A United Nations committee meeting has determined that two Baha’i shrines in Israel possess “outstanding universal value” and should be considered as part of the cultural heritage of humanity.

The decision today by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee means that the two most sacred sites for Baha’is - the resting places of the founders of their religion - join a list of internationally recognised sites like the Great Wall of China, the Pyaramids, the Taj Mahal, and Stonehenge.

The World Heritage List also includes places of global religious significance like the Vatican, the Old City of Jerusalem, and the remains of the recently destroyed Bamiyan Buddhist Statues in Afghanistan.

The Baha’i shrines are the first sites connected with a religious tradition born in modern times to be added to the list, which is maintained by UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.

The two shrines, one near the recognised heritage site of Old Acre on Israel’s northern coast and the other on Mount Carmel in Haifa, are the resting places of Baha’u’llah and the Bab, the founders of the Baha’i Faith.

Sitting in her little house near Tarbes, in the French Pyrenees, Marie-Pierre Manet-Beauzac is talking about her ancestry.

For most people this would be agreeable, perhaps even pleasurable. For the 40-something mother-of-three, the story of her bloodline is marked with a unique sadness: because she belongs to an extraordinary tribe of hidden pariahs, repressed in France for a thousand years.

Marie-Pierre is a Cagot.

If the word "Cagot" means nothing to you, that is not surprising. The history of the Cagot people is obscure; some assert it has been deliberately erased. Marie certainly believes that: "To talk about the Cagots is still a bad thing in the mountains. The French are ashamed of what they did to us, the Cagots are ashamed of what they were. That is why no one, these days, will confess they are of Cagot descent."

Except, uniquely, for Marie-Pierre herself. She is probably the only person in the world willing to admit she is of Cagot blood. But it took her many years to realise what that meant. "When I first had children, I wanted to know where they came from – which means where I came from. And so I started researching, I traced my family tree back through the generations – through many villages and towns in the Pyrenees.

"And that's when I noticed certain names and trades in my background, lots of humble carpenters, basket-makers, poor people, people who lived in the 'wrong' parts of town. Soon I realised I was a Cagot. Though many argue what that really means."

DALI, Yunnan -- More than 2,000 wooden poles recently unearthed at a site in Jianchuan county, have been found to be more than 3,000 years old.

The poles, still standing, were dug 4.5 m into the ground.

Archaeologists said carbon tests showed the poles were from the Neolithic age, and were probably the foundations for a structure built by a community that existed at the time in southwest China.

The possibility of a Palaeolithic human presence in Ireland has once again presented itself. A flaked flint dating to about 200,000 years ago found in Co Down is certainly of human workmanship, but its ultimate origin remains uncertain.

Discovered at Ballycullen, ten miles east of Belfast, the flake is 68mm long and wide and 31mm thick. Its originally dark surface is heavily patinated to a yellowish shade, and the lack of sharpness in its edges suggests that it has been rolled around by water or ice, Jon Stirland reports in Archaeology Ireland.

Indulgences, which give Catholics time off Purgatory for good behaviour, are making a comeback under Pope Benedict XVI.

In the past year, the Vatican has granted them for World Youth Day, the 150th anniversary of the Virgin Mary's apparition at Lourdes and, most recently, the 2,000th anniversary of St. Paul's birth.

The renewed enthusiasm for the controversial practice is being felt here. Ottawa's archbishop, Terrence Prendergast, is encouraging area Catholics to celebrate St. Paul by going for the indulgences; going so far as to issue a press release recently spelling out how to get one.

The man whose plan to build a casino near Gettysburg drew national attention and significant local opposition in 2005 and 2006 said Wednesday he has the financial backing he needs to take a second shot at securing a slots license for Adams County.

LeVan said he intends to do exactly that if a license becomes available - something that seems increasingly likely....

This time around, LeVan's proposal will include plans for a horse-racing facility and be located somewhere in the southern part of the county - away from the Gettysburg battlefield and near the Maryland line. The project would cost between $400 million and $500 million and secure between $15 million and $20 million for the county and local government in tax revenues, he said.

