An international rocker is creating a rare opportunity to sing about change on the Communist island of Cuba.

Colombian singer Juanes -- a 17-time Latin Grammy winner -- has brought 15 international artists to Havana. He hopes to thaw U.S.-Cuba relations by staging a "Peace without Borders" concert.

But the reaction in Miami, Florida, home to both Juanes and a large Cuban exile community, has not been entirely peaceful.

Juanes has received death threats over the concert via Twitter, he said, and his home in Miami is under police protection.

New findings indicate that farming in the Yangtze Basin existed as early as 4,000 years ago. Excavation in the Xiezi Area of Hubei Province yielded a total of 402 cultural relics, including carbonized rice.

Stone tools, pottery, bronze, jade and porcelain were unearthed, as well as a number of spinning wheels, drop spindles made of clay and other textile tools. There were also stone mounds and smelting relics such as slag. A variety of grains and seeds were found, and experts believe there may be carbonized wheat among the plant findings at the site.

The discovery effort took about four months, according to a report on Sept. 12 in a Chutian newspaper. The Hubei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archeology announced the findings. The relics were determined to be from the Neolithic Era or New Stone Age at the time of the Shang Dynasty (ca. 1600–1050 B.C.) and Western Zhou Dynasty (ca. 1046–771 B.C.)

The controversial M3 motorway in Co Meath (Ireland), which has been the subject of several years of protests, is now almost 90 per cent complete, the National Roads Authority (NRA) has said. At almost 60km
of main motorway and a further 40km of link roads and interchanges,the it is one of the longest motorways under construction in Europe.

The M3 is not scheduled to open until July 2010. Work could still finish ahead of this scheduled date, but not before mid-spring next year, the NRA said.

Controversially, the route runs just over 2km from the Hill of Tara, and adjacent to the Lismullin national monument and the hill fort of Rath Lugh. Protesters have occupied these latter two sites, blocking the road's construction at various times in recent years, most memorably in March last year when conservationist Lisa Feeney shut herself inside a chamber at the bottom of a 33-foot tunnel at Rath Lugh for 60 hours. No protesters are currently blocking or picketing any part of the motorway, and Vincent Salafia of Tarawatch said that such action is unlikely to recur. "The frontline part of the campaign is pretty much over. There are people still protesting in the area, but not on the front line of the road. At this stage any protest on the road would be a largely symbolic gesture, but that doesn't mean the campaign is over."

KOCHI: Archaeological findings dating back about 3,000 years discovered in the Kalady area are in peril. The Neolithic relics have ended up in private custody, prompting the State Archaeology Department to initiate a move to recover them. An archaeology enthusiast K.A. Ali had recovered 43 stone axes (Neolithic Celts) and a grinding stone from a tributary of the Periyar.

Two teachers of a private college in the region reportedly took possession of the major portion of the finds, which prompted the Archaeology Department to act.

In south India, the period between 4000 B.C. and 1000 B.C. is considered Neolithic age. Though a large number of stone tools from the age were collected from Tamil Nadu during the second half of the 19th century, only a few were collected from the State, archaeologists said.

Mr. Ali collected the Celts from a paleo-channel (old river channel) which flows through Mekkaladi near Kalady.

The department is understood to have written to the teachers to return the finds considering the archaeological and historical value of the find, they said.

A number of stone tools were recovered from the banks of the river channel Kottamnam Thodu.

Archaeologists working in Orkney have pieced together the most complete picture to date of life in Neolithic Britain. Excavation of a settlement on the island of Westray points to a people that farmed and fished together and probably had their own village hall.

Archaeologists believe that the Links of Noltland settlement could become as significant as Skara Brae, the Unesco World Heritage Site on Orkney’s mainland.

Graeme Wilson, who is leading the excavation of the site, said that he hoped to learn how “ordinary, run-of-the-mill people” lived 5,000 years ago. It is thought that up to six extended families lived in Links of Noltland in three to four buildings and that they farmed crops such as barley, and kept livestock, including cattle and sheep.

