The fortress-like 1960s concrete block housing America’s embassy in Britain could be listed by English Heritage.

The conservation quango is expected within the next few weeks to recommend to Andy Burnham, the culture secretary, that he should give the 600-room building a grade II listing.

The US ambassador, Robert Tuttle, is said to have been lobbying the conservation quango to head off the preservation order, which could halve the estimated £200m value of the embassy in Grosvenor Square, Mayfair.

The young soldier stepped into the bedroom. It was the first time he had gone to a prostitute and he felt apprehensive and embarrassed. He also found himself unable to have sex. 'I was - what do you call it? - impotent,' he said.

This type of recollection from an unnamed veteran of the First World War, 90 years after the end of the conflict, is seldom reflected in the histories, poems or services of remembrance. It is among newly discovered accounts which bring to life a hidden history of young men who, facing death daily in the trenches, sought sexual release where they could.

They came to light when historian Joshua Levine trawled the sound archives of the Imperial War Museum for his forthcoming book, Forgotten Voices of the Somme. The archive contains more than 56,000 hours of taped interviews, with contributions from veterans who have long since died. Along with memories of battle and the loss of comrades, some were surprisingly candid about sex and sexuality, despite the taboos of their generation.

Negative campaigning in America was sired by two lifelong friends, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Back in 1776, the dynamic duo combined powers to help claim America's independence, and they had nothing but love and respect for one another. But by 1800, party politics had so distanced the pair that, for the first and last time in U.S. history, a president found himself running against his vice president. Things got ugly fast. Jefferson's camp accused President Adams of having a"hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman."

In return, Adams' men called Vice President Jefferson"a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father."

As the slurs piled on, Adams was labeled a fool, a hypocrite, a criminal, and a tyrant, while Jefferson was branded a weakling, an atheist, a libertine, and a coward.

Even Martha Washington succumbed to the propaganda, telling a clergyman that Jefferson was"one of the most detestable of mankind."

A YouTube video has caught a Venezuelan TV sportscaster in the act of a flagrant example of historical ignorance.

The anchor, one of the replacement journalists the government of Hugo Chavez installed after nationalizing TV station RCTV, confuses Michael Phelps and Jesse Owens, and then goes on to claim that Hitler presided over the Munich games of 1972.

Hijacked by a relatively small few, the GOP of today bears no resemblance to Lincoln, Roosevelt or Eisenhower’s party, or many of the other Republican administrations that came after. In my grandparents’ time, the thrust of the party was rooted in: a respect for the constitution; the defense of civil liberties; a commitment to fiscal responsibility; the pursuit and stewardship of America’s interests abroad; the use of multilateral international engagement and “soft power”; the advancement of civil rights; investment in infrastructure; environmental stewardship; the promotion of science and its discoveries; and a philosophical approach focused squarely on the future.

MANAGUA — Standing on the floor of the old national legislature where he and a group of Sandinista rebels sparked a national insurrection 30 years ago, legendary guerrilla leader Eden Pastora urges Nicaraguan youth to continue the revolution after he and his graying comrades have passed away.

''You need to be more revolutionary,'' Pastora, 71, told the packed audience of high-school students, as part of the government's weeklong commemoration of the assault on the National Palace. "Sandinismo and the revolution are the only instruments that can save this country.''

Pastora first introduced the world to the Sandinista revolution on Aug. 22, 1978, as the dashing Comandante Cero who took the entire legislature of 90 lawmakers hostage and then forced dictator Anastasio Somoza to agree to a prisoner swap for jailed Sandinista rebels.

History continues to be unearthed through excavations of the ancient city of Pompeipolis, located in the western Black Sea city of Kastamonu.

Last year the excavations uncovered the Temple of Augustus, a Turkish bath, a drainage system and the ruins of a villa from the late Roman period. During the third-term excavations, which started a month ago, archeologists have unearthed a mosaic and an iron furnace from the Roman period, as well as a marketplace.

Professor Latife Summerer, the head of the excavations and a lecturer at Munich University, said a team of 39 people was working on the excavations and they had made their findings in a very short time. She added they had found more artifacts that they had expected during the three-year excavations.

The U.S. intelligence community buckled sooner in 2002 than previously reported to Bush administration pressure for data justifying an invasion of Iraq, according to a documents posting on the Web today by National Security Archive senior fellow John Prados.

