Hockey historians are celebrating the discovery of a document hailed as a missing link in the early evolution of the sport. Two Swedish researchers have unearthed the second-oldest written reference to hockey being played on ice, a vintage description of an 1839 game contested on a frozen river in southern Ontario near Niagara Falls.

The latest find comes from a British army officer's memoir of his years in what was then the colony of Upper Canada.

"During the winter, the skating on Chippewa Creek was excellent and added not a little to our amusement," writes Col. Richard Levigne, referring to the present-day Welland River. "Large parties contested games of hockey on ice, some 40 or 50 being ranged on each side."

Col. Levigne's description is the earliest known reference to hockey being played anywhere in southern Canada, where Halifax, Montreal and Windsor, N.S., have long battled for the right to be called the sport's "birthplace."

Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin's description of his men playing hockey on a small lake near Deline, N.W.T. remains the oldest known document in the sport's history.

THE suspected remains of a World War II airman found dangling in trees in the jungle of Papua New Guinea have turned out to be just a moss-covered branch, the Australian military revealed today.

Hikers on the famed Kokoda Track, site of a brutal 1942 battle between Japanese and Australian troops, reported they had discovered what appeared to be the suspended skeleton of a flyer tangled in parachute cords two weeks ago.

But the Australian Defence Force said it had sent staff from Canberra's embassy in Port Moresby to inspect the remote site, only to discover that the suspected human skeleton was simply a tree limb tangled in vines.

Deep inside an underwater cave in Mexico, archaeologists may have discovered the oldest human skeleton ever found in the Americas.

Dubbed Eva de Naharon, or Eve of Naharon, the female skeleton has been dated at 13,600 years old. If that age is accurate, the skeleton—along with three others found in underwater caves along the Caribbean coast of the Yucatán Peninsula—could provide new clues to how the Americas were first populated.

The remains have been excavated over the past four years near the town of Tulum, about 80 miles southwest of Cancún, by a team of scientists led by Arturo González, director of the Desert Museum in Saltillo, Mexico (see map of Mexico).

Portraits of famous people tend to look like the painters because the artists were all simply depicting themselves, according to new research.

Computer-aided comparisons made between a series of portraits of British monarchs and the self-portraits of the artists who painted them prove that there has always been a hidden agenda in top-level portraiture, argues the art historian Simon Abrahams.

After lengthy research and the examination of hundreds of famous paintings from new angles, Abrahams has launched his contentious theory through his website, ArtScholar.org. He believes it is clear that many portraitists, painters who were often doing this kind of work just for money, chose to assert themselves by reproducing their own facial characteristics within those of their powerful sitters.

The practice, which Abrahams has called 'face fusion', is evident as early as the 1600s in the work of Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, who both painted Queen Elizabeth I, and it continues to this day. He even offers visual evidence that the portrait of the current Queen completed in 2001 by Lucian Freud bears more than a passing resemblance to Freud himself.

'These royal images were never intended by the artist as historical records of an actual sitter, but as depictions of the artist's alter ego. No doubt they pretended otherwise to their patrons but they, and their peers, knew better; the evidence is overwhelming,' he writes.

Abrahams's argument is made most strongly by looking at an engraving of William III by the artist Sir Godfrey Kneller alongside his near-identical self-portrait, by Sir Joshua Reynolds's portrait of George IV and his self-portrait, or perhaps by looking at Sir Peter Lely's portrait of James II next to the artist's version of his own features.

'At least two contemporaries of Peter Lely complained that the faces in his portraits resembled each other,' writes Abrahams, 'one even suggesting that he was too fond of studying his own features.'

While a couple of art historians have noted similarities between painters and the painted in the past, Abrahams points out, the issue has always been either ignored or brushed over by academia. 'The assumption has been that there were some painters who were good at painting the world "as it is" and then those who were "poetic" and painted what was in their mind,' Abrahams told The Observer

While Barack Obama has struggled to capture Jewish votes, it turns out that one of his wife’s cousins is the country’s most prominent black rabbi.

Michelle Obama, wife of the Democratic presidential nominee, is a first cousin once removed of Rabbi Capers Funnye, spiritual leader of a mostly black synagogue on Chicago’s South Side. Funnye’s mother, Verdelle Robinson Funnye, and Michelle Obama’s paternal grandfather, Frasier Robinson Jr., were brother and sister.

