The National Constitution Center, the site of the speech, announced it will mark the anniversary 'by launching a virtual exhibit online. The interactive website and supplemental educational materials will provide users with a deeper understanding of this important speech. The interactive webpage [launches tomorrow] will ... contain full video of President Obama's speech, A More Perfect Union, with a chapter index and a scrolling transcript to make it easy for users to follow along. The page will also feature quotes from media personalities and historians about the significance of the seminal speech, including audio of historian Harold Holzer comparing Lincoln's historic Cooper Union speech and Obama's Race Speech at the Constitution Center; press materials; and an image gallery of photographs from the event and of the Center's signed copy of the speech.'

More than 10,000 cave paintings — dating back to more than 6,000 years — were discovered by Peruvian archaeologist Quirino Olivera in the Andean country’s jungle department of Amazonas, daily El Comercio reported.

Hidden by the region’s lush vegetation for centuries, the paintings were discovered in caves located near the village of Tambolic, in the district of Jamalca, province of Utcubamba.

“Over the past two years,” said Olivera, “we have found 6,000-year old cave paintings, especially in the Cuaco and Yamón mountains, located in the Lonya Grande district. These are in addition to those recently found in Shupcha, Tambolic, were many of these ancient images are concentrated.”

According to Olivera, most of the Tambolic paintings depict hunting scenes and are similar to those found in Toquepala. The artists used mainly red, brown, yellow and black pigments.

In an effort to educate the public on the state of the economy and his plans for improving it, President Obama is considering a series of short televised addresses similar to Franklin Roosevelt's fireside chats. Press secretary Robert Gibbs has told the television networks that the administration may request more time than usual for a president. Gibbs did not provide a schedule but described the addresses as lasting about 10 minutes each.

You may think you've heard all this before. When Barack Obama became the first president to put his weekly radio address on YouTube, it was heralded as his version of FDR's famous fireside chats. It was a sloppy comparison. FDR wasn't the first president to use radio. (Here's Hoover giving a fireside-chat-like address on unemployment.) And FDR did not speak weekly. (That was a Reagan invention.) Roosevelt spoke only 30 times in 12 years. But what made the addresses so powerful and popular was the connection the president created with the country as he explained his sweeping policies.

The number of Americans who think another Great Depression will occur within the next year is on the rise, a poll released Tuesday shows.

Forty-five percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey said another depression is likely.

"Will the Great Recession turn into another Great Depression? A growing number of Americans think it might," said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "Last December, 38% said a depression like the one the U.S. experienced in the 1930s was likely in the next year. Now that number is up 7 points."

The poll described the 1930s' Great Depression as a time in which roughly one out of four workers was unemployed, banks failed across the country and millions of ordinary Americans were temporarily homeless or unable to feed their families.

Nearly nine out of ten people questioned in the survey said economic conditions in the country are poor today, with only 11% suggesting that conditions are good.

Britain is locked in a court battle with an American treasure-hunting company over ownership of the wreck of a cruise liner with its valuable cargo of bullion, torpedoed in the First World War by a German U-boat in the Atlantic. The 18,000-tonne Royal Mail Ship Laconia, which had been commandeered by the British government, was attacked with the loss of 13 passengers, including three Americans, en route from New York to Liverpool on 25 February 1917.

That changed the course of the war: a graphic account of the sinking by an American journalist aboard was credited with helping to push the United States into joining the conflict after it was read to both Houses of Congress.

But the discovery of the hull of the former Cunard liner 160 miles off Ireland by Odyssey Marine Exploration, a Florida-based company, has turned RMS Laconia into the source of a new transatlantic power struggle. The treasure-hunters have been appointed "custodian" of the wreck and its contents, including 852 bars of silver and 132 boxes of silver coins worth an estimated £3m.

Odyssey found the Laconia last November along with another First World War British merchant vessel, but kept secret the identity and precise location of the wrecks. The names of the ships were disclosed in a British government document obtained by The Independent.

Dating back to the Saffarid Dynasty, one of Iran’s oldest mosques, located in the city, is currently being excavated during this season, team director Hamideh Chubak told the Persian service of CHN on Monday.

