A recent article is challenging the notion that the Anglo-Saxon King Harold Godwinson was killed by an arrow to the eye during the famous Battle of Hastings. The battle, fought in 1066, was a pivotal moment in England's history, ushering in an era of Norman rule.

In an article for The Historian, a publication by the Historical Association, Chris Dennis argues that Harold Godwinson was actually hacked to death by a group of knights that may have included William the Conqueror.

The traditional view is that Harold was killed by an arrow that struck his face or eye. The scene is part of the Bayeux Tapestry, and is found in chronicle accounts as early as 1080.

But Dennis points to other works, such as Bishop Guy of Amiens' Song of the Battle of Hastings, written one year after the battle, and a 12th century work by a historian named Wace, which state that during the critical part of the battle, William assembled several knights and charged at the Anglo-Saxon king. When they reached Harold, they hacked him to death.

Dennis explains that the story of the arrow in the eye may actually have been deliberate propaganda put out by King William's court: "For Duke William, it was a convenient way for the king to have met his end. If Harold had been killed by a fateful arrow, his death could be directly attributed to the will of God."

Furthermore, because Harold had been crowned and anointed in a church ceremony, his reign had the officially blessing of the Catholic church and the Papacy, so their were legal problems over whether or not William was a legitimate ruler. "The new king did want to be implicated in Harold's violent end," writes Dennis, "nor could he afford to undermine the legitimacy of his own accession by admitting responsibility for an anointed king's death."

Researchers said Wednesday for the first time they have found what they believe to be pieces of a burial shroud from the time of Jesus.

The find is of importance because tests on the shroud and the body it wrapped revealed the earliest proven case of leprosy in the Old City of Jerusalem.

And in addition, the weave of the shroud raises fresh doubts about the Shroud of Turin, which many people believe was used to wrap the body of Jesus.

According to researchers involved in the excavation and subsequent testing, the recently discovered shroud lends more credible evidence that the Shroud of Turin does not date to Roman times when Jesus died but from a later period.

Harvard archaeologists have found the first architectural signs that may pinpoint the location of the 1655 Indian College, one of Harvard University’s earliest buildings.

In the final days of the 2009 dig, Peabody Museum archaeologists and Archaeology of Harvard Yard students uncovered a 17th-century trench situated on the parcel of land where the Indian College stood. The trench was filled with stone, clay roof tile, and vast quantities of brick, including a special brick used as an architectural ornament that may have supported a column. The location, size, and structure of the trench, along with the materials found inside, indicate that it was once a wall foundation for a building—either part of the Indian College building or a closely related structure.

The trench included other significant finds related to the Indian College: two pieces of 17th-century printing type, likely from the first printing press in British colonial America and housed in the Indian College, as well as several pieces of 17th-century ceramic. The large quantities of brick in the trench further tie the trench to the Indian College—Harvard’s first brick building. The ornamental brick points to an investment in architectural detail for the building.

As with most presidents at the end of their first year in office, Barack Obama's approval ratings have slipped in 2009, though not as much as the clamor of his critics would suggest. He is almost exactly where Ronald Reagan was at the end of 1981, when he too was struggling with the bad economy he had inherited.

What's really exceptional at this stage of Obama's presidency is the extent to which the public has moved in a conservative direction on a range of issues. These trends have emanated as much from the middle of the electorate as from the highly energized conservative right. Even more notable, however, is the extent to which liberals appear to be dozing as the country has shifted on both economic and social issues.

Pew Research surveys throughout the year have found a downward slope in support both for an activist government generally and for a strong safety net for the needy, in particular. Chalk up these trends to a backlash against Obama policies that have expanded the role of government.

More surprising is declining support for gun control, a fall in support for abortion rights, and a rise in public doubts about global warming. Much of the change on these issues has come from independents, a category now populated by many former self-identified Republicans. But a lack of passion among Democrats -- and liberals in particular -- is also a part of the story of this conservative trend among the public at large.