Funnye (pronounced fuh-NAY) is the chief rabbi of the Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation in southwest Chicago. He is well known in Jewish circles for acting as a bridge between mainstream Jewry and the much smaller, and largely separate, world of black Jewish congregations, sometimes known as black Hebrews, or Israelites. He has often urged the larger Jewish community to be more accepting of Jews who are not white.

The assassination of the journalist Georgi Markov in London in 1978 by a man wielding a poison-tipped umbrella was one of the most infamous episodes of the Cold War and brought relations between Britain and Bulgaria to breaking point. Thirty years on, with the Bulgarian authorities closing the case on the anniversary of the dissident's death this Thursday, secret official documents have uncovered the truth behind the killing.

The papers, from the archives of Bulgaria's National Intelligence Service reveal how discussions about the assassination took place between the KGB and the Bulgarian intelligence services. They show how the suspected killer, Francesco Gulino (also spelt Gullino and Giullino), referred to as Agent Piccadilly, was given the mission and later decorated for his services. Among the documents is a secret agreement between Bulgarian intelligence and the KGB, whereby Russia would provide fast-acting poisons and devices for their delivery.

Several classified documents relating to the assassination, secured after a three-year legal battle by the Bulgarian journalist Hristo Hristov, are to be published in Bulgaria's Dnevnik newspaper this week.

Other revelations in the Bulgarian newspaper Sofia Echo suggest parallels with the case of Alexander Litvinenko, the critic of the Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, who was fatally poisoned in London in 2006.

While the Bulgarian authorities are preparing to shelve their investigations, under a 30-year statute of limitations, the Metropolitan Police remain on the case. Several visits have been made by Scotland Yard in the past two years to gain access to classified documents and interview dozens of people.

The great landmark that once separated the Roman empire's British citizens from the Celtic tribes of the north will be highlighted, literally, next year by a spectacular art installation as all of Hadrian's Wall is lit up.

The team behind the Northumberland Lights project are to announce plans this week to set up lights along the 73 miles of the wall for three days to draw visitors to the site at night.

'This will be a way of getting people to see the landscape in a different way,' said Zoe Bottrell, director of the Northumberland Lights festival.

OCEAN CITY – A large section of what is likely a fairly ancient wooden vessel was discovered in the surf at 43rd Street this week and now awaits its fate in a town-owned storage facility in West Ocean City as state historians and maritime archaeologists attempt to date it and perhaps discover from whence it came.

The roughly 25-foot long, L-shaped artifact was first discovered in the surf by swimmers in the 43rd Street area on Monday. Ocean City Beach Patrol staffers tried to remove the unknown object from the water, but quickly realized it was something much larger than they were capable of moving. The town’s Public Works department was called in and was eventually able to haul the giant piece of history from a bygone era from the water using a front-end loader and other equipment.

“People were reporting to us they kept bumping into something in the water below the surface,” said Beach Patrol Lieutenant Ward Kovacs. “The lifeguards tried to get it out, but they knew right away it was something beyond the scope of their abilities.”

An 87-year-old Ukrainian immigrant lost his appeal to keep his US citizenship after a US federal court ruled he had collaborated with Nazis and helped liquidate a Jewish ghetto in Poland.

Ruling in the four-year-old case, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals said that John Ivan Kalymon had lied about his involvement with the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police (UAP) when he emigrated to the US from Germany in 1949, US justice officials said Friday, Sept. 5.

The Troy, Michigan, resident became a US citizen in 1955. US investigators charged that as a member of the UAP, Kalymon had helped round up Jews, imprison them in a ghetto, terrorize them and supervise their forced labor, kill those trying to escape and lead survivors to extermination and forced labor camps, including Belzec in Poland.

Evidence of personal involvement

He allegedly committed the crimes in Lviv, formerly in Poland and now part of Ukraine, from 1941 to 1944.

The court decision from Thursday was announced Friday by acting assistant attorney general Matthew Friedrich of the US justice department's criminal division.

The White House released an unusual 700-word statement Friday evening that charges author Bob Woodward with distorting the effectiveness of the Iraq “surge” policy in his new book, “The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008,” set for publication Monday.

