Thailand's top court questioned on Tuesday the legality of Bangkok's support for a Cambodian bid to list a disputed Hindu temple as a World Heritage site, giving the opposition another weapon to attack the government.

The Constitutional Court ruled 8-1 that a communique approved by the cabinet in June backing Cambodia's bid to list the 900-year-old Preah Vihear temple had required the approval of parliament.

UNESCO, the U.N. agency for culture and education, voted on Monday to approve Cambodia's request to register the temple, which has been at the centre of a bitter 50-year dispute on the Thai-Cambodian border.

Today, the National Park Service announced the award of 32 grants totaling $1,367,144 to assist in the preservation and protection of America’s significant battlefield lands. With an increase in funding this year, the grant program was able to support a dozen more projects than in 2007—projects that will help preserve more than 100 battlefields nationwide.

“These grants help safeguard and preserve American battlefield lands,” said Mary A. Bomar, Director of the National Park Service. “It is important to protect these lands as symbols of individual sacrifice and national heritage for present and future generations.”

This year’s grants provide funding for projects at endangered battlefields from the Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Second Seminole War, Civil War, World War II and various Indian Wars. Awards were given to projects in 24 states or territories entailing archeology, mapping, cultural resource survey work, documentation, planning, education and interpretation.

The Italian government declared a state of emergency at the Pompeii archaeological site on Friday to try to rescue one of the world's most important cultural treasures from decades of neglect.

A cabinet statement said it would appoint a special commissioner for Pompeii, the ancient Roman city buried by an eruption of the Vesuvius volcano in AD 79 and now a Unesco World Heritage site.

A report in daily Corriere della Sera this week said most of the 1 500 houses at the site are closed to the public, its frescoes have faded to become almost invisible and restoration work that began in 1978 has yet to be completed.

The "state of emergency", which the government said would last for a year, allows for extra funds and special measures to be taken to protect the site.

A pre-Christian Hebrew text shows that the idea of a messiah rising from the dead after three days was already in Jewish tradition before the birth of Jesus, a prominent biblical scholar will argue today.

The controversial theory of Professor Israel Knohl, citing his new reading of a tablet inscribed in the 1st century BC discovered nearly 10 years ago, is expected to trigger a new Judaeo-Christian debate over the meaning and origin of the most central tenet of Christianity, the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Professor Knohl, a professor of biblical studies at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, will unveil his interpretation of the text at an Israel Museum conference of scholars, saying that it quotes the Archangel Gabriel telling an earlier "Prince of Princes" that: "In three days you shall live, I Gabriel, command you."

The tablet, known as Gabriel's Vision of Revelations because it contains an apocalyptic text ascribed to the angel, has attracted the intense interest of scholars. It came to light after it was bought from a Jordanian antiquities dealer by an Israeli-Swiss collector, David Jeselsohn, who kept it in his Zurich home. The location of the original discovery is not clear, though it may have been in Jordan on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea.

DACHAU, Germany — The crow leads the way to the crematorium.

Past the "Arbeit macht frei" (Work will make you free) sign at the front gate of the former Nazi concentration camp that's a 20-minute train ride from Munich.

Past the 10-meter-by-100-meter rows of gravel that once held the wooden barracks where the enslaved were kept between 1933 and 1945 and where an estimated 32,000 persons lost their lives.

Past the guard towers and barbed-wire fence.

Past the gardens and religious shrines — present-day memorials on neatly trimmed ground atop heaps of dead from generations past.

It's early, and there are few visitors to the ovens. The silence is an appropriate companion while viewing the solid brick reminder of man's inhumanity to man.

The concentration camp was established in the buildings of an unused munitions factory. The first inmates were political prisoners and those of mixed ancestry. After 1936, the proportion of Jews rose dramatically.

They were brutally beaten and inadequately fed. For medical experiments, they were injected with pus and made to drink seawater.

Some inmates were used for slave labor. Others were sent to gas chambers in the East, mostly in Poland.

Dachau became the model for other Germany concentration camps. It was where top-ranking Nazis learned the secrets of mass killings.

In all, more than 200,000 prisoners from more than 30 countries were housed at Dachau. An epidemic of typhus in early 1945 claimed hundreds of the already weakened victims. More died in a forced march during a hasty evacuation not long before the arrival of Allied troops.