The documents suggest that the public relations push for war came before the intelligence analysis, which then conformed to public positions taken by Pentagon and White House officials. For example, a July 2002 draft of the "White Paper" ultimately issued by the CIA in October 2002 actually pre-dated the National Intelligence Estimate that the paper purportedly summarized, but which Congress did not insist on until September 2002.

A similar comparison between a declassified draft and the final version of the British government's "White Paper" on Iraq weapons of mass destruction adds to evidence that the two nations colluded in the effort to build public support for the invasion of Iraq. Dr. Prados concludes that the new evidence tends to support charges raised by former White House press secretary Scott McClellan and by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in its long-delayed June 2008 "Phase II" report on politicization of intelligence.

A website drawing some attention has been established to build public opposition to Wal-Mart's plan to construct a new store adjacent to Civil War battlefields in Virginia.

Readers coming to the website, http://www.civilwar.org/walmart08, are told:

Walmart is planning on building a 141,000 sq. ft. Superstore next to the Wilderness and Chancellorsville Battlefields. Do you want to see the historical significance of both of these battlefields marred forever by more pavement, more traffic and more developement that a Walmart Supercenter will bring in its wake?

Related Links

News story

Walmart's War on America (Huff Post)

About two years ago, National Park Service employees stumbled upon a fascinating and largely untold piece of American history.

It involves a secret World War II interrogation camp at Fort Hunt, Va., not far from the Pentagon. During and right after the war, thousands of top German prisoners were questioned there about troop movements and scientific advances.

Soldiers at the site also prepared special "care packages" for American POWs that they sent overseas. They included maps, radios and other escape tools.

Many of the camp's records were destroyed right after the war, and those who worked there were sworn to secrecy. Many veterans never spoke about it, even to family and friends, although the operation has been gradually declassified over the past two decades.

The National Park Service, which now runs Fort Hunt Park, has been trying to piece together the story of the interrogation facility — code-named P.O. Box 1142 during the war.

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com published a short, sidebar analysis in the latest issue of the New Republic showing that in recent decades the candidate with the larger post-convention poll bounce invariably wins the national popular vote. That is, Al Gore out-conventioned George W. Bush, as did the other outright presidential winners. (TNR requires a subscription, but its link to Silver's analysis and accompanying chart is no longer available anyway; however, here is a more technical post from Silver about convention bounces.)

Mark Penn, in the Politico today, echoes Silver's point:

This year, the party that wins the battle of the conventions will likely win the election. In the past 60 years, few presidential candidates have overcome negative poll numbers taken after the conventions. While races have gotten closer and debates have had an effect, nothing in the months between convention and election has swayed the voters' preferences.

With all the ads, debates and spin and counterspin, can it really be that the conventions -- usually dismissed in the modern era as confections, as mere pageants -- matter so much? The evidence seems to be there. This could just be a reflection of how close elections have been in recent decades, and hence one can find any number of so-called pivotal factors.

Still, it is amazing, if a bit daunting, to think that these two, four-day pageants held during the late-August/Labor Day period, when voters are supposed to be tuned out at the beach, watching the Olympics or back-to-school shopping, can matter so much to the final outcome three months later.

As the two big parties that govern America ready for their quadrennial conventions, the question on the minds of many political pros is … well, OK, it’s who the vice presidential picks will be. But they’re also wondering something else: What’s happened to the bounce?

Historically the hoopla and media attention of conventions give nominees a boost in the polls. But in 2004, President Bush got an unimpressive 2 percent bounce following the GOP week-long party. The comparable figure for John Kerry was zero. Nada. A doughnut.

So, will Barack Obama and John McCain get bounces, or was 2004 the beginning of a trend? When it comes to conventions, the bounce is kind of the point of the thing,
after all. The gatherings are highly scripted media events designed to frame candidates in the minds of voters and provide them a head start in the race to November.

“Campaigns are a multistage process – but the convention is a key step,” says Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University.

History should be some comfort to both the Obama and McCain campaigns. Almost all of the 22 national conventions held since 1964 produced an increase in voter support for their nominees, notes a just-released Gallup Poll analysis. The median increase has been five points. The only nominees to get no bounce, or fall backward, were Democrats: Senator Kerry in 2004 and George McGovern in 1972.

“This convention bounce is an important part of the presidential campaign narrative, and is one of the more highly anticipated events for poll watchers,” notes the Gallup analysis.

This boost sometimes is a slingshot that puts a trailing candidate ahead for good. According to Gallup numbers, in 1988 the conventions were the turning point for the GOP’s George H.W. Bush in his race against Democrat Michael Dukakis. Ditto for 1992, when the end of the Democratic convention coincided with independent Ross Perot dropping out of the race. Bill Clinton bounced up 16 points in Gallup surveys and never looked back.