Buenos Aires, Argentina - On September 3, 2009, three aging, retired officials from Argentina's army entered a federal courthouse in Rosario, Argentina. The men - Pascual Guerrieri, Jorge Alberto Fariña and Juan Daniel Amelong - have been charged with the kidnapping, forced disappearance and torture of 29 people, and the murder of 17 of them during Argentina's last dictatorship.

The case in Rosario is the latest in a tidal wave of cases to reach a courthouse against the dictatorships of the Southern Cone from a generation ago. Until several years ago, less than a dozen officials were ever convicted for the atrocities committed by Latin America's military governments in the 1970s. Most of them were eventually pardoned. But within the last three years - particularly the last year - justice has sped up, including dozens of convictions and hundreds of indictments.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, eight of South America's ten largest countries were ruled by dictatorships. These governments committed some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century, and created a new type of international crime: the forced disappearance. Intelligence services, such as Chile's DINA, raided people's homes; snatched them off the streets; held them in a clandestine locations; denied them all contact with lawyers, family and the outside world and, in many cases, executed them...

... For years, the perpetrators of these atrocities walked free, spared by political compromises during democratic transition. In Uruguay, a general amnesty was passed in 1984 shortly after the return of democracy and was later upheld by popular referendum in 1989. In Brazil, the military passed a self-amnesty law to shield themselves from prosecution in 1979, five years before the return of democracy. The law until now has been respected. In Chile, dictator Augusto Pinochet was even given a permanent seat in the Senate, where he remained for over a decade, after he was forced from the presidency by popular referendum in 1988. Here in Argentina, the military's top officials were prosecuted in the early 1980s, but the military forced the passage of an amnesty law and several presidential pardons after a series of rebellions in the late 1980s and 1990.

But these amnesties have been and are slowly being repealed. Argentina broke the "impunity" (as it is known to human rights activists) when a lower court judge ruled that its own amnesty laws were unconstitutional in 2001. Subsequently, the Supreme Court ratified that decision in the celebrated Simon case, and hundreds of officials have now been indicted. Dozens of cases have reached a courthouse, mostly resulting in convictions. A similar process is under way in Chile and Paraguay. On August 31, a Chilean judge ordered the arrest of 120 former officials from the DINA, Chile's intelligence service...

Seven former heads of the CIA have written to U.S. President Barack Obama to urge him to halt the inquiry in to abuse allegedly suffered by suspected terrorists whilst they were being detained by the agency.

The letter, which has yet to draw a response from the White House, was written in light of the decision last month by Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a prosecutor to investigate claims that officers of the Central Intelligence Agency and contractors working for the agency had used interrogation methods that had not been officially approved.

According to Radio New Zealand such methods included the use of a power drill and making death threats to detainees.

However the seven former CIA chiefs, the BBC confirms that they served both Republican and Democrat Presidents, who penned the letter to President Obama are concerned that the agency's effectiveness will be undermined by the inquiry.

Noting that lawyers from the time of the George W. Bush administration, who launched an investigation in to the alleged abuses, only prosecuted one case, the men who served as either Director of the CIA or Director of Central Intelligence, a position whose responsibilities included heading up the CIA, also questioned if other countries may be discouraged from sharing intelligence with the U.S. if they feared that the source of the intelligence would not be kept a secret.

As you're reading this, two German ships are heading for the Dutch port of Rotterdam, having set sail from South Korea in late July. Nothing remarkable about that. Except that by Sept. 16, both vessels — the Beluga Fraternity and Beluga Foresight — had passed Novaya Zemlya, the crescent-shaped island off Russia's north coast that to many marks the end of the Northeast Passage. Shunning conventional shipping routes between Asia and Europe in what appears to be the first commercial navigation via the treacherous Arctic sea-lane, Beluga, the shipping company behind the voyage, said in a statement that "we are all very proud" to have "successfully transited the legendary Northeast Passage."