Saffarids were an Iranian dynasty of lower class origins that ruled a large area of eastern Iran during the 9th century CE.

The team also has been scheduled to demarcate the city of Decius and to study industrial workshops located in the site, she added.

The Austrian Science Fund (FWF) announced, today, its latest project to research and make public information about the management of the Imperial Court in Vienna. The project, entitled ‘At Your Majesty’s Service!’, is based on the study of the ‘instruction manuals’ of the Viennese court by Institute for Austrian Historical Research at the University of Vienna. The manuals notably provided the court staff with details about the manner in which specific tasks were to be carried out and by whom. They were used for over 200 years and were kept up to date by the staff of the Obersthofmeister, who held the highest administrative office at the court. The manuals constitute four volumes, with a total of 1,400 handwritten pages.

An edition of the manuscripts is currently being prepared and the study of the volumes has provided both a fascinating insight into the organisational structures of the court and a detailed picture of the way in which it operated.

Dixie State College Board of Trustees members retired the school's former Rebel nickname and mascot Friday morning after a 5-4 vote.

Following an update on the college by president Stephen D. Nadauld and the introduction of student body present-elect, Dewey Denning, board members delved into their first action item on the agenda, the Dixie Rebel nickname and mascot.

"There have been some matters of advice that probably suggest that it would be wise that we just go ahead and vote," said Trustees chairman Shandon Gubler. "You can change that direction if you want, but it would probably be the wise thing to do."

Community members and students helped choose a new nickname and mascot, which was then approved by the Board of Trustees. Their vote led to hundreds of upset students and alumni announcing their disapproval to the Board during the Feb. 9 meeting approving DSC's new Red Storm nickname and bull mascot.

After talking to students, Board members decided to continue discussion on the issue. On Friday, some were still hesitant to move forward with a decision.

Board member Bill Ronnow made the motion to retire the Rebel name and mascot and "any and all items associated with the Confederate symbol."

Vicki Wilson, vice chair, seconded the motion.

As General Motors and Chrysler struggle to remain solvent, the railroad bailout of a generation ago could offer a template to the Obama administration — one in which the federal government would run the auto companies until they are back on their feet, The New York Times’s Louis Uchitelle reported.

That was a different age, of course. Congress was very much on board, supervising the reorganization of the bankrupt Northeastern railroads and then forming Conrail, in 1976, to run them. The auto companies, in contrast, are being pushed by the White House and Congress to reorganize themselves and remain private corporations, owned by shareholders.

Conrail presided over huge cutbacks in rail operations, leaving the railroad system with much less track and roughly half the number of employees. By 1981, it was turning a profit hauling freight, and eventually its operations were sold back to privately operated lines.

Five years after Conrail’s creation, Ronald Reagan became president and gave government takeovers a bad name by popularizing the view that government was inept in the marketplace. The Obama administration, respectful of this continuing view, wants the automakers to stand on their own, with only temporary federal loans to get them through the hard times.

During a ceremony Wednesday at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, members of the Kosakadani family were presented a Japanese flag that belonged to Cpl. Masayuki Kosakadani, who died during World War II.

The flag was brought to Japan by Air Force Col. Charles Eastman, who is in Japan with members of the Air War College in Alabama, where he is an instructor. Eastman got the flag from Casey Breslin, a friend who says the colonel is the only servicemember she knows, Eastman said after the ceremony..

Breslin is the granddaughter of Army Maj. Hugh Breslin Jr., who had possession of the flag for a short time until his death last year. Hugh Breslin had received it from Army Col. John H. Blair, who served with Breslin and who had kept the flag for more than 60 years. According to a fact sheet released by the U.S. Embassy, the exact circumstances relating to how Blair obtained the flag are unknown.

A 94-year-old former German army officer sentenced to life in prison by an Italian military court for the deaths of four Italian civilians in August 1944 has been cleared on appeal, his lawyer said Friday.

Francesco Coran told the ANSA news agency that the military appeal court in Rome had quashed the sentence handed down against Hans Dietrich Michelsen, who was tried in his absence by a military tribunal in La Spezia in February last year.

Michelsen, then a 29-year-old Wehrmacht major, had been tried in his absence for the killing of the civilians on August 18, 1944 in the central Italian village of Grotta di Maona.

