Retired Catholic Archbishop Rembert G Weakland, who has been accused of covering up widespread child rape by priests in Milwaukee, has a forthcoming memoir in which he wrote the following bits of wisdom:

"We all considered sexual abuse of minors as a moral evil, but had no understanding of its criminal nature."

Weakland, who retired in 2002 after it became known that he paid $450,000 in 1998 to a man who had accused him of date rape years earlier, said he initially "accepted naively the common view that it was not necessary to worry about the effects on the youngsters: either they would not remember or they would ‘grow out of it’."

WHENEVER a heavy storm rips through this coastal city, Mary Witkowski, a local historian, immediately has the same worrisome thought: “Are they still standing?”

So far, she has been both amazed and relieved to find that the two rickety structures known as the Freeman houses have indeed survived on their adjacent 161-year-old foundations.

Thought to be the state’s oldest remaining houses built by African-Americans, the boarded-up homes are the only remnants of a south-end community of free blacks and runaway slaves who thrived here before the Civil War.

Lately, Ms. Witkowski, head of historical collections at the Bridgeport Public Library, has also begun to wonder whether the houses can outlast a tax dispute that has kept them in a legal limbo for more than two years.

The city foreclosed on the historic houses in May 2007 for unpaid property taxes. Their owner, ABCD Inc., a social service agency for the poor, does not have the funds to pay the full amount owed, but has fought to keep the city from gaining title

When Father Patrick Desbois heard that chilling Nazi maxim, he knew that he had to make a journey into one of the darkest corners of the Holocaust.

After a five-year investigation he had received a shocking insight into the mechanics of genocide — and strong indications that historians may have to raise their estimate of how many Jews were killed.

Working with a ballistics expert, the 53-year-old French priest dug up the mass graves of Ukraine.

"Every village was a crime scene,” he says, “and each case was different because the heads of the killing squads had to take in all the different factors — the geography, the transport available, the proximity of partisans — before organising the most efficient massacre.”

As his work in the Nazi killing fields continues, he is convinced that the figure for the number of Jewish dead will have to be revised upwards.

Use an interactive graphic at people-press.org to track trends in party affiliation going back to the Roosevelt administration.

A FEMA official told a House panel Friday that the government will send Katrina survivors still living in temporary housing eviction notices starting June 1 and try to connect them to agencies that can help them.

The $5.6 billion housing assistance program that provided temporary trailers and hotel rooms to victims was supposed to end in 2007. But the deadline was extended by two years to May 1 of this year to help the more than 5,000 individuals and families still struggling to rebuild their lives. (At its peak, 143,000 households along the Gulf Coast were located in temporary housing units.)

But the Obama administration says they have to go by the end of the month or face eviction.

Newly discovered footprints of different sizes, apparently left by men, women and children, on an ancient military route, have helped recreate a war scene that occurred at least 2,000 years ago, an archaeologist said Friday.

The footprints, the smallest of which were believed to belong to children around six years old, were found last week along vehicle tracks on China's first interprovincial road, a 700-km dirt road built under the reign of the "First Emperor", said Zhang Zaiming, a researcher with Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archeology, based in the ancient capital Xi'an.

Zhang therefore restored a chaotic scene, with men trying to fight back enemies and women running after panic-stricken children. "There was no blacktop road back then, and the footprints they left on the muddy route remained intact even today."

Near the footprints, unearthed in Huashugou Village of Fuxian County on the outskirts of Yan'an City, Zhang and his colleagues also found primitive buildings, which they believed were barracks or military service stations.

Saturday marks the 75th anniversary of the deaths of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. And decades later, we're still fascinated with Clyde, a hardhearted killer, and Bonnie, his more-than-willing accomplice.

Sure, Depression-era America was enamored with the love-struck outlaws, but Hollywood hype, intense media interest and time have ways of distorting reality.

Their life on the run, for the most part, was far from glamorous, historians say.

They were clumsy criminals. They didn't always rob banks, often resorting to stealing small sums of cash from gasoline stations and food stores, while living out of their stolen cars.

You know science has made it big when the Google homepage logo is changed to celebrate a fossil finding and the mayor of New York shows up at a press conference to unveil it.

A new 47-million year old primate fossil unveiled to the world Tuesday has made waves among scientists and non-scientists. Google responded by working an image of the fossil into the logo of its search page.

The discovery was presented with much fanfare at a press conference at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where researchers called the finding a "missing link" and a publisher from Little, Brown (which put out a related book called "The Link") called it "a scientific discovery that will undoubtedly revolutionize how we understand our own evolution." Mayor Michael Bloomberg called the finding an "astonishing breakthrough."

The mayor's enthusiasm aside, some scientists aren't convinced.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney's defense Thursday of the Bush administration's policies for interrogating suspected terrorists contained omissions, exaggerations and misstatements.

