Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus today received the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Director for International Relations, Dr.Shimon Samuels, at the Presidential Palace in Vilnius.

Samuels raised the following issues of concern in the Jewish-Lithuanian context:

-the poisonous political climate conflating the fate of Jewish Holocaust victims mass murdered in Ponar with that of Lithuanians exiled to the Soviet Gulag
-the subsequent antisemitic media attacks and judicial harassment of elderly Jewish partisans, Fania Brantsovskaya and Rachel Margolis - as also Yad VaShem Chairman emeritus, Dr.Yitzhak Arad
-the restitution of Jewish community property and the dispute over the Jewish cemetery
-the lack of Holocaust education

Now a member of European and Western international organizations, Samuels urged Lithuania to comply with their provisions on tolerance and antiracism,with a special historic responsibility to join the campaign against resurgent antisemitism at the UN Durban Review Conference in Geneva next April.

The Centre, likewise, called on Lithuania to "celebrate the anti-Nazi resistance by both Jewish and non-Jewish partisans."

Samuels acknowledged the President's statement denouncing Skinhead violence,the banning of Nazi insignia and his wreath laying at the AMIA Jewish Centre bombsite on his State visit to Argentina.

"Mr.President, all these measures are eclipsed by the offence to the Jewish partisans," continued Samuels, "as a respected international statesman and Ambassador of Goodwill of UNESCO, our Centre calls on you to invoke your moral authority for prompt closure on this issue...the United States Congress has just registered its own discontentment."

"Next month's 65th anniversary of the liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto is perhaps a fitting occasion for a Presidential major statement honouring the anti-Nazi resistence by inviting Fania, Rachel and Dr. Arad as guests of the State," concluded Samuels.

President Adamkus responded by condemning the Holocaust as, "the most horrible crime of the twentieth century," adding, "Lithuania, a small country, lost its leading Jewish intellectuals and doctors to the Nazi genocide and its leading citizens to the Soviets."

He added, "I recognize the crimes committed by my fellow Lithuanians. This group destroyed our image...our Righteous Gentiles, though few, showed what should have been our true principles. These were moments of which I am ashamed."

"Regarding the cemetery, it was first desecrated by the Soviet Sports Palace in the 1950's. The open space in front of it - even if privately owned - is to be sequestered and dedicated to Jewish memory for generations. Our Prime Minister agrees that it must be untouched."

"On the partisans, I have spoken with the Attorney General, the Arad case is closed. Neither are the two women suspects. If they would give their expertise in a historical investigation, that would be welcome."

Samuels advised that this formula would be construed as continued implication in a judicial process and requested a public statement confirming the definitive closure of this painful crisis.

The Centre thanked the President looking forward to the implementation of these oral commitments.

Al Smith spent the last 12 years filling in the shell of his cherry-red 1957 2-door Chevrolet Bel Air.

And today, it became a part of history, driving in a parade of 100 General Motors Corp. vehicles to celebrate the automaker’s 100-year history at the Woodward Dream Cruise.

“These cars are automotive art,” said Smith, whose wife is a financial manager at GM, which was founded almost 100 years ago – on Sept. 16, 1906.

GM put out a call to employees and retirees for their own stories about their GM vehicles – vintage and modern – to select the cars and pickups that would take to Woodward Avenue for the GM Century Cruise.

At 7:30 this morning those 100 vehicles revved and rumbled from a parking lot just outside GM’s headquarters at the Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit up Woodward Avenue to the Athens Coney Island in Royal Oak.

People who showed up along Woodward to watch the parade of GM vehicles – as well as those just waiting for a bus – waved or snapped pictures...

If it hadn’t been for the presence of aboriginal people, European settlers could not have endured life in Nova Scotia centuries ago, a conference in Halifax heard Saturday.

Amateur historian Niven Sinclair said the Mi’kmaq helped colonizers adapt quickly to the New World, and for that their efforts should be publicly praised.

"The reality is that the early voyagers who came to these shores could not survive for a single day without the help of the indigenous people," he told about 65 delegates to the Atlantic Conference.

The international symposium, which wraps up today at Saint Mary’s University, has attracted historians, archeologists, native leaders and others to metro to examine historical contacts between First Nations people and Europeans in North America.