Plenty have tried. For centuries, sailors have searched for a shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the icy waters off Russia's northern coast. Otherwise known as the Northern Sea Route, the passage — from Siberia to the Bering Strait — promised a speedy sea route between Europe and Asia for anyone who could make it. But caked in ice during winter and pretty much inhospitable because of floating ice in summer, the route has remained largely off-limits. Global warming may change that. "The Northeast Passage offers unmatched chances for efficient sea traffic," Beluga CEO Niels Stolberg wrote in an e-mail to TIME, and "plenty [of] trade potential."

Sailing from Korea to the Netherlands via the Northeast Passage could shave 3,500 miles (5,500 km) and 10 days off the traditional 12,500-mile (20,000 km) route via the Suez Canal. Other routes could offer even bigger time savings. For Beluga, quicker trips and reduced fuel costs has saved the firm some $300,000 per ship. The company plans to sail even bigger ships through the passage next summer and expects to save about $600,000 on those voyages.

What a story a 4-inch bronze cap planted under the pavement of State Route 121 has to tell.

From this spot, the U.S. government drew the boundaries of the 2-million acre Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation, and later sold half the land to white settlers for $1.25 an acre.

So much of the Uintah Basin's bittersweet pioneer history emanated from this point five miles east of the farm village of Neola, and it infused a rededication ceremony here Friday...

... In the 20th century Utah paved Route 121, using the east-west line of the marker -- officially known as the 1875 Uinta Special Meridian -- because it already divided properties. That's when some surveyor stuck a nail in the asphalt marking the meridian below, and left it for posterity to ponder. And on Friday, on a big-sky day that made plain why the original surveyors started their work from a point on these brushy heights in full view of the red bluffs miles distant, white and Indian Utahns alike commemorated a shared heritage.

About 100 members and guests of the Utah Council of Land Surveyors dedicated a roadside monument and placed a new brass cap on the actual meridian point through a new manhole in the westbound lane.

It's a story that will forever change the way you think of the phrase, "Get Out of Jail Free."

During World War II, as the number of British airmen held hostage behind enemy lines escalated, the country's secret service enlisted an unlikely partner in the ongoing war effort: The board game Monopoly.

It was the perfect accomplice.

Included in the items the German army allowed humanitarian groups to distribute in care packages to imprisoned soldiers, the game was too innocent to raise suspicion. But it was the ideal size for a top-secret escape kit that could help spring British POWs from German war camps.

In the light of present discussion on Armenian-Turkish relations some Armenian politicians are inclined not to comment on the current stage of relations but instead suggest reviewing history.

Arman Melikyan, former Foreign Minister of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, believes that Armenia should not sign Armenian-Turkish protocols, (which among other things suggest the recognition of the current Armenia-Turkish border) but instead to start negotiations with Turkey over annulling the Treaty of Kars, which defines the borders between Turkey and the Transcaucasian countries. (Including Armenia)

The Treaty of Kars was signed in 1921 between Kemalist Turkey and Bolshevik Russia.

Armenia and Turkey had not any kind of relations after 1993 and now that a dialogue has started, Melikyan says it should include debate on old agreements.

“It will put an end to the creation of the relations established then,” Melikyan says. “And eventually it is necessary to create a plan of Armenian-Turkish joint actions, by which new diplomatic relations will start with Turkey.”

According to the above mentioned Treaty based on the Treaty of Moscow signed between the same countries earlier in 1921, Armenia ceded 24,000 square kilometers of territory (the Kars province and Surmalu entirely) to Turkey, and Nakhijevan was placed under Azerbaijan’s command.

According to Melikyan, since the signing of the Treaty of Kars was imposed on Armenia, it runs counter to all modern standards of international law. “If Turkey is really sincere, and if it, in fact, seeks to establish equal bilateral relations with Armenia, it must disavow those two treaties.”