In other years, the candidate bounces and then falls back to earth. In 1980 and 2000 Democrats Jimmy Carter and Al Gore, respectively, gained the lead in polls following convention season. Both lost after debates and other events sent their ratings down.

On average, the bounce for Democratic candidates is larger than it is for Republicans, according to Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. His figures show that the typical bounce for a Democratic nominee over that time has been 7.3 percent. The comparable figure for the GOP has been 6.4.

The Vatican has for the first time published the prayer the Knights Templar composed when "unjustly imprisoned", in which they appealed to the Virgin Mary to persuade "our enemies" to abandon "calumnies and lies" and revert to "truth and charity".

L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, said the prayer was further proof that the order, which was dissolved in the fourteenth century, was not heretical. The knights were innocent of the charges against them, which included the accusation that they worshipped idols such as a "monstrous statue, half man and half goat".

The L'Osservatore Romano article, by Barbara Frale, the Vatican Secret Archives scholar who has made a special study of the knights, said it was untrue that the knights were guilty of "decadence, heresy and immoral practices".

Archaeologists have lifted the lid on Roman history in the North-East of England. I’m not punning for the sake of it: they have literally lifted the lid off two coffins that have been discovered on a building site in ewcastle. You can see a video of the actual event on the BBC News website . Given the parlous state of our summer you won’t be surprised to note that the coffin in question was brimful of muddy water once they craned the heavy stone top away. You might have thought that such an ingress of brown muck wouldn’t be a terribly promising state of affairs for the archaeologists, but in fact, there’s a strong tradition of great Roman remains from the vicinity of Hadrian’s Wall coming out of waterlogged deposits. I’m thinking of course of the Vindolanda tablets, the wooden records of everyday life on the Roman frontier that were famously preserved by lying for centuries in a protective layer of sealed damp clay.

So, once the water had been drained away, the remains of a female were found in the muddy floor of the coffin. They bones looked very much the worse for wear but the archaeologists are shown in the video very carefully trowelling around them. I’ve done that task myself, spending several happy but very very muddy days trying not to damage Bronze Age wooden remains in various waterlogged holes in the Somerset Levels. It’s not terribly glamorous but anaerobic conditions are marvellous for preserving organic matter so it’s a job worth doing.

One does not normally see 2000 lb. statues in marble and bronze playing musical chairs. But that’s what has been happening at the Natural History Museum in London, with Charles Darwin and his main adversary as the only players.

The museum was designed in the Victorian era as “a temple to nature,” and it feels like a cathedral. There’s a main hall that looks a lot like a nave, and at the far end, there’s a statue on a stairway landing below a stained glass window, in a position that might otherwise be occupied by Jesus Christ. For 90 years, until this past May, a bronze image of Richard Owen, the great nineteenth-century anatomist who founded the museum, stood in this place of honor.

Owen is remembered nowadays mainly for having coined the term dinosaur (meaning “terrible lizard”), but he also wrote important papers on animals from the moa and the pearly nautilus to the ground sloth. When Charles Darwin returned from his round-the-world travels on H.M.S. Beagle, he handed over the sloth and other fossils for Owen to analyze.

But the two men later fell out over Darwin’s evolutionary theories. Owen was a social climber and a schemer. If T. H. Huxley was "Darwin's bulldog," then Owen was the snarling lapdog of the establishment opposition. And he waged a long losing battle against the Darwinian revolution. Darwin, who seldom had an unkind word for anyone, once remarked, “The Londoners say he is mad with envy because my book is so talked about. It is painful to be hated in the intense degree with which Owen hates me."

Owen soon had further grounds for stoking his hatred: Shortly after Darwin died in 1882, the nation honored the founder of evolutionary theory by putting his marble statue on the landing in Owen’s own cathedral, the Natural History Museum. Owen had to live with this slight until his own death in 1892.

Then in 1927, some lingering Owen loyalist managed to get Darwin booted out and Owen moved in. And that’s how it was until May of this year: Owen presiding in the main hall, while Darwin sat in a secondary room, beyond the main entrance hall, amid the noisy children eating lunch at the Waterhouse Cafe. (Huxley’s statue was there, too, and he looked as if he wanted to be out biting someone's ankle).

But 2009 is the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On The Origin of Species. So in May, the museum plucked Owen off his pedestal, and put Darwin in his place. The statue swap took three days.