After the war, Dachau was converted into an internment camp operated by the American military. Persons suspected of war crimes were held in separate units.

The memorial site was opened on May 9, 1965, on the 20th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp. More than 800,000 people visit every year.

You can stand on the roll-call parade ground. Twice a day, the entire camp population stood here at attention until everyone was accounted for. If someone was missing, everyone had to remain on their feet until the inmate was found (often dead).

You can tour an old building that's been converted into a museum. Individual stories of some of the victims are told here. You also meet some of the persecutors.

You can walk through a reconstructed barracks and see mock-ups of the stacked bunks. If brutalizing their charges wasn't enough, the Nazi guards had exacting standards on how the housing units were to be maintained and now the prisoners were to display their belongings. Punishment was meted out for the slightest infraction.

I spent most of my time at the crematorium.

Only when you understand the twisted logistics can you fully grasp the horror.

There were many more people to kill than Hitler's minions could handle with just standard cruelty. Simply put, the inferior ones took up too much room. They not only had to be exterminated efficiently, they had to be reduced in size so the next wave of victims on the next wave of trains could be duly processed.

So the Nazis burned the bodies. Ashes take up less space than flesh and bones. Problem solved.

What makes this place even more sorrowful is the knowledge that this double-shot of sadism and terrorism didn't take place in the dusty back pages of our history books.

People are still breathing who were on the receiving end at places such as Dachau.

The solid brick reminder of that evil — that recent evil — weighs heavily on our collective psyche.

As it should.

A young boy who wants to emulate his hero Indiana Jones has made his first archaeological discovery - at the tender age of just four-years-old.

Max Farrow wants to be an archaeologist when he grows up and was, in his mother Joanna's words's “digging for tombs” in his back garden when he made his debut discovery.

He found a broken clay tobacco pipe which he was so pleased with he popped it into his toy box - where it remained for a year until he showed it to experts who revealed it was up to 300 years old.

Mrs Farrow, who lives in Elizabeth Fry Road, Norwich, with Max, his two-year-old sister Francesca and husband David, said her son was thrilled to learn it was so old.

She said: “He was digging around for Egyptian tombs in the back garden when he found it. He is obsessed with it and is always doing things like that. He wants to be an archaeologist when he grows up.

“It was about a year ago when he found it and it had been in his toy box ever since until we were up at the Castle Museum and he was pointing at some of the pipes they have on display there saying they were like his one.

“We took it to the museum study centre and they have told him it is between 250 and 300 years old, dating back to about 1750. He is really pleased with himself.”

The family plan to have the pipe framed and Mrs Farrow said her son, who visits the Castle Museum every week, hoped to make many more discoveries.

“We took him to see the Indiana Jones film the other week and he absolutely loved it. We took him to Egypt earlier this year to see the pyramids, which he had been going on about for about a year.”

The young explorer himself, who is now five-years-old and goes to Nelson Infant School in Northumberland Street, told the Evening News: “I want to be an Egyptologist when I grow up. The next thing I will be looking for in my back garden is for some pottery.”

Dr Adrian Marsden, finds officer based at the Shirehall in Norwich, dated Max's pipe to the middle of the 18th century. He said: “Once Walter Raleigh brought tobacco to England pipe production started in the 1600s. You can date them according to their size, because at first tobacco was very expensive so the pipes were quite small. They then got bigger as tobacco became cheaper.

“They turn up all over the country, and the one Max found could have been from somebody who went out into their garden for a smoke in the mid 18th century.

“We have a lot of keen youngsters in the county who often come to us to get their finds dated, but Max is among the youngest we have seen.”

Iraq said on Thursday it has created a special task force to investigate the theft of valuable ancient Judaic manuscripts that later turned up in Israel.

The rare books, confiscated during the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, were rescued from US bombing at the start of the 2003 war and then sent to the United States for restoration but later wound up in Israel instead.

At a press briefing at the National Museum in Baghdad, Iraqi Minister of Tourism and Archaeology Mohammad Abbas al-Oraibi said that a working group"will investigate in the US to find out if this is true or not."

A special coin minted to mark Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday was launched yesterday. South Africa's central bank said five million of the five rand (33p) coins, featuring a smiling portrait of the former president and anti-apartheid icon, would go into circulation on his birthday – 18 July.

"We want people to touch a bit of Madiba [Mandela], to share the love and leadership as the coin goes around," Finance Minister Trevor Manuel said at a ceremonial minting of one of the coins in Johannesburg yesterday.

