Archaeologists believe they have unearthed the remains of Shakespeare's first theatre, the BBC has learned.

A team from the Museum of London found the remains of the theatre in Shoreditch last summer.

Built in 1576, it is thought the Bard acted there and that it also hosted the premiere of Romeo and Juliet...

Taryn Nixon, from the Museum of London, said her team had found part of the original curved wall of the playhouse, which was believed to be polygonal in shape.

A metre and a half below street level, it has also uncovered the gravel surface, gently sloping down towards the stage, where the bulk of the audience would have stood...

The theatre was constructed by James Burbage, possibly using bricks from an old priory.

It is thought to have played host to Shakespeare's theatre company, the Chamberlain's Men.

About 25 years after it was built, it was dismantled and moved timber by timber to construct the Globe Theatre on the South Bank of the Thames...

The [excavation] site is now owned by the Tower Theatre Company. It plans to preserve the architecture in situ and construct a new playhouse around it which will open in 2012.

In 1930, few people thought political turmoil in Germany was the most significant event in the world—not with a global Depression underway. Only the year before, in the German national elections of 1929, Adolf Hitler had still been regarded as "something of a joke, a minor figure from a fringe far-right group" whose Nazi Party managed to win just 2.6 percent of the vote and 12 seats in the Reichstag, Liaquat Ahamed writes in his magisterial new history, "Lords of Finance." But the next year, with unemployment soaring and Berlin about to default on its international debt payments—and with the German equivalent of "Hoovervilles" rising in the cities—Hitler drew tens of thousands to his rallies by promising to restore prosperity and purge the profiteers. The Nazi Party leapt into second place in the Reichstag with 107 seats. It was the beginning of a downward political spiral that ultimately eclipsed the economic crisis that sparked it, turning the European continent into a slaughterhouse and changing the world forever.

No one sees any Hitlers on the horizon today, and the current global recession is, as yet, nowhere near as devastating as the Great Depression. But the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies—with the approval of President Obama—are taking a hard look at the political implications of a worldwide crisis that is being compared more and more to that earlier era. When retired Navy Adm. Dennis Blair took over as Obama's "intelligence czar" in January, he told his staff he wanted concerns about the recession at the top of his annual "worldwide threat assessment" to Congress. Among the questions: Would Russia be destabilized? What about China and India? Does a huge new humanitarian crisis loom in Africa? As originally drafted, these economic warnings were mentioned along with more familiar issues, like terrorism. But Blair told his new staff that he wanted to do more than list his concerns about the economic crisis—he wanted to open his presentation with them. "He sharpened it," says one intelligence official familiar with the process who would discuss it only on condition of anonymity.

Nearly 200 years ago, a ship sank in the Gulf of Mexico, about 35 miles off Louisiana's coast. It stayed, undiscovered, on the seabed, about 4,000 feet below the surface, until 2002, when a crew happened upon the wreckage while checking out a pipeline.

An expedition led by Texas A&M University found no skeletal remains and nothing to indicate the vessel's name, where it came from or how it sank. But underwater sleuths discovered plenty of artifacts, including a telescope, pottery, French bottles, swords, English mustard jars, hourglasses, a cast-iron stove and a Scottish cannon, Louisiana State Museum spokesman Arthur Smith said.

About 500 of those pieces are to be transferred today to the Louisiana State Museum and the state Division of Archaeology.

Archaeologists will study the pieces, Smith said, and eventually the museum will display them.

In addition to receiving the artifacts, the state will assume the responsibility of solving this mystery of the deep.

So far the only clue researchers have about the vessel's age is a coin marked 1810. That means it might have gone down during the War of 1812, Smith said, but no one is certain about that yet.

SKELETON exhumed from a grave in Venice is being claimed as the first known example of the "vampires" widely referred to in contemporary documents.

Matteo Borrini of the University of Florence in Italy found the skeleton of a woman with a small brick in her mouth while excavating mass graves of plague victims from the Middle Ages on Lazzaretto Nuovo Island in Venice.

At the time the woman died, many people believed that the plague was spread by "vampires" which, rather than drinking people's blood, spread disease by chewing on their shrouds after dying. Grave-diggers put bricks in the mouths of suspected vampires to stop them doing this, Borrini says.