Experts in their fields reported on their work and heard Mr. Sinclair, a retired entrepreneur from the United Kingdom, talk about his ancestor, Prince Henry Sinclair, a Scottish nobleman.

According to folklore and monuments, the Scotsman sailed to what is now North America in 1398. He was said to have spent the winter in Nova Scotia before moving along the coast to Massachusetts. But many historians dispute the claim that Prince Henry beat Columbus to North America by nearly a century...

She was "The Korean Seductress Who Betrayed America," a Seoul socialite said to have charmed secret information out of one lover, an American colonel, and passed it to another, a top communist in North Korea.

In late June 1950, as North Korean invaders closed in on this panicked city, Kim Soo-im was executed by the South Korean military, shot as a "very malicious international spy." Her deeds, thereafter, only grew in infamy.

In 1950s America, gripped by anticommunist fever, one TV drama told viewers Kim's "womanly wiles" had been the communists' "deadliest weapon." Another teleplay, introduced by host Ronald Reagan, depicted her as Asia's Mata Hari. Coronet magazine, under the "seductress" headline, reviled her as the Oriental queen of a vast Soviet "Operation Sex."

Kim Soo-im and her love triangle are gone, buried in separate corners of a turbulent past. But in yellowing U.S. military files stamped "SECRET," hibernating through a long winter of Cold War, the truth survived. Now it has emerged, a half-century too late to save her.

The record of a confidential 1950 U.S. inquiry and other declassified files, obtained by The Associated Press at the U.S. National Archives, tell a different Kim Soo-im story:

Col. John E. Baird had no access to the supposed sensitive information. Kim had no secrets to pass on. And her Korean lover, Lee Gang-kook, later executed by North Korea, may actually have been an American agent.

The espionage case, from what can be pieced together today, looks like little more than a frame-up.

Her colonel could have defended her, but instead Baird was rushed out of Korea to "avoid further embarrassment," the record shows. She was left to her fate — almost certainly, the Americans concluded, to be tortured by South Korean police into confessing to things she hadn't done.

Historians now believe the Seoul regime secretively executed at least 100,000 leftists and supposed sympathizers in 1950. This one death, for one American, remains a living, deeply personal story.

Wonil Kim — son of Kim Soo-im and Col. Baird — is on a quest to bury the myths about his mother, a woman, he says, "with a passion for life, a strong woman caught up in the torrent of historical turmoil, and drowned."

The son, a theology professor at California's LaSierra University, was the first to discover the declassified U.S. documents. Now he has also found an ally, Seoul movie director Cho Myung-hwa, who plans a feature film on Kim Soo-im.

"He betrayed her," Cho said of Baird. "He could have testified. But he just flew back stateside to his American family."

The soft-spoken theologian, 59, and the veteran moviemaker, 63, both say that to grasp the Kim Soo-im story one must understand that young, educated Koreans of the 1930s and 1940s largely favored recasting their feudal country in a leftist mold once rid of their Japanese colonial rulers. But the U.S. Army's Lt. Gen. John R. Hodge, taking charge in southern Korea at World War II's end, vowed to "stamp out" the communists.

Kim Soo-im, born in 1911, was among the educated elite. An orphan, she was schooled by American missionaries, eventually graduating from Seoul's prestigious Ewha women's college.

In 1936, as a female office administrator, she was featured in a Seoul magazine article on the new generation of liberated young women. Smart and fashionable, with a circle of sophisticated, politicized friends, she later met an older married man, Lee Gang-kook, a German-educated intellectual active in Seoul's leftist movement.

She became his lover, and Lee rose to political prominence after Japan's defeat. But within a year of the U.S. takeover, he faced arrest as an alleged security risk and fled to communist-run northern Korea.

Kim Soo-im's fluent English, meanwhile, had made her valuable to the U.S. occupation. She was hired as an assistant by Baird, the Americans' 56-year-old, Irish-born military police chief. Baird secured a house for her and took to spending nights there, according to Korean and American witnesses in the declassified record.

"She had a baby by Col. Baird," Kim's friend Nancy Kim would later tell U.S. interrogators. "We all knew. He slept in the house many times. The baby looks like the father."