Former Bush administration official Ellen Sauerbrey, who served as Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration, is warning that President Obama's policies point in a very dangerous direction: economic fascism.

The County Times of St. Mary's County, Maryland, reported on an appearance that Sauerbrey -- a former two-time GOP nominee for governor -- put in at a local Republican dinner this past Saturday. The paper reports that Sauerbrey said that President Obama was surrounded by a cult-like following, edging towards that of Juan Peron or Adolf Hitler. She told the paper that she was not making a comparison between Obama and Hitler, but instead saying that the conditions in this country were such that a dictator could usurp the rights of citizens:

She said that the Obama administration advanced "fascist, socialist ideals."

"I'm really afraid for the future of our country," Sauerbrey told attendees at the annual Lincoln/Reagan Dinner of Sept. 12 in Callaway. "Our Constitution is indeed being dismantled."... ...Sauerbrey said she probably did refer to a cult-like following,"because this is typical of any time you get a strong leader." But her discussion of Juan Peron's Argentina was an example of what happens when big government causes hyperinflation of a currency -- which she sees as a real danger here."I never mentioned Hitler's name other than when the reporter came up to me afterwards," she said."And I said, look, I am not making a direct comparison Obama and Hitler. I'm making a comparison between policies in countries, and that history has a way of repeating itself."...

AUSTIN — Christmas will stay in Texas textbooks, State Board of Education members said Thursday while reviewing early recommendations for new social studies standards.

The board will not approve the new curriculum standards for public schools until next year, but wanted to assure constituents they will not accept a recommendation to yank Christmas.

“We have heard quite significant feedback from parents, from people who are very disturbed that we are not going to continue keeping Christmas in our standards. No one on this board intends to take out Christmas,” said Gail Lowe, of Lampasas, chair of the 15-member board...

... After board members settled the Christmas controversy, the focus shifted to which historical figures and contemporary leaders to include.

More than 50 people mentioned in current textbooks are not included in the proposed standards, including Carl Sagan, Colin Powell, Nathan Hale, Neil Armstrong, Eugene Debs, John Steinbeck and Mother Teresa.

Some board members argued for more accomplishments of minorities to be included in the final version. An early recommendation to remove the late farm workers leader Caesar Chavez and the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall provoked a strong reaction. Both are expected to remain in the textbooks.

“We can't satisfy everyone,” said board member Barbara Cargill, of The Woodlands. “We don't want to burden textbooks with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of names … As we go through this process we will see a lot more minorities than we ever have been before, so that's a positive.”

Touring an archaeological dig site, you generally expect a glimpse of antiquities a little more antediluvian than a television antenna, a seven-inch single, a tailfin and a rotary-dial telephone. But an odd excavation site that recently opened to the public on Governors Island purports to offer just that: artifacts not of the Mesoamerican but of the midcentury variety, about 1954.

That is the year, at least according to Geert Hautekiet, the man in charge of exhibiting the site, that the United States Army, which then controlled the island, ordered a small, obscure civilian community there to be evacuated during the approach of a dangerous electrical storm. All of the buildings and houses in the town, Mr. Hautekiet said, were then inexplicably buried under sand by the military, which later appeared to deny that the village had ever existed.

The town, known as Goverthing — which strangely has never appeared on any New York City historical maps or been noted by a single historian — is said to have been stumbled upon during recent demolition work on the island, which New York City and New York State have jointly controlled since 2003, seeking to develop it as a recreational, historic and artistic destination.

It was then, the story goes, that a team of Belgian archaeologists was summoned to uncover pieces of the unlikely — indeed, almost unbelievable — community that, before it was evacuated, numbered only 29 residents, many of Belgian and French descent, whose livelihood centered on a small factory in town that capitalized on a once-thriving international market for snow globes.