Morris Island, made famous by the charge of the black 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment and once considered one of the nation's most endangered Civil War battlegrounds, has been protected from development.
The City of Charleston, working with the Trust for Public Land, purchased the property last month from developer Bobby Ginn in a $3 million deal. Now the city is working with the public on how to interpret and provide public access to the 800-acre island on Charleston Harbor.

The purchase capped an effort to protect the island which, in 2005, was named one of the nation's most-endangered battlefields by the Civil War Battlefield Trust.

Confederate Battery Wagner, where the Massachusetts troops died in a charge dramatized in the movie "Glory," has been washed away by the sea.

Wary Clyburn, the Confederate army veteran, puts a new face on an old standard for which we can measure our character. He was brave and loyal.

Clyburn was a slave.

He was born about 1841 in Lancaster County, S.C., records show. He died in 1930 in Union County, where he moved after the war.

He was honored as a Civil War hero Friday during a ceremony at Hillcrest Cemetery in Monroe. Members of N.C. Sons of Confederate Veterans sponsored the event, along with the City of Monroe. Mayor Bobby Kilgore declared it Wary Clyburn Day.

The copper box, tarnished green from seeping water, tells the story.

Most everything inside this time capsule, entombed in 1917 in the granite base of a Civil War monument in Stillwater, succumbed to moisture.

"Mucky, basically," is how senior objects conservator Paul Storch of the Minnesota Historical Society described the contents when they arrived in his St. Paul laboratory last summer. "It's fairly common when they use copper boxes that have been soldered or crimped and then they're buried. It seems all it takes is a pinhole."

Now the contents of the copper box -- intended to preserve memories of early Stillwater and Washington County -- are back home at the county's Historic Courthouse.

Saved: A miniature silk American flag with 48 stars. Three Civil War ribbons that say GAR, meaning Grand Army of the Republic. A vague image of downtown Stillwater. Bits of newspaper society notes for readers who don't mind sentences cut down the middle.

TAMPA - They sat at the same tables inside Alessi Italian Bar & Grille on Saturday, but those who support and oppose a giant Confederate battle flag to be flown within view of Interstates 4 and 75 appear as divided as ever.
In April, the Sons of Confederate Veterans plan to fly the 50-foot-by-30-foot flag that inspired rebel soldiers atop a pole half as tall as a football field is long. The flag is part of a Confederate memorial that includes a lighted park and 30 bronze plaques set in granite telling Civil War stories.

The memorial sits on private property, and the plans have been approved by the County Commission. The banner is one of five being erected as part of a project called Flags Across Florida.

The plans, however, have drawn the ire of activists in the black community, who say the flag represents racism.
Representatives of both sides of the debate voiced their positions at Saturday's luncheon before an audience of barely more than a dozen people. The event was organized by Alvin McCray of Tampa, a member of both the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

It was a crime so improbable that many had trouble believing it could have happened at all: Three black soldiers stood accused of lynching an Italian prisoner of war, found dangling from a wire on an obstacle training course at Ft. Lawton in the middle of World War II.

The subsequent trial of the three men, along with 40 other black enlistees charged with rioting, became the largest and longest Army court-martial of the war, and the only recorded instance in U.S. history in which black men stood trial for a mob lynching.

By the time it was over, 28 men had been convicted on rioting charges and two of them were also found guilty of manslaughter in connection with the 1944 hanging.

Despite their protests of innocence -- and the government's own secret investigation showing the prosecution's case was poisonously flawed -- the men were sentenced to hard labor and forfeiture of military pay and benefits, and were given dishonorable discharges.

Twenty-six of the men went to their graves with the stain of wartime dishonor still on their records. It wasn't until Saturday, in a low-key ceremony on a wide lawn at the Army base in Seattle, that history switched gears. A senior Army official handed out certificates setting aside the convictions and converting the discharges to honorable status, in recognition -- 64 years after the fact -- that prosecutors' "egregious error" had resulted in a trial that was "fundamentally unfair."

