Zealous guardians of his words and his likeness, the family of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is demanding a share of the proceeds from the sudden wave of T-shirts, posters, and other merchandise depicting the civil rights leader alongside Barack Obama.

Isaac Newton Farris Jr., King's nephew and head of the nonprofit King Center in Atlanta, said the estate is entitled to hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing fees - maybe even millions.

"Some of this is probably putting food on people's plates. We're not trying to stop anybody from legitimately supporting themselves," he said, "but we cannot allow our brand to be abused."

A criminal complaint filed in the Spanish High Court has revived hopes that those behind the massacre of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador's civil war could face trial.

The Archbishop of Canterbury called Auschwitz-Birkenau an "image of hell" as he made his first visit to the Nazi death camp.

Dr Rowan Williams said it was vital that people saw the site where more than 1 million were killed during the Second World War in order to understand how the atrocity had come about.

He and Britain's Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, placed candles on the railway tracks that lead under a watchtower into the vast Birkenau camp. It was from there that hundreds of thousands of European Jews, Gypsies and political prisoners were bundled from cattle trucks and either murdered in gas chambers or used as slave labour for the Nazi war effort.

At a memorial next to the destroyed crematoria where victims' bodies were burned, the two religious leaders read prayers at a ceremony attended by almost 200 English schoolchildren and their local MPs, who had been taken on the one-day trip by the Holocaust Educational Trust which sends two pupils from every school as part of a Government-funded scheme.

Dr Williams described the visit to the concentration camp in western Poland, made with seven other faith leaders from the UK, as "shattering".

On Jan. 20, Barack Obama will inherit a world very different from the one his predecessor found in January 2001. Over the past eight years, the Bush administration has faced great challenges and nurtured grand ambitions; it has tried hard to remake the world. Condoleezza Rice has been a central player in that effort since becoming the chief foreign policy adviser in 2000 to Bush, then a candidate, so we arranged to interview her at the State Department late last month. The interview turned into a wide-ranging discussion of where this government has taken the United States and what sort of world it will leave for the next president....

Legacy of the Bush agenda

Why Bush set the freedom agenda

[RICE] George W. Bush deserves credit for recognizing that the terms were now going to be set for the next big historical evolution. The president recognized that freedom was something that was not just desirable but essential for the United States; that it meant not just freedom from tyranny but also freedom from disease, from poverty. And that if you were going to have democratic leaders, they had to be able to deliver for their people. Thus the president supported the Millennium Challenge and the HIV/AIDS and malaria projects. (Bush announced the Millennium Challenge initiative in 2002. It emphasized good governance and accountability in the structuring of foreign aid and resulted in the formation of the Millennium Challenge Corp. in January 2004.)

And linking up the great compassion of the United States with our security interests. Making it about democracy, defense and development. We're at the beginning of that historical transformation, and yes, sometimes it's lonelier at the beginning than at the end.

It's really recognizing that this is about a single answer to what is the right form of government, and that's democracy. It takes different forms: There is Japanese democracy, and there's American democracy, and there are fragile democracies, and there are emerging democracies, and there are states that are trying to find some form of popular legitimacy....

Three of the four surviving British veterans of World War I have helped mark the 90th anniversary of the end of the conflict. Henry Allingham, 112, Harry Patch, 110, and Bill Stone, 108, represented the RAF, Army and Royal Navy respectively at a ceremony at London's Cenotaph. They led the country in observing two minutes' silence from 1100 GMT. Among other Armistice Day events across Europe, Prince Charles laid a wreath at a battle site in France.

Obama has a host of relatives in exotic locations from Hawaii to Kenya, and during his run for the American presidency he discovered that he had an aunt living in Boston.

Now he is being claimed by not one but as many as 8,000 Beduin tribesmen in northern Israel.

Although the spokesman for the lost tribe of Obama has yet to reveal the documentary evidence that he says he possesses to support his claim, people are flocking from across the region to pay their respects to the "Beduin Obama," whose social standing has gone through the roof.

"We knew about it years ago but we were afraid to talk about it because we didn't want to influence the election," Abdul Rahman Sheikh Abdullah, a 53-year-old local council member, told The Times in the small Beduin village of Bir al-Maksour in the Israeli region of Galilee. "We wrote a letter to him explaining the family connection."

Most people know something of the events in 1714 when the British government instituted a prize for the discovery of a successful way to find longitude at sea. The aim was to reduce the heavy toll of shipwrecks caused by the crude navigational method of dead reckoning. Dava Sobel gave new life to this episode in her bestselling book, Longitude: The true story of a lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of his time (1995), which inspired the widely viewed television programme Lost at Sea (aired in 1998). After these came a feature film directed by Charles Sturridge in 1999, starring Michael Gambon and Jeremy Irons. All these versions place at their centre the heroic figure of John Harrison and his struggles to perfect a clock which would finally carry off the prize of £20,000. Meanwhile, an early rival who figures in the tale has gone down in history as another projector from Yorkshire, named Jeremy Thacker. Unfortunately Thacker never existed and his proposal now emerges as a hoax.

Army Sgt. Cornelius H. Charlton was two months shy of his 22nd birthday when his platoon tried to take a hill near Chipo-Ri, South Korea. The platoon leader was wounded, so Charlton took command.

He rallied his men, who had suffered heavy casualties, and led the next assault, only to be pushed back again. Despite a severe chest wound, he refused medical attention and led another charge. He alone eliminated the remaining enemy emplacement, though he had been hit again by a grenade. His wounds led to his death June 2, 1951.

The next year, Charlton was awarded the Medal of Honor, reserved for the "bravest of the brave," and he was supposed to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. But it didn't happen.

Until yesterday.

For years, Johanna Arnoldy wondered about her brother’s wartime service. But she could never get any answers.

“When he came back, he wouldn’t talk about it. He said he had lost too many friends,” she said.

All the Wabasha woman knew was that her brother, Arden Gullickson, was drafted and served in the Army on Iwo Jima during World War II. Then came an unexpected discovery made just in time for this year’s Veterans Day — a forgotten letter.

“I am writing this letter in a foxhole, and it won’t be very nice, as the wind is blowing and it’s dusty,” he wrote. “I haven’t had much sleep the last week or washed, but I am going to get tonight off to sleep.”

The letter is addressed to his parents and written April 1945 from “somewhere in the Pacific.”

“I never knew this letter existed,” his sister said.