For the Fourth of July weekend, nearly 1,000 people from around the country will meet in Colorado to talk about a part of this country's past many often forget or ignore.

"This conference will explore: What does it mean today to be an American?" said Irene Hirano, longtime president and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.

Hirano just stepped down and now serves as an executive advisor for the organization which purposefully held their national conference over the holiday weekend entitled "Whose America? Who's American?"

"It's time to celebrate what our collective history has been," said Hirano. "A deep understanding of what it means to be an American, all the good and the bad."

Hirano and Dr. Daryl Maeda believe that schools at all levels do not teach enough about Japanese American history. Maeda is an assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado. He says schools often ignore topics such as the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans nationwide in internment camps including Camp Amache in Granada, Colorado.

In mid-April Silvio Berlusconi was elected prime minister of Italy in a campaign focused on increasing security and fighting crime, particularly by cracking down on illegal immigration.

In addition to strengthening local government's power to expel undocumented foreigners, the Berlusconi government has focused its crime-fighting efforts on the estimated 140,000 Roma and Sinti -- Gypsies -- who live in the country.

At least half the Gypsies are Italian citizens.

Within a month of his election, Berlusconi's government was promising to dismantle unauthorized Roma camps, leading to expressions of concern by Vatican officials and a variety of religious leaders in Italy.

The concern became outrage in late June when Interior Minister Roberto Maroni announced plans to fingerprint every Gypsy in Italy, including children.

Maroni said the plan would enable the government to identify each person and check whether he or she was in Italy legally. Children were included in the plan, he said, because it was the only way to keep track of whether their parents were sending them to school or were forcing them out on the streets to beg or steal.

Archbishop Agostino Marchetto, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Migrants and Travelers, described his reaction as one of "surprise, unease and sadness."

While he said he supported efforts to protect children from exploitation and to send them to school, he said he was convinced there were other ways to accomplish that.

"In Catholic morality," he said, "not only must the aim be good, but the means for reaching it must be."

The fingerprinting plan is blatantly discriminatory, he said.

UNESCO's World Heritage Committee on Sunday added three new sites to its heritage list, including a former slave hideout in Mauritius, the Nabataean archaeological site in Saudi Arabia, and China's Fujian Tulou earthen houses.

The Archaeological Site of Al-Hijr, the largest conserved site of the civilization of the Nabataeans south of Petra in Jordan, is the first World Heritage site in Saudi Arabia.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization also chose the Morne Cultural Landscape, a rugged mountain jutting into the Indian Ocean in southwestern Mauritius that was used as a shelter by runaway slaves, maroons, through the 18th and early years of the 19th centuries.

Nazi hunters arrived in Chile on Monday on the trail of Aribert Heim, nicknamed Dr. Death for killing hundreds of inmates at an Austrian concentration camp during World War Two, who they believe may be lurking in picturesque Patagonia.

Heim, who kept the skull of a man he decapitated as a paperweight, is the most wanted Nazi war criminal still thought to be alive. He would be 94 and his family says he died in 1993.

"We are not here thinking that his capture is imminent, but we have to bolster a campaign that we launched a few months ago," Sergio Widder, of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Buenos Aires, told Reuters on his arrival in Santiago.

The Gettysburg Cyclorama is to reopen Sept. 26 after a five-year restoration, and for the first time in more than a century, viewers standing in the middle of the wraparound canvas will see it as its artist originally intended.

The cyclorama, which a 19th-century poster promoted as a "sublime spectacle" presenting "glorious Gettysburg in all the awful splendor of real war," had become less than that over the decades. The U.S. National Park Service and its private partner, the Gettysburg Foundation, have been reconstructing the diorama and other elements of the colossal artwork to bring back the ensemble that made veterans cry when the cyclorama opened in 1884.

Conservators are now dabbing final brushstrokes onto the canvas and setting up the pieces of the diorama. When its $15 million restoration is completed, the cyclorama will be displayed in the Gettysburg National Military Park's new museum and visitor center here, filling a building that evokes a Pennsylvania round barn.

With all illusion-making machinery in place, the effect should be like putting on special glasses at a 3-D movie. The restored oil painting - now larger at 377 feet in circumference and 42 feet tall (about 115 meters and 13 meters) - combined with the recreated diorama, an elevated viewing platform and other features, can once again exert its visual trickery.