Biblical scholars have long argued that the Dead Sea Scrolls were the work of an ascetic and celibate Jewish community known as the Essenes, which flourished in the 1st century A.D. in the scorching desert canyons near the Dead Sea. Now, a prominent Israeli scholar, Rachel Elior, disputes that the Essenes ever existed at all — a claim that has shaken the bedrock of Biblical scholarship.

Elior, who teaches Jewish mysticism at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, claims that the Essenes were a fabrication by the 1st century A.D. Jewish-Roman historian, Josephus Flavius, and that his faulty reporting was passed on as fact through the centuries. As Elior explains, the Essenes make no mention of themselves in the 900 scrolls found by a Bedouin shepherd in 1947 in the caves of Qumran, near the Dead Sea. "Sixty years of research have been wasted trying to find the Essenes in the scrolls," Elior tells TIME. "But they didn't exist. This is legend on a legend."

Elior contends that Josephus, a former Jewish priest who wrote his history while a captive in Rome, "wanted to explain to the Romans that the Jews weren't all losers and traitors, that there were many exceptional Jews of religious devotion and heroism. You might say it was the first rebuttal to anti-Semitic literature." She adds: "He was probably inspired by the Spartans. For the Romans, the Spartans were the highest ideal of human behavior, and Josephus wanted to portray Jews who were like the Spartans, in their ideals and high virtue."

So who were the real authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls? Elior theorizes that the Essenes were really the renegade sons of Zadok, a priestly caste banished from the Temple of Jerusalem by intriguing Greek rulers in 2nd century B.C. When they left, they took the source of their wisdom — their scrolls — with them. "In Qumran, the remnants of a huge library were found," she says, with some of the early Hebrew texts dating back to the 2nd century B.C. Until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest known version of the Old Testament dated to the 9th century A.D. "The scrolls attest to a Biblical priestly heritage," claims Elior, who speculates that the scrolls were hidden in Qumran for safekeeping.

Elior's theory landed like a bombshell in the cloistered world of Biblical scholarship. James Charlesworth, director of the Dead Sea Scrolls project at Princeton Theological Seminary and an expert on Josephus, says that it is not unusual that the word "Essenes" does not appear in the scrolls. "It's a foreign label," he tells TIME. "When they refer to themselves, it's as 'men of holiness' or 'sons of light.'" Charlesworth contends that at least eight scholars in antiquity refer to the Essenes. One proof of Essene authorship of the Dead Sea Scrolls, he says, was the large number of inkpots found by archeologists at Qumran.

Elior is braced for more criticism of her theory. "Usually my opponents have only read Josephus and the other classical references to the Essenes," she says. "They should read the Dead Sea Scrolls — all 39 volumes — the proof is there."

A pair of stone-age boats, thought to be the oldest in Europe, have been allowed to rot in a partially collapsed shed while the northern German regional archaeology authorities stood by broke and helpless, it emerged this week.

The two 7,000-year-old wooden boats and a third one thought to be around 6,000 years old, were hailed as a sensation when they were found during construction work on the Baltic coast near Stralsund in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern seven years ago.

But now they are effectively ruined, after a lack of funds resulted in them being stored inappropriately. “It is a loss for Germany if not for the whole world,” said Andreas Grüger, director of the Stralsund historical museum.

The boats had been entrusted to the Authorities for Culture and Preservation of Ancient Monuments in Schwerin for restoration and conservation. But Michael Bednorz, head of the State Office admitted that financial difficulties meant that they were kept in a shed instead of an appropriate space.

The remains of the boats have now been sent to the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin where students are planning to investigate the extent of the damage and draw up a plan to save at least fragments.

Pope Benedict XVI will undertake what would be the first papal visit to Britain in 30 years and the second by any pontiff since King Henry VIII broke with the Vatican to establish Church of England, according to sources.

However, details of the papal visit are still under discussion, but some cities being considered include London, Birmingham, Oxford, Edinburgh, Armagh and Dublin, 'The Daily Telegraph' quoted the unnamed sources as saying.