The statement is extremely surprising because it was issued by National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley, who shepherded Woodward’s interaction with the West Wing and encouraged top administration officials to grant interviews to the celebrity investigator.

President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and a host of underlings gave interviews to Woodward. The White House had been optimistic that the book would reflect glowingly on the president, although that optimism waned when the book’s title was announced last month.

Hadley does not quarrel with Woodward’s facts — only his interpretation. Specifically, he argues that the surge policy helped calm down Iraq, while the book says other factors were at play.

“Because of the President's decision, Iraq is a much more stable and secure country today,” Hadley says in the statement. “Because of this success, the President announced earlier this year that five brigade combat teams would return home, a policy of ‘return on success.’ The President is now weighing options to bring more troops home based on the improved conditions on the ground, but without sacrificing the hard fought gains of the last year.”

The Republican Georgia Rep. doesn’t back down from his Thursday quote labeling the Obamas “uppity.”
Says in a statement: “I’ve never heard that term used in a racially derogatory sense. It is important to note that the dictionary definition of ‘uppity’ is ‘affecting an air of inflated self-esteem — snobbish.’”

Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon has begun looking for information on Franco's victims in preparation for a possible court case. Victims groups are thrilled, but not everyone is happy about stirring up the country's fascist past.

It is a monument visited by hundreds of thousands of people each year. On Sundays, some travel from nearby Madrid to lay wreaths at the site. But just what the memorial, known as the Valley of the Fallen, stands for is not entirely clear.

Officially, it commemorates everyone who died in the Spanish Civil War, fought from 1936 to 1939. But the Valley of the Fallen monument, a vast complex dominated by an enormous granite cross, also contains the mausoleum in which the body of General Francisco Franco, Spain's fascist dictator, is buried. It was built using the slave labor of political prisoners.

Indeed, the Valley of the Fallen has recently come to symbolize a Spain still scarred by its civil war and almost four decades of Franco's iron-fisted regime. Some, though, have begun picking at that scab. This week, a Spanish judge began collecting information with an eye toward creating an accurate list of those killed during Franco's dictatorship. In doing so, he has turned up the heat on a long-simmering national debate.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is as complex as the place she calls home. Plucked from near-political obscurity to become Sen. John McCain's running mate, Palin either has pitch-perfect political instincts or has benefited from a spectacular run of luck that has landed her in the ultimate right place at the right time.

It is easy to see why McCain was drawn to her; their political resumes have much in common. The 44-year-old Republican has sold herself as a political maverick willing to buck her party over principle, an ethics reformer who quit a lucrative job rather than play ball with the old boys' network and a pragmatist who will reach across the aisle to get her agenda enacted. Like McCain, she has at times been a black sheep in her own party. Also like McCain, she has been accused of overstepping ethical bounds on occasion.

On the September 3 broadcast of San Francisco radio station KSFO's The Lee Rodgers Show, Rogers said of Takeru Kobayashi, six-time winner of the Nathan's Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog Eating Contest in Coney Island, New York, "Just eat, eat, eat, and you gain no weight. Oh, there is no justice. God needs to take a hand in this." Co-host Tom Benner, known as "Officer Vic," agreed and added: "Even things out. Wait, that's socialism, I'm sorry. Forget it." Rodgers replied, "Well, you're right, you're right. Well, under Barack Obama, then, it'll probably be done." He continued: "Oh, lordy. Bring us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free. ... Free of the stifling stupidity of liberalism, which disguises slavery as benevolence. That's -- that's the program for the Obama campaign, by the way." Benner replied: "Arbeit macht frei." Rodgers then said, "Yeah. Make more of them dependent on the government."

The German phrase "arbeit macht frei" translates to "work makes one free" and was written on the gate at the entrance to Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps.

Israeli archaeologists uncovered the remains of two distinct southern walls of ancient Jerusalem on Mount Zion, establishing the size of the city during Jesus' time as well as during the Byzantine period.

At a Sept. 3 press conference archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority said locating the two city walls corroborates their theory about the southern expansion of the city during these two periods.

The two separate wall segments had been discovered and excavated at the end of the 19th century by American archaeologist Frederick Jones Bliss and British archaeologist Archibald Dickie. However, after mapping out the site they filled in the site, and the walls were covered for 150 years.