The archaeologist credited with supervising the dig could not be reached for comment this week, and the Web site of the Belgian university where he is said to work shows no record of him. But Mr. Hautekiet, who described himself as an exhibition specialist dispatched from Antwerp to oversee the display of the site — he has a long background in unconventional guerrilla theater and sly conceptual art in Belgium — recently showed a reporter some of the more unusual items recovered.

The year was 1968 and as revolutionary fervour spread around the world a group of students stormed the president’s office at Columbia University in New York.

Fortunately these were sensible Ivy League radicals and their iconoclasm had its limits. Before things got out of hand they allowed two police officers in to remove the magnificent Rembrandt portrait hanging on the wall.

It disappeared into storage and a few years later was sold privately to a collector who never showed it publicly.

But now the painting is up for auction for the first time since 1930 and Christie’s fully expects it to command the same respect with billionaire art collectors as it did with hippy radicals.

Portrait of a man, half-length, with his arms akimbo has a price estimate of £18-£25 million, the highest placed on an Old Master work.

It is a bold statement of intent at a time when much of the headline-grabbing fizz has gone out of the art market but Paul Raison, head of Old Masters at Christie’s in London, said that the auction house was “very confident about our market”.

The world record for an Old Master at auction was set at Sotheby’s in 2002 when bidding on Peter Paul Rubens’s The Massacre of the Innocents raced away from the estimate of £4-6m to sell for an eventual £49,506,648. The nearest price realised before or since is £20,489,143 for a Turner in 2006. The most raised by a Rembrandt is £19,800,000.

A team led by Bulgarian archaeologist Prof. Nikolay Ovcharov has uncovered an enormous cult complex at the ancient Thracian city of Perperikon in the Rhodoppe Mountains.

The complex consists of at least 9 altars each 2 meters in diameter located on an area of 12 square km. They are dated back to about 1 500 BC thanks to objects discovered around them, which is about the time of Ancient Egypt and the civilization of Mycenae and Minoan Crete. This is the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age.

On those altars, the ancient Thracians practiced fire rituals; similar rituals were practiced at about the same time in Ancient Egypt, on the island of Crete, and in the Hittites state in Asia Minor.

JERUSALEM.- A section of a stepped street paved in stone slabs, going south in the direction of the Shiloach Pool was discovered in excavations conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority in the Shiloach Pool Excavation at the City of David in the Jerusalem Walls National Park. The excavations are conducted in cooperation with the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, funded by the Elad Foundation, under the auspices of Prof. Ronny Reich of Haifa University and Eli Shukron of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

The existence of this road has been known about for over one hundred years, since it was first discovered between 1894 and 1897 by Prof. Frederick J. Bliss and Archibald C. Dickey of the British Palestine Exploration Fund, and then covered and filled in at the end of their excavation. Other sections of this same road, to the north, have been excavated and covered over in the past, including during the excavations of Jones in 1937 and Kathleen Kenyon from 1961-1967.

This section of the stepped street was discovered at a distance of 550 meters south of the Temple Mount. The road represents the central thoroughfare of Jerusalem that ascended from the north-west corner of the Second Temple Shiloach Pool to the north.

According to Prof. Ronny Reich, "In the Second Temple Period, pilgrims would begin the ascent to the Temple from here. This is the southernmost tip of the road, of which a section has already been discovered along the western face of the Temple Mount."

JAMES CITY — Local archaeologists have discovered Argall Towne, a short-lived village that was the first suburb of nearby Jamestown.

The village was started in 1617 by Capt. Samuel Argall, then a colorful lieutenant governor of the colony. It thrived for three years, but his impetuous behavior led many of the settlers to move away to Martin’s Hundred near Carter’s Grove Plantation.

Alain Outlaw of Williamsburg-based Archaeological & Cultural Solutions has been searching for the site since 1975.

“It’s been a slow process,” said Outlaw, who is also an adjunct professor at Christopher Newport University. For two years, since he got access to the land, his students and volunteers have researched the site.

