Gold miner James Roberts was pistol-whipped to death a century ago, but he can’t rest in peace.

He’s resting in pieces.

His body is buried in an unmarked grave, and his cranium is in a box formerly used to hold raffle tickets in a saloon. Such has been the long, crazy odyssey for the top of Mr. Roberts’ head. It started in 1901 when a coroner cut off the cranium for a slick lawyer to use in the alleged killer’s defense. In the decades since, the bone has gathered dust in a storeroom at Teller County Courthouse, dodged a judge who wanted it for an ashtray, escaped a pub that wanted it as a trophy and survived two years as a conversation piece in someone’s home.

Now, the cranium that once topped Mr. Roberts has come to rest at the Cripple Creek District Museum. You can look, but not touch. Not that you’d want to ...

The museum got the cranium last month. Director Jan Collins said plans are to house it there until it can be reunited with the dead man’s body, which, according to documents, is buried somewhere in the town’s Mount Pisgah Cemetery. Nobody knows exactly where.

In his first public meeting as superintendent of Gettysburg National Military Park, Bob Kirby announced Thursday night that the Ziegler’s Grove restoration project is scheduled to commence this month.

He also noted that attorneys for the National Park Service and the Dept. of Justice are “reviewing options” in the legal battle over the old Cyclorama Center.

A federal judge ruled two weeks ago that the park must reconsider its Cyclorama building demolition plans and include alternatives, which are federally-mandated but were skipped in the park’s original landscape rehab proposal of 1999.

“There is a lot of curiosity about what’s happening with the Cyclorama,” Kirby said Thursday during the park’s Advisory Commission session....

Situated between Taneytown Road and Steinwehr Avenue, the 45-acre site was the scene of Pickett’s Charge, although it later became home to parking lots, as well as the old Visitor Center and Cyclorama buildings. The park razed the old Visitor Center last year, and intends to remove one parking lot around the third or fourth week of April, as it aims to convert the land to its Civil War era appearance of 1863....

For many tourism marketers below the Mason-Dixon Line, old times are not forgotten — they're promoted.

But as Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell discovered when he proclaimed April as Confederate History Month without mentioning slavery (an omission he corrected after a volley of protests), pitching Dixie's past during the run-up to next year's 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War could be challenging.

"The Civil War sesquicentennial is going to be a minefield throughout the South. It's going to take a near miracle to tiptoe through it without serious injury, (and) this McDonnell incident has made things much worse," says Larry J. Sabato, a native Virginian and director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics.

Virginia — where the current capital of Richmond was also the capital of the Confederacy, and an estimated one in seven tourism dollars come from visitors interested in the Civil War — isn't the only government to put a spotlight on the Lost Cause.

Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi also have Confederate History Month proclamations this year, and at least seven states celebrate Confederate Memorial Day, says Calvin Johnson of the Sons of Confederate Veterans....

Preservation issues -- such as the one going on with Wal-Mart and the Wilderness battlefield -- are going to become only more contentious in coming years as suburban sprawl and economic development collide with once-rural Civil War battlefields.

It often comes down to a matter of money vs. history.

"Most of the time what drives counties is economic development," said Art Taylor, president of the Hanover County Historical Society and an active member of Friends of North Anna, a citizens group that supports North Anna Battlefield Park near Doswell. "The dollar kind of always wins out."

Often, but not always. In fact, Taylor and the Friends of North Anna worked to save more of the core battlefield area, doubling the size of the North Anna park, which commemorates a battle where more than 150,000 soldiers faced off in May 1864. The park was created in the 1980s when the property owner, a quarry company, donated 80 acres to Hanover County as part of a conditional-use permit. Two years ago, the current owner of the quarry, Martin Marietta Materials, agreed to donate an additional 90 acres as part of a plan to expand its operations....

The 120 veterans wore red, white and blue tags emblazoned with the word "Liberator" and crept along on walkers. Others could hardly hear as they toured the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on Wednesday. But the memories of the atrocities they witnessed in the waning months of World War II -- when soldiers from several armored and infantry divisions liberated concentration camps throughout Germany and Austria -- remained achingly clear.

Some attending what museum officials said is one of the largest gatherings of liberators ever held remembered cremation ovens were still warm, ashes fuzzing the foul air. Stacks of bodies on railroad cars. How their hearts ached when commanding officers forbade them from passing along rations to the starving people, for fear the rich food would sicken them further.

Fletcher Thorne-Thomsen said he would never forget one emaciated man who was so happy to see the American he tried to hug him with fragile arms.

"I can still see a pair of eyes," he said. The man's look was penetrating. It's haunted him for 65 years....

Missouri officials cannot bar a Ku Klux Klan splinter group from holding an event Saturday at the site of one of the state's biggest Civil War battles, a federal judge in St. Louis ruled Wednesday.