The Cultural Center of Khorramshahr Sacred Defense recently donated a dozen stamps to the Brest Fortress Defense Museum, Belarus.

Head of the center, Nader Daryaban, said that the stamps bear the images of Iranian martyrs and aim to transfer the concept and values of Iran’s Sacred Defense era (Iran-Iraq 1980-1988 war), the Persian service of IRNA reported.

“The stamps bear images of the commanders including Mohammad-Ali Jahan-Ara, Abdorreza Musavi, Behruz Moradi, Ahmad Shush, Mohammadreza Dashti, Behnam Mohammadi and Shahnaz Hajishah,” Daryaban added.

The Vatican has for the first time published the prayer the Knights Templar composed when "unjustly imprisoned", in which they appealed to the Virgin Mary to persuade "our enemies" to abandon "calumnies and lies" and revert to "truth and charity".

L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, said the prayer was further proof that the order, which was dissolved in the fourteenth century, was not heretical. The knights were innocent of the charges against them, which included the accusation that they worshipped idols such as a "monstrous statue, half man and half goat".

The L'Osservatore Romano article, by Barbara Frale, the Vatican Secret Archives scholar who has made a special study of the knights, said it was untrue that the knights were guilty of "decadence, heresy and immoral practices".

The move follows legal action by the alleged heirs of Knights Templar to force the Vatican to restore the reputation of the disgraced order and acknowledge that assets worth some 80 million pounds were confiscated.

Back when Jimmy Carter was running for president in 1976, his brother Billy had a tendency to mouth off and act so colorfully that a reporter suggested to him that, well, perhaps he was a little strange. “Look,” Billy replied, “my Mama was a 70-year-old Peace Corps volunteer in India, one of my sisters goes all over the world as a holy-roller preacher, my oldest sister spends half her time on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and my brother thinks he’s going to be president of the United States. Which one of our family do you think is normal.”

True enough. Then again, when it comes to families, there is no such thing as “normal.” Which is why every four years, we reach that part of the presidential campaign cycle where the family laundry comes tumbling out in soiled and smelly heaps.

Earlier this week, it became known that Cindy McCain had not one but two half-sisters, one of whom has been deeply offended that Mrs. McCain describes herself as an “only child.”

“I’m upset,” Kathleen Hensly Portalski told NPR. “I’m angry. It makes me feel like a non-person, kind of.”

Barack Obama had his own sibling problems this week, when a 26-year-old man, George Hussein Onyango Obama, shown standing dejectedly in front of a shack in Nairobi, told the Italian-language Vanity Fair that he is Mr. Obama’s half brother. “I live like a recluse,” George Obama says in the article. “No one knows I exist.”

Then there is Hillary Rodham Clinton’s brother, Tony Rodham, who was spotted in Obama enemy territory this week, meeting with former supporters of his sister and Carly Fiorino, a McCain campaign adviser, according to the Scranton Times Tribune.

All of which proves once again that TV’s most far-fetched soap operas can be as sterile as academic studies when it comes to capturing the crazy, complicated, surprising twists in the dynamics of real-life families.

Mrs. McCain has defended herself, explaining that she was raised as an only child while her older sisters lived separately with their mothers. That has not stopped the criticism by some left-leaning pundits.

Mr. Obama is also under attack, with conservative talk radio blasting him for not doing more to help his impoverished family members. Mr. Obama devoted numerous pages to that part of his life in “Dreams from My Father,” a book that was in part an attempt to deal with Mr. Obama’s Kenyan father, who helped produce at least eight half-brothers and sisters from four marriages or relationships.

As for the Clintons — their critics have had a field day, seeing Tony Rodham’s meeting with Ms. Fiorina as proof of Bill and Hillary’s duplicity when it comes to their sincerity in supporting Mr. Obama.

Chances are this week’s mini-scandals won’t be the end of it, given that most Americans stem from extremely entangled family trees. But this is hardly a new problem: Presidents and would-be presidents have been embarrassed by relatives dating back to John Adams. He was accused of nepotism for appointing a son-in-law and the father-in-law of his son, John Quincy, to government posts.

One of the many scandals in the administration of Ulysses S. Grant involved his brother-in-law, who had been the equivalent of a corporate lobbyist.

And Richard Nixon so feared scandal erupting from his brother’s business deals that he had the Secret Service spy on him.