Related Links

Salon: WWII soldier dies a day after formal Army apology

NASA and Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library based in San Francisco, made available the most comprehensive compilation ever of NASA's vast collection of photographs, historic film and video Thursday.

The Internet site combines for the first time 21 major NASA imagery collections into a single, searchable online resource. A link to the Web site will appear on the NASA home page.

The Web site launch is the first step in a five-year partnership that will add millions of images and thousands of hours of video and audio content, with enhanced search and viewing capabilities, and new user features on a continuing basis.

A review of historic maps, photographs and other resources has confirmed with "reasonable certainty" that part of a burial ground for slaves and other African-Americans rests under a parking lot now owned by Virginia Commonwealth University, officials said today.

The Richmond Slave Trail Commission and VCU said in a joint statement that they will begin to discuss ways to properly memorialize the site, along Interstate 95 in Shockoe Bottom.

"The documentary evidence for the Richmond Burial Ground for Negroes is very compelling. We are moving in the right direction and I look forward to collaboration as we work to find a way to memorialize this sacred place," said City Councilwoman Delores L. McQuinn, chairwoman of the Slave Trail Commission.

THE Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum at Hyde Park, N.Y., the nation’s first presidential library, is literally falling apart. The roof leaks, the basement floods, asbestos is flaking from old steam pipes, an ancient electrical system could send the whole place up in smoke. This sorry situation is an insult to the person the library and museum honor: the founder of the New Deal, the greatest investment in our nation’s modern development....

While the library sits high above the river, its basement lies below the water table. Sump pumps installed in 1939 are supposed to keep it dry, but don’t. Storms have caused flooding in the basement where collections are stored and in restrooms and public areas. What’s worse, storm and sewer drainage run together, which means they mingle if there’s a backup in the basement.

The electrical system, which was also installed in 1939, has outlived the suppliers of replacement parts. Archivists turn the lights on and off using the original circuit breakers. And with the electrical vault in the flood-prone basement, the library’s director, Cynthia Koch, fears that a short in the system could set the place on fire and destroy the entire collection.

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled in favor of a Russian World War II partisan contesting a Latvian conviction for war crimes committed under the Nazi occupation, the court said on Thursday.

Vasiliy Kononov, an 85-year-old Latvian who was granted Russian citizenship in 2000, was convicted in April 2004 of murdering Latvian civilians during the war and was sentenced to a year and eight months in jail.

The case outraged many Russians, who saw him as a brave partisan fighting the Nazi armies that devastated the Soviet Union. Former Russian President Vladimir Putin sent Kononov occasional notes, such as one to wish him a happy new year.

A solitary chunk of granite, small enough to heft in one hand, is key evidence that Australia and parts of Antarctica were once attached to North America, a new study suggests.

The Earth's continents are thought to have collided to become supercontinents and broken apart again several times in Earth's 4.5 billion year history. The most recent supercontinent was Pangaea, which began to break apart about 200 million years ago; the landmasses that comprised Pangaea eventually wandered into the current configuration of continents.

Several supercontinents predating Pangaea have been proposed by geologists, including one dubbed Rodinia that existed about 1.1 billion years ago.

For several decades, researchers have theorized that part of the ancient supercontinent Rodinia broke away from what is now the southwestern United States around 800 million to 600 million years ago, eventually drifting southward to become eastern Antarctica and Australia. The idea is known as the southwestern United States to East Antarctica (SWEAT) hypothesis.

But there was little physical evidence that could tie the southernmost continent to the long-disappeared Rodinia. Until scientists stumbled upon this rock, that is.

A collection of books bought by the Victorian prime minister William Gladstone while he was an inquisitive Oxford student has been sold for £65,000. Using plentiful family money, the young Gladstone acquired more than 2,000 volumes on everything from military history to the travel exploits of a young Englishman, David Carnegie. The 400 lots auctioned at Montrose included diaries from other Gladstones which were stored at Fasque House in Aberdeenshire. Gladstone's main library is at his former home in Hawarden, Flintshire, which he gave to the nation on his death in 1898.

