“THIS case is quite perplexing,” Clarence Darrow wrote his ex-wife in 1924, “and will most likely be a hard struggle to save the lives of the boys.”

The “boys” were Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two brilliant teenagers from wealthy Chicago families who conspired to commit the perfect crime. They failed, with tragic consequences for their kidnapping victim, 14-year-old Bobby Franks, and for themselves.

Still, Darrow, a champion of unpopular causes (think Spencer Tracy facing off against Frederic March in “Inherit the Wind”), chose to be their attorney and invoked a novel legal defense in their murder trial. His passionate closing argument, which still resonates in debates over capital punishment, spared the defendants the death penalty.

Now, nearly a century later, the public is receiving new insights into Darrow’s concerns about the case, as well as into his personal and professional life — he also defended William (Big Bill) Haywood, the union radical, and he fought murder charges against a black family in Detroit who had defended their home against a white mob. The insights are contained in hundreds of letters that Darrow wrote and received, and that were donated by his granddaughters to the University of Minnesota Law School library. The law library released the first 473 letters last week....

When John Updike died of lung cancer in January 2009, at 76, there seemed little left to learn about him. Not only was he among the most prolific writers of his time, but he was also among the most autobiographical, recasting the details of his life in an outpouring of fiction, poetry, essays and criticism that appeared with metronomic regularity in the pages of The New Yorker and in books published at a rate of almost one a year for more than half a century.

Yet Updike was a private man, if not a recluse like J. D. Salinger or a phantom like Thomas Pynchon, then a one-man gated community, visible from afar but firmly sealed off, with a No Trespassing sign posted in front.

Updike cultivated his embowered solitude early. At 25, with no books yet published, he fled New York (and a writing job at The New Yorker) and moved to the Massachusetts shore, an hour north of Boston, where he remained for the next five decades, perching eventually on an 11-acre estate he shared with his second wife, Martha Updike, in Beverly Farms. There he assumed the remote aspect of a literary squire, ensconced in a nest of second-floor offices overlooking the Atlantic and descending twice a week for rounds of golf at the exclusive Myopia Hunt Club. He surfaced intermittently for interviews or readings, invariably presenting a mask of debonair geniality, only to retreat once more.

But all the while he was fending off the public, Updike was also leaving a trail of clues to his works and days: an enormous archive fashioned as meticulously as one of his lathe-turned sentences. "The archive was vitally important to him," Mrs. Updike said in a telephone interview, especially in his last days. “He saw it not just as a collection of his working materials, but as also a record of the time he lived in.” Today the material crowds an aisle and a half of metal shelving in the basement of Houghton Library, Harvard University’s rare book and manuscript repository that sits atop stone stairs in Harvard Yard, a short walk from Hollis Hall, the redbrick dormitory where Updike lived as a freshman 60 years ago....

Pope Benedict XVI traveled to a central Italian town Sunday to pay homage to Celestine V, saying the simple lifestyle of the 13th-century hermit who resigned the papacy can serve as an example for modern men and women.

Benedict praised his predecessor for his detachment from material things such as money and clothes.

Celestine V assumed the papacy in 1294 at age 85 and resigned five months later, saying he was not up to the task. He was later put under guard for fear he would become the rallying point for a schism....

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said the US will donate $15m (£10m) to preserve the site of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Mrs Clinton was on a visit to Poland, where she oversaw the signing of a key missile base agreement.

She warned of a "steel vice" of repression crushing democracy and civil liberties activists in countries such as Iran, Egypt and Zimbabwe.

She held up Poland, which elects a new leader on Sunday, as a model democracy....

Lebanon's top Shia Muslim cleric, seen as a key figure in the founding of militant group Hezbollah, has died at the age of 74.

Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah was regarded as Hezbollah's spiritual guide after the group was founded in 1982, a charge both denied.

An implacable critic of the US, he had a wide following among Shias and backed the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.

But he was known among Shias for his moderate social views.

He held particularly progressive views on the role of women in Islamic society....

The costs of a Leonardo da Vinci theft investigation and extortion case at the High Court have exceeded £350,000.

The figures were obtained by the BBC via Freedom of Information requests.

Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary has spent nearly £250,000 on its operations since the Madonna of the Yarnwinder was stolen in 2003.

Prosecution costs of two extortion cases, which did not result in any convictions, have been estimated at a little more than £130,000.

The figure does not include defence costs for the accused during their trial....

The Great Fire of London started accidentally in a bakery, right? That wasn't the view at the time - many believed it was a terrorist attack and violent reprisals against possible suspects soon followed.

The date 1666 is one burned on to the collective memory of a nation.

But a new Channel 4 documentary focuses on the lesser known story of the fire - it sparked a violent backlash against London's immigrant population, prompted by the widely-held belief at the time that it was an act of arson committed by a foreign power.