In his address to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative policy organization in Washington, Cheney said that the techniques the Bush administration approved, including waterboarding — simulated drowning that's considered a form of torture — forced nakedness and sleep deprivation, were "legal" and produced information that "prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people."

He quoted the Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, as saying that the information gave U.S. officials a "deeper understanding of the al Qaida organization that was attacking this country."

In a statement April 21, however, Blair said the information "was valuable in some instances" but that "there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is that these techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security."

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Poland's former prime minister, has seemed lackluster of late. He has only seldom thrown himself into the ongoing campaign ahead of European Parliament elections in two weeks. Instead of delivering his accustomed tirades against the European Union, he has meekly called on his fellow citizens to go to the polls on June 6. It seemed that he was short on issues.

This week, though, Kaczynski has found his old form again -- with the unexpected help of SPIEGEL."The Germans are attempting to shake off the guilt for a giant crime," he said, commenting on the latest SPIEGEL cover story," The Dark Continent: Hitler's European Holocaust Helpers."

The feature describes how foreigners aided the Germans during World War II in the killing of 6 million Jews. Some of the accomplices -- who represented a small minority in each of their countries -- were forced into their roles, others denounced Jews in exchange for money. And some shared the Nazi's anti-Semitic beliefs and joined in out of conviction.

The reference to this particular aspect of the Holocaust is seen in Poland as an attempt by"the Germans" to shift the burden for at least part of the responsibility for the mass murder onto others. If Poland allows"such practices" to happen in Germany, Kaczynski added, then his country shouldn't be surprised one day if Berlin demands reparations for the German soldiers who died during the bloody crushing of the Warsaw Uprising.

Related Links

Editorial in Spiegel Online: Hitler's European Holocaust Helpers

For the captured British troops held in German prisoner of war camps, life was truly harsh.

Some who survived time in the stalags and officers' camps such as Colditz spoke of torture, forced route marches, meagre daily rations of bread and soup...

In contrast, daily life for Germans held in PoW camps in Britain seems to have been almost relaxed, if these astonishing images are anything to go by.

One shows a group in white dinner jackets, playing clarinet, accordion, drums, guitar and violin in a dance band.

In another scene, they appear relaxed as they are marched along a country lane towards the village church for a Sunday morning service.

Others show a model village and fountain built by the PoWs, who pose happily by their tents.

The remarkable scenes come from rare film footage chronicling the friendly, orderly atmosphere at No 633 (German) Prisoner of War Company in Nottinghamshire.

The film is going on public display for the first time at a new exhibition at the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester.

Margaret Thatcher is to travel to Rome for a private meeting with Pope Benedict XVI next week, The Independent has learnt. The former Prime Minister will fly to Italy today with her daughter Carol and her week-long stay will include a private audience with the pontiff next Wednesday.

The 83-year-old will make a brief protocol visit to the Vatican and has been afforded time to see the Pope face to face. She did not seek the private audience, but agreed to its being arranged by her old friend Carla Powell, whose husband, Charles, was a key foreign policy advisor to her Conservative government. Lady Thatcher will be staying with Lord and Lady Powell at their villa on the outskirts of Rome.

Lady Thatcher's visit to the Vatican follows that of both Gordon Brown who met the Pope in February, and Tony Blair who saw him in June 2007. But Lady Thatcher can claim a certain one-up-manship in the Papal stakes: she has met two of Pope Benedict's predecessors as well.

Bush has always been friendly. And maybe, after years of being cordoned off by security, his face time with others carefully choreographed and his days scheduled to the hilt, it's refreshing to him just to have the chance for a spontaneous chat with a neighbor. But Bush's choice of conversational companions may speak to something deeper. He lived in a bubble during much of his time in Washington; having left office with a disapproval rating of 73 percent, he might be forgiven for being a bit hesitant about what awaits him on the outside. He's declined to give a major interview since leaving office (he and his aides declined to cooperate with this story). So Bush seems to be easing into life back home in Texas, reaching out quietly to reconnect with old friends, stalwart supporters—and the occasional teenage fanboy, who may or may not yet be fully aware of the harsh public judgments, even in Republican circles, of the guy who just moved in next door.

"He is in home territory for sure, no question about it. And that's where he wants to be," says Bruce Buchanan, a presidential scholar at the University of Texas at Austin. "He doesn't enjoy naysayers and critics and opposition. Never has. And right now, he needs that nurturing cocoon that he is in. He is not calling people who didn't support him. He is calling people who supported him, those 14-year-olds."

"But we will see how serious he wants to get in being a participant in the debate over his legacy, beyond writing his side of the story," Buchanan continues. "He may decide, forget it. Or he may decide to become his own version of the Jimmy Carter model. Or he might just stay on the lecture circuit and make money. He has all those options."