And, a senior cardinal is due to make a private trip to Britain in the summer to make preparations for the Pope's visit, which could be announced by the end of this year, the newspaper said.

The Ancient Egyptians cherished their fragrant scents, too, as perfume flacons from this period indicate. In its permanent exhibition, Bonn University's Egyptian Museum has a particularly well preserved example on display. Screening this 3,500-year-old flacon with a computer tomograph, scientists at the university detected the desiccated residues of a fluid, which they now want to submit to further analysis. They might even succeed in reconstructing this scent.

Pharaoh Hatshepsut was a power-conscious woman who assumed the reins of government in Egypt around the year 1479 B.C. In actual fact, she was only supposed to represent her step-son Thutmose III, who was three years old at the time, until he was old enough to take over.

Hatshepsut's perfume is also presumably a demonstration of her power. "We think it probable that one constituent was incense – the scent of the gods," Michael Hoveler-Muller declares. This idea is not so wide of the mark, as it is a known fact that in the course of her regency Haptshepsut undertook an expedition to Punt – the modern Eritrea, and the Egyptians had been importing precious goods such as ebony, ivory, gold, and just this incense, from there since the third millennium B.C. Apparently the expedition brought back whole incense plants, which Hatshepsut then had planted in the vicinity of her funerary temple.

Sales of illegal antiquities total at least $7.8 billion annually. It’s a black market that ranks behind only drugs and weapons as the most profitable, according to a United Nations analysis.

What comes out of the ground passes through international networks of plunder. At the end of the line, people purchase archaeological artifacts in shops, on the Internet and in private and public auctions. Buyers rarely know or, apparently, care how a $2.99 Native American arrowhead or a $75,000 Egyptian sarcophagus managed to come into their possession.

During the Archaeological Institute of America’s annual meeting, held in Philadelphia in January, researchers offered analyses of auction and Internet data documenting an ongoing demand for archaeological artifacts. Buyers show no hesitation when offered desirable items that have no documented ownership history, or provenance. Auction-house catalogs of available items contain a fair number of fake pieces and genuine ones illegally obtained.

The laws and conventions aimed at stopping illegal looting are difficult to enforce.

Nevada collector believes he has found a mid-1800s photographic image of Ulysses S. Grant, the Civil War general who went on to become the nation's 18th president.

A University of Nevada, Las Vegas archivist says the daguerreotype appears to be an authentic image of Grant, who served two terms as president from 1869 to 1877.

Collector Randall Spencer said he would prefer to sell the image to a historical institution for public display, but would consider selling it to a private collector to finance his search for vanishing images of U.S. history.

"There was at that time still an abundance of Early American photography that had not been examined, especially in San Francisco, because when people went West in the mid-19th century, that's where they ended up," Spencer said. "And what really launched me into photography was discovering a picture of Mrs. Thomas Lincoln, Sarah Bush Lincoln, the stepmother who raised Abraham Lincoln."

A rare photo of a person widely admired, Spencer said, has a stronger market than an even rarer photo of some historic scoundrel. And while Grant's presidency was considered a poor one, most Americans greatly appreciate his winning the Civil War.

Spencer said he hoped to find a corporation or an individual willing to pay $2.5 million for what he called the only image of its kind.

With Feb. 12 marking the bicentennial anniversary of the birth of America's 16th president, an exhibit focusing on Abraham Lincoln collectibles was well-attended Sunday at the Spring Fox Valley Antiques Show.

The two-day event began Saturday and drew more than 1,000 visitors, said Virginia Larsen, chair of the Chicago Suburban Antique Dealers Association show.

Presenting rare finds -- ranging from an original bust of Lincoln, dated in 1865, to a steel engraved Lincoln portrait and a vintage beaver-felt top hat similar to those worn by the president -- Ray McCaskey presented "Collecting Lincoln" and explained the types of items that typically comprise a collection.

"Sometimes, collectors actually set out to acquire particular items, and other times, collections just happen," said McCaskey, a member of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Museum Foundation board in Springfield. "The prime types of collectibles are things the person handwrote or actually used, while other items in a collection might be things that represent what a person might have used."

