At Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, the Park Service is partnering with the First Colony Foundation to shed light on a mystery that still fascinates us after more than four centuries: What happened to the lost Roanoke Colony? Archeologists working at the settlement site haven’t answered that question yet, but artifacts they’ve dug up tell us interesting things about life on Roanoke Island in the late 1580s.

The first English attempt to create a permanent settlement in the New World came to grief when Sir Walter Raleigh’s little colony on Roanoke Island in North Carolina’s Outer Banks vanished with scarcely a trace sometime between 1587 and 1590. What happened to those unfortunate men, women, and children struggling for a toehold in a vast wilderness far from home remains one of history’s most intriguing mysteries. Were the Roanoke colonists killed by Indians? Did cold and disease do them in? Did they starve to death? Did they lose hope of being rescued, wander off into the woods, and succumb to the many grave perils that lurked there?

Investigators haven’t had much to go on. When relief ships from England finally arrived in 1590, three years after the colonists were last seen, they found only an abandoned village and a few strange carvings on trees. Apparently left for searchers to find, they read “CROATOAN” and “CRO.” Exactly what that meant has never been determined. Indeed, the carvings themselves disappeared centuries ago, and we can’t even be sure where they once stood. Organic material tends to rot quickly in Roanoke Island’s acidic soil, and shoreline erosion has probably erased parts of the original settlement. When Europeans resettled the area many years later, little evidence of the settlement’s existence remained.

THE lone collection of Prehistoric Amerindian carvings so far discovered on this island has been damaged.

“Unfortunately, these have not been looked after awfully well,” Archaeologist and Professor at the University of Sussex Professor Peter Drewett said while displaying pictures of carvings in the Spring Head cave.

He pointed out several modern carvings that have been placed on top of the prehistoric ones, some of which were scoured out with a knife.

“Fortunately we did record these detailed drawings prior to this latest range of damage to them,” he said.

Expressing his certainty that other caves would have had such markings, he stated that these had more than likely been eroded during the passage of time.

BURLINGTON, Vt. (AP) — Archaeologists from the University of Vermont are searching for the remains of a War of 1812 hospital near Battery Park in Burlington.

The archaeologists are using a grant from the National Park Service’s American Battlefield Protection Program to try to learn more about the encampment where 5,000 soldiers were stationed. The war against Great Britain lasted from 1812 through 1815.

MILFORD, Conn. — A Colonial-era skull believed to belong to a Revolutionary War soldier is set to be reburied in Connecticut with full military honors.

The unidentified skull was discovered in the 1840s when railroad tracks were being laid near where 46 soldiers died of smallpox. British troops had captured the soldiers in 1776 and abandoned them by what is now Milford Cemetery.

Former Khmer Rouge prison chief Duch should be jailed for 40 years, a prosecutor has told Cambodia's UN-backed war crimes court.

Duch, whose real name is Kaing Guek Eav, had overseen the deaths of 15,000 people at Tuol Sleng jail in the 1970s, the court heard.

In a closing statement, Duch apologised to his victims but said he had not carried out the massacres alone.

The tribunal is not expected to give a verdict before early next year.

Voters are a bit less inclined this month to blame President Obama’s policies for the country’s current economic problems.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 50% of U.S. voters now say the problems are due to the recession which began under the Bush administration. Forty-two percent (42%) blame Obama’s policies, and eight percent (8%) are not sure.

In a survey at the end of last month, voters were inclined to assess blame a bit more evenly. Forty-nine percent (49%) pointed the finger at the Bush-era recession, while 45% said the nation’s economic problems were caused more by Obama’s policies.

Voters also have a little more confidence in the president’s economic judgment this month, although 57% still trust their own judgment more than Obama’s when it comes to the economic issues facing the nation. In late October, 62% felt that way.

Newly released text messages reportedly from the morning of September 11, 2001, show panicked family members trying to contact loved ones and officials frantically trying to grasp what was happening.

More than half a million messages, released by whistleblower site Wikileaks, reveal the panic, horror and pain of what happened that morning in the words of those who experienced it.

Another text message references "a bomb detonation" in the World Trade Center and asks recipients of the message to report back assessments of their areas.