For example, over the course of the year, strong opposition to health care reform has topped strong support in every survey Pew Research has conducted. Our December poll brought this intensity gap into a sharp -- and highly partisan -- focus. While 39% of Republicans said they would be angry if current reform proposals were enacted, just 22% of Democrats said they would be very happy if the measures succeeded.

On abortion, for the first time in many years we find a close division of opinion between those who support the pro-choice position and those who do not. The issue has receded in importance among the public -- our most recent poll finds that the contentious Congressional debate over an abortion funding amendment to the health care bill barely registered with the public when it was asked its opinion of the bill -- but the decline in enthusiasm about the abortion issue is sharpest among liberals, while opposition to abortion has grown firmer among conservatives.

Similarly, belief that there is solid evidence of global warming, expressed by 70% or more of the public in recent years, has now slipped to 57%, a trend particularly pronounced among Republicans and independents, but also apparent to some extent among Democrats, too.

And for the first time since the Columbine school shooting in 1999, nearly as many people believe it is more important to protect the right of Americans to own guns (45%) than to control gun ownership (49%). As recently as April 2008, the public judged gun control more important by a 58%-37% margin. This shift is apparent among independents and Republicans, but not among Democrats.

Leadership anxiety -- worries about a liberal president -- may well account for the conservative shift among Republicans and independents on some of these issues. More puzzling is why liberals seem asleep on issues like health care and abortion. Are they dozing because they take comfort that one of their own is in the White House? Or are they disillusioned because they think Obama is not liberal enough?

On that last question, there is some indication that liberals may be feeling a bit ignored by the administration. When asked in December, most Republicans (66%) think Obama is listening most to his party's liberals. But just 20% of liberal Democrats believe that. For the most part, they think the president is listening to moderates (54%) or that they are not sure who has his ear (25%).

Nonetheless, an overwhelming proportion of liberal Democrats (84%) say Obama is doing an excellent or good job "in standing up for the traditional positions of the Democratic Party." A smaller majority of conservative and moderate Democrats (69%) say that Obama is doing an excellent or good job in advocating for the party's traditional positions.

Whether it is disillusionment, apathy or over confidence, the administration and the Democratic Party will need a lot of help from liberals in 2010, given the public opinion trends on issues and the rising anti-incumbent sentiment abroad in the land. Many key elements of Obama's base (young voters, minorities) do not have a particularly good record for turnout in off years, as Republican victories last month in Virginia and New Jersey illustrated. Obama's challenge is to avoid further scares to skittish independents, while lighting a fire under lethargic liberals.

A biblical expert at the University of Chicago, Margaret M. Mitchell, together with experts in micro-chemical analysis and medieval bookmaking, has concluded that one of the University Library's most enigmatic possessions is a forgery. The book, a copy of the Gospel of Mark, will remain in the collection as a study document for scholars studying the authenticity of ancient books.

Scholars have argued for nearly 70 years over the provenance of what's called the Archaic Mark, a 44-page miniature book, known as a "codex," which contains the complete 16-chapter text of the Gospel of Mark in minuscule handwritten text. The manuscript, which also includes 16 colorful illustrations, has long been believed to be either an important witness to the early text of the gospel or a modern forgery, said Mitchell, Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature.

"The mystery is now solved from textual, chemical, and codicological (bookmaking) angles," said Mitchell, who first became intrigued by the codex when she saw it as a graduate student in 1982. Comprehensive analysis demonstrates that it is not a genuine Byzantine manuscript, but a counterfeit, she said, "made somewhere between 1874 and the first decades of the 20th century."

Mitchell said experts from multiple disciplines made the findings possible. "Our collective efforts have achieved what no single scholar could do -- give a comprehensive analysis of the composite artifact that is an illustrated codex. The data collected in this research process has given us an even deeper understanding of the exact process used by the forger," said Mitchell. "It will, we hope, assist ongoing scholarly investigation into and detection of manuscripts forged in the modern period."