The belief in vampires probably arose because blood is sometimes expelled from the mouths of the dead, causing the shroud to sink inwards and tear. Borrini, who presented his findings at a meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in Denver, Colorado, last week, claims this might be the first such vampire to have been forensically examined. The skeleton was removed from a mass grave of victims of the Venetian plague of 1576.

However, Peer Moore-Jansen of Wichita State University in Kansas says he has found similar skeletons in Poland and that while Borrini's finding is exciting, "claiming it as the first vampire is a little ridiculous".

Security forces in central Tibet have increased patrols and border vigilance in advance of a sensitive anniversary to guard against possible disruptions caused by followers of the Dalai Lama or by Western groups advocating Tibetan independence, according to state news agency reports Monday. Meanwhile, a police car and a fire engine were attacked with homemade explosives in a Tibetan area on Monday, but no one was wounded.

The announcement of the increased patrols came one day before the 50th anniversary of a failed Tibetan rebellion against Chinese rule. After the 1959 revolt was suppressed, the Dalai Lama fled into exile in India.

Last March, the police clamped down on a protest by Buddhist monks in Lhasa, the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region, prompting many Tibetans to riot in the streets. The uprising quickly spread to other Tibetan areas of China, becoming the largest-scale Tibetan rebellion against Chinese rule in decades.

The Chinese government fears the same thing could happen again this year, and it has been flooding Tibetan regions across western China with troops and police officers, creating an unofficial state of martial law. Foreigners have been barred from many areas.

The five detainees at Guantanamo Bay charged with plotting the September 11, 2001 attacks have filed a document accepting responsibility for the deaths of nearly 3,000 people and expressing pride at their accomplishment, The New York Times reported late Monday.

The document, which the newspaper said may be released publicly on Tuesday, describes the five men as the "9/11 Shura Council," and says their actions were an offering to God, according to excerpts of the document read to a reporter by a government official, the report said.

The document is titled "The Islamic Response to the Government's Nine Accusations," the military judge at the U.S. Naval base said in a separate filing, obtained by the Times, that described the detainees' document.

The document was filed on behalf of the five men, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who has called himself the mastermind of the attacks.

Some of the men had said earlier that they planned the 2001 attacks and that they wanted to be martyrs. The reason for the new filing, which the report said reached the military court on March 5, was not clear. The brief court order describing the filing said the men sought no legal action.

BOGOTA, Colombia -- In a new book titled "Out of Captivity," three Americans describe being chained at the neck by rebel guards during five years of imprisonment in Colombia's jungles, and reveal tensions among themselves and their fellow hostages.

Another former hostage, Fernando Araújo, recounts in his book the anguish of finding his wife with another man after his escape from the guerrillas' clutches.

Luis Eladio Pérez writes that during the years he was held by the rebels, he came to realize what a self-absorbed politician he had been. Lucy Artunduaga, whose husband was a hostage, writes about learning that he had fallen in love with another captive during his six years in the jungle. And Colombia is breathlessly awaiting what Ingrid Betancourt, a French Colombian politician and the most famous of all the former captives, will say in a book expected later this year.

These days, bookstores in Colombia are full of gripping tales by former hostages detailing how they survived forced marches, military bombing runs, jungle-borne parasites and the abuse of sadistic guards. A few of the authors, though, have gone deeper, exploring their frailties under harrowing conditions or recounting the inevitable human drama that unfolded in the jungle, from rivalries in makeshift prisons to the romances that blossomed between some hostages.

The books have generated a swirl of controversy in a country where people tend to be wary of airing intimacies in public. Some here -- including newspaper columnists, radio talk-show hosts and the more discreet of the former hostages -- have strongly rebuked the trend.

The Iraq Museum has received 531 archeological pieces which were in the possession of senior
government officials.

The pieces were handed over to the Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Qahtan al-Jibouri who in turn
gave them to the Iraq Museum, according to the ministry's spokesman Abdulzahara al-Talaqani.

Talaqani said the first batch comprising a magnificent collection of numismatic coins was returned
to the museum by Minister of National Security Shirwan al-Waili.

This batch included 366 gold and silver coins of various colors, Talaqani said.

He said the second batch of 165 artifacts was kept by two members of parliament and included mainly
statues and cylinder seals.

Americans are becoming less religious, increasingly turning away from many denominations that once served as their spiritual homes, according to a major national survey released Monday.

The percentage of people who do not claim a religious identity has nearly doubled since 1990, growing to 15% of Americans last year, researchers with the American Religious Identification Survey found.