He discussed books and newspaper articles about Lincoln, as well as commemorative items such as a campaign fob about the size of a nickel, with Lincoln's portrait on one side and vice presidential running mate Andrew Johnson's on the other, and a campaign booklet introducing Lincoln as a presidential candidate.

Original documents bearing the president's signature also are coveted items for the collection, he said. One exhibit included an original pass issued to a soldier for a temporary leave, along with one of President Lincoln's hand-signed calling cards given to the soldier during a chance meeting with Lincoln. Plaster casts of Lincoln's hands, possibly created from the original set of molds, were also part of the collection. McCaskey also had a few novelty items on hand, pointing out a plastic aftershave bottle shaped like Lincoln, and a Lincoln-themed plastic candy dispenser.

At the show, 55 vendors displayed antiques from the 17th, 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. The Garfield Farm Museum in LaFox sponsored the event.

Scientists Scan Charleston Harbor Looking For Ships, Fortifications And Torpedoes.

A University of South Carolina archaeologist is scanning the bottom of Charleston Harbor for Civil War artifacts, using a twin-outboard motor boat and a clutch of scientific equipment.

James Spirek of the South Carolina Institute for Archaeology and Anthropology has been on the water this week putting together the first comprehensive historical scan of the harbor bottom.

Friday, on a cold, gray, windy morning, the search was focused on Confederate frame torpedoes. They were essentially mines anchored to the bottom with wooden frames guarding to inland waterways from Yankee ships.

The last statue of General Franco in Spain is to be withdrawn almost 34 years after the death of the dictator.

The regional government of Melilla, one of Spain's North African enclaves along with Ceuta, said the bronze statue of General Franco would be removed "within the period of 15 days".

The move means no more commemorative figures will stand in public streets to the man who ruled Spain between the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 and his death in November, 1975.
Daniel Conesa, spokesman for the Melilla regional government, said the statue, which shows Franco standing, would be kept in storage then transferred to a military museum.

The Melilla government is removing the effigy of El Caudillo in compliance with the controversial Law of Historical Memory, which offers redress to victims or their relatives who were killed or "disappeared" during the Civil War and its aftermath.

Under the law, introduced in 2007, local authorities must remove symbols of the dictator or his supporters such as statues or plaques and change road names associated with the regime.

Architectural detectives in Maryland will spend the next year studying ghost images that splotch the walls of one of the nation's most historic spaces in the hope that the clues will guide the restoration of the room to its appearance at the time of the nation's birth.

For years, a mysterious water leak had plagued the walls of the Old Senate Chamber in the Maryland State House, the nation's oldest continuously operative legislative building. The water was causing ugly bubbles in the plaster of the historic room, where in 1783 George Washington stood in front of the Continental Congress and resigned his commission as head of the army....

In search of the source of the water, the preservationists last year peeled back all of the plaster and paint accumulated over the years in the Old Senate Chamber, revealing the bare brick beneath. And, stripped to its bones, the room began to share its secrets.

VIENNA In Austria's recent general election, nearly 30 per cent of voters backed extremist right-wing parties. Live visits the birthplace of Hitler to investigate how Fascism is once again threatening to erupt across Europe.

From all over Austria, people are here to pay their respects to their fallen hero. But the solemnity of the occasion is cut with tension. Beyond the crowd of about 300, armed police are in attendance. They keep a respectful distance but the rasping bark of Alsatians hidden in vans provides an eerie soundtrack as the crowd congregates in mist and light rain.

This is a neo-Nazi gathering and in the crowd are some of Austria’s most hard-faced fascists. Among them is Gottfried Kussel, a notorious thug who was the showman of Austria’s far-right movement in the Eighties and Nineties until he was imprisoned for eight years for promoting Nazi ideology.

This is a gathering in memory of an Austrian-born Nazi fighter pilot, who during WWII shot down 258 planes, 255 of them Russian. Such was Major Walter Nowotny’s standing at the time of his death in 1944 that the Nazi Party awarded him a grave of honour in Vienna’s largest cemetery, close to the musical legends Mozart, Brahms and Strauss.

But in 2005 that honour was revoked and his body moved to lie in an area of public graves. The decision infuriated the far right and made their annual pilgrimage an even greater event.