Since 1937, when Edgar J. Goodspeed a University of Chicago biblical scholar, acquired the Archaic Mark, the manuscript has been an enigma. As early as 1947, scholars speculated about its authenticity. Because it is the closest of any known manuscript to the venerable 4th-century Codex Vaticanus for the text of Mark's Gospel, Mitchell said, it was believed to be "either a very important textual witness (from the 14th Century) or a forgery based upon some late 19th-century critical edition of the Greek New Testament incorporating the readings of the Vatican manuscript." The modern blue pigment in the illustrations, indentified in 1989, would support the latter, but Mitchell explained this finding was not definitive because the pigment could have come from a restoration effort on an earlier manuscript.

In 2006, the University of Chicago Library digitized the Archaic Mark, making it available to scholars worldwide (goodspeed.lib.uchicago.edu) and stimulating renewed interest in it. The following year, in response to that growing interest in the mysterious manuscript, Alice Schreyer, Director of the Special Collections Research Center, convened a committee to lead a complete and definitive examination of the material components of the Archaic Mark.

The Library commissioned materials analysis from McCrone Associates, and enlisted the aid of Abigail Quandt, a rare books expert and preservationist at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

Last January, Joseph G. Barabe, a senior scientist at McCrone, took 24 samples of parchment, ink and a range of paints used in illustrations. Barabe analyzed the samples using an array of techniques -- polarized light; energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry; the scanning electron microscope for elemental analysis; X-ray diffraction; Fourier Transform infrared spectroscopy; and Raman spectroscopy. Under microscopic analysis, Barabe and his colleagues found no evidence of retouching of any kind in the manuscript, disproving earlier suspicions of restoration attempts.

Barabe determined the Archaic Mark was created after 1874 -- using materials not available until the late 19th century -- on a parchment substrate dating from about the middle of the 16th century. Carbon dating determined the animal hide was from some time between 1485-1631.

The rest of the authentication team confirmed and helped interpret Barabe's findings.

Quandt carefully reconstructed the steps the modern forger took to produce the manuscript, from preparing the parchment, to the painting of images and inscription of text, as well as the application of the modern coating, cellulose nitrate. Quandt also identified specific ways in which its production defies usual Byzantine procedures, and she determined that the reused parchment contains no recoverable text underneath.

Mitchell completed the analysis with a study of the textual edition the forger had used. She confirmed and refined Stephen C. Carlson's proposal that the modern edition from which the forger copied the text was the 1860 edition of the Greek New Testament by Philipp Buttmann. Mitchell identified telltale readings in the Archaic Mark that arose from the original 1856 edition of Buttmann's critical text, reproducing errors later corrected in the flurry of collations of the famous manuscript Vaticanus between 1857 and 1867.

Mitchell, Barabe and Quandt have detailed these findings in a paper scheduled for February publication in the journal Novum Testamentum.

Millions of White House emails that went missing during the Bush administration have been recovered following an extended court battle.

Around 22m messages spanning more than 90 days were declared missing in 2007, shortly after a scandal arose over the decision to fire nine federal prosecutors who had not toed the White House line.

The Obama administration said that its computer technicians had successfully recovered the lost data, in what campaigners called a victory in the attempt to clear up the "electronic data mess" left behind by Bush officials.

The White House is legally obliged to maintain copies of all the communication it sends, including email, under the Presidential Records Act - brought in after the Watergate scandal in the 1970s as a way of preserving evidence of activities conducted by presidential staffers.

Related Links

National Coalition for History: Obama Administration Settles Lawsuits Over Missing Bush White House E-Mails

The Nobel Peace Prize winner told Oprah Winfrey that helping to steady the economy and building plans for the withdrawal from Iraq were highlights of his first 11 months in office.

The US President, who took office on January 20, added there was still work to be done.

"B+ because of the things that are undone. Health care is not yet signed," Mr Obama said.

"If I get health care passed, we tip into A-."

Mr Obama said his administration had "inherited the biggest set of challenges of any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt", which they were still working on.

On one page Napoleon peeks through a set of curtains to spy on cavorting nudes. On another the Duke of York is in carnal embrace with his diminutive wife. A third depicts George III defecating into a hat.

The bound volume of cartoons by James Gillray, the 18th and 19th century artist whose satirical etchings were the forerunner of modern political cartoons, was once considered so obscene that it was seized by police.

