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Unlike sisterhoods that required a life spent apart from society under vows of chastity, these Catholic women looked for holiness outside monastic norms. Although they lived and prayed together within an enclave, partly as a form of mutual protection — some historians believe they banded together after losing their men to the Crusades, which left behind mainly criminals and louts — beguines were not confined to the cloister. Many ministered to the poor and sick outside their walls. Lifelong celibacy was not required either. They could leave the order and marry (but not return).

Each community had its own rules, albeit under the aegis of the church, and several housed mystics who developed ecstatic approaches to worship. Little wonder, then, that over the centuries they suffered waves of distrust and persecution as heretical"free spirits."

Traces of these remarkable women and their idiosyncratic spiritual ways can be found today in the urban islands of quietness they once called home. Known as beguinages or begijnhofs, several dozen of these compounds are still intact (to varying degrees) from England to Germany.

These days, unemployed youths shout vulgar catcalls at female shoppers walking past crumbling facades. Vendors on potholed sidewalks peddle Chinese-made T-shirts. Legless beggars grab the ankles of passers-by for alms.

There are graver ills in the Egyptian megalopolis of 18 million people: Whole outlying neighborhoods thirst for drinking water, ramshackle houses collapse on shallow foundations and trash clutters miles of dirt alleyways. Still, the district of Cairenes, known simply as downtown, provokes a kind of longing for possibilities lost in a once cutting-edge and even glamorous city.

"The Talaat Harb district represented Cairo as a fresh capital of a European country," said Alaa al-Aswany, author of the 2004 novel"Yacoubian Building," a chronicle of Cairo's moral decay set downtown."It symbolized a vigorous, cosmopolitan Cairo."

After over 20 years of bitter public debate, and an estimated £9m spent on consultants, designs and planning inquiries, the proposed £57m visitor centre collapsed last year when the government abandoned, on cost grounds, the plan to tunnel the A303 where it passes one of the world's most famous prehistoric monuments.

Ordered by culture minister Margaret Hodge to sort the site in time for the expected Olympics tourism bonanza, English Heritage yesterday launched yet another public consultation, this time on a new quick fix solution: a"temporary" building lasting up to 20 years, costing up to £20m, and providing a café, a shop and twice as much parking.

Still, the Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute director will have to reach depths of several hundred feet.

Adovasio plans to co-lead a two-week expedition in the Gulf of Mexico at the end of the month to look for evidence of early American Indians along the ancient coast of Florida, now about 300 feet underwater, Mercyhurst College in Erie announced Monday.

"We have these little hints ... that there are potentially early sites off the coast of Florida," said Adovasio, former chairman of the University of Pittsburgh's anthropology department."That is what makes this so exciting."

Officials in both countries called the incident a misunderstanding that occurred after the soldiers went to fetch three Thai protesters arrested earlier in the day for jumping an immigration checkpoint to reach the Preah Vihear temple.

But later a Cambodian government spokesman said the Thai troops were being held until further talks could resolve the stand-off.

"This discovery is an archaeological sensation," commented Norbert Müller of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. The research project extended over several weeks before being completed in the middle of May 2008.

Prior to this, the hippodrome had only been known from written sources. Archaeologists had failed to locate its actual site. This is surprising, as German archaeologists have been continuously excavating the site of where the ancient olympiad was held since 1875; this research has become a tradition and innumerable archaeologists, historians, and sports historians from all over the world have been involved in trying to solve this secret for over a hundred years.

The forced sterilization and euthanasia program developed as a consequence of the "law to prevent hereditary diseased offspring," which was enacted on July 14, 1933 and was based on the controversial theory that one could improve the human race through selective breeding.

Meanwhile, the hunt for one of the doctors believed to have taken part in the systematic murder of thousands of people during the Third Reich has heated up. Representatives from the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) were in Chile this week to announce its new ad campaign for Operation: Last Chance.

The campaign aims to ensnare Aribert Heim, known to some as "Dr. Death" from Mauthausen, who's been on the run since 1962 when he was tipped off about his imminent arrest. The 94-year-old Austrian served as medical doctor at the Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen concentration camps. At Mauthausen, he murdered hundreds by administering lethal injections during the fall of 1941.

"Despite many and repeated assurances that this problem would be addressed by 2010, the committee is now very skeptical that the Office of the Historian will succeed in meeting the 30-year requirement for the Foreign Relations series at any time within the next decade," the State Department Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation wrote in its new annual report.

Compliance with the 30 year deadline is not optional; it is a binding legal requirement."The Secretary of State shall ensure that the FRUS series shall be published not more than 30 years after the events recorded," according to a statute enacted in 1991.

But instead of advancing towards that goal, FRUS seems to be retreating further and further away from it. The FRUS series' sparse publication record in 2007"was a considerable disappointment, and does not bring with it much encouragement for the future," the committee wrote in its report to the Secretary of State.

"Last year the committee reported that 'it is reasonable' to be optimistic that the series would be in compliance with the law by the end of 2010," the committee noted."We no longer have any reason to be optimistic, and are frankly very pessimistic."

The annual report, dated May 19, 2008, will appear in the September 2008 issue of Perspectives on History, a publication of the American Historical Association (www.historians.org). An advance copy is available here: http://www.fas.org/sgp/advisory/state/hac2007.pdf"The committee must really be concerned for the report to be so explicit and emphatic," one former State Department official told Secrecy News.

In a delicate allusion to reports of morale problems in the Office of the Historian and the ensuing resignations of professional staff, the Advisory Committee strongly recommended that State Department Human Resources personnel" conduct mandatory exit interviews to determine the principal reasons behind the departure of skilled researchers."

The committee also expressed dismay at plans to provide reduced coverage of U.S. policy during the Reagan Administration.

"The committee is concerned that despite a collection of 8.5 million classified pages in the Reagan Library, compared with the Nixon years' 2.5 million pages, the Office plans substantially fewer volumes of the FRUS series."

"The publication of the Foreign Relations series stands as a symbol of commitment to openness and accountability," the Advisory Committee report affirmed.

Regrettably, with its persistent violation of mandatory publication requirements and its diminishing productivity, the Foreign Relations series may indeed be a fitting symbol of the current state of openness and accountability.

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