After years of spirited debate over how and when people first reached the Americas, scientists finally seem poised to reach agreement. The emerging consensus: In contrast to what was long held as conventional wisdom, it now seems likely that the first Americans did not wait for ice sheets covering Canada to melt some 13,000 years ago, which would have allowed them to traipse south over solid ground. Instead, early nomads might well have traveled by boat or at least along the coast from Siberia to North America, perhaps navigating arctic waters near today's Bering Strait. The telltale evidence: ancient DNA from those early people that's been coaxed, by powerful analytical technology, into revealing its secret.

Rewriting the prehistory of the Americas is perhaps the most remarkable discovery—but hardly the only one—so far achieved through the analysis of ancient DNA. Other new insights about the past are being drawn from the same emerging scientific discipline. In the past five years, the double helix has shed light, for example, on the vanished woolly mammoth, the flightless dodo, and even humanity's long-lost kin, the Neanderthals. Extracting and testing old DNA, once considered practically impossible because too little of the stuff survives the eons intact, are now at the cutting edge of archaeology, paleontology, and other fields, thanks to new techniques and more powerful technology.

A group of Aboriginal elders on Saturday left Australia for the United States to bring home the remains of 33 ancestors from the Smithsonian Institute, the first Aboriginal remains to be returned from the United States.

Aborigines have fought for decades for the return of ancestral remains from overseas universities and museums where they have been taken for scientific and anthropological studies.

Aborigines have inhabited Australia for some 45,000 years and have the world's longest living culture. They believe that their spirit can not settle until it is reunited with their land, which they regard as their mother.

"Sixty years after leaving our shores, these are the first indigenous Australian remains to be returned from a major American institution," said Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin.

Bletchley Park, the codebreaking centre that helped to win the Second World War and launch the modern computer, is in danger of irreparable decay unless the Government steps in to save it, some of the country’s leading computer scientists caution today.

In a letter to The Times, 97 senior experts, mostly professors and heads of department, say that “the ravages of age and a lack of investment” have left the historic site under threat.

One of the unheated wooden huts where the codebreakers worked day and night to turn the tide of the war now looks “like a garden shed that’s been left for 60 years”, according to Sue Black, head of the Department of Information and Software Systems at the University of Westminster and one of the organisers of the letter.

A dirty tarpaulin keeps out the rain, and several of the eight surviving huts have peeling paint and boarded-up windows.

Time was running out, she said. “If we don’t do something now we’re going to lose what’s left. If we leave it ten years it might be too late.”

The signatories call for Bletchley Park to be made the home of a national museum of computing. Bletchley is open to the public as a museum but receives no public funds and the signatories say that many of the huts where the codebreaking occurred are in a terrible state of repair.

“As a nation we cannot allow this crucial and unique piece of both British and world heritage to be neglected in this way. The future of the site, buildings, resources and equipment at Bletchley Park must be preserved for future generations,” they say. Dr Black said yesterday that the site “is fundamental for the history of computing because we wouldn’t have the computers we’ve got now without it, and fundamental for our history because we might not have won the war without it”. Bletchley, a Victorian mansion in what was then the Buckinghamshire countryside, was an unlikely place for such an achievement. But it was there that the Government Code and Cipher School arrived in 1939, masquerading as Captain Ridley’s Shooting Party.

An addition of the historical book, which has been calligraphed by Master Mir Ali Hervai in 1533 CE, was unveiled during a ceremony at the Imam Ali (AS) Religious Arts Museum in Tehran on Thursday.

The original version of the book, which is also known as “Hervi Devotions”, is keep at the Astan-e Qods Razavi Museum and Library in Mashhad.

Master Gholam-Hossein Amirkhani, who has done the calligraphy for the book’s preface, and Mohammad Jafar Yahaqqi, professor of the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad who has written the preface, some officials from Astan-e Qods Museum, and a number of Iranian cultural figures attended the ceremony.