Yesterday the pornography and obscenity team at the Ministry of Justice conceded that times have changed and handed it over to the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The cartoons were considered bawdy fun when they were first published individually in the late 18th century, but by the 1840s, when they were printed as a collection, they were sufficently outrageous for the publisher to withhold his name from the title page. The police of the Victorian era agreed. They impounded the book and handed it to government officials.

What if Mitterrand’s alleged opposition to German unification was no more than a myth? Was Thatcher thus the only leader opposed to German unification? How far did Thatcher's views represent those of Britain as a whole? Maybe her alleged opposition to unification too was merely a legend? Or maybe these are the wrong questions to ask? If German unification was inevitable, perhaps the questions to be posed are slightly more complex.

These were some of the questions raised by an impressive panel of speakers at a conference held at the residence of the French Ambassador to the UK last week. The conference, entitled ‘France, Britain, German unification and European construction: Twenty years after the Fall of the Wall’, was organised to mark the launch of the latest book by Frederic Bozo, Mitterrand, the End of the Cold War, and German Unification. Bozo is professor in contemporary history and international relations at the Sorbonne. Speakers included Bozo himself, Professor Michael Cox from the LSE, Professor Patrick Salmon, chief historian at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and Jean Mendelson, the director of the French national archives. The hugely engaging and stimulating discussion was chaired by James Blitz, the Diplomatic Editor of the Financial Times.

In his book, Bozo argues, against the dominant view, that Mitterrand was against German unification, and that he sought to oppose it. The French president’s alleged opposition was a ‘legend’. French policies were undoubtedly different to German and American policies and these differences, at times, caused disagreement between the three countries. Historiography is also dominated by the American viewpoint, which has caused French policies of German unification, in favour of a unified Germany within a European framework, to be largely overlooked.

Iraq’s Tall Harmal, site of the old Babylonian city of Shadupum, has been left unguarded since the 2003-U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The site, in the outskirts of Baghdad, was fenced and seen as one of the country’s most important ancient landmarks prior to the invasion.

Only recently the Antiquities Department has remember Harmal, where Iraq’s most renowned archaeologist Taha Baqer had unearthed an ancient library of about 300 cuneiform documents in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Baqer did not only excavate the city but reconstructed some of its most important buildings where visitors could feel, touch and even smell the grandeur of a Babylonian site.

This highly significant site was left unattended “because of lack of financial resources”, according to Abdulzahra al-Talaqani, the department’s spokesman.

Ordinary people could enter the site and illegal digs have been reported to have taken place there.

Encroachments in the form of illegal buildings and cultivation have been freely conducted at the site in the past few years.

However, Talaqani said the department was determined to “remove all violations” and has appointed guard to protect the site.

But what could one single guard do amid the mounting violence that has engulfed Baghdad.

Talaqani said the site will be fenced once again and urged residents in neighborhoods close to it not to dump their garbage there.

Talaqani did not say whether the magnificent ancient temples which Baqer had reconstructed have escaped damage.

Earlier, local newspaper said insurgents used the massive site as a launching pad for their mortar and rocket attacks on U.S. occupation troops and Iraqi government offices.

Last time a foreign excavation team was at Tall Harmal was in 1997 when a team from the German Archaeological Institute dug new soundings to shed more light on older civilizations that inhabited the site before the Babylonians had it turned into a major settlement.

At the College of Holy Cross this year, language instructors had to scramble to set up a second section of introductory Russian -- for the first time since the Cold War.

Not only are more students enrolling, but different kinds of students. "Our core has always been those with a love of the literature and we are still getting them, but now we are getting students with all sorts of other interaction with Russian culture," said Amy Adams, associate professor of Russian.

She has Reserve Officers' Training Corps students who want careers in intelligence. She had parents of one student tell her recently that their daughter wants to be a sports lawyer and hopes to deal with Russian hockey players. She has a group of seniors who want to go into the business world in Moscow after they graduate. She has some "heritage speakers" who are from immigrant families and grew up speaking the language, but never learned to read and write it.

"Students view Moscow as glittering and exciting, and they want to be there as young people," said Adams.