Frank Ancona, who identified himself as imperial wizard of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, filed suit Wednesday morning for an emergency order to overrule rejection of its application to rent a large pavilion at the Fort Davidson State Historic Site.

It's in Iron County, about 70 miles south of St. Louis.

Ancona said in a phone interview after winning the ruling that he's not sure the event will be held, because of financial concerns. U.S. District Judge Rodney Sippel required the group to post a $1,800 bond and comply with all laws and regulations, including having liability insurance of $300,000....

Few moments in modern British history are more iconic than the evacuation of the British expeditionary force of nearly 340,000 troops in the spring of 1940 from the beaches of Dunkirk, 22 miles across the Channel from the white chalk cliffs that overlook this ancient port town. At the time, Winston Churchill called it “a miracle of deliverance.”

Beneath azure blue skies on Sunday, an intrepid band of Englishmen tried to stage a scaled-down rerun of the “little ships,” hundreds of private craft that joined the Royal Navy in the improbable 1940 rescue, saving hundreds of thousands of British, French and Canadian soldiers to fight on against Nazi Germany.

This time, the effort centered on a group of men in a flotilla of inflatable speedboats who set out from Dover to ferry some of their stranded compatriots home from the rail and ferry chaos created by the cloud of volcanic ash that has shut down much of Europe’s air traffic.

British newspapers have calculated that the shutdown has stranded up to a million British travelers, counting those whose outbound flights have been canceled and those abroad trying to get home.

But after hours of fruitless negotiation, the organizers of the modern evacuation venture were defeated by an adversary that prevailed where Hitler’s battalions and dive bombers failed. The opposing force on this occasion was a small regiment of unimpressed French harbor and immigration officials, who met the Englishmen and their 30-foot boats in the harbor at Calais with a resolute “Non!”

By almost every conceivable measure Americans are less positive and more critical of government these days. A new Pew Research Center survey finds a perfect storm of conditions associated with distrust of government -- a dismal economy, an unhappy public, bitter partisan-based backlash, and epic discontent with Congress and elected officials.

Rather than an activist government to deal with the nation's top problems, the public now wants government reformed and growing numbers want its power curtailed. With the exception of greater regulation of major financial institutions, there is less of an appetite for government solutions to the nation's problems -- including more government control over the economy -- than there was when Barack Obama first took office.

The public's hostility toward government seems likely to be an important election issue favoring the Republicans this fall. However, the Democrats can take some solace in the fact that neither party can be confident that they have the advantage among such a disillusioned electorate. Favorable ratings for both major parties, as well as for Congress, have reached record lows while opposition to congressional incumbents, already approaching an all-time high, continues to climb....

These are the principal findings from a series of surveys that provide a detailed picture of the public's opinions about government. The main survey, conducted March 11-21 among 2,505 adults, was informed by surveys in 1997 and 1998 that explored many of the same questions and issues. While a majority also distrusted the federal government in those surveys, criticism of government had declined from earlier in the decade. And the public's desire for government services and activism was holding steady....

The mad heroines of classic Victorian fiction have long been objects of fascination.

The violent and feral Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre, the mysterious Woman in White whose escape from an asylum begins Wilkie Collins's gripping thriller, and the terminally delusional Emma in Madame Bovary.

But were they really mad? Would we today recognise them as mentally ill or were our heroines merely misunderstood, not to mention a tad inconvenient?

For Radio 4 documentary, Madwomen in the Attic, medical historians, psychiatrists and literary specialists gave their diagnoses of our troubled heroines.

No restraint

The picture of Mrs Rochester on all fours, baying at the moon, manic laughter ringing through the house, sadly still defines our notions of madness today.

Yet even when Jane Eyre was published in 1847, Charlotte Bronte was criticised for her portrait of insanity.

But Charlotte's brother Branwell was an opium-addicted alcoholic, subject to severe depression.

"While she was writing Jane Eyre downstairs," says Anne Dinsdale, archivist at the Haworth Parsonage - where the Bronte family lived - "Branwell would have been raving in the bedroom on the second floor, where he had been confined because he was a danger.

"He even set the bed on fire."

Bertha Rochester does the same in Jane Eyre.

"We have a letter from Charlotte to her publisher," says Anne, "in which she answered her critics saying that 'the character is shocking but all too natural'."

"Bertha is the embodiment of the monstrous lunatic who requires restraint," says historian of madness, Catherine Arnold.

At the time, mental illness was regarded with shame and as evidence of familial "taint".

Even though asylums were available, secrecy was better served by keeping the sufferer confined at home, as Rochester (and the Brontes) did.

There has been much speculation about the first Mrs Rochester's madness.

Notions of female insanity in the 1850s included "unrestrained behaviour," often merely Victorian-speak for female sexuality.

"Attics are where wives who cannot be contained, who are over-sexualised and unruly are stored away," says writer and psychotherapist, Adam Phillips.

And would not anyone have then gone mad, locked up in an attic with gin-sodden Grace Poole?