“This is the first time a book from a manuscript in the museum has been published by Astan-e Qods Razavi Center for Artistic Creations,” Hossein Abedi a member of Astan-e Qods Museum board of directors said.

Australia’s greatest ancient Aboriginal rock art is at risk of being damaged or destroyed because it sits at the epicentre of the country’s resources boom, experts say.

The etchings of men and animals on the rocks of the Burrup Peninsula, some of which are believed to be up to 30,000 years old, lie in Western Australia’s remote and mineral-laden Pilbara region.

Images carved onto the red rocks scattering the landscape include kangaroos, lizards and emu tracks as well as the extinct native Tasmanian tiger which died out on the mainland 6,000 years ago. Among the most significant panels are those showing human faces and activities and what experts believe are mythical figures.

In Gemmayzeh, on the northeast end of the Lebanese capital, it's common to find relatively recent structures looming over late-Ottoman and Mandate-period buildings, like warnings of coming development. The architectural record goes back beyond the Ottomans, as it happens, and for the past several months, the diversity of the quarter's historic architecture has been more obvious.

Just east of the Haddad Street gas station, due south of Gouraud Street, is a large hole - at its largest extent, it ran southwest for about 1,100 square meters. The pit is the site of an archaeological excavation, whose ruins are estimated to have been erected in the Roman period, between the end of the first and the start of the second centuries AD.

At the height of the excavation work, the site was pleasingly incongruous. Peering over the southern lip of the pit is a once-modest late-Ottoman building, which a few years ago underwent a cyborg-like reconstruction a-la Lebanese architect Bernard Khoury.

150 years ago, on 26th July 1858, the first Jewish MP sat in Parliament. It reminds us that our open and inclusive society was only achieved after a series of significant and hard fought changes. This was one of them.

Lionel Rothschild was elected as MP for the City of London 11 years before. However, he refused to take his seat because Parliament prescribed a Christian oath. Instead he campaigned for change, in order that he could declare his loyalty, but as a Jew. After many set backs and his re-election as MP several times the campaign ultimately won.

It was supported in the House of Commons by future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, who was a Christian but of Jewish lineage.

And so, a century and a half ago, Lionel Rothschild took his oath in accordance with Jewish traditions, with a covered head and holding the Old Testament. It was a major step towards today's religious freedom.

Only a few weeks after its dramatic Berlin opening, the Madame Tussauds waxworks museum is back in the headlines. First it drew criticism for including Hitler and his bunker in its exhibition. Then a vandal decapitated the Hitler wax figure on the first day it was open to the public. And now the museum has angered politicians in the state of Bavaria for depicting a controversial former German defense minister as a "villain."

In a display entitled, "Heroes and Villains," Franz Josef Strauss appears in a photocollage with notorious East German spy Günter Guillaume -- and both are clearly slotted in the category of "villains." As heroes, the image features would-be Hitler assassin Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and fighter pilot Manfred von Richthofen, who became known as the "Red Baron" during World War I. Though Strauss didn't make the cut to get a wax statue, the display has become a lightning rod for criticism.

Strauss is less known abroad than he was in Germany, where played a role in one of the most important chapters in postwar history -- a role the waxworks is seeking to illustrate in its exhibition. The text for the image, under the headline "political scandal," points to the so-called SPIEGEL affair that led to Strauss' resignation from his job as German defense minister in 1962. "Strauss ordered the arrest of SPIEGEL publisher Rudolf Augstein," the text reads. "He was held prisoner for 103 days. At first Strauss denied all responsibility, but he would later admit, under massive pressure, in a hearing of the German parliament, that he had lied. Afterwards he resigned."

A judge Friday ordered former Atlantic City Mayor Robert Levy to serve three years probation and pay a $5,000 fine for lying about his Vietnam War service to receive extra veteran's benefits.

During a sentencing hearing, U.S. District Court Judge Jerome Simandle also ordered Levy to repay the $25,000 in extra benefits he received as a result of the lies.

Known as the "missing mayor" because he dropped out of sight for two weeks last fall, Levy later admitted to lying about what he did in the war in order to obtain the extra veteran's benefits.