Today, the anniversary of Nowotny’s death, also coincides with Kristallnacht, the ‘night of broken glass’ in 1938 when 92 people were murdered and thousands attacked across Germany as stormtroopers set upon Jews in an outpouring of Nazi violence.

Some 70 years on from that infamous pogrom, the world faces a similar financial crisis to the one that precipitated the rise of Hitler and, in chilling echoes of Thirties Europe, support for far-right groups is exploding. Hitler’s birthplace has become the focus for neo-Nazis across the world.

Three hundred years ago, more or less, the last serious alchemists finally gave up on their attempts to create gold from other metals, dropping the curtain on one of the least successful endeavors in the history of human striving.

Centuries of work and scholarship had been plowed into alchemical pursuits, and for what? Countless ruined cauldrons, a long trail of empty mystical symbols, and precisely zero ounces of transmuted gold. As a legacy, alchemy ranks above even fantasy baseball as a great human icon of misspent mental energy.

But was it really such a waste? A new generation of scholars is taking a closer look at a discipline that captivated some of the greatest minds of the Renaissance. And in a field that modern thinkers had dismissed as a folly driven by superstition and greed, they now see something quite different.

Alchemists, they are finding, can take credit for a long roster of genuine chemical achievements, as well as the techniques that would prove essential to the birth of modern lab science. In alchemists' intricate notes and diagrams, they see the early attempt to codify and hand down experimental knowledge. In the practices of alchemical workshops, they find a masterly refinement of distillation, sublimation, and other techniques still important in modern laboratories.

Alchemy had long been seen as a kind of shadowy forebear of real chemistry, all the gestures with none of the results. But it was an alchemist who discovered the secret that created the European porcelain industry. Another alchemist discovered phosphorus. The alchemist Paracelsus helped transform medicine by proposing that disease was caused not by an imbalance of bodily humors, but by distinct harmful entities that could be treated with chemicals. (True, he believed the entities were controlled by the planets, but it was a start.)

Alchemists might have been colossally wrong in their goals, but they were, in some fundamental way, part of the story of science, these scholars say. Robert Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton, fathers of modern chemistry and physics, were also serious students of alchemy. And the fact that alchemists have been marginalized as hand-waving mystics says less about alchemists themselves than about modern society's need to separate itself from the supposedly benighted past.

Former President George W. Bush is preparing for one final struggle against the odds: raising $300 million for a presidential library, museum and policy institute at a time when dollars are tight and skepticism about his presidency runs high.

The former president and first lady have already begun holding small private dinners to persuade wealthy friends to invest in a monument and incubator based on the values and events of his presidency. By this fall, he’ll be armed with architect’s renderings and will hold travel around the country to meet with groups and build support for the complex on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas....

Groundbreaking for the George W. Bush Presidential Center is scheduled for the fall of 2010, with the grand opening expected in the spring of 2013. The center will have three parts — a library, where Bush’s papers will be stored; a museum of exhibits; and a policy institute, with plans for such novel programs as conversations with retired international leaders about their time in office.

Related Links

NYT Mag. article about the Bush library and institute

On this day, March 15, 44 B.C. (the Ides of March), Julius Caesar was assassinated by a group of plotting Roman senators.

Historians differ on the exact details of the assassination. Some say Caesar was outside the Senate when he was stabbed by the senators, others have him inside.

More recently, some historians have argued Caesar was attacked by the senators before he arrived at the Senate.

Either way, the death blow came after friction grew between the senators and Caesar over perceived indignities propagated by Caesar.

The final blow, some historians argue, came when a group of senators met with Caesar and Caesar did not rise to greet
them.

The Obama administration has endangered Americans and opened the country to further attack by reversing Bush administration anti-terrorism policies such as harsh interrogations of suspects, former Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday.

Cheney told CNN's "State of the Union" that the Bush administration's "alternative" interrogation techniques were "absolutely essential" to preventing further assaults like the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

Critics said those techniques amounted to the torture of prisoners in American custody.

Since taking office in January, Obama has announced plans to close the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to halt the military trials of suspected terrorists there, and to make CIA officers follow the Army field manual's rules on interrogations.

During Sunday's wide-ranging interview, Cheney also defended the Bush administration's economic record, arguing he and former President Bush handled multiple crises as best they could.