Making good on a promise to a friend to summarize his views on Christianity, Thomas Jefferson set to work with scissors, snipping out every miracle and inconsistency he could find in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Then, relying on a cut-and-paste technique, he reassembled the excerpts into what he believed was a more coherent narrative and pasted them onto blank paper -- alongside translations in French, Greek and Latin.

In a letter sent from Monticello to John Adams in 1813, Jefferson said his "wee little book" of 46 pages was based on a lifetime of inquiry and reflection and contained "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man."

In the early 1950s, American troops were being killed and captured by the thousands in Korea. Panic spread that China’s Communists had learned how to penetrate and control the minds of American prisoners of war.

The technique was called “brainwashing.” And suddenly it’s worth recalling what brainwashing was about. Because now we know, from an article in The New York Times last week, that in a new time of anxiety America’s own interrogators drew lessons from China’s treatment of American prisoners of war for their treatment of prisoners in the war on terror.

The concept of brainwashing was the brainchild of Edward Hunter, a newspaperman born in 1902, who had covered the rise of fascism in Europe before joining the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency, during World War II. The Korean War had just begun in 1950 when The Miami News published his article, “ ‘Brain-Washing’ Tactics Force Chinese Into Ranks of Communist Party.”

Members of the list may be interested to hear that a remarkable cache of documents spanning the 1660s through the mid-20th century has been recently uncovered in an old Eastern Shore manor house. Poplar Grove, granted to the Emory family by Lord Baltimore in 1669, and still in the possession of descendants, is a veritable treasure trove of 400 years of American history. The well-connected Emorys played important roles in national and state politics, and served in every major military conflict from the Revolution to World War II. They also saved virtually every scrap of paper that came into their possession, including 17th century land records, a letter from a West Point cadet describing ex-President Monroe's 1828 visit to the Academy, important Civil War documents, an antislavery petition signed by dozens of Eastern Shore residents in the 1830s, and a detailed description by Tench Coxe of buying a slave in Philadelphia in 1779.

Through a partnership between the Maryland State Archives and the C.V. Starr Center for the American Experience at Washington College, a team of four student researchers under the direction of State Archivist Dr. Edward Papenfuse, is spending the summer carefully inventorying, transcribing, and cataloguing these priceless resources. The Poplar Grove papers will eventually be accessible to researchers through the Maryland State Archives.

The project has aroused quite a bit of public interest. To share its findings with all those following the story, the Poplar Grove team has created a blog that will be updated throughout the summer, and will include scans of some of the more interesting finds: HYPERLINK "http://poplargroveproject.blogspot.com/" http://poplargroveproject.blogspot.com/ The team welcomes postings of comments and questions on the blog site.

How would the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin feel about the way the United States has turned out 232 years after declaring its independence?

Not pleased, a majority of Americans recently polled said.

According to a new CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey, 69 percent of adult Americans who responded to a poll June 26-29 said the signers of the Declaration of Independence would be disappointed by the way the nation has turned out overall.

Twenty-nine percent responded "pleased," the only other choice given to the 1,026 respondents of the telephone poll.

SCRANTON, Pa. — Few of the 3,000 historic postcards in Jack Hiddlestone's collection are as veiled in mystery as the one with Abraham Lincoln on the front.

The postcard, from 1909, depicts an ornate stone pillar decked out with bronze eagles and lions and topped by an enormous bronze bust of the nation's 16th president. Along the bottom of the card are the words "Lincoln Monument, Nay Aug Park."

Here's the mystery: Sometime in the early decades of the 20th century, the 16-foot-tall structure — which had been dedicated with great fanfare on July 4, 1909, the centennial year of Lincoln's birth — simply vanished.

And no one still living seems to know where it went.

As Scranton prepares to celebrate Lincoln's bicentennial next year, Hiddlestone and other local historians — who only recently confirmed the memorial's existence — are now trying to find out what happened to it. Their dream: to locate Lincoln and bring him back to Nay Aug Park by Independence Day, 2009.

"Ideally, someone would say, 'I know where that is,' said Mary Ann Moran-Savakinus, executive director of the Lackawanna County Historical Society. "Someone from the Midwest would call us and say, 'We purchased it and moved it out here."'