Mainline Christian denominations, once bulwarks of the religious landscape, have suffered most from the drift.

The Chinese government and Tibet's government-in-exile offer competing versions of whether the remote, mountainous territory was historically ruled as part of China, or whether it has legitimate claims to independence or autonomy.

Following are some details about the history of relations.

Many of the most substantive and significant documents generated by the Obama Administration to date are surprisingly absent from the White House web site.

President Obama recently ordered the reorganization of the National Security Council through a Presidential Policy Directive. But the unclassified Directive is not even mentioned on the White House web site, much less posted there. Secrecy News obtained a copy of the signed directive PPD-1 (pdf).

Another directive, Presidential Study Directive-1, mandated a review of the organization of homeland security and counterterrrorism activities. Its existence is likewise unreflected on the White House web site. A signed copy is here (pdf).

A new White House report on the interdiction of aircraft engaged in drug trafficking is similarly unmentioned on the White House web site. It was published by the House Foreign Affairs Committee and is available here (pdf).

The White House web site does notify Americans that the First Lady visited Miriam's Kitchen last week to help feed the homeless, which is good to know. But its web page about the President's Intelligence Advisory Board does not provide meaningful information about the Board, not even a list of members.

In short, the current White House web site does not present a reliable or complete record of Presidential actions or activities. For that, one still has to turn elsewhere.

The federal court records read like variations on the same morality play sharing the same opening scene: A neighbor known as quiet and friendly is accused of Nazi war crimes, stunning residents of nearby bungalows or adjoining apartments.

"He was always out ready to help his neighbors," Kathy Blitch testified at the trial of Conrad Schellong, with whom she shared a back porch on Chicago's Northwest Side.

But Schellong, a retired machinist, was also among a number of concentration camp guards whose dark pasts caught up with them decades after they had bluffed their way into this country.

Many lived in Chicago, where the ethnic patchwork made it easy to blend in among various displaced people rebuilding their lives after World War II. Having participated in the horrors of Auschwitz and Treblinka, former Nazis and their collaborators went on to live in quiet anonymity in Cicero and Schiller Park, Brookfield and Brighton Park.

Sixty-five years after his plane went missing over northern India, the mystery of what happened to a Madison County airman from World War II is likely solved.

In recent days, surviving relatives of U.S. Army 2nd Lt. John W. Funk Jr. learned that a nonprofit organization founded by Arizona businessman Clayton Kuhles located the wreckage of Funk’s long-missing C-87 transport last fall on a jungle-covered mountain in India’s Arunachal Province.

Kuhles is the founder of MIA Recoveries and conducts annual expeditions to Burma, India, Bangladesh and China in search of aircraft lost while flying “the Hump,” an infamous air route over the Himalayas that claimed the lives of more than 1,000 Allied airmen during World War II.

On Oct. 3, Kuhles’ party discovered remnants of a C-87 cargo plane believed to be Funk’s. They were led to the wreckage by area villagers who remembered walking to the crash site and burying the plane’s five crew members more than a half century ago.

According to the MIA Recoveries Web site, the plane disappeared on a flight from Yangkai, China to Jorhat, India in August 1943. Aside from Funk, who was the plane’s navigator, crew members included Captain Tom Perry, the pilot; Lt. John T. Tennison, the co-pilot; Staff Sargent Alvin J. Lenox, the radioman; and Corporal Donald A. Johnson, the crew chief.

Kuhles said it is now up to JPAC to bring the remains of the fallen airmen home. His organization, which is funded through private donations, has worked since 2001 to locate plane wrecks in “the Hump.” Thus far, he has documented 15 crash sites and the remains of more than 100 men. The information he obtained was turned over to surviving families and JPAC for further action.

“All five families (of the C-87) have now been contacted,” Kuhles said. “They have put together a form letter that friends and family members can send to their Congressional representatives, encouraging the government to recover the remains.”

He noted that JPAC spends about 90 percent of its resources on recovering U.S. soldiers lost in Vietnam, with only about 10 percent focused on those from World War II. He said it generally takes intense media and family pressure to influence government action on recoveries from that earlier war.

SELMA, Ala. -- Across this largely African-American city, there are signs of hope. Faces light up at the mere mention of President Obama. Even the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where Alabama state troopers attacked defenseless civil rights demonstrators on "Bloody Sunday" 44 years ago this month, seems somehow to lead to a better place – if not yet to the promised land.

