The House yesterday apologized to black Americans, more than 140 years after slavery was abolished, for the "fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery and Jim Crow" segregation.

The resolution, which passed on a voice vote late in the day, was sponsored by Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), a white Jew who represents a majority-black district in Memphis. Cohen tried unsuccessfully to join the Congressional Black Caucus this year.

"I hope that this is part of the beginning of a dialogue that this country needs to engage in, concerning what the effects of slavery and Jim Crow have been," Cohen said. "I think we started it and we're going to continue."

Israeli archaeologists in Jerusalem said yesterday they found the imprint of a seal that belonged to an 6th century BC official in the court of the last king of Judah who was mentioned in the Old Testament.

We found the imprint in clay, remarkably well preserved, of a seal with the name of Gedaliah the son of Pashur," Eilat Mazar, who leads the team of archaeologists, said.

Gedaliah is mentioned in the Bible as among the ministers in the court of King Zedekiah who called for Prophet Jeremiah to be put to death for urging Jerusalem residents to surrender to the city's Babylonian attackers.

It is the second such bulla-a lump of clay stamped with a seal-found at the site in Jerusalem. A similar one was found nearby in 2005.

The identity of this creature, which reportedly washed up on a New York beach last month, has captivated the blogosphere and is dividing animal experts.

The beast, dubbed the Montauk Monster after the Long Island resort where it was discovered, has a hairless, leathery body, sharp teeth and what appears to be a beak.

A photo of the animal appeared on the gossip website Gawker earlier this week under the headline “Dead Monster Washes Ashore in Montauk”, and the story has since been picked up by US networks Fox News and CNN.

A major archive in Germany has purchased 15 custom-made scanners to digitize and catalog a huge collection of virtually untapped Holocaust records. The archive at the International Tracing Service in the German town of Bad Arolsen contains testimony from Holocaust survivors as dictated to humanitarian workers in displaced persons camps after World War II. Survivors detailed the horrors they endured in concentration camps and spoke of their plans for the future while workers recorded the testimony on tabloid-size paper. Kathrin Flor, a spokeswoman for the service, said the archive could fill important historical holes about the fate of survivors after the war. The scanners cost more than $280,000 and are large enough to digitize the odd-sized papers.

A rare astronomy tool that helped medieval scientists tell time will remain in Britain after the British Museum scrambled to come up with the money to buy it.

The brass device, called an astrolabe quadrant, had been sold at auction last year, and the museum was outbid. But money from the National Heritage Memorial fund, The Art Fund and the British Museum Friends helped the museum purchase it recently for 350,000 pounds ($700,000).

"The quadrant will be a very important addition to our medieval collection as an object which can explain the sophistication of science in the Middle Ages and the transfer of knowledge between Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities," deputy director of the British Museum Andrew Burnett said in a statement Thursday.