Museum officials in Thailand have covered a billboard depicting Adolf Hitler saluting after complaints from the German and Israeli embassies.

The advertisement, which reads in Thai, "Hitler is not dead," was set up on a main road out of Bangkok two weeks ago.

The billboard was covered up after the museum received "a lot" of complaints, director Somporn Naksuetrong said.

The series of highway advertisements featuring famous dead people promote Louis Tussaud's Waxworks in Pattaya.

The poll by the Levada-Centre showed that 57% of those questioned considered that Russia needed democracy - the lowest number since 2006.

It said 26% believed that democratic governing was not suitable for Russia.

Nearly 95% of respondents said they had little or no influence on what was happening in the country.

A Russian academic investigating the fate of ethnic Germans deported by Stalin during World War II has had his research seized by security services.

History professor Mikhail Suprun was briefly arrested in the far north of Russia last month, but the incident has only now come to light.

Prof Suprun told the BBC he has been ordered not to comment on the case.

Prof Suprun had managed to track down the files of 5,000 deportees and had interviewed hundreds of their descendents.

But now the documents he had collected over 10 years, his computer and all his hard drives have been seized by the FSB - the powerful successor to the KGB.

Although he has been ordered not to comment on the case, a few days ago he described the seizure as absurd.

Peter Brierley, whose son died in Iraq in 2003, was one of several relatives critical of ministers in a preliminary hearing of the Iraq war inquiry.

He said: "If someone has done something wrong they should pay."

At an Iraq memorial service last week he told Mr Blair he would not shake his hand "because it had blood on it".

Speaking at an inquiry session on Friday, Mr Brierley, 59, of Batley, West Yorkshire said: "Members of the government that are proved to be involved in a decision to go to war should face a court charge of crimes against humanity and genocide.

A 13-foot statue of William Wallace that infuriated historians because of its likeness to actor Mel Gibson, has been returned to its creator.

The 12-tonne gold sandstone piece had stood at the Wallace Monument in Stirling for more than 10 years.

However, it was removed last year to make way for a new visitor centre.

FOR nearly two decades, the Communist Party strove to wipe out the national memory of Zhao Ziyang, the reform-minded party secretary who opposed the use of force against pro-democracy protesters in 1989.

So when a former aide of Mr. Zhao’s, Du Daozheng, disclosed in May that he had helped secretly record Mr. Zhao’s memoir for posthumous publication, Mr. Du’s daughter refused to let him walk outside alone for fear of possible repercussions.

She need not have worried. On June 25, a top official in charge of propaganda showed up at Mr. Du’s western Beijing apartment with a reassuring message from Zhongnanhai, the headquarters of the Communist Party and the government. Mr. Du said he was told that, as an old friend of Mr. Zhao’s, “Zhongnanhai and party central can understand why you did this.”

Mr. Du used to be among those who delivered such judgments. Until he was ousted in 1989 with Mr. Zhao, he served as head of the government’s press and publications administration, an agency that helps enforce censors’ orders.

Now he spends his days jousting with such officials, trying to foist unmentionable topics like Mr. Zhao’s career into the public domain. Helping with Mr. Zhao’s memoir — a rare look at the party’s inner conflicts that was published this May outside China — was a particularly daring thrust.

But strategic ventures into forbidden territory are characteristic of his monthly scholarly journal, Yanhuang Chunqiu. In 2005, he published articles on Hu Yaobang, the former party leader whose death helped set off the Tiananmen protests. Infuriated authorities threatened to reduce copies of the magazine to pulp, according to Mr. Du’s daughter, Du Mingming.

After a string of journal articles last year touched on Mr. Zhao’s accomplishments, party authorities issued an internal regulation so precisely focused that it could have been named after Mr. Du. The order forbids retired government or party officials to serve as publication directors.

Party sources say Jiang Zemin, the now-retired leader who replaced Mr. Zhao, was irritated by the articles and instigated the pressure on Mr. Du to step down. Sitting in the magazine’s musty offices, Mr. Du said he dealt with the order by reshuffling titles.

“I just ignore it,” he said. “I am old enough and tough enough that if there is any pressure from the government, I can hold on here.”

MR. Du survives such skirmishes because he is 86, wily and quietly supported by certain party luminaries. He says as many as 100 former party officials back his magazine’s attempts to draw lessons from the party’s buried past and nudge it toward democratic reforms. Some current officials also sympathize with the effort, he suggests. “Nobody dares close it,” he said, lest that provoke a reaction from “old cadres.” Last year supporters promised him, “If the magazine closes, we will take to the streets,” he said.

They said: “We are old. We are in our 80s. We have heart problems. We will probably die in the streets.”

“So the conservatives don’t take any action,” Mr. Du said, “because they are afraid of that responsibility.”

Others suggest the party can afford to be tolerant. Russell Leigh Moses, a Beijing-based analyst of China politics, said that Mr. Du and other liberal-minded party “elders” posed no particular threat to today’s Communist Party, so slaps on the wrists sufficed.

“I admire the courage and the conviction, but the conservatives really won this battle some time ago,” he said. “I really see him as a tragic figure, still holding the flag after most of the armies have left the field.

“He is fighting a struggle against the political tenor of the times, as well as against time itself,” Mr. Moses said.

Mr. Du is not, however, fighting with himself. He sees his modest magazine, printed on newsprint-quality paper and distributed to some 100,000 subscribers for about a dollar a copy, as “the best thing he has done in his life,” his daughter said.

The struggle between truth and propaganda has been a constant theme in Mr. Du’s life. He was an early Communist Party loyalist, dropping out of middle school at age 14 to join the battle against Japanese invaders. After the Communists rose to power in 1949, he dutifully — and falsely — reported the party’s claims of record harvests and free food as a reporter for Xinhua, the state-run news agency.

But by April 1959, he could no longer reconcile the discrepancy with reality. In a 4,900-word letter to a superior, he documented widespread famine and disease in the countryside...

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The Obama administration said Friday that the federal budget deficit for the fiscal year that just ended was $1.4 trillion, nearly a trillion dollars greater than the year before and the largest shortfall relative to the size of the economy since 1945.

The number, while lower than forecast a few months ago, underscored the challenges ahead in shrinking the deficit even as the White House and Congress are considering more steps to stimulate an economy that is making a slow recovery. The political hurdles to finding a solution were evident on Friday as each political party immediately blamed the other for the growth of the deficit.

The shortfall for the fiscal year 2009, which ended Sept. 30, translates to 10 percent of the economy, according to a joint statement from the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, and the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter R. Orszag. For the 2008 fiscal year, the deficit of $459 billion was 3.2 percent of the economy, as measured by the gross domestic product.