Outlaw won’t pinpoint the locale for fear of relic hunters.

The find is important because it represents the first major settlement in James City outside Jamestown, and it provides a key link to how settlers expanded outward from Jamestown. Argall Towne was built on strategically high land that was easily defended, and from that point small farmsteads spread inland.

An unprecedented miniature portrait of a young, resolute, sexy Alexander the Great has emerged during excavations in Israel, archaeologist announced this week.

Engraved on a brilliantly red gemstone, the finely carved tiny head portrait is estimated to be 2,300 old, possibly dating to after the Macedonian king's death in 323 B.C.

Less than a half-inch long, the gemstone was found by a University of Washington student in the remains of a large public building from the Hellenistic period at Tel Dor, an archaeological site that once was a major port on Israel's Mediterranean coast.

MADRID - A Spanish judge on Thursday indicted three alleged ex-Nazi death camp guards who all lived for many years in the United States, charging them with being accessories to genocide and crimes against humanity.

Judge Ismael Moreno of the National Court issued international arrest warrants for Johann Leprich, Anton Tittjung and Josias Kumpf. The 18-page indictment says Kumpf apparently now lives in Austria and the other two are still in the United States...

... He said they were simple guards forced into service who "stood out in the rain, watched the snow come down. ... That's your Nazi war criminal. They hated it."

Leprich is from Macomb County's Clinton Township, near Detroit.

The judge acted in part under Spain's observance of the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows particularly heinous crimes such as genocide, torture or terrorism to be prosecuted in Spain even if they are alleged to have been committed elsewhere...

Poland's fears that it is becoming a second-class U.S. ally whose interests come after those of Russia were reinforced by Washington's decision to reorient its missile-defense plans away from Central Europe.

While Polish government officials gave a cautious and generally upbeat assessment of the change in U.S. strategy Thursday, many nonetheless were concerned by what the shift said about the changing focus of the Obama administration.

"I don't like this policy. It's not that we need the shield, but it's about the way we're treated here," Lech Walesa, Poland's first post-Communist president, said in televised comments.

Poland, which broke away from the Soviet orbit in 1989 and joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization 10 years later, had hoped the deployment of 10 interceptor missiles and the stationing of U.S. soldiers on its territory would improve its security, ensuring that if anyone attacked the U.S. would be compelled to react...

... Warsaw has proved a staunch U.S. ally. It sent thousands of troops to fight in Iraq, siding with the U.S. and Britain when Europe divided over the invasion. Poland also keenly supported Westward-leaning governments and democratic elections in the ex-Soviet states, particularly in neighboring Ukraine. These policies antagonized Moscow, however, and the Obama administration is now trying to "reset" the damaged U.S.-Russia relationship.

"The American decision [to shelve the missile program] was made in the well-understood American interest that now means good relations with Russia, for which President Obama is ready to sacrifice the interests of Central European countries," said Zbigniew Lewicki, professor of American studies at the Warsaw University.

The conservative government and president that came to power in Warsaw in 2005 embraced the Bush administration's missile project. They also had a fraught relationship with Poland's two historic foes, Russia and Germany. Thursday, by coincidence, was the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, launched just weeks after Nazi Germany began its assault. The two powers divided their neighbor between them.

But a center-right government that took power in Poland in 2007 proved more skeptical of the U.S. project. It tried to improve relations with Moscow and Berlin and worried that while Iran -- the ostensible aggressor that the defense shield was meant to contain -- was unlikely to target Poland, hosting the installations could trigger a response from Russia. The new government bargained to get U.S. Patriot-missile batteries and a bigger U.S. troop contingent as part of the deal, delaying signature of the agreement until August 2008...