For George W. Bush, it was too late: His brother, Neil, was slapped by an administrative law judge for his role in the economically devastating savings and loan scandal of the 1980s.

And while Bill Clinton had to do some ’splaining about his half-brother, Roger, even before he was elected, there was even more sibling tension after he was sworn in, some again involving Mrs. Clinton’s brothers. They had a tendency to get involved in controversial business opportunities at most inopportune times for the sitting president — for instance, when Tony Rodham traveled to Cambodia during a violent election campaign there to scout out investment opportunities.

As for Billy Carter, he was often the subject of ridicule for his antics, which included drinking copious amounts of beer. But when he took a $220,000 loan from the Libyan government, which was looking for a favor from the United States — well, let’s just say having the Internal Revenue Service and other government agencies scouring your every transaction was a lot less humorous than launching a label called Billy Beer.

Kneeling on the dining room floor, Evan Lattimer sliced open a cardboard box and braced herself for what might be inside: a lock of human hair, a half-smoked cigar, an arcane torture device, perhaps? Her face broke into a smile as she peeled away the bubble wrap: a dinosaur egg.

"You just never knew with Dad," she said.

When her father, John Lattimer, died in May 2007 at the age of 92, Evan Lattimer knew her inheritance would include more than the family tea set. John Lattimer, a prominent urologist at Columbia University, was also a renowned collector of relics, many of which might be considered quirky or even macabre.

Over the course of seven decades he amassed more than 3,000 objects that ranged in age from a few years to tens of millions of years. "He was like a classic Renaissance collector," said Tony Perrottet, a writer specializing in historical mysteries who spent time with John Lattimer before his death. "Anything and everything could turn up in the collection, from Charles Lindbergh's goggles to a bearskin coat that belonged to Custer."

Roman temple ruins from the 2nd century A.D. have emerged from excavations at the ancient Jewish capital of the Galilee in Israel.

The discovery shows that the city of Zippori housed a significant pagan population which built a temple in the city center during the Roman period.

The central location of the temple lies within a walled courtyard, and may help archaeologists better understand the urban layout of Zippori in the Roman era.

Le Van Lua, the first North Vietnamese that Lieutenant Commander John McCain encountered in 1967, says he greeted the American aviator with the biggest kitchen knife he could find. He'd like to welcome McCain back as president of the United States.

He isn't alone. Former prisoner of war McCain has some unlikely supporters in Vietnam, a country he bombed 23 times. Like Le, many Vietnamese are cheering for the self-confessed ``air pirate,'' absolving McCain-the-bomber and embracing the senator who pushed to normalize diplomatic relations with Vietnam in 1995.

``They love the man who looks to the future,'' said Nguyen Dai Phuong, an editor at Tien Phong, a Hanoi daily. ``They don't love the pilot who came to kill their family.''

McCain's role as a ``frontrunner'' in the normalization process has convinced Vietnam's ruling class that his White House would increase bilateral trade, which was about $11 billion last year.

[Vlad Jecan is a science journalist and can be contacted via his personal website http://www.vladjecan.com.]

Archaeologists digging at the ancient site of Sagalassos, in Turkey, found a huge marble head of Faustina the Elder, wife of Emperor Antoninus Pius.

Initially, archaeologists have correlated the finding to Vibia Sabina. She was forced at the age of 14 to marry Hadrian and died in 136-137 AD. This assumption was eventually abandoned as the team managed to get a better look at the finding and the real identity of the marble head was revealed. It is a representation of Faustina the Elder, wife of the Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius.

The immense statue fragment was discovered in an ancient bath house filled with rubble only 6 meters away from the spot where last year the team found the colossal portrait of Hadrian. Faustina’s marble head was found in a room that was probably a frigidarium, a cold water pool where the Romans would go after having a hot bath.

“Just like Hadrians head, leg and right foot last year, Faustina's head was found in the collapse of the bath complex. In the mean time, also one arm, the two feet of Faustina the Elder as most probably the two feet of Antoninus Pius also turned up”, said Marc Waelkens, from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, who directed the excavations.

Waelkens said that the construction work of the Roman baths started under Emperor Hadrian who gave the city a privileged status by appointing it the center of the Imperial cult in the region of Pisidia. Later the building was dedicated to the co-emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus in 165 AD when the room in which Fuastina and Hadrian have been discovered was the ‘Kaisersaal’. “This means that all emperors and empresses from Hadrian to Marcus Aurelius and his wife Faustina Minor, and Lucius Versu and his wife Lucilla must have stood in that room.”