But Dinesh Bhugra, president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, recognises a clear description of schizophrenia in Jane Eyre.

"You can rule out manic depression as there is no evidence of a mood disorder, just a chronic deteriorating condition."

Captive

By the time Wilkie Collins wrote Woman in White in 1860, there were many private and public asylums, including the long established Bethlem Hospital (from which we get the word Bedlam), now the Imperial War Museum.

The plot of Woman in White sounds far-fetched - wicked aristocrat Sir Percival Glyde, aided by sinister Count Fosco, plans elaborate asylum switch of sane woman (his rich wife Laura) for madwoman (the nothing-but-white wearing Anne Catherick) in order to get his hands on a fortune.

But it was based on a real-life case, that of millionaire novelist and MP Bulwer Lytton who had his wife Rosina carted off to an asylum when she began to criticise him in public.

She was released only after a public appeal.

"If a man wanted to get rid of his wife, he would simply get two doctors to certify her and lock her up," says John Sutherland, Emeritus professor of English Literature at University College London.

"It's what Dickens himself did when his wife kicked up a fuss at his affair."

But what about the "madwoman", Anne Catherick?

"They talk about her as being feeble-minded as a child and that she'd grow out of it - so perhaps a learning disability as we understand it," says Dinesh Bhugra.

"An asylum wasn't necessary."

Meanwhile he points out that there are a number of plainly certifiable mad-men in Woman in White.

The psychopath Fosco, for instance, or the obsessive compulsive Mr Fairlie. They are admired, not incarcerated.

Frustration

In the 19th Century women were thought to be intrinsically mad by virtue of their femaleness, which made them vulnerable, and women outnumbered men in Victorian asylums almost two to one.

If Jane Eyre looks back to an almost medieval view of madness, Flaubert's Madame Bovary looks forward to the age of Freud and analysis.

Madame Bovary marries a dull, unsuccessful doctor called Charles. She dreams of luxury and romance and after the birth of her daughter, embarks on two ruinous affairs.

A serial fantasist and shopaholic, she gets into a monstrous level of debt.

When there is no way out of her debt, she takes poison and dies. It is a coolly analytic portrait of a woman unravelling.

Flaubert knew of the work of Parisian neurologist Charcot (later to be a mentor of Freud) and of his descriptions of hysteria.

"You could argue that Madame Bovary is a clinical case study," says Sandra Gilbert, Professor of English at the University of California.

But is Emma mad?

"No she's not mad, just very frustrated," says Adam Phillips.

And very, very irritating, perhaps particularly to women readers.

"Men find her fascinating and today there is no doubt she'd be a reality TV star, living out her fantasies and celebrated - not censured - for her dreams."

The Thurston County coroner's investigation of a death at a private home in Olympia on Feb. 5 turned up more than a few skeletons.

Not the metaphoric skeletons concealed in a closet, but literal collections of bones - human bones - that once supported flesh and blood.

The coroner is now storing three complete skeletons that were taken from the deceased 55-year-old man's home, including one inscribed with writing indicating that it belonged to a 6-year-old boy. Another has a sticker on its skull that states it came from Calcutta, India. The third skeleton, part of which was hanging on display in the home, appears to be "very old," said Thurston County Coroner Gary Warnock, and possibly dates to the early 1900s.

Warnock emphasized that none of the remains are thought to have come into the man's possession as a result of foul play. Olympia Police Lt. Jim Costa confirmed that the police department has not opened an investigation into either the deceased man or the remains.

MI5 secretly planted bugs in 10 Downing Street despite repeated official denials and they remained in place for more than 10 years during the tenure of five prime ministers.

The disclosure was to have been included in the official history of MI5 by the Cambridge historian, Christopher Andrew, published last year to mark the agency's 100th anniversary. It is believed to have been suppressed by senior Whitehall officials to protect the "public interest".

Bugs are understood to have been placed in the cabinet room, the waiting room, and the prime minister's study, at the request of Harold Macmillan in July 1963. They remained there until James Callaghan removed them in 1977.

An MI5 file referring to the operation was included in the draft of Andrew's book, The Defence of the Realm, according to the Mail on Sunday. Whitehall officials did not deny the claims.

The remains of a Second World War pilot and his downed Lancaster bomber which dived into woodland have been discovered in a small German village.

For Ashford resident John Tutt it marks the end of decades of searching for his brother, Sgt Bernard Frederick Tutt, who died aged just 29.

It was thanks to John’s persistent investigations that he received a response to a letter he sent 11 years ago to the Burgermeister of Brandau, a small village 22 miles south east of Frankfurt where the plane came down.

Archaeology buff Felix Klingenbeck, 20, made the discovery after becoming interested in stories told by villagers about an English bomber that had crashed in the woods east of the village.

He found sections of the plane with serial numbers, which he posted online in the hope that someone would confirm the type of aircraft.