In Selma this past weekend, people gathered to honor the leaders and achievements of the civil rights era of the 1960s, paying homage to a movement that, many here say, laid the foundation for an African-American man to become president of the United States less that half a century later.

Mr. Obama's election is again focusing attention on the unfinished business of racial reconciliation, says the Rev. Clete Kiley, president of the Faith and Politics Institute, which led the weekend tribute that included about 30 members of Congress.

"A page has been turned," he says. "But America has still not had the conversation about race it needs to have.... Our goal [in taking members of Congress to the churches and other landmarks associated with the civil rights era] is to get beyond nostalgia ... and to ask, 'Where do we go from here?' "

It is the ninth time since 1998 that the institute has organized such a trip to coincide with Selma's annual Bridge Crossing Jubilee.

OREM, Utah -- Discussing one of the darkest events in Utah's history in a civil manner was one of the goals of a panel discussion at Utah Valley University on Thursday evening. Will Bagley, an independent historian; Forrest Cuch, executive director of the Utah Division of Indian Affairs; and Richard E. Turley Jr., assistant LDS Church historian participated in "Perspectives on a massacre: A panel discussion on Mountain Meadows."


Moderator Alex Caldiero, poet and scholar in residence at UVU, illustrated the problems inherent in such a discussion when he began the evening by reading three different versions of "just the facts."

Then it was the panelists' turn. Each gave a 15-minute presentation on their perspective of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The massacre occurred in 1857 west of Cedar City, Utah, when Mormon settlers attacked a California-bound wagon train, killing 120 people.

Turley focused on the events leading up to the massacre. Like the book "Massacre at Mountain Meadows" that he co-authored with Ronald W. Walker and Glen M. Leonard, he placed the massacre in the context of studies of group violence and the process that leads to such atrocities. "Demonizing (the victims), authority, obedience, peer pressure, ambiguity, fear and deprivation -- all were present in southern Utah in 1857," Turley said.

Turley rejected the search for scapegoats, but also emphasized that none of the conditions and nothing the victims did justified the massacre. "Unless human beings choose to resist powerful forces, otherwise good people under certain circumstances can commit the unthinkable," he said.

Some students used drawings of Presidents Barack Obama and George Washington, while others wrote essays or poems that spoke of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The message of each entry in the "I Am Making History" contest was clear: Black History Month is a time to remember the past and be hopeful for the future.

Kroger, which sponsored the contest, awarded 80 winners Saturday with scholarships, iPods and computers for their representations of what Black History Month means to them. The awards ceremony was held in Lovett hall at the Henry Ford in Dearborn.

Jaslyn Morris, an eighth-grader at Grand Blanc West Middle School in Grand Blanc, was recognized for her essay, "How We Are Making History." Morris, 13, said Black History Month, which is celebrated in February, is a chance to highlight the accomplishments of African Americans.

There are certain words that tend not to engage very much sympathy in a person, and "archive" has traditionally been one of them. It is generally associated with something dried out and perhaps a little dull. Could it be that the collapse of the Cologne city archives building will mark a change in this mentality in Germany?

Even after the Anna-Amalia Library in Weimar burnt down, it was possible to sense a change in Germany – perhaps a very subtle change, but a change nonetheless. After decades of selective memory loss, many people feel that the narrowing of German history to the twelve revolting years of Nazi rule has become something of a cul-de-sac. German history is well over 1000 years old, and if one were to include the Roman-Germanic symbiosis on the Rhine it would be more like 2000.

There is no better place to witness this than Cologne. The city’s founding as a colony of the Roman Empire didn’t have so much to do with its strategic position, as it did with the vanity of a certain woman: Agrippina. The grandchild of the commander Agrippa and sister of Emperor Caligula, wife of Emperor Claudius and mother of Emperor Nero was born there in 15 AD and was not prepared to live in the world metropolis of Rome while being labelled as springing from an insignificant provincial town. And that was how Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinesium, under the acronym of CCAA, was born, the Roman Empire's most strategically important city north of the Alps.

And it doesn’t matter where you dig in present day Cologne: Residue of the Roman era can be found everywhere. For example the accident-site, which was directly in front of the Roman city walls, was the location of a station for the Roman street police for centuries. Today, Sankt Georg, an early Roman treasure, is also not far away....