The Bush administration took office with a budget surplus and left with deep deficits and higher unemployment.

But Cheney said the administration had to grapple with the September 11, 2001 al Qaeda attacks and the resulting war in Afghanistan, as well as the disaster of 2005's Hurricane Katrina.

He also defended the invasion of Iraq, which the administration launched in 2003. Obama has begun to wind down the widely unpopular war, but Cheney said: "We've accomplished nearly everything we set out to do."

Thousands of children suffering from illnesses linked to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster have been barred from coming to Britain on charity-funded holidays.

Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian president of Belarus who is often described as Europe’s last dictator, introduced the ban after a teenage girl on a charity trip to the United States expressed a wish to stay there.

Although she has since returned to Belarus, authorities in the former Soviet republic have halted visits to Britain and other European countries.

More than 4,000 children born in regions worst hit by the Chernobyl disaster 23 years ago travel to Britain every year on free summer holidays. Many are suffering from cancer and leukaemia.

Britain and other European governments are trying to have the ban lifted. Belarus is demanding an undertaking from each country that it will return home any child who wants to stay in the West. A similar arrangement has already been accepted by Italy and Ireland. But the regime insists that only children under 14 will be allowed to leave.

Belarus was badly affected by the explosion at Chernobyl, in neighbouring Ukraine, when strong winds blew in contaminated dust.

Lukashenko, 55, has ruled Belarus with an iron fist since 1994. He has jailed opposition leaders who accused him of vote rigging. Other critics have disappeared.

On Wednesday, President Obama signed a law that bans federal funding of any research that leads to the destruction of human embryos just two days after lifting Bush-era restraints on it.

President Obama may have abolished contentious Bush-era restraints on federal funding of stem cell research on Monday, but a legislative obstacle still remains for scientists seeking more money.

A spending bill that Obama signed on Wednesday explicitly bans federal funding of any "research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death," language that pertains to creation of new stem cell lines.

This provision, known as the Dickey-Wicker amendment, was included in the 465-page omnibus spending bill that will fund government agencies through September. The amendment is a measure Congress has included in spending bills in every fiscal year since 1996.

Bush's executive policy additionally had limited researchers receiving federal aid to just 21 stem cell lines created before August 2001. Obama's reversal allows them to use hundreds of other stem cell lines already in existence.

But the Dickey-Wicker provision still prevents federally backed researches from creating their own stem cell lines, blocking their access to hundreds of new embryonic stem cell lines, usually from embryos left over from fertility treatments that would otherwise be discarded. Scientists tout such promising, long-term research in hopes of creating better treatments, possibly even cures, for conditions ranging from diabetes to paralysis.

Reps. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., and Mike Castle, R-Del., are seeking a quick vote on legislation to repeal the amendment, after failing twice in the past to overturn Bush's restrictions. Degette said she doesn't want stem cell research to become a "pingpong ball going back and forth between administrations."

A battle over the Dickey-Wicker provision erupted after Obama lifted the ban on federal funding for embryo-destroying stem cell research.

The New York Times called on Congress to repeal Dickey-Wicker in an editorial on Tuesday.

Forensic experts believe they have identified the skeleton of the queen’s younger sister, murdered over 2,000 years ago.

Archeologists and forensic experts believe they have identified the skeleton of Cleopatra’s younger sister, murdered more than 2,000 years ago on the orders of the Egyptian queen.

The remains of Princess Arsinöe, put to death in 41BC on the orders of Cleopatra and her Roman lover Mark Antony to eliminate her as a rival, are the first relics of the Ptolemaic dynasty to be identified.

The breakthrough, by an Austrian team, has provided pointers to Cleopatra’s true ethnicity. Scholars have long debated whether she was Greek or Macedonian like her ancestor the original Ptolemy, a Macedonian general who was made ruler of Egypt by Alexander the Great, or whether she was north African.

Evidence obtained by studying the dimensions of Arsinöe’s skull shows she had some of the characteristics of white Europeans, ancient Egyptians and black Africans, indicating that Cleopatra was probably of mixed race, too. They were daughters of Ptolemy XII by different wives.