The move from one to two sections may seem small compared to the numerous sections of Spanish one can find at many colleges. Indeed, Russian professors are the first to admit that increases of 50 or 100 percent are possible in part because the base was small.

But Russian programs at colleges around the country are reporting such gains, some starting last year but many seeing the gains take off this year. The increases are particularly welcome to those teaching Russian, given the vulnerability during a recession of programs that don't have meaningful enrollments. And the increase could yield a much larger cohort of potential experts to study language, culture, history, politics and society of an obviously important country.

Stetson University last year marked the first time ever it filled two sections of introductory Russian. Indiana University went from three sections of introductory Russian to four. Union College, which used to enroll 5 or 6 students in its introductory Russian course, now has 13, and for the first time in years, there are enough students that the college is offering third year Russian.

The University of Kentucky in the last year saw enrollment in introductory Russian go to 32 from 16 and the Russian department's courses on Russian folklore and culture (taught in English) are at capacity. At the University of Pittsburgh, enrollment in first year Russian has gone to 57 from 39 in the last year, and enrollment in fourth year Russian has gone to 9 from 5. At Portland State University, enrollment in all Russian language courses is 257 this fall, up from 161 a year ago and 112 two years ago.

There are no current national data available on Russian enrollment. But many Russian professors have been trying to figure out what's happening, since it is in such contrast to a post-Cold War depression in interest. The Modern Language Association's periodic surveys of foreign language enrollments provide the best national data, and those figures were last collected in 2006, prior to the recent surge. The MLA data show that Russian enrollments went up only marginally between 1998 and 2006, a period that saw huge gains for languages such as Chinese and Arabic.

The recent increase has implications for many fields. William Taubman, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, said that advanced work in many disciplines depends on graduate students and professors with ability to do research in Russian. Taubman is a political scientist at Amherst College, which is also seeing an increase in Russian language enrollments, and he said that Russian studies is seeing a notable growth in work by sociologists and anthropologists -- in addition to work by historians, literary scholars and political scientists -- and that all of them need the language.

"This is very, very good news for Russian studies," he said.

Why Russian Now?

Many Russian professors, while thrilled with the surge in interest, want to figure it out. Some, like Adams at Holy Cross, point to a confluence of factors. Cynthia A. Ruder, associate professor of Russian at Kentucky, agrees. The U.S. government has classified Russian as a "critical language" and that designation helped attract three Air Force ROTC students to Kentucky's program; more of her students have friends who are immigrants from Russia; others have career goals, such as the art history major planning a career in art research or the international relations major who wants to work for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Other experts, who note that American students flocked to Russian during the Cold War, say that a friendly Russia (as in the immediate post-Soviet era) is less interesting to students than an in-your-face Russia in which leaders joust (verbally) with the United States and (not verbally) in places like Georgia.

Eugene Huskey, director of Russian studies at Stetson, quoted the Russian saying chem khuzhe, tem luchshe (the worse, the better) as applying to the field. "The worse U.S.-Russian relations are, or the worse the conditions are inside Russia, the more likely students are to read about the country," Huskey said. "The current generation of high school students is growing up with the perception of a more menacing Russia, and that has piqued their curiosity in a way that is not dissimilar to what I experienced as a boy growing up in central Florida during the Cuban missile crisis."

Jeffrey D. Holdeman, Slavic language coordinator at Indiana University, when asked whether the interest is more due to Pushkin or Putin, said that it's both, and added Pasha (a common Russian nickname) as a third reason. When he started teaching Russian in 1996, as a graduate student at Ohio State University, he said Pushkin would have been the answer because literature was the draw. "It was common for students to say that they wanted to be able to read Tolstoy or Dostoevsky in the original," he said.

Holdeman got in the habit of asking students each year why they enrolled in Russian, and he still hears about literature, but also other reasons. Of late, he said, he hears "more practical and personal reasons," such as "our neighbors are Russian," "my hockey coach is Russian," "I got to go to Russia in high school," "this video game I play has a lot of Russian in it," "my best friend is Russian and I spent all of my time over at his house, his parents feeding me, and I even picked up some words." That's what he thinks of as the Pasha explanation.