September 22, 2009 (Washington, DC) – Today, on the anniversary of the issuing of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, President Lincoln’s Cottage launches their award-winning program, “Debating Emancipation,” in an online version. “Lincoln’s Toughest Decisions: Debating Emancipation” is an interactive program that puts students in the role of Lincoln’s closest advisors. Using letters and other historical documents students learn how they would advise the President on this controversial issue. This innovative program is currently offered as a school/adult program at the Robert H. Smith Visitor Education Center at President Lincoln’s Cottage and, thanks to a grant from the Motorola Foundation, is now available on LincolnCottage.org so that teachers around the country can use this program in their own classrooms.

Link to Debating Emancipation Online: http://www.lincolncottage.org/schoolsandgroups/offcampus.htm

President Lincoln’s Cottage offers other school programs and group tours for field trips year round. Visit http://www.lincolncottage.org/schoolsandgroups/index.htm for more information. The Cottage is located on a picturesque hilltop in Northwest Washington, DC, on the grounds of the Armed Forces Retirement Home, also known as the Soldiers’ Home. It is the most significant site associated with Abraham Lincoln’s presidency after the White House. President Lincoln spent one quarter of his presidency here and was living here when he drafted the Emancipation proclamation and deliberated issues of the Civil War. Lincoln commuted three miles daily by horseback or coach to the White House, last visiting the Cottage the day before his assassination.

Opened to the public for the first time in 2008, the Cottage offers intimate, guided tours providing an in-depth, media-enhanced experience highlighting Lincoln’s ideas and actions through historical images and voices. The Robert H. Smith Visitor Education Center, adjacent to the Cottage, houses thematic galleries and changing exhibitions providing visitors of all ages opportunities for in-depth exploration of Lincoln's life and times.

Hours of operation: Tours on the hour 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM. Visitor center open 9:30am-4:30pm Monday-Saturday, 11:30am-5:30pm Sunday.

For more information go to www.lincolncottage.org.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation is a non-profit membership organization bringing people together to protect, enhance and enjoy the places that matter to them. By saving the places where great moments from history – and the important moments of everyday life – took place, the National Trust for Historic Preservation helps revitalize neighborhoods and communities, spark economic development and promote environmental sustainability. With headquarters in Washington, DC, 9 regional and field offices, 29 historic sites, and partner organizations in all 50 states, the National Trust for Historic Preservation provides leadership, education, advocacy and resources to a national network of people, organizations and local communities committed to saving places, connecting us to our history and collectively shaping the future of America’s stories. For more information, visit www.PreservationNation.org.

Only one in four Oklahoma public high school students can name the first President of the United States, according to a survey released today.

The survey was commissioned by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs in observance of Constitution Day on Thursday.

Brandon Dutcher is with the conservative think tank and said the group wanted to find out how much civic knowledge Oklahoma high school students know.

The Oklahoma City-based think tank enlisted national research firm, Strategic Vision, to access students' basic civic knowledge.

"They're questions taken from the actual exam that you have to take to become a U.S. citizen," Dutcher said.

More than 100 veterans of the Battle of Arnhem are travelling this weekend to the southern Dutch city to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the heroic and doomed struggle to capture and hold the “bridge too far”. It may be the last such commemoration.

The dwindling number of survivors among the thousands of British and Polish soldiers who parachuted into Arnhem or arrived by glider will be honoured by Dutch officers, children and some of the elderly civilians who sheltered the Allied troops as they came under withering attack from German Panzer divisions.

On Sunday the Duke of Edinburgh and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands will pay tribute to the thousands who were killed during the ten-day battle, the brainchild of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who had hoped to shorten the war by capturing strategic bridges across the Rhine in September 1944 and pushing on to Berlin.

The Lockerbie bomber has launched a fresh bid to clear his name by publishing documents relating to his appeal on the internet.

Abdelbaset Al Megrahi, who is now back in Libya, has posted documents running to 300 pages online which he claims will prove his innocence.

Not content with being released back to his homeland on compassionate grounds, he is still adamant he wants to clear his name.