Faustina the Elder

With Emperor Nerva in 96 AD, a new dynasty was founded, known as the Antonine dynasty that ruled Rome for about one century. The death of Commodus is 192 AD brought the Empire into Civil War and ended the dynasty. Antoninus Pius was adopted by Emperor Hadrian and ruled the Empire between 138 and 161 AD. His reign is known to have been mostly without wars or internal strife.

Antoninus got the epithet ‘pius’, meaning kind, affectionate, after he kindly asked the Senate not to ban the memory of his adoptive father, Emperor Hadrian. Of course he had other means at his disposal but preferred a more diplomatic one.

Quite infrequent for the royal family was a happy marriage, but this is not the case for Antoninus Pius and Faustina the Elder. Their marriage lasted for 31 years until Faustina’s death in 141 AD. It seems that she never interfered with the state’s policies nor did she try to politically influence her husband.

“It is a characteristic of all empresses of the Antonine dynasty that they did not try to influence their husbands’ policies,” said Waelkens.

We find Faustina the Elder to also have had a kind heart. She was well respected and came from a noble family. One aspect of her life that defines her character is her continuous involvement in charity work.

“She took measures in favor of orphaned children, especially girls”, Waelkens added.

After Faustina’s death Antoninus deified her and issued coins in her memory depicting her on one side with the inscription “Diva Faustina” (Divine Faustina).

Sagalassos

Sagalassos is an ancient site with thousands of years of history. The site was actually occupied by the first settlers in around 8000 BC. Millennia later we find various Hittite documents mentioning the site in 1,400 BC.

In Roman Imperial times, Sagalassos became the capital of Pisidia, a region in the western part of the Taurus Mountains, and quickly had economical success.

Waelkens said that this success was due to the building of Roman road ‘via Sabaste’ which was built in 6BC to link the colonies to the ports of Pamphylia. Local aristocrats saw the commercial benefits.

“The aristocrats of Sagalassos, which owned a territory of 1.200 sq. metres, embraced immediately the Roman cause and were rewarded with Roman citizenship, knighthood or even senatorship and became rich as the road allowed them to invest in cash crops export (grain, olives) and in the production and export of high quality red slipped table ware”, Marc Waelkens said.

Unfortunately, in 518 disaster came. A devastating earthquake shook the city and plague was responsible for the lives of many locals. But the city was finally abandoned just one hundred years later, in around 640, after another earthquake almost completely destroyed it.

One of the presidential campaign's most pitched battles is already blazing away. But the action won't be coming to you live from Denver or St. Paul in the next two weeks, pollsters can barely track it and -- most important -- there aren't any rules.

For months, anonymous e-mail chain letters, blog posts and message board items attacking Barack Obama have been flying around the country. Obama's campaign is concerned enough about the rumor mill to devote an entire Web site to fighting them. While some of the messages are blatantly false, the most dangerous ones mix lies and out-of-context facts just well enough to sound legit, playing not too subtly on racism and ignorance to make the truths they include sound sinister. (Now a book that basically collects some of the bogus accusations by Jerome Corsi is sitting at the top of the New York Times bestseller list.)

Two such messages, circulating by e-mail and popping up in comments on blogs for months, are reproduced below -- and annotated and debunked, point by point -- to illustrate the tactics Obama's been up against for most of the campaign. The first e-mail attacks the candidate's wife, attempting to paint Michelle Obama –- and by extension, Barack Obama -- as an America-hating black separatist radical. Democratic pollsters say many voters don't know much about Michelle Obama. This e-mail, which began circulating during the Democratic primaries, seems to be a deliberate attempt to fill in a mostly blank mental canvas with negative associations before the Obama campaign can tell her story itself.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine on Tuesday approved a broad reuse plan that will allow Fort Monroe to become a combination tourist destination, park, and community of homes, offices and retail businesses.

An 18-member Fort Monroe Federal Area Development Authority has worked with consultants on the delicate act of preserving the post, which is a nationally registered landmark, while coming up with a plan to have it bring in enough revenue to pay for maintenance, restoration and improvements. The authority approved the plan in June and it was submitted to the governor for final approval.

"I am pleased with the work of the FMFADA over the past 18 months to create a plan for Fort Monroe that ensures this spectacular and historic property will be enjoyed by many generations to come," Kaine said in a prepared statement. "I also am pleased that the process to create the reuse plan has included many community and regional leaders, experts in historic preservation and economic development, the city of Hampton, and the National Park Service."