A minute later, firsthand reports started flooding in.

Leiden, The Netherlands - The first Pilgrims of the first American Thanksgiving in 1621 were unusually devout – even by Puritan standards. They crossed the ocean on a conviction that "the Lord has more truth and light yet to break forth out of his holy Word," as pastor John Robinson said before they sailed from the Netherlands.

Yet the Pilgrim band that braved the Mayflower and shared deer and turkey with native Americans were also some of the most cosmopolitan and tolerant among the Puritan groups willing to brave the wilds of a new world.

Before going to Plymouth, the Mayflower group lived 11 years in the Dutch city of Leiden. Those years of exile in Leiden, where the Pilgrims worked, worshipped, and debated – amid hefty clashes of civilizations and belief in Europe – profoundly influenced their sensibilities in ways that have not been widely recognized.

The Pilgrims – unlike British Puritans who wanted to turn Massachusetts into a theocracy – sharply advocated church-state separation. They heretically believed that women should be allowed to speak in church. They were far more tolerant of other faiths and open to the idea that their theology, like all human dogma, might contain errors.

Pilgrim experiences "in the cosmopolitan Netherlands are a reason they are less rigid or dogmatic in their views about what people must and must not do," argues Jeremy Bangs, curator of the American Pilgrim Museum in Leiden and author of "Strangers and Pilgrims, Travellers and Sojourners: Leiden and the Foundations of Plymouth Plantation," a 900-page reappraisal published this year on the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims' arrival in Leiden.

"The pilgrims didn't have witchcraft hysteria, they didn't kill Quakers. These are big differences!" notes Mr. Bangs, a former curator of Plimoth Plantation whose work draws heavily from untapped Dutch and New England archives. "Pilgrim leaders were less prone to persecute…. The possibility that others may be right and they may be wrong is something influenced by their time living in an extraordinary community of other exiles in Holland."...

Recent reports have held up a remote Brazilian town—filled with blonde, blue-eyed twins—as evidence of Mengele's postwar attempts to add to the ranks of an Aryan "master race."

But research announced today says Cândido Godói's "Nazi twins" are nothing more than a myth.

The outback town of about 7,000 has a twin rate nearly 1,000 percent higher than the global average.

The twins' fair features are no mystery—Cândido Godói (map) is largely populated by the descendents of German immigrants. But the frequency of twin births is a decades-old mystery.

Earlier this year Argentine historian Jorge Camarasa offered a bombshell of an explanation in his book Mengele: The Angel of Death in South America.

In World War II, Mengele, aka the Angel of Death, was mainly interested in twin research while serving as chief doctor at the Birkenau extermination camp in Poland.

According to Camarasa, Mengele likely continued his twin experiments in the 1960s while on the run in South America.

Mengele disguised himself as a roaming physician and veterinarian and gave pregnant women in Cândido Godói an ahead-of-its-time, twin-inducing mix of drugs or hormones, the historian suggests...

When a president's rendezvous with destiny puts him in a position to save his nation's economy from ruin, he probably can be forgiven for thinking it's all right to use his power to move the Thanksgiving Day holiday.

Rescheduling Thanksgiving Day is exactly what President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to do in 1939.

As NPR's Michelle Norris discussed on All Things Considered with Melanie Kirkpatrick who wrote a piece for Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, in 1939 FDR caused controversy by declaring that Thanksgiving would occur one week earlier.

The world’s foremost expert on Political Islam, Gilles Kepel, gave a lecture on jihad on Tuesday evening.

Speaking at the London School of Economics (LSE), Kepel trailed the history and geography of the political-religious phenomenon.

Beginning and ending with Afghanistan, the former visiting professor at Columbia University explained how Political Islam plugged into the world system.

Kepel is the Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs (2009-10) in LSE IDEAS, the centre for the study of international affairs, diplomacy and grand strategy.

The scholarly book getting the most buzz at the American Anthropological Association's annual conference next week is likely to be a doctoral dissertation published 15 years after its author's death. Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia is by S. Ann Dunham, the mother of President Obama, a connection noted on the book's front cover. The publisher, Duke University Press, will unveil the book on December 3 at the conference, to be followed by a special session devoted to Dunham and her life and work.