As for Putin, Holdeman said that he also hears students say things like, "I think Russian is still relevant in the world" and "Russia is still an important country."

Huskey, of Stetson, said that whatever draws students to Russian, the difficulty for most Americans of learning a language with a different alphabet from the one they know puts a lot of pressure on the professors who teach beginning students, and Huskey credited people like Michael Denner -- an associate professor at Stetson who teaches these students -- with keeping the students. "Every vibrant Russian program has a stellar professor to bring students in the door," Huskey said.

Adams, of Holy Cross, said that because the attraction of Russian language comes from interest in culture and society, not just politics, the classroom and non-classroom offerings can be broad -- and that builds more interest. Holy Cross has a lecture series that has featured a Russian journalist, a Russian novelist, and a Russian professor who is an expert on rock music.

In classes, Adams said doesn't speak any English, and uses YouTube videos of Russian musicians to illustrate some concepts. While some of her students are reading Pushkin, the program "isn't about Pushkin's Russia," she said. At the same time, she was quick to add that once students are engaged with Russia, they embrace the literary classics. One of her former ROTC students recently told her about reading Pushkin during down time in a tank in Iraq.

Some Russian programs may have focused in the past decade on just serving a small number of students, but Adams said that this is the time for these programs to be more visible on campuses. "We have so many professors who can really light up a room, and we need to let people know," she said. "These enrollments are ours to lose."

One of her students is typical of many of the trends Adams and her colleagues elsewhere see.

Nicholas Pope, a freshman at Holy Cross, said he's thinking of going into diplomacy or teaching English as a second language -- and that Russian has appeal for either choice. His mother is Czech, so he has some familiarity with a similar language and grew up "with a fascination of Russia." As more students study Russian, teaching activities that require a critical mass (and that are fun) are also possible. Pope's song and dance routine didn't win this year's "Russian Idol" contest at Holy Cross, but he's hoping for next year.

A huge, rare deep-blue diamond known as the Wittelsbach-Graff Diamond will join the other gems at the National Museum of Natural History for seven months next year.

The diamond, which weighs 31.06 carats, has not been on public display since an exhibition in Brussels in 1958. The museum announced Monday that the current owner, Laurence Graff, chairman of Graff Diamonds International, is lending the brilliant gem not only for exhibition but also research. Graff bought the diamond last December at auction for $24.3 million, a record price for a single stone at the time.

The Wittelsbach-Graff Diamond is believed to be from the same mine in India as the world famous Hope Diamond. The Hope, which weighs 45.52 carats, has been one of the most popular attractions at the Smithsonian Institution for 50 years. The Smithsonian gemologists, under Jeffrey Post, curator of the National Gem Collection, plan to conduct experiments to see whether the smaller stone has the same properties as the Hope.

Besides its origin, the blue diamond has an intriguing past. In 1664 it was given to Infanta Margarita Teresa by her father, Philip IV of Spain, when she married Emperor Leopold I of Austria. Then it was owned by the House of Wittelsbach, a Bavaria ruling family, until their jewels were sold at Christie's in 1931.

The gemstone will be on display from Jan. 28, 2010, to Aug. 1, 2010.

Signs of what could be a previously unknown ancient civilisation are emerging from beneath the felled trees of the Amazon. Some 260 giant avenues, ditches and enclosures have been spotted from the air in a region straddling Brazil's border with Bolivia.

The traditional view is that before the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the 15th century there were no complex societies in the Amazon basin – in contrast to the Andes further west where the Incas built their cities. Now deforestation, increased air travel and satellite imagery are telling a different story.

Their discovery, in an area of northern Bolivia and western Brazil, follows other recent reports of vast sprawls of interconnected villages known as "garden cities" in north central Brazil, dating from around AD 1400. But the structures unearthed at the garden city sites are not as consistently similar or geometric as the geoglyphs, Schaan says.

Excavations have unearthed ceramics, grinding stones and other signs of human habitation at some of the sites but not at others. This suggests that some had purely ceremonial roles, while others may also have been used for defence.

