Their skin is charred. Their bones melted away. Many watched their parents die. Yet they consider themselves the lucky ones. 65 years ago, they survived the unimaginable: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

They are called the Hibakusha. They are a unique group which hopes their dramatic stories will convey the need to eliminate the scourge that nearly killed them during two days that changed the world, 65 years ago.

Mikiso Iwasa says August 6th, 1945 began like any other day. "It was a hot summer day, and the cicadas were singing," said Iwasa. Then the sound changed.

"We heard the sound…from the north and the children screamed. It's a plane! It's a plane!," he recalled....

Participants in the two-day Manhattan Project Symposium held at the Tinian Dynasty Hotel and Casino were joined by island residents yesterday at the atomic bomb assembly pits in North Field Tinian to memorialize the 65th anniversary of the dropping of the first A-bomb used in combat over Hiroshima.

In a brief ceremony littered with moments of high drama, a stunning moment of reverence was occasioned when “taps” was sounded in an ambience where only the sound of the wildlife in the surrounding habitat could be heard.

Prior to that, CNMI historian Dan Farrell extemporaneously reflected in poetic and lyrical tones the significance and symbology of the two pits that assembled the uranium bomb “Little Boy” and plutonium bomb “Fat Man” into the annals of human history, radically shifting the course and confluence of many lives.

U.S. Air Force Gen. Douglas Owens' remarks affirmed Farrell's sentiments when he declared that the happening initiated from Tinian 65 years ago changed the course of U.S. history, determining national policies and programs, including those of the Air Force in the Pacific....

When Wolf Hall won last year's Booker prize some commentators suggested that the term "historical fiction" was itself becoming a thing of the past. So many novels these days are set prior to the author's lifetime that to label a novel "historical" is almost as meaningless as to call it "literary". Eight of the last 10 Booker prize shortlists have included a novel set in the 19th century, and with the inclusion of David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet in this year's longlist, there is a better than fair chance that 2010 will be no different. However, one issue still divides historical fiction and contemporary: the matter of historical accuracy.

Historical accuracy is like quicksand. Stay too long in the same place and it will suck you down and there will be no movement, no dynamism to the story. Too much attention to factual detail is undoubtedly an impediment to literary art. Adam Foulds's The Quickening Maze is described on the Booker prize website as "historically accurate but beautifully imagined", as if "historically accurate" implied a literary problem. In some respects it does. Ask a historical author: how do you stop that facts getting in the way of the story? And the novelist, driven by his or her imagination, will offer a wealth of answers. The historian will assure you that the facts are the story.

Ignoring the mythical holy grail of historical accuracy is even more problematic. By far the most commonly cited book in this respect is The Da Vinci Code, even though it is not a historical novel at all. The historical context of the plot is what excites criticism in this respect. The same could be said of many historical films. My particular favourite historical error appears at the end of Braveheart, where it is suggested that the future Edward III (born in 1312) was the product of a union between the Scottish rebel William Wallace (executed in London in 1305) and Princess Isabella of France, who was nine at the time of Wallace's death. It would be funny – if I had not met so many people who believed it....

A Danish archeologist shot dead a polar bear that attacked and severely clawed his colleague during a dig in Greenland, the museum that employs them said Wednesday.

Bjarne Groennov killed the animal after it threw fellow expert Jens Fog Jensen to the ground in the incident on Saturday, said the National Museum of Denmark.

"It was a shocking experience but in such a situation we are just glad to get out alive and more or less unharmed," Jensen was quoted by the museum as saying on his return to Denmark after treatment in Iceland.

Jensen was taking notes on Clavering island in northeast Greenland when "suddenly the polar bear came out from behind the rocks, just 10 or 15 metres away from him," the museum said.

Groennov shouted out to warn him and Jensen tried to run away, but "the bear chased him and threw him to the ground before biting him and clawing his arms and legs."...

A team of archaeologists discovered what they believe is an ancient winery during their continued exploration of the Late Antiquity-Early Byzantine fortress on the Saint Atanas Cape on Bulgaria’s northern Black Sea coast.

The supposed winery, according to reports, consisted of two stone buildings connected through a wooden passage. One of them would be filled with grapes that were pressed with large rectangular stones.

Several structures thought to be ancient wineries have been found in Bulgaria so far, although their function isn’t known for sure, Professor Valeri Yotov, the head of the archaeological team from the Varna Archaeology Museum, explained. The tests on the new find, which are yet to come out, might make it the first properly uncovered ancient winery in the country, he said.

Similar wineries have been found by archaeologists in the Caucasus, the Crimean Peninsula, Serbia and Israel, which boasts what is believed to have been the largest wine-making structure in the Byzantine Empire.

The winery in the fortress on Saint Atanas Cape, near the town of Byala (in the photo above) was likely a part of a monastery, according to Yotov, whose team rediscovered the fortress last summer. In addition to it, they have also found an early Christian church and much of the fortress walls at the site....