I spoke with Dunham's daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, who is President Obama's half-sister, about their mother's life and work and how the dissertation made it from her closet to print. Ms. Soetoro-Ng wrote a foreword to the book. She and Mr. Obama spent some time in Indonesia as children while Dunham worked as a development and microcredit consultant and did fieldwork for the dissertation.

The book runs about 300 pages and focuses on a blacksmithing village called Kajar, in the province of Yogyakarta on the island of Java. The work has been whittled down significantly from its original form, which ran more than a thousand pages and investigated the socioeconomics of several village-based handicrafts, including batik, pottery, and the making of puppets used in shadow theater...

The U.S. embassy in Baghdad has given 515 archaeological items to the Iraq Museum, Antiquities Department chief said.

Qais Rasheed said the treasures date to “various ancient periods” of Iraq’s history.

“The FBI and the American embassy in Baghdad passed the treasures to the Iraq Museum,” he said.

“The collection includes pottery pieces, cuneiform tablets, cylinder seals, precious stones and statues from different Mesopotamian epochs,” he added.

Thousands of artifacts are still missing from the museum whose exhibits were looted shortly after the 2003-U.S. invasion.

ROCHDALE has become the first town in the UK to honour the victims of a barbaric Soviet famine that claimed the lives of millions.

A memorial stone has been unveiled to mark the Holodomor genocide — an enforced starvation over 18 months between 1932 to 1933 which claimed the lives of at least seven million Ukrainians under Joseph Stalin’s regime.

The memorial stone was unveiled during a ceremony at the memorial gardens opposite Rochdale Town Hall on Friday.

Organised by Rochdale Council, Rochdale Friends of Lviv and the Ukrainian community, the ceremony was part of a tribute to commemorate the victims of the genocide – one of the most brutal acts carried out by the Soviet leader.

LONDON -- Iran and Libya, not Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, were Britain's main security concerns before the invasion of Iraq, Foreign Office officials testified Wednesday at an inquiry probing Britain's role in the war.

William Ehrman, the Foreign Office's director of international security from 2000 to 2002, said "in terms of nuclear and missiles, I think Iran, North Korea and Libya were probably of greater concern than Iraq." The inquiry, billed as the most sweeping look yet at the conflict, was in its second day of hearing public evidence.

It is examining Britain's involvement in Iraq, beginning with the run-up to the 2003 invasion and concluding in July 2009.

WARWICK — The discovery of Native American artifacts dating back thousands of years –– plus the likelihood that there are many more beneath the streets of neighborhoods off Tidewater Drive –– have stalled an effort to bring sewers to the coastal area.

Archaeologists retained by the Warwick Sewer Authority have been unearthing a variety of artifacts in test trenches for more than three years and recently issued a report stating that the Mill Cove area was probably home to generations of Native Americans, with artifacts from about 3,000 years ago through the 1600s.

Given those findings and the need for far more extensive archaeological study before any sewer construction could begin, the WSA is exploring less-disruptive engineering methods while other city officials say that sewers may be out of the question for the neighborhoods just north of Warwick Neck.

Imprisoned in a foreign country, hundreds of miles away from home, German soldiers would whittle away at wood making unique toys to pass the time.
Now these toys, which were made at East Cams prison camp in Portchester Road, Portchester, during the Second World War, have gone on display at a museum in Fareham.

The toys were made at the prison by prisoners of war, and they are now part of the Hampshire Hidden Treasures display at Westbury Manor Museum.

Some of the toys include a wooden figure of Winston Churchill, which lifts his walking stick when pushed along.

Nothing a president does lends itself more easily to a punch line – deliberate or inadvertent - than the annual pardon of a Thanksgiving turkey.

"I think it's kind of funny, and it's an annual ritual," said President Clinton at his first turkey pardon ceremony in 1993.

He said the pardon was easy for him "because I've been around turkeys all my life." Upon realizing the double meaning of his statement, Mr. Clinton was quick to add: "I didn't mean it like that."

At the turkey pardon in 2001, President George W. Bush observed that "our guest of honor looks a little nervous. Nobody's told him yet that I'm going to give him a pardon."