An ashtray that belonged to Prime Minister Winston Churchill is due to be sold at auction in Norfolk, with experts estimating the silver dish could fetch £1,500.

The silver dish used by Churchill is expected to fetch a premium price when it goes under the hammer in Norfolk, owing to its famous connections.

Churchill, a keen smoker who was frequently pictured with a cigar clamped between his teeth, used the ashtray at The Other Club – a political dining club he co-founded in 1911.

The 200-year-old ashtray was originally intended to be a butter dish.

William King, auctioneer at Keys of Aylsham – which will sell the item on November 18, told the Eastern Daily Press: “It is a relatively unassuming butter dish.

The Segontium Roman Museum in Caernarfon, Gwynedd is on a site which experts call one of the best preserved Roman fortresses in the world.

But cash from a five-year funding deal is running out, and the trust says it may not be able to open in the spring.

The Welsh Assembly Government says it hopes a solution can be found to save the centre from closure.

Segontium Cyf, a trust made up of local people, took over the running of the centre from National Museum Wales in 2003.

Since then, the day-to-day running costs of the centre have been met through a funding deal set-up by the national museum.

MAN on the premises!

Martha Morales, the evening supervisor at the Webster Apartments, a large, brick home to 370 women of varying ages and occupations, strode down a long corridor lined with identical doors. She zeroed in on one of them and knocked.

“Can I come in your room?” she called out politely — and then got straight to the point. “We think you have a man in there.”

A young woman opened the door.

There was no man to be seen in the small, modest chamber, just a narrow single bed, desk and a chest of drawers. But there was also a closet. Under orders, the young woman opened it.

Sure enough, crouching inside amid the hanging garments was a terrified-looking male — who proceeded to run for his life. He tore out of the room and disappeared down the hall. Ms. Morales let him go, staying behind to speak sternly to his female host and order her to report to the building’s manager, Maryann Lienhard, the next morning.

This is not a tale from the 1950s. It is straight out of 21st century New York City. With an amused smile but an earnest tone, Ms. Lienhard (who warned the embarrassed tenant that she would get “no second chances”) recalled the incident the other day — just one small drama from a slice of life that many people assume vanished from the city decades ago.

The Webster, on West 34th Street, is one of the few remaining all-female residences in a city that used to have many. Hotels and apartment houses that provided temporary refuge for young ladies hoping to find fame, or start a career (or snare a husband) in the big city occupy a distinct sliver of New York lore. The most famous, the Barbizon Hotel for Women on East 63rd Street, was memorably depicted in Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel “The Bell Jar” as populated by well-to-do “girls” whose parents “wanted to make sure their daughters were living in a place where men couldn’t get at them and deceive them.”

Plath gave the place a thinly fictionalized name, the Amazon. In real life the Barbizon is known for sheltering Grace Kelly while she was studying acting, as well as a young Joan Crawford, Candice Bergen, Ali McGraw, Liza Minnelli and Plath herself. An ad for the hotel that ran in The New Yorker in 1966 boasted, “Many of the world’s most successful women were Barbizon girls.”

Though the Barbizon and others, such as the Parkside Evangeline on Gramercy Park, have succumbed to developers’ offers over the years, sold and remade into condos or luxury hotels, the smattering of all-female residences that remain are thriving, most with waiting lists of prospective tenants. The appeal today is not so different than it was in the past: safety, cleanliness and — especially attractive in modern-day New York — a good real estate deal.

It costs about $1,000 per month to live at the Webster. For that you get a small single room and shared bath but also a hot breakfast and dinner, maid service, use of a large walled garden and a roof deck with a spectacular view of the Empire State Building. (Developers are constantly making unsolicited offers for the property.)

The deal is similar — minus the garden and the roof deck — at the Brandon Residence for Women, tucked among multi-million-dollar town houses and co-ops on the Upper West Side, and the Sacred Heart Residence, run by an order of Catholic nuns, in Chelsea.

The Jeanne D’Arc Residence on West 24th Street, which was established in 1896 as a home for “friendless French girls” who crossed the Atlantic to take jobs as nannies and seamstresses, is even cheaper — between $355 and $510 a month, depending on the size of the room. But you have to cook yourself...

The Haight-Ashbury neighborhood is history. At least, so think two groups of residents who are planning museums to capture memories of the 1960s hippie movement before they fade with its aging participants.

One, led by Haight-Ashbury Free Clinics founder David E. Smith, will function as a "library museum" of the free-clinic movement, which began in the Haight in the 1960s to provide free health care to residents. The other effort, led by local artist David Wills, will chronicle the neighborhood's history from its farming days in the late 1800s to the Summer of Love in the 1960s.

If the museums launch -- neither is slated to open until after 2011 -- they would be the latest in a recent push by San Francisco groups to better document the city's history. The San Francisco Museum and Historical Society has been working to renovate the old Mint Building in the South of Market neighborhood into a San Francisco Museum by 2013. Last year, the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Transgender Historical Society opened a museum in the Castro district. Another half a dozen local museums have expanded in the past five years, according to the San Francisco historical society.

Not too long ago, Ricardo Herrero was one of Miami's Cuban-American hard-liners, an ardent supporter of the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba as well as the ban on U.S. travel to the communist island. But a half-dozen trips to Cuba during this decade have changed his mind about the latter. "There are no better ambassadors of American culture and American democracy than Americans themselves," says Herrero, 31. Many fellow Cuban Americans who've traveled there, he adds, have come to the same conclusion: they "always come back saying it was a completely eye-opening experience" and have "changed their views because they witnessed firsthand the ineffectiveness of our current policy."

For the first time, there are hard numbers to show that Herrero is far from alone. Last year, a majority of Miami Cuban Americans said they favored dumping tight regulations on Cuban-American travel to Cuba — something candidate Barack Obama pledged to do and then did this year as President. And a recent poll found that a remarkable 59% of all Cuban Americans think the 46-year-old ban on all U.S. travel to Cuba should be removed. The survey by Miami-based Bendixen & Associates, the largest Hispanic polling firm, also found that 48% of older and more conservative Cuban exiles known as historicos support lifting the prohibition, up from 32% in 2002. "I think that all exchange is good," says one, 68-year-old Miamian Lala Suarez, who before coming to the U.S. was imprisoned in Cuba by Fidel Castro's government after the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion by militant exiles.

The importance of this attitude shift can't be underestimated. Whenever Congress has tried in the past to strike down the Cuba travel ban — even when a majority of Americans said they wanted to get rid of it — the biggest obstacle has always been the staunch resistance of politically potent Cuban-American voters. But the newest bill, the freedom to travel to Cuba act, introduced this year in both the House and Senate, suddenly has Cuban-American backing — and as a result a decidedly better chance of passing. In a recent statement, Indiana Senator Richard Lugar, a Republican and co-sponsor, called this "a very good time for public diplomacy with Cuba."...

GUANGZHOU, China – President Barack Obama's half brother has broken his media silence to discuss his new novel — the semi-autobiographical story of an abusive parent patterned on their late father, the mostly absent figure Obama wrote about in his own memoir.

In his first interview, Mark Ndesandjo told The Associated Press that he wrote "Nairobi to Shenzhen" in part to raise awareness of domestic violence.

"My father beat my mother and my father beat me, and you don't do that," said Ndesandjo, whose mother, Ruth Nidesand, was Barack Obama Sr.'s third wife. "It's something which I think affected me for a long time, and it's something that I've just recently come to terms with."

Like his novel's main character, Ndesandjo had an American mother who is Jewish and who divorced his Kenyan father. The novel, which goes on sale Wednesday by the self-publishing company Aventine Press, is one of several books in the works by relatives of the president.