now, more than 170 years after it was found and lost, the mystery could be solved.

Built from polished blue basalt to transport the king's earthly remains to the next world, the elaborately decorated vessel lay hidden inside the third-largest of Giza's renowned Pyramids for more than 4,000 years. In 1837 the British colonel Richard William Howard Vyse blasted his way into Menkaure's sepulchral chamber using gunpowder and discovered the stone casket.

The mummy was missing by that time — ancient Arabic graffiti indicated that the colonel was not the first to find the chamber — and he realised that his discovery could open the way for a new generation of grave robbers. "As the sarcophagus would have been destroyed had it remained in the Pyramid," he noted in his diaries, "I resolved to send it to the British Museum."

In a twist worthy of an Indiana Jones film, the sarcophagus was lost again the following year before it could reach British shores. The merchant ship Beatrice, which was carrying it and other antiquities found by the archaeologist, sank while sailing from Malta to Gibraltar — reportedly off the coast of Spain, near Alicante.

Now the Egyptian Government wants to recover it with the aid of underwater robots. Zahi Hawass, who heads Egypt's Supreme Council for Antiquities, told Spanish journalists that he was seeking financing from the National Geographic Society for the search.

To locate the Beatrice he has lined up the services of Robert Ballard, who found the Titanic using high-tech submersibles. The Egyptians have also privately suggested Franck Goddio, the French marine archaeologist who has discovered hundreds of artefacts from submerged parts of Alexandria.

The Bradley Project on America’s National Identity today released its Report, “E Pluribus Unum,”the product of a two-year study involving a number of our nation’s leading academics, public figures, journalists, educators and policy experts. The report examines four aspects of American life crucial to American identity: historical memory, civic education, assimilation, and national security.

The report finds that America is facing an identity crisis and calls for a national dialogue on America’s national identity. According to James Ceaser, professor of politics at the University of Virginia and a participant in the project, America’s understanding and appreciation of diversity is important but must be balanced by an emphasis on what we share. “In selecting the title E Pluribus Unum, the Project embraces the conviction that plurality and unity are not necessarily in tension with one another, but are supporting ideas of the same national experiment,” Ceaser said. “Plurality is only made safe when it when it is grounded in a deeper commitment to national unity. Unity is the precondition for healthy diversity.”

To inform its work, the Bradley Project asked HarrisInteractive to conduct a study on Americans’ views on national identity. The good news is that most U.S. citizens believe there is a unique national identity that defines what it means to be an American. The troubling news is that over six in ten believe our national identity is getting weaker. And “even more troubling is that younger Americans – on whom our continued national identity depends – are less likely than older Americans to believe in a unique national identity or in a unique American culture.” Indeed only 45 percent of 18-34 year old Americans believe that the U.S. Constitution
should trump international law in instances where there is a conflict.

According to Professor Ceaser, “The weight of all this evidence suggests mounting confusion about the meaning of American national identity and a loss of commitment to its promotion.”

“The findings from the report are sobering and significant. They raise subjects that are vital to our future, transcend partisanship, and clearly resonate with the American people,” said Rick O’Donnell, Executive Director of the Bradley Project. O’Donnell continued: “Our intention is that the report be the starting point for a national conversation on these important issues. Silent Spring in 1962 started a conversation that brought about significant changes in our environment. A Nation at Risk in 1983 launched an ongoing national conversation that continues to reshape American education. It is in that tradition that we release E Pluribus Unum.”

A number of notable scholars have already joined this conversation and commented on the Bradley Project report.

Walter A. McDougall, Pulitzer-prize winning historian and professor at the University of Pennsylvania calls the report: “An eloquent defense of America’s intellectual, civic, and moral identity that deserves wide circulation, especially among American youth.”

Harry Lewis, former Dean at Harvard College, says of the report: “A stirring reminder that America is more than the union of our differences, and a rational program for preserving the nation by passing American ideals on to the next generation of citizens.”