His name is Alexei Petrov. He used to be an officer, now he is a defendant in a case, accused of being part of an "organised crime group" and facing a 15-year sentence. But he's not "that" Alexei Petrov, the one arrested in "Operation Octopus", just a namesake. His alleged crime is stealing a tank.

If you follow the news closely, you will likely remember the story from two and a half years back, when police arrested two German nationals as they attempted to smuggle out of the country a Panzer IV tank, whose price on the black market can easily exceed 100 000 euro. At that time, Major Alexei Petrov was second-in-command at the military unit in Yambol charged with guarding the precious relics. According to prosecutors, he is also the man that helped the Germans steal the tank.

On that December 2007 day, about 80 Nazi tanks and assault artillery units were still on Bulgaria's border with Turkey, where they had been half-buried as part of the Krali Marko line that was meant to protect Bulgaria from land invasion during the Cold War.

Two months before the group was caught, the legendary Tsaritsa – a Sturmgeschütz III Ausf. G assault artillery gun made in 1943 – disappeared from the area near the village of Fakia. The gun is said to have been a personal gift from Hitler to the Bulgarian queen-mother Yoana, hence its name. It is believed that the gun was loaded onto a truck and taken to Germany, where it was sold.

The three men allegedly decided to steal a tank using the same scheme, but the military counterintelligence was tipped off about the deed and arrested Petrov and the two Germans on December 13 2007. They were arrested while a group of Roma workers, hired for 20 leva each, were digging out the Panzer.

The story is curious not only because it is the first larceny of a tank from the Bulgarian army, but also because it set in motion a series of events that prevented the loss of one of Bulgaria's largest military treasures, the so-called tank collection of the Defence Ministry.

Residents in Yambol are convinced that the trio did not act alone and had the protection of someone in the Bulgarian General Staff. If not for that case, the Panzer tanks even now might have been the subject of looting, much to the joy of collectors and scrap buyers. Without meaning to, Petrov and his German "colleagues" made possible saving this piece of Bulgarian history....

The way we look at 9/11 is about to undergo a radical change.

Quietly, as the city focuses on the ground zero mosque and Condé Nast's planned move to the neighborhood, Joe Daniels has been working on a $700 million monument to the dead. Mr. Daniels, president of the foundation behind the 9/11 Memorial and Museum at ground zero, is doing more than simply planning a museum-he and his team may well be reframing the dialogue about that day in a surprisingly forthright and confrontational way.

The 9/11 Memorial and Museum is widely expected to immediately become one of the city's largest tourist attractions, projected to draw between five million and seven million visitors when its first phase opens in September 2011. But far from being the toothless, tasteful tribute to American greatness many expected after an earlier incarnation, the International Freedom Center, was abandoned five years ago, the revamped museum promises an unblinking account of the violence and terror of Sept. 11, 2001. Its choices could define American thought about 9/11 for decades....

One day last week, the novelist Peter Quinn (“I’m actually a lapsed historian”) was walking west on 45th Street, beyond Eighth Avenue, when he stopped outside the old home of a vanished Broadway restaurant called Billy Haas’s Chophouse.

“This is it,” he said, nodding at the graceless apartment building that had, in the local manner, risen to take its place. “He comes out here” — Mr. Quinn pointed at the curb — “and a tan cab is heading west. He’s wearing a double-breasted coat. He’s just had dinner with William Klein, a lawyer for the Shubert brothers, and a showgirl named Sally Ritz. He tips his hat, climbs in the cab — and that’s it.”

Mr. Quinn, who is 62 and bearded, is a Bronx-born man of Irish descent and a member of that cadre of New Yorkers known as Craterites. While most of these unfortunate souls — obsessed with the cold case of Joseph Force Crater, a State Supreme Court justice who vanished 80 years ago this week — are content to scratch their heads at the mystery, Mr. Quinn has dared to imagine its solution in the pages of “The Man Who Never Returned,” his new book.

“I solved the case in my head,” he had said earlier in the day, sitting in a hallway of the New York Public Library, just below the carrel-filled study where he wrote a good portion of the book. Arranged on his lap were three accordion files of Craterite gold: the original police circular announcing the disappearance; scores of day-by-day investigative reports; and countless letters from bounty-seekers in Havana, Shanghai, even the South Pacific — all claiming to have seen the missing man....

Navy Capt. Vernon L. “Mike” Micheel, an unassuming but heroic naval aviator who downplayed his feat of bombing two Japanese aircraft carriers on the same day during the Battle of Midway, died Thursday at Fleet Landing in Atlantic Beach. He died two weeks short of his 93rd birthday.

A reception in his honor will be held at 10:30 a.m. Aug. 21 in the Coleman Center at Fleet Landing, 1 Fleet Landing Blvd.

When he retired in