Megrahi, who has terminal prostate cancer, had abandoned his appeal so that he could be freed and allowed to return home to die.

Mary Queen of Scots’ last letter, dated 1587, went on display in the George Bridge Building at the National Library of Scotland on Tuesday, September 15th, to mark the official launch of the library’s new visitor centre. The 422-year-old manuscript is the farewell letter which Mary wrote to Henri III, King of France, just six hours before she was executed. The letter will remain on show until Monday 21st September. It will thereafter be replaced by a facsimile.

VINCENNES, Ind. The students filed into their social studies class just after lunch and slumped into desks where they had learned about the Civil War, Lewis and Clark, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor. On this day, teacher Michael Hutchison said, the class would feature "another of those huge moments in our history." He reminded the high school juniors and seniors that he would be grading their notes. Then he dimmed the lights and played a video on the classroom TV....

Eight years later, this is an example of what Sept. 11, 2001, has become for a generation that's too young to remember much, if anything, about that day: It is an educational DVD, a 167-page textbook, a black binder of class handouts titled "A National Interdisciplinary Curriculum." In Room C215 at Lincoln High School, images of the collapsing Manhattan skyline are now a classroom "warm-up exercise." "Militant," "imploding" and "rubble" are boldfaced vocabulary words for students to memorize. Homework assignments and essay questions ensure that Sept. 11 will indeed be remembered by millions of schoolchildren, if with a new sense of detachment.

Over the last century they have passed into gruesome folklore, but Victorian census records on Jack the Ripper's victims cast new light on the lives of some of the murdered prostitutes.

An online genealogy website which trawled the 1881 census - taken seven years before their deaths - has pulled together information on the women that 'provides a small window onto the past' and dispels the myth that they had been teenage street walkers.

The five - Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly - were all brutally murdered in London's East End between August 31 and December 20, 1888. Their bodies were left horribly mutilated on the streets of Whitechapel. Their murderer was never caught.

Although prostitutes at the time of their violent murders, three of the five had previously been married, according to records taken on April 3, 1881.

The website www.findmypast.com discovered Stride was recorded as 37 at the time and living with her husband, a carpenter. She had moved to London from Sweden in 1866 where she had already worked as a prostitute. However, her luck changed and on March 7, 1869, she married John Thomas Stride, a carpenter 13 years her senior. He died in 1884...

... This information on the three women has been available online since the 1881 census records were published eight years ago - it is only now that they have been pulled together to provide an insight into the lives of the women in their latter years...

Pasadena: The Planck mission has captured its first rough images of the sky, demonstrating the observatory is working and ready to measure light from the dawn of time. Planck - a European Space Agency mission with significant NASA participation - will survey the entire sky to learn more about the history and evolution of our universe.

The space telescope started surveying the sky regularly on Aug. 13 from its vantage point far from Earth. Planck is in orbit around the second Lagrange point of our Earth-sun system, a relatively stable spot located 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) away from Earth.

"We are beginning to observe ancient light that has traveled more than 13 billion years to reach us," said Charles Lawrence, the NASA project scientist for the mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "It's tremendously exciting to see these very first data from Planck. They show that all systems are working well and give a preview of the all-sky images to come."

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama abruptly canceled a long-planned missile shield for Eastern Europe on Thursday, replacing a Bush-era project that was bitterly opposed by Russia with a plan he contended would better defend against a growing threat of Iranian missiles.

The United States will no longer seek to erect a missile base and radar site in Poland and the Czech Republic, poised at Russia's hemline. That change is bound to please the Russians, who had never accepted U.S. arguments, made by both the Bush and Obama administrations, that the shield was intended strictly as a defense against Iran and other "rogue states."

Scrapping the planned shield, however, means upending agreements with the host countries that had cost those allies political support among their own people. Obama called Polish and Czech leaders ahead of his announcement, and a team of senior diplomats and others flew to Europe to lay out the new plan.