When the U.S. occupation army withdrew in 1949, succeeded by an advisory corps, Baird shifted to assisting the national police, and his American wife joined him in Korea.

Finally, on March 1, 1950, Kim, no longer U.S.-employed, was arrested by South Korean police, joining thousands of others ensnared in President Syngman Rhee's roundups of leftists.

"It was witch-hunting," said historian Jung Byung-joon, who has studied the case. "The South Korean police and prosecutors hated her because she was the lover of Lee Gang-kook, and then of Col. Baird, and nobody could touch her. They waited for their chance."..

Think of a coup d'etat and images of a far-flung banana republic likely come to mind. So it might come as a surprise that it happened here in the United States — just once, in 1898.

A mob of white supremacists armed with rifles and pistols marched on City Hall in Wilmington, N.C., on Nov. 10 and overthrew the elected local government, forcing both black and white officials to resign and running many out of town. The coup was the culmination of a race riot in which whites torched the offices of a black newspaper and killed a number of black residents. No one is sure how many African-Americans died that day, but some estimates say as many as 90 were killed.

"Some of the elderly African-Americans told my stepfather that the Cape Fear River was running red with blood," Bertha Todd, a teacher, recalls in producer Alan Lipke's documentary series, "Between Civil War and Civil Rights."

Especially chilling was the fact that the insurgency had been carefully planned — a conspiracy by powerful white Democrats.

Southern Democrats lost their grip on power in North Carolina in 1894 and plotted to wrest control from the biracial Republican Party in 1898 elections. They campaigned on a platform of white supremacy and protecting their women from black men...

What’s the single most significant date in the evolution of the National Park System? Was it 1872, the year that Yellowstone National Park was established as the first national park in America and the world? Was it 1906 when the Antiquties Act was signed into law? Was it 1916 when the Organic Act created the National Park Service? Was it 1917 when Stephen Mather became the first Director of the National Park Service? Was it December 2, 1980, when the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) added 43 million acres to the National Park System? Was it October 17, 2006, the day that Mary Bomar took over the helm of the National Park Service?

How about “none of the above”? I’m of the opinion, shared by many, that August 10, 1933 was the single most important day in the long history of America’s national parks. Here’s why.

Even before the National Park Service came into existence in 1916, ardent champions of the national parks chafed at the fact that dozens and dozens of natural areas and historic sites that should be national parks were instead being administered by the War Department, the Department of Agriculture (home agency of the U.S. Forest Service), and other agencies or offices.

Horace Albright, the man who followed on the heels of Stephen Mather as the Park Service’s second director, was among the many who thought – and missed no opportunity to proclaim – that it just wasn’t right for the National Park System to be slighted in this way. Albright lobbied for 17 years in behalf of righting this “mistake.”

A very interesting sequence of events eventually brought the matter to a head and changed the National Park System forever.

On March 3, 1933, exactly one day before he left office, President Herbert Hoover approved legislation that authorized presidents to reorganize the Executive Branch of the government. The immediate beneficiary of the new legislation would be Hoover’s replacement, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

On April 9, Roosevelt was driven to Virginia to inspect Rapidan Camp, a fishing retreat on the Rapidan River that Hoover had purchased with his own money and arranged to donate to Shenandoah National Park. Roosevelt wanted to see if the property would be suitable for his own use as a presidential retreat. (It wasn't, so Roosevelt instead established his retreat at Camp Shangri-La, later renamed Camp David, in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains.)

National Park Service Director Horace Albright was along for the ride, and he seized the opportunity to argue in behalf of one of his pet causes. Turning the conversation to history and historical sites, Albright told President Roosevelt that he would love to see the War Department’s historical areas transferred to the National Park System.

Imagine how elated Albright must have been when the President readily agreed and instructed him to draw up an executive order for the transfer.

On June 10, 1933, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6166. This, and Executive Order 6228, dated July 28, took effect on August 10, 1993. On that date, a whole bunch of federally administered sites would be consolidated and transferred to the National Park System. Under the terms of the executive orders, the National Park System would henceforth administer all federally owned national parks and national monuments, all national military parks, 11 national cemeteries, all national memorials, and the National Capital Parks (which had been managed by a separate office in Washington, DC)...