Amy A. Kass, of the University of Chicago, writes: “The Bradley Project’s report addresses the urgent problem of American identity in our global and multicultural age, and its wise recommendations for promoting civic consciousness and civic understanding couldn’t be more timely or more fitting.”

James C. Rees, Executive Director of Mount Vernon, said: “This report confirms what we experience at Mount Vernon every day – that most Americans know precious little about their own history. George Washington’s face is still familiar to most Americans, because we see it each day on the dollar bill. But when asked about Washington’s character and leadership, which made all the difference in the world to the founding of our nation, the average citizen is rendered speechless.”

The report makes clear that we didn’t get to this point overnight, and that addressing our challenges is a long-term imperative. In addition to its call for an immediate and comprehensive national dialogue on America’s national identity, it recommends:

■ a renewed focus on the teaching of American history,
■ embracing America’s heroes and historic landmarks,
■ affirming the benefits of diversity, but not adopting policies that perpetuate divisions or compromise our national identity,
■ inaugurating an initiative to ensure immigrants learn English, understand democratic institutions, and participate fully in the American way of life,
■ and creating an annual Presidential Award for American Citizenship for students and new citizens who demonstrate exemplary understanding of and commitment to American ideals and institutions.

Professor Ceaser concludes: “The report speaks of a nation ‘founded not on a common ethnicity,’ but ‘on an idea.’ And it argues that ‘a nation founded on an idea starts anew with each generation and with each new group of immigrants.’” “Knowing what America stands for is not a genetic inheritance,” said Ceaser. “It must be learned, both by the next generation and by those who come to this country. From this premise follow many of the recommendations to strengthen the serious study of American principles and the American founding at all levels of education, including college.”

Genetic material from outer space found in a meteorite in Australia may well have played a key role in the origin of life on Earth, according to a study to be published Sunday.

European and US scientists have proved for the first time that two bits of genetic coding, called nucleobases, contained in the meteor fragment, are truly extraterrestrial.

Previous studies had suggested that the space rocks, which hit Earth some 40 years ago, might have been contaminated upon impact.

Both of the molecules identified, uracil and xanthine, "are present in our DNA and RNA," said lead author Zita Martins, a researcher at Imperial College London.

In all the tales of wartime courage peppering John McCain's presidential campaign trail, perhaps the most outstanding example of selfless heroism involves not the candidate but a humble Vietnamese peasant.

On October 26, 1967, Mai Van On ran from the safety of a bomb shelter at the height of an air raid and swam out into the lake where Lieutenant Commander McCain was drowning, tangled in his parachute cord after ejecting when his Skyhawk bomber was hit by a missile.

In an extraordinary act of compassion at a time when Vietnamese citizens were being killed by US aerial bombardments, he pulled a barely conscious McCain to the lake surface and, with the help of a neighbour, dragged him towards the shore.

And when a furious mob at the water's edge began to beat and stab the captured pilot, Mr On drove them back.

Nearly three decades later, a Vietnamese government commission confirmed he was indeed the rescuer and, in a 1996 meeting in Hanoi, McCain embraced and thanked Mr On and presented him with a Senate memento.

From that brief encounter to his death at the age of 88 two years ago, Mr On never heard from the senator again, and three years after their meeting, McCain published an autobiography that makes no mention of his apparent debt to Mr On.

It is a snub Mr On took to his death.

ROSARIO , Argentina - While Ernesto "Che" Guevara remains the most famous export of this sleepy city, his legacy here has long been a low-key one.

Except for a handful of businesses named in his honor, few markers alert visitors that the revolutionary leader was born here exactly 80 years ago before becoming one of the most mythic figures of the 20th century.

That changed Saturday when civic leaders inaugurated the first official monument honoring the revolutionary leader in Argentina , ending decades of government silence about the controversial figure.

A 13-foot-high bronze statue unveiled before hundreds of cheering admirers depicts the beret-wearing Guevara standing defiantly while facing toward Santa Clara , Cuba , where another statue of Guevara faces toward Argentina .

At Princeton, she came to terms with being a black achiever in a white world.