A treasure trove of history preserved by nature for millions of years in eastern India is threatened with extinction.

Plant fossils, scattered all over the Rajmahal Hills in Sahebganj district of Jharkhand state, are fast finding their way into the hundreds of crusher machines that are reducing them into stone chips to be used in road construction.

Spread over approximately 2,600 sq km, the Rajmahal Hills are home to plant fossils dating back between 68 million years and 145 million years.

U.S. military spending on the war in Iraq has nearly matched the cost of the war in Vietnam, according to a new Congressional Research Service analysis of the financial costs of wars throughout U.S. history. And total post-9/11 U.S. military spending has exceeded the cost of Vietnam by a considerable margin.

The ongoing war in Iraq has incurred an estimated $648 billion to date, and total post-9/11 military spending including the Iraq War, Afghanistan and other terrorism-related military expenditures has reached $859 billion, the CRS reported.

The Vietnam War (1965-1975) cost an estimated $686 billion in 2008 dollars, the CRS said.

The total cost of the American Revolution (1775-1783) was $101 million, or about $1.8 billion in 2008 dollars. The cost of World War II (1941-1945) was about $4.1 trillion in 2008 dollars, and consumed a massive 35.8% of gross domestic product. The Iraq war represents 1% of GDP today.

These estimates include various caveats and limitations spelled out by CRS.

"All estimates are of the costs of military operations only and do not include costs of veterans benefits, interest paid for borrowing money to finance wars, or assistance to allies," the CRS report indicated.

"Comparisons of costs of wars over a 230 year period... are inherently problematic," the new report cautioned. See"Costs of Major U.S. Wars," Congressional Research Service, July 24, 2008:

http://www.fas.org

Barack Obama drew a crowd estimated at 200,000 people in Berlin yesterday.

This not only surpassed his own record of 75,000 in Portland (which was aided by the presence of a rock band performance earlier in the day), but the record of both Presidents Kennedy and Reagan.

When President Kennedy delivered his famous 'Ich bin ein Berliner' speech in 1963 he attracted a crowd of 120,000.

Nearly a quarter century later President Reagan told Gorbachev to "tear down this wall." He attracted a crowd of 40,000, according to ABC News.

OSEPA - Benjamin Pykles scans the southern edge of this old townsite in Utah's desolate Skull Valley, looking for the front wheel of a century-old tricyle. The New York anthropologist believes the relic reveals a lot about the Polynesian pioneer community that endured for a 28-year period straddling the turn of the 20th century.

"This is not just some dreary place. There were kids here and they were having fun," Pykles says as he finds his quarry during a tour Wednesday. He records the wheel's GPS position and gathers its parts, a rim, spokes, pedals and a crank once attached to the wheel's hub. A short distance away he finds the runner to an ice skate."This is a cool story. What is this doing in the middle of the desert?"

These toys are among the artifacts left by the inhabitants of Iosepa (pronounced yo-see-pa), an agricultural community known for winning town beautification awards not long before it was abandoned in 1917. Some 100 residences, laid out among a dozen streets with Polynesian names, are little more than depressions, foundations and rock alignments. But their voices can be heard through metal and ceramic fragments of Iosepans' possessions, scattered among the cow dung and other detritus left by the cattle operation that succeeded the town under the Stansbury Mountains. Pykles, a professor from the State University of New York at Potsdam and an alumnus of Brigham Young University, is netting some of those voices as he conducts the first archaeological survey of Iosepa this month with a dozen SUNY anthropology students.

Australia's greatest ancient Aboriginal rock art is at risk of being damaged or destroyed because it sits at the epicentre of the country's resources boom, experts say.

The etchings of men and animals on the rocks of the Burrup Peninsula, some of which are believed to be up to 30,000 years old, lie in Western Australia's remote and mineral-laden Pilbara region.

Images carved onto the red rocks scattering the landscape include kangaroos, lizards and emu tracks as well as the extinct native Tasmanian tiger which died out on the mainland 6,000 years ago.