Cambodia is to relive the horrors of the Khmer Rouge's S-21 torture prison when its jailer goes on trial.

The old prison is a museum now, lined with the haunting black and white portraits of its inmates. Each one of them was grotesquely tortured with the tools still on display until they confessed to crimes they never committed. Many victims implicated everyone they ever met in fantastical conspiracies in their desperation to satisfy the inquisitors. John Dawson Dewhirst, the only British victim, eventually claimed he joined the CIA when he was 12 years old.

Finally they were driven to the killing fields outside Phnom Penh at Choeung Ek to be killed and dumped in pits. The site is a tourist attraction now, with a monument of skulls and the clothes of victims emerging from the bumpy ground. Surviving prisoner lists show that at least 12,380 people passed through S-21, although the true number may be higher. Only around a dozen are believed to have survived.

Four other Khmer Rouge leaders are in custody awaiting trial and prosecutors at the court, jointly run by the United Nations and the Cambodian government, are preparing cases against six more people. The court will only pursue senior figures – Him Huoy is not important enough to be prosecuted, although he will be a witness in Duch's trial.

It is three decades since the fall of the Khmer Rouge's lunatic regime, and the special court has been blighted by delays, financial scandal and political rancour. The hope is that at the end of it all Cambodians will have heard their painful history carefully examined and – perhaps – laid to rest. If the process is a success the wounded country might move a step closer to reconciliation and "closure".

Twenty-four days into his presidency, Barack Obama recorded last night a legislative achievement of the sort that few of his predecessors achieved at any point in their tenure.

In size and scope, there is almost nothing in history to rival the economic stimulus legislation that Obama shepherded through Congress in just over three weeks. And the result -- produced largely without Republican participation -- was remarkably similar to the terms Obama's team outlined even before he was inaugurated: a package of tax cuts and spending totaling about $775 billion....

The feat compares only with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's banking system overhaul in 1933, which cleared Congress within days of his inauguration.

Family papers detailing the private life of the former first lady Bess Truman were released last week, with no apparent bombshells about her in the more than 24,000 pages.

The Harry S. Truman Library and Museum opened the family papers to mark the 124th anniversary of the birth of Mrs. Truman. The library obtained the papers after the death of the Trumans’ daughter, Margaret Truman Daniel, in January 2008.

About 1,600 of the papers once belonged to Mrs. Truman’s mother, Madge Gates Wallace. They apparently do not mention the 1903 suicide of Mrs. Truman’s father, David Wallace.

The papers include ledgers detailing Mr. Truman’s personal finances while he was president. The ledgers include notations involving occasional payments made by the president to his younger sister, Mary Jane Truman, which became a financial embarrassment.

As Russia marks the 20th anniversary of its withdrawal from Afghanistan, officials in Moscow are warning that US and Nato-led forces are making exactly the same mistakes as the Soviet Union made when it invaded the country in 1979.

Experts say the Soviet government under Leonid Brezhnev had assumed their invasion in December 1979 would bring rapid results, stabilising the fledgling communist government in Kabul and thus ensuring the loyalty of an important neighbouring country at the height of the Cold War.

But instead of being able to leave within six months, the Soviet forces became bogged down in a protracted conflict with a tough and well-armed guerrilla force which received massive assistance from the West and the Muslim world.

Now just 20 years later, the Russians are looking with astonishment at the way the US and Nato-led forces are waging their war in Afghanistan.

The view from Moscow is that the Western forces have learned nothing from the bitter experience of the Soviet Union.

Instead, they are falling into exactly the same trap.

In a bland courtroom on the outskirts of Phnom Penh next week the justice that most Cambodians believed had passed them by will finally begin to creak into motion.

Three decades after the fall of Pol Pot, the first trial of the leaders of his genocidal Khmer Rouge regime is to begin before a UN-backed tribunal - the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC).

On Tuesday a thin, elderly former schoolmaster will stand in the dock accused of crimes against humanity committed 30 years ago.

Kang Kek Ieu, known as Comrade Duch, was the director of the infamous Tuol Sleng prison, the torture and interrogation centre in Phnom Penh where thousands of innocent people were sent to die.

Anyone who has failed to keep track of a winning lottery ticket for all of 12 months may want to consider the efforts of 39 bondholders who have been safekeeping valuable, tissue-thin, New York City securities since shortly after the Civil War.

Next month, one of the bonds, issued in 1868 and thought to be one of the oldest active municipal bonds in the country, will come due. And the city stands ready to retire the debt incurred when Winston Churchill’s grandfather came up with the idea of building a road to one of the nation’s first racetracks, which he had opened in what is now the Bronx.

For 135 years, New York City has been dutifully paying 7 percent annual interest on the bonds, which financed construction of the road. On March 1, the owner of one of them is entitled to come forward and collect its face value: $1,000.

Nuns and priests sacrificed their own lives to provide medical care for the poor in Renaissance France, according to a new study that implicates exposure to contagious plague victims in the deaths of several religious order members.

The study is among the first to find that plague, a deadly bacterial disease also known as "the Black Death," can be quickly and accurately identified in ancient human remains.

Several recently identified women who died after caring for plague victims were all Benedictine nuns from the Sainte-Croix Abbey's chapter house near Poitiers, France.

Barack Obama is not the first president to feel a kinship with Abraham Lincoln. Nixon made at least one midnight visit to the Lincoln Memorial for a talk with the great man's statue. Teddy Roosevelt wore a ring that was made from a lock of Lincoln's hair. Franklin Roosevelt hired Robert Sherwood, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his play, "Abe Lincoln in Illinois," as his speechwriter.

But Obama has taken the identification with the 16th president to a new level. He began his presidential campaign two years ago in Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln's home, on the weekend of Lincoln's birthday. And he comes full circle on Thursday, Lincoln's 200th birthday. After speaking in honor of Lincoln at the Capitol Rotunda in the morning ("I feel a special gratitude to this singular figure who in so many ways made my own story possible," he said), he journeys back to Springfield to deliver another tribute in the evening.

Of course, the timing of his election with Lincoln's bicentennial, being celebrated Thursday around the United States, is coincidental. Still, one wonders if Obama could over-do the Lincoln analogy. Is it in his political interest to mind-meld with another president? Is he being presumptuous? Is he raising expectations?

Obama's pilgrimages to Springfield are bookends to a period in which he has elevated Lincoln to the status of, well, almost a co-president. He quoted Lincoln throughout the campaign and mimicked the trappings of his inauguration, down to copying the menu for his inaugural lunch from Lincoln's, and having the food served on replicas of the china that Mary Todd Lincoln chose for the White House. On Wednesday, Obama even joined a star-studded celebration for the rededication of Ford's Theatre, where Lincoln was assassinated.

We talked with several historians and analysts about the political benefits and the risks for Obama in keeping Lincoln so close at hand. Most generally agreed that the advantages outweigh any disadvantages, which explains why he is still doing it.

Mark Salter, a top adviser in Senator John McCain's presidential campaign against Obama, sees no real political harm in Obama's claiming the Lincoln mantle and says that if McCain had been elected, he would probably claim it too.

But he is irked at cable television shows that he says get carried away with the analogies. He sees Lincoln as a rich, textured figure of Shakespearean proportions who had to make extraordinarily difficult decisions, and says few if any other presidents have risen to that level. He says the Lincoln atmospherics have no bearing on the success of Obama's presidency.