Today's recyclers can now conceivably lay claim to a rich, bloody, brawny heritage, if a new Viking discovery is any indication.

The famed Norse warriors, many of whom settled parts of eastern and northern England in the Middle Ages, recycled as they fought, new excavations in the United Kingdom suggest.

An 11th-century metalworking site recently discovered in the city of York (map) is likely evidence of a makeshift recycling center, where Vikings took weapons for reprocessing after battle, according to historian Charles Jones, organizer of the Fulford Battlefield Society, which advocates preserving the battle site against potential development.

Jones and his team have found hundreds of pieces of ironwork—including axes, sword parts, and arrowheads—along with lumps of melted-down iron and the remains of smelting pits.

Even with a measure of gin and a slice of lime, it's likely to leave a bad taste in the mouth.

An ice cube tray has gone on sale in which drinkers can make a replica of the Titanic - complete with four icebergs. The product is called the Gin And Titonic Ice Tray.

The manufacturer says it allows drinkers to 're-create history' by making the two objects collide in the glass, but one critic has branded the idea 'sick and distasteful'.

Titanic historian Brian Ticehurst has gone so far as to suggest the product is akin to making light of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Manufacturer Fred and Friends is renowned for its off-beat household items. The packaging for Gin and Titonic reads: 'Ice ahoy! Gin and Titonic is guaranteed to be an unsinkable addition to your next party.

THE makers of Rabbit Proof Fence yesterday rejected claims by historian Keith Windschuttle that the film lies about a government policy to "breed out" Aboriginality in the 1930s.

In the third volume of his The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Windschuttle claims that two of the three girls the subject of the 2002 film were removed in 1931 for their own safety, because of alleged promiscuity with white station workers, not as part of a systematic breeding program.

Director Phillip Noyce and screenwriter Christine Olsen provided a letter from Western Australia's chief protector of Aborigines Auber Octavius Neville, which said one of the girls, Daisy Kadibill, 8, was removed to stop her from mating with an full-blood Aboriginal man.

A historical marker that commemorated the call to arms at the Battle of Lexington in 1775 was stolen late last week, town officials said.

The bronze plaque marked the location of the Old Belfry that was used to sound the alarm on April 19, 1775, at the beginning of the American Revolution.

The Old Belfry was originally built in 1762 and then moved to the Battle Green in 1768. Its bell was used to summon townspeople to worship or warn them of danger.

The plaque was stolen some time between Thursday and Friday. Pieces of the stone that housed the plaque could be seen strewn about the grounds of the Lexington Battle Green Monday.

The copper plaque might have been stolen by thieves seeking to profit from the high price of copper, police said.

The remains of St Nicholas, the man who inspired Father Christmas, are buried at Jerpoint Abbey in County Kilkenny, Ireland, historians believe.

Experts claim that the philanthropist St Nicholas of Myra is entombed at the 12th century abbey after his body was moved there 800 years ago.

The saint, revered for his extraordinary generosity, lived during the 4th century and was Bishop of Lycia in what is now Turkey.

Due to his habit for leaving anonymous gifts for the poor, he was declared a saint soon after his death in 346, and inspired the legend of Father Christmas.

The bishop was buried in the cathedral church in Myra, which became a pilgrimage site, but Irish historians claim the early crusaders brought his remains back to Jerpoint Abbey.

Philip Lynch, an historian and chairman of Callan Heritage Society in Co Kilkenny, said: "It is an amazing story and yet very few people in Ireland know about St Nicholas's connection with this country.

“Every year now we get visitors to the site, but still not that many.

"There is a great story about a notorious old miser. He never gave the children any Christmas presents, instead he delighted in bringing them to Jerpoint and showing them Father Christmas's grave."

Born into a wealthy family, his parents died when he was young and Nicholas dedicated his life to serving God.

Inspired by Jesus's teachings to "Sell what you own and give the money to the poor," he spent all his inheritance helping the sick and needy.

One story tells of a poor peasant with three daughters, who could not afford the dowry to ensure they married and were saved from a life of slavery.