As the fire raged, and rumours spread that the French had invaded, angry mobs hunted anyone who appeared to be foreign, says Ms Horth. A Swedish diplomat was lynched. A French woman trying to escape to a refugee camp in Spitalfields had her breast cut off because people thought the baby chicks she carried in her apron were fireballs.

Until the 19th Century, the plaque at London's Monument stated that followers of the Pope were to blame, says Ms Horth, and named Hubert as the fire-starter. It was only after Catholic emancipation in the 19th Century that the government decided the plaque was inflammatory and had those inscriptions removed....

Would the spirit of the Declaration of Independence have been any different if it referred to Americans as "subjects" instead of "citizens?"

Thomas Jefferson apparently thought so, and recent analysis of a rough draft of the Declaration has confirmed speculation that he considered both before settling on "citizens."

Recent hyperspectral imaging by scientists in the Library of Congress' Preservation Research and Testing Division performed on Jefferson’s rough draft shows he originally wrote the phrase "our fellow subjects." But he apparently changed his mind and heavily scrawled over the word "subjects" was the word "citizens."

Hyperspectral imaging is the process of taking digital photos of an object using distinct portions of the visible and non-visible light spectrum, revealing what previously could not be seen by the human eye, according to the Library of Congress.

The correction occurs in the portion of the declaration that deals with U.S. grievances against King George III's incitement of "treasonable insurrections," according to the Library of Congress. The specific sentence is is not in the final draft, but a similar phrase stuck, and the word "citizens" is used elsewhere in the final document....

A man wanted in Hungary for the torture and killing of a Jewish teenager during World War II averted extradition Friday after an Australian federal court ruled in his favor, an Australian news agency reported.

Hungary issued a warrant for Perth resident Charles Zentai, 88, in 2005. He is suspected of being a Nazi collaborator who killed Peter Balazs in Budapest in November 1944, the Australian Associated Press said.

Zentai is on the list of most wanted Nazis compiled by the Simon Weisenthal Center, which first discovered Zentai in Australia in 2004. The Jewish human rights organization accuses Zentai of participating in manhunts of Jews as well as persecution and murder.

But Australian Judge Neil McKerracher found several problems with the extradition order, AAP said....

If she's confirmed, Solicitor General Elena Kagan would become the fourth woman to sit on the Supreme Court. If not, at least she'll earn a spot on a future version of this list -- nominees who didn't make it to the bench, at least on their first try.

1. Robert Bork

In our time, the most famous rejected nominee is Robert H. Bork, a legal scholar and U.S. Court of Appeals judge with a long paper trail of conservative opinions. Nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, Bork could have tilted the Court decisively to the right. As a known quantity, he was an easy target for liberal opponents, who organized a campaign against him. He was rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee after 12 days of hearings.

2. Alexander Wolcott

"Oh degraded Country! How humiliating to the friends of moral virtue -- of religion and of all that is dear to the lover of his Country!" the New-York Gazette Advertiser wailed in 1811 over President James Madison's nomination of customs inspector Alexander Wolcott.

Wolcott's strong enforcement of the controversial embargoes against Great Britain and France cost him support in the Senate and in the press. The Senate turned him down by a 9-24 vote, the widest rejection in Supreme Court history....

Amedeo Guillet, who died on June 16 aged 101, was the Italian officer who led the last cavalry charge faced by the British Army.

Amedeo Guillet was born in Piacenza on February 7 1909 to a Savoyard-Piedmontese family of the minor aristocracy which for generations had served the dukes of Savoy, who later became the kings of Italy.

He spent most of his childhood in the south – he remembered the Austrian biplane bombing of Bari during the First World War – then followed family tradition and joined the army.

Guillet excelled as a horseman and was selected for the Italian eventing team to go to the Berlin Olympics in 1936. But Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 interrupted his career as a competition rider. Instead, using family connections, he had himself transferred to the Spahys di Libya cavalry with which he fought repeated actions.

He also witnessed aerial gas attacks on Emperor Haile Selassie's lightly armed warriors, which appalled world opinion. In Guillet's view, gas was largely ineffectual against an unentrenched enemy which could flee, and he himself was fighting with horse, sword and pistol....

A 75-year-old man has been sentenced to 25 years in jail for killing thousands of people during Rwanda's 1994 genocide.

Yussuf Munyakazi, a father of 13, was found guilty of "genocide and extermination" involving Tutsis who had sought refuge in Catholic churches, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda said in a statement.

In a summary of its judgement on Wednesday, the court said it accepted the accounts of witnesses, who said that Munyakazi led groups of Hutu militants to the churches in south-western Rwanda and participated in the killings that followed.

Munyakazi was, however, not convicted of involvement in a massacre of hundreds of civilians at another church because claims of his involvement could not be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, the summary said....