The Kremlin has posted a decree that aims to prevent what are described as efforts to falsify history and harm the interests of Russia. The government move to set up a commission to deal with the issue, comes after the party of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin called for measures to criminalize the defamation of any Soviet contribution to victory in World War II.

The Kremlin Web site posted a decree Tuesday signed by President Dimitry Medvedev on May 15 that authorizes the establishment of a presidential commission to counter what are described as attempts to falsify history.

Writing on his Internet blog on May 7, Mr. Medvedev said Russia is being increasingly confronted with determined, malicious and aggressive historical falsifications. He said the number of interpretations of wartime history, some controversial, is also increasing.

The Kremlin leader acknowledges that every field of knowledge can have its own analysis, but he says perhaps the reason for reinterpretation of the war is because there are fewer and fewer people who fought in it and saw it with their own eyes. He says the vacuum being created, either through ignorance or to some extent deliberately, is being filled by a new vision and new interpretations of the war.

The president of Russia's Academy of Military Sciences, Makhmut Gareyev, told VOA there has been what he called an endless stream of suggestions in Russian media that the Soviet Union did not win the war, or that it would have been better had Hitler won.

Gareyev mentioned in particular Russian journalist Alexei Pivovarov who recently aired a controversial nationwide TV documentary on the 1942 Battle of Rzhev on the Volga River. The Nazi-Soviet encounter is little-known in Russia, though it claimed the lives of an estimated 1.5 million people, two-thirds of them Soviets.

Pivovarov's account of what historians call the Rzhev meat grinder strayed from typical Russian accounts of noble heroism and wise Kremlin leadership.

Veterans have since branded Pivovarov a traitor. Makhmut Gareyev also rejects the contention of many historians in Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics that they were occupied by Soviet forces.

Gareyev asks how was it possible for Soviet forces to destroy Hitler's armies and to liberate the Baltics or Poland without entering their territory. He notes that American troops remain in Germany and wonders why they are not considered occupiers, but Soviets in Eastern Europe were.

Most Western historians argue that British and American troops were not occupiers, but liberators who advanced from the west to destroy Nazi power and liberate German-captured territories.

In Kyiv, the director of the History Institute at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Stanislav Kulchytsky, notes that Ukrainians and other nationalities fought in the Soviet Army with Russians and therefore share a common history. But Kulchytsky told VOA each country has a different interpretation of the events.

Kulchytsky says Russian media, particularly television, are currently showing many historical features with various interpretations of Ukrainian and Russian history. He says negative portrayals of Ukrainians create a wall of misunderstanding, indeed lack of understanding, which results in an image of Ukraine as a nation with a very negative attitude toward Russia, which he rejects as not true.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko stirred controversy in 2007 when he posthumously decorated Roman Shukhevych, the leader of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA, which struggled for an independent Ukraine during World War II. Moscow portrays the UPA as Nazi collaborators. The unit, which fought Soviet forces, initially welcomed the Germans as liberators, but soon waged war against them as well. UPA resisted Soviet rule into the 1950s.

Moscow and Kyiv are also at odds over the Holodomor, an event described in Ukraine as artificial famine perpetrated by the Kremlin, which claimed the lives of millions in the early 1930's. Ukrainians consider it an act of genocide. Russia says it was not genocide, because peasants of various ethnicities, not just Ukrainians, were also victimized.

Moscow was also outraged two years ago when Estonia relocated the statue of a Red Army soldier from a central location in Tallinn.

Meanwhile, Russian Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu has introduced legislation in Parliament that would make it a crime to deny the Soviet victory in World War II. Foreigners deemed guilty would be banned from entering Russia. Historians have expressed concern the measure could also create a climate of fear that would further close access to already limited Russian archives.

The University of Colorado has filed a court brief formally responding to Ward Churchill’s bid for court-ordered reinstatement to the faculty. As university officials had suggested would be the case, their stand on his reinstatement is a very emphatic no.

In the brief, filed yesterday in state court, the university’s lawyers note that the jury that found last month that Mr. Churchill had been fired unjustly, in violation of his free-speech rights, also determined that he was due only $1 in damages. The jury’s decision to award Mr. Churchill such a nominal sum “can be seen only as a complete repudiation of Professor Churchill’s scholarship and the jury’s ultimate conclusion that he destroyed his own reputation.”

Justice David H. Souter has in the past avoided the limelight. But in a speech yesterday at Georgetown Law Center decrying Americans’ lack of civic knowledge, the retiring justice demonstrated his speaking prowess.

Souter warned that the republic "can be lost, it is being lost, it is lost, if it is not understood,” the National Law Journal reports. He cited surveys showing about two-thirds of Americans can’t even name the three branches of government, one of the basic lessons he learned as a youth at town hall meetings in Weare, N.H., according to the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal Law Blog.