As he began to despair, on three separate nights as they came of age, bags of gold appeared in his home, seemingly tossed through a window or down the chimney as they slept, landing in shoes left by the fire.

The story inspired the tradition of children leaving out their stockings to be filled by Father Christmas.

It has previously been held that St Nicholas’s remains were taken to Bari in southern Italy in the 11th century after his grave was looted by Italian sailors.

However, Mr Lynch claims there is evidence to suggest that a French family who settled in Ireland shortly after 1169 were responsible for moving his remains.

He believes that the crusading family, called the de Frainets, exhumed the tomb after they were routed by their enemies, and brought the content to southern Italy, which was then Norman lands.

When they were subsequently forced out of Italy by the Genoese, the remains were entrusted to relatives in Nice, who moved them to family lands in Kilkenny for safe keeping.

Nicholas de Frainet built a dedicated Cistercian Abbey at Jerpoint where St Nicholas’s remains were then interred in 1200.

"St Nicholas Church is still standing and there is a slab on the ground which marks St Nicholas's grave," said Mr Lynch.

When Kim Ciak searched through her grandparents' attic to look for her late mother's Elvis Presley bubblegum cards, she instead, to her great surprise, found photographs -- wrapped in linen, stored inside a hope chest -- of Adolf Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis.

The slide-sized photographs, her grandmother told her, belonged to her late grandfather, Julius Dobrzynski, who served in the U.S. Army during World War II and whose duties included defusing live bombs.

Ciak took the photos home with her that February day, placed them in her hutch, and didn't look at them again until after her grandmother passed away in September.

"The photos were interesting, they were very interesting, but I really didn't know what I
was looking at,'' the 23-year resident of East Brunswick said. "It was time I found out.''

Last month, still puzzled by the photos, Ciak, a 1985 graduate of St. Mary's High School — now Cardinal McCarrick High School — in South Amboy, sought the help of her former history teacher, Frank Yusko, now a teacher at Spotswood High School.

After receiving an e-mail from his former student, Yusko and his colleague, German teacher Dianna Altmiller, met with Ciak and they both determined the photos were of the 1936 Nuremberg rally.

"I was able to explain to Kim that every one of the Nuremberg rallies has a theme, and this rally was themed "The Rally of Honor,''' Altmiller said. "The photos had been taken in 1936, the third year after the rallies had moved to Nuremberg.''

Ciak said each photo is numbered. The number goes up to 100, but 20 photos are missing, she said.

She doesn't know how her grandfather obtained the images. However, according to Yusko, it was common for military members to collect various souvenirs during their travels.

According to Altmiller, the photos were taken by Otto Schonstein, a Nazi sympathizer.

"He was a photographer who was very innovative, one of the people in the forefront of a stereoscopic photography, which was meant to show scenery and is the predecessor of our panoramic view,'' Altmiller said. "He was part of Hitler's unspoken propaganda team.''

Altmiller added the photos were likely part of an "elaborate" hardcover commemorative book that included transcripts of speeches, tickets to rallies and numerous newspaper articles.

"In the front cover, there would be this little door that opened up, and inside the door,
there would be a 3-D viewer,'' she said. ""You would take the viewer out and look at the book. It was a souvenir book similar to what you would pick up at the World's Fair, but this was the deluxe model.''

Ciak said she found the photographs ""surprising.''

"It makes things hit home more, because you're not seeing these photos in a text book,'' she said. ""Now you're seeing actual photos of these people.''

Altmiller agreed.

"They were absolutely chilling to look at,'' she said. ""I teach this, I've seen video,
I've read books, and I have been in Germany to study, but when you have seen someone's actual photos, it almost puts you in that place at that time.''

Both Altmiller and Yusko said they have since shared the images with their classes. Altmiller said her classes were "taken back'' when they saw the pictures.

As for the missing images, both instructors told Ciak to keep searching.

"I told her that a museum or a historical society would be very interested in having
these,'' Yusko said. "When she first told me about them, I was expecting them to just be old photographs that perhaps a German family had taken, but when I saw them, I knew immediately that she had something extraordinary. It was a pretty historic find.''