###

As Catherine Donnelly climbed the stairs to her dorm room at Princeton University over a quarter-century ago, the Louisiana freshman felt ready for whatever lay ahead. But then she met Michelle.

Her full name was Michelle LaVaughn Robinson. She was so tall that her head seemed to brush the sloping ceiling of the cramped fourth-floor room. She was Donnelly's new roommate. And she was black.

Well, this was new.

Growing up in the South, Donnelly had gone to school with a handful of black classmates, but living together was quite another thing. Donnelly quickly warmed to Robinson, with her big sense of humor and riveting stories. But she was worried that her mother, who Donnelly said had grown up in a racist family, would not react well. She was right.

When Donnelly's mother, now 71, learned the race of her daughter's roommate , she was beside herself. She called alumni friends to object. And the next morning she marched into the student housing office.

"I said I need to get my daughter's room changed right away," recalled Alice Brown, a retired schoolteacher, who has since come to regret her reaction. "I called my own mother and she said, 'Take Catherine out of school immediately. Bring her home.' I was very upset about the whole thing."

For 17-year-old Robinson - who is now Michelle Obama and the first African-American woman to face the real prospect of becoming first lady - the incident was a stunning beginning to a formative chapter in her life. It was a time when her views on race and American culture began to coalesce - views that have helped make her a compelling figure but also somewhat of a lightning rod during the campaign. Just last week the Barack Obama campaign took on an apparently baseless rumor that she had once been taped talking of white Americans as "whitey."

Researchers in the decidedly un-tropical German city of Chemnitz are uncovering spectacular remains of a petrified rainforest. The forest was preserved under a thick layer of ash after a volcanic eruption 290 million years ago.

ARCHAEOLOGISTS have dug up the skeletons of 16 horses and a two-wheeled chariot in a grave dating back to the Roman Empire in north-east Greece, the culture ministry announced today.

Half of the horses were buried in pairs, whilst two human skeletons were also discovered in a dig near Lithohori, in the Kavala region.

Near to the remains of six of the horses archaeologists found a shield, weapons and various other accessories.

Scientists have grown a tree from what may be the oldest seed ever germinated.

The new sapling was sprouted from a 2,000-year-old date palm excavated in Masada, the site of a cliff-side fortress in Israel where ancient Jews are said to have killed themselves to avoid capture by Roman invaders.

Dubbed the "Methuselah Tree" after the oldest person in the Bible, the new plant has been growing steadily, and after 26 months, the tree was nearly four feet (1.2 meters) tall.

The species of tree, called the Judean date, (Phoenix dactylifera L.), is now extinct in Israel, but researchers are hoping that by reviving the plant they may be able to study its medicinal uses.

Bucking conventional wisdom, Ann Coulter in her latest syndicated column calls President Bush a "great president" and predicts that "the man responsible for keeping Americans safe from another terrorist attack on American soil for nearly seven years now will go down in history as one of America's greatest presidents."

She adds: "It is unquestionable that Bush has made this country safe by keeping Islamic lunatics pinned down fighting our troops in Iraq.... Our servicemen must be baffled by the constant nay-saying coming from their own country....

"Monthly casualties in Iraq now come in slightly lower than a weekend with Anna Nicole Smith. According to a CNN report last week, for the entire month of May, there were only 19 troop deaths in Iraq. (Last year, five people on average were shot every day in Chicago.) With Iraqi deaths at an all-time low, Iraq is safer than Detroit -- although the Middle Eastern food is still better in Detroit."

Members of the Tseycum First Nation visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York City this week to reclaim the remains of ancestors taken from their land about a century ago.

The group planned to take the remains late Wednesday back to Vancouver Island in Canada's British Columbia. An interment is planned for Friday, Chief Vern Jacks said.

"Our people don't belong in boxes in a museum," he said. "This is our life, we still respect our dead."

The tribe said it was pleased with the New York museum's reaction to its request.

Charles McLean, senior vice president for communications and marketing at the museum, said a process was already in place to address repatriation issues. He said there had been at least one other occasion where the museum had returned remains.