It's the sort of classic jewellery favoured by modern women except these earrings were worn 2,500 years ago.

An archeologist discovered gold earrings, a ring and other funeral gifts dating back to the 5th century B.C. while excavating a Thracian tomb near the village of Kushare, about 280km from Sofia, Bulgaria.

Some of the oldest examples of gold jewellery and artifacts have been discovered in Bulgaria and it's Black Sea coast is considered the birthplace of the world's metal production.

Skeletons of a tiny woman and two children laid to rest on a bed of flowers 5000 years ago have been found in what is now the barren Sahara Desert.

The slender arms of the youngsters were still extended to the woman in perpetual embrace when researchers discovered their skeletons in a remarkable cemetery that is providing clues to two civilisations who lived there, a thousand years apart, when the region was moist and green.

Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago and colleagues were searching for the remains of dinosaurs in the African country of Niger when they came across the startling find, detailed at a news conference yesterday at the National Geographic Society.

Federal officials granted temporary legal status on Friday to 15 illegal immigrants whose spouses or parents died on 9/11 but who have remained largely invisible, living in the shadows of society for fear of deportation.

Those officials and the families’ supporters said the decision would clear the way for Congress to move forward on bills that would grant the immigrants permanent legal status.

“When I told my clients about it, there were tears of joy,” said Debra Brown Steinberg, a lawyer representing several of the immigrants. “They can show their faces and say their names.”

“Now they can make 9/11 their story, too,” she added. “It’s a great day.”

The immigrants have lived in limbo since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. They were the wives, husbands and children of several victims in the World Trade Center, some of whom were legal immigrants, the rest of whom were illegal themselves.

While the families received payments from the Victim Compensation Fund, ranging from $875,000 to $4.1 million, they have not been able to easily invest the payments because they lacked Social Security numbers and other identity documents, their lawyers said. Some of the immigrants were so fearful of being extorted or robbed, with no recourse in the justice system, that they did not tell some relatives and friends of their losses.

A bill introduced last year by two members of Congress from New York, Peter T. King, a Republican, and Carolyn B. Maloney, a Democrat, would grant permanent resident visas to the survivors.

Several Republicans in the House who opposed the measure demanded more information about the immigrants to ensure that they were not terrorists or criminals. But the immigrants’ lawyers said they were reluctant to provide any information that might expose their clients to deportation...

A South Dakota State University historian's study of violence and community life is chipping away at some deeply held myths about the American West.

Assistant professor Charles Vollan is finding that wealthy, respectable people had little to fear from gunslingers and other "roughs," for example it worked the other way around.

"When we tend to think about violence in any sort of historic western boomtown, whether it be Cheyenne or, for that matter, Deadwood, we tend to think about rough-andtumble types who were the ones to commit violence ," Vollan said. "We don't tend to think about lawyers, and doctors, and the general store operators but we should."

Vollan, whose reseach is an ongoing study of the Old West, said in boomtowns such as the ones that became the modern-day Deadwood or Cheyenne, Wyo., there was plenty of violence in the lower socio-economic class. But it tended to stay there. Violence didn't cross class borders

"Violence among the lower classes tended to be really contained in the lower class itself," Vollan said. "Only in the case of the vigilantes do we see sort of a wholesale crossing of class borders.

"The crazy thing about it, the thing that stands out, is that they thought they were acting in the name of order. Vigilantism is inherently disorderly ."

Vollan said community and conflict go together, especially during chaotic periods such as America's westward expansion. Vollan studies that theme by looking at the cities that developed along the Union Pacific Railroad when it was being constructed, focusing on the post-Civil War years 1865-69 .

"In particular, the city I've studied in most detail is Cheyenne, Wyoming, which at one point at this time was Cheyenne, Dakota Territory. Cheyenne was what was known as a 'hell on wheels' town, and in the 19th century, they didn't use terms like 'hell on wheels' lightly," Vollan said. "Cheyenne's reputation, in the parlance of the day, was that they "had a man a day for breakfast" that was the idea, that somebody got killed every day.