No such luck so far. The historical society has looked through its records and taken inventory of its holdings but has found no reference to the memorial or its fate.

"It's just depressing," Moran-Savakinus said. "It's very unfortunate that it's not documented somewhere. Things like that just don't disappear."

Hiddlestone stumbled on the Lincoln postcard while browsing at a postcard show in Allentown a decade ago. He was baffled by its reference to Nay Aug Park, one of his favorite haunts as a boy growing up in the 1930s and '40s.

Hiddlestone, 79, often swam or went ice skating at Nay Aug and didn't remember ever seeing a Lincoln bust, certainly not one as large and elaborate as the monument on the postcard. He asked around and none of his fellow history buffs knew anything about it, either. The historical society queried its members and got no response.

Hiddlestone, who has published several booklets on local history and lore, came to doubt the postcard's veracity. The subject was dropped.

But not for good.

As it happens, a reporter for The Times-Tribune of Scranton spotted a photo of that very same monument while rummaging through the paper's archives last month.

The photo, in which more than a dozen men, women and children are seen posing with the monument, appeared in the July 3, 1909 edition with a caption that said the bust was to be presented to the city as part of the Independence Day dedication of Lake Lincoln, a manmade lake at Nay Aug Park.

A few days later, on July 6, 1909, the paper reported that 20,000 people were in attendance as Scranton's Italian consul, Fortunato Tiscar, presented the monument to Mayor John Von Bergen Jr., who proclaimed it "that magnificent bust of the immortal Lincoln."

With that kind of documentary evidence, there's no longer any doubt that Honest Abe occupied a place of honor at the city-owned park.

"Now the question is, why isn't it there today?" Hiddlestone said.

A clue might be found in one of Hiddlestone's own booklets. There, on page 26, is a reproduction of a 1921 postcard titled "Merry Bathers, Lake Lincoln" that shows the monument along a distant shore of the lake, next to a bathhouse. The image is blurry, but unmistakable. A reader spotted it a few weeks ago and alerted the newspaper.

Hiddlestone was sheepish.

"I know my collection really well, but I never put a (magnifying) glass on that shoreline and looked at it," he said.

Since the monument was situated along the water, one promising theory holds that when Lake Lincoln was renovated and expanded in the '20s, officials realized it was in the way and took it down.

If that's true, there's little hope that the memorial's intricately carved stone base has survived.

But Charles Spano, who chairs Lackawanna County's Lincoln bicentennial commission, said the bronze bust may still be out there, perhaps in storage at a museum somewhere.

"Maybe somebody in that museum will look in their collection and there might be some provenance" to indicate that it came from Scranton, he said.

There's one thing he's sure about: "You just didn't walk up, stick it under your coat and take it home."

Astronomers from Texas State University have suggested an alternative date for Julius Caesar’s first landing in Britain. Donald W. Olson and Russell Doescher dispute the accepted dates for the Roman landing of August 26-27, 55BC, because the English Channel was flowing in the wrong direction. Tests carried out in August 2007 provided a unique opportunity for comparison with 55BC tidal conditions. It prompted the astronomers to suggest a revised date of August 22-23 for the invasion at Deal on the south coast of England. The findings are reported in the August issue of Sky & Telescope magazine.

Obama now wears a flag pin on his lapel. Every day.

Short of wearing a stars and stripes onesie, the flag lapel pin is the quickest sartorial method for a politician to telegraph his or her patriotism. The origin of the flag lapel pin is murky, though it is by necessity linked the history of the American flag as a commonly used symbol. According to Mark Leepson's Flag: An American Biography, the "near religious reverence many Americans have" for our national symbol dates only to the Civil War era (not back to the Revolutionary War, as many assume) . Prior to that, few private citizens possessed or flew their own flags — it was limited to military and federal facilities. When the Confederates started winning battles early on in the War Between the States, Northerners began to fly the flag as a sign of pride.

Since then, flag imagery has been intricately tied to moments of crisis or conflict. Over the past four decades, Kit Hinrichs, one of the nation's top graphic designers, has collected more than 5,000 pieces of stars and stripes–related memorabilia. He says the flag lapel pins in his collection don't really date back before mid-century. "I don't think it was a common thing for men and women to wear before the Second World War," he says. "I certainly have jewelry from before then with flags on it — cufflinks and stick pins and tuxedo buttons and brooches — but not [many flag pins] before the '50s."