The reality was far different. Far, far fewer people were killed in Cheyenne it was more like a man a month. Still, by our standards, an elevated level of violence, but not absolutely extraordinary and certainly understandable in the circumstances ."...

He wears whiskers and a stovepipe hat as he stares proudly from the pages of the journal that he kept during 40 years at sea.

The self-portrait is the only known likeness of George Hodge, ordinary seaman, and one of the very few pictures of a humble sailor in Nelson’s navy. While officers and admirals were immortalised in oils, most sailors lived, and died, out of sight.

Hodge’s journal records the ships he served on, the oceans he sailed, the ports he visited and the actions in which he fought, between 1790 and his retirement from the sea in 1833. It includes everything from the lyrics of sea shanties to a picture of the first ship on which he served. His spelling may have been erratic - apparently he was self-educated – but his paintings were filled with naive charm.

Hodge’s naval career spanned an era when Britannia really did rule the oceans. He saw action in the Napoleonic Wars and the American War of 1812, from the West Coast of Africa to the Great Lakes. His watercolours include one of HMS Tremendous, forlorn in storm-tossed seas after an encounter with the French, and his own ship the Lancaster, all flags flying during a review off the Cape.

The 7-and-One-half inch journal was still in Hodge's family in the 1880s but its subsequent history is unknown until it was bought by an American collector, J. Welles Henderson, a lawyer, from a London bookdealer 20 years ago.

Mr Henderson, who founded a maritime museum in Philadelphia, died last year, and more than 600 items from his collection are being sold tomorrow by Northeast Auctions in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Hodge’s volume is expected to fetch up to $50,000 (£26,750).

Inside Ford's Theatre, there is nothing original: no hint of the fire that ruined the place in 1862, no trace of the actual box where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, no vestige of the forgotten catastrophe almost three decades later that killed 22 people and injured 60 others.

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What's inside now dates from a 1960s renovation, theater officials say, and much of that is being transformed. The "cursed" old theater on 10th Street NW, twice wrecked by disaster and once marked by assassination, is partway through its first major renovation in 40 years.

This week, Paul R. Tetreault, the theater's producing director, provided a glimpse at the project, about two-thirds completed. The goal is to remake Ford's into the centerpiece of a state-of-the-art Lincoln campus in honor of the bicentennial of the president's birth Feb. 12.

The theater, which has been closed since last August, is now a dusty tangle of construction equipment and shiny ductwork. The box where Lincoln was shot, a 1960s reconstruction of the original, is barely visible through a forest of floor-to-ceiling scaffolding. The theater's seats are gone, and the stage is bare.

But by early next year, Ford's will have a new entrance next door, new seats, new stage equipment, new restrooms, a new air-conditioning system, elevators (for the first time), a new museum and a new lobby featuring a haunting display under glass of the blood-spotted overcoat Lincoln was wearing the night he was killed.

The new entrance, with a weather canopy and a vertical marquee reading "Ford's Theatre," will be in the Atlantic Building just north of the old theater. The old theater entrance will become the exit.

The entrance will lead to a lobby, a gift shop, box offices, concessions and the cylindrical case containing the coat, which was embroidered on the inside with the words, "One Country One Destiny." ...

Mexican archeologists have discovered a maze of stone temples in underground caves, some submerged in water and containing human bones, which ancient Mayans believed was a portal where dead souls entered the underworld.

Clad in scuba gear and edging through narrow tunnels, researchers discovered the stone ruins of eleven sacred temples and what could be the remains of human sacrifices at the site in the Yucatan Peninsula.

Archeologists say Mayans believed the underground complex of water-filled caves leading into dry chambers — including an underground road stretching some 330 feet — was the path to a mythical underworld, known as Xibalba.

According to an ancient Mayan scripture, the Popol Vuh, the route was filled with obstacles, including rivers filled with scorpions, blood and pus and houses shrouded in darkness or swarming with shrieking bats, Guillermo de Anda, one of the lead investigators at the site, said on Thursday.

The souls of the dead followed a mythical dog who could see at night, de Anda said.

Excavations over the past five months in the Yucatan caves revealed stone carvings and pottery left for the dead...

It is possible that cricket, a game venerated all over the Commonwealth, is older than currently thought. In fact, Jesus may very well have played the game (or a similar bat and ball contraption) as a child himself, according to an ancient Armenian manuscript.

Long before the English launched cricket some 300 years ago, similar games were being played as early as the 8th century in the Punjab region, Derek Birley writes in his Social History of English Cricket.

But an Armenian scholar says there is good reason to believe that similar games were played in the Middle East long before that time.

Dr Abraham Terian, recently a visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Humanities, points to a rare manuscript as his source.

He notes that in the Armenian Gospel of the Infancy, translated into Armenian in the 6th century from a much older lost Syriac original, a passage tells of Jesus playing what may well be the precursor of cricket, with a club and ball.

Terian discovered the manuscript more than a decade ago at the Saint James Armenian Monastery in the Old City of Jerusalem.

His English translation of the book has been published by Oxford University Press.

He says he has now identified the same passage in a couple of other manuscripts of the same gospel of which some 40 copies exist in various archival collections in Europe and the Middle East, including the oldest copy now in Yerevan, the capital of the Armenian Republic.

The latter manuscript is dated 1239, whereas the undated Jerusalem manuscript is considerably later.

Quoting from his Armenian source, Terian says the gospel relates how Jesus, at the age of nine, had been apprenticed to a master dyer named Israel in Tiberias, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.

"Jesus is instructed to watch Israel's house and not leave the place while the master goes away on a tour to collect clothes to be dyed. But no sooner has Israel left the house, than Jesus runs out with the boys,'' Terian says...

The visionary architect began work on the monumental basilica 125 years ago but his untimely death beneath the wheels of a tram in the northeastern city in 1926 meant completion of his opus was entrusted to future generations.

But as construction of the bizarre structure nears the final stages - latest estimates put completion within two decades - an influential group from the artistic world claim the end result will bear little resemblance to Gaudí's vision.

More than 100 figures from Spain's art and heritage world have signed a manifesto protesting at what they see as the "betrayal" of Barcelona's most famous son by those determined to leave their own stamp on the monument.

"What stands out is the mediocrity of a group of technicians and developers who are well-meaning but full of an anachronistic paternalism in the best of cases and are once more using Gaudí to leave their personal mark on the building to the detriment of the original work," read a statement on the website of the FAD, the arts and design institute...

James Hoyt delivered mail in rural Iowa for more than 30 years. Yet Hoyt had long kept a secret from most of those who knew him best: He was one of the four U.S. soldiers to first see Germany's Buchenwald concentration camp.

Hoyt died Monday at his home in Oxford, Iowa, a town of about 700 people where he had lived his entire life. He was 83.

His funeral was Thursday at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Oxford, with about 100 people in attendance. The Rev. Edmond Dunn officiated and recalled time he spent with Hoyt and his wife.

"I used to go over to have lunch with Doris and Jim, and I would sit across from Jim at the kitchen table and think, 'Before me is a true American hero,' " he said.

Hoyt had rarely spoken about that day in 1945, but he recently opened up to a journalist.

"There were thousands of bodies piled high. I saw hearts that had been taken from live people in medical experiments," Hoyt told author Stephen Bloom in a soon-to-be-published book called "The Oxford Project."

"They said a wife of one of the SS officers -- they called her the Bitch of Buchenwald -- saw a tattoo she liked on the arm of a prisoner, and had the skin made into a lampshade. I saw that." See the horrors of Buchenwald »

Pete Geren, the secretary of the U.S. Army, said the sacrifice Hoyt made for his country so many years ago should never be forgotten.

"It's important that we don't allow ourselves to lose him," Geren told CNN by phone. "It's the memory of heroes like James Hoyt and the memories of what they've done that we must ensure that we keep alive and share with the current generation and future generations.

"Mr. Hoyt, as a young man, saw unspeakable horrors when he was one of the soldiers to discover the Buchenwald concentration camp, and those are experiences as a country and a world we can never forget.

"You think back on a young man 19 years old and to have the experience that he had," Geren said, his voice dissolving before finishing his thought.

The discovery of Buchenwald, on April 11, 1945, began the liberation of more than 21,000 prisoners from one of the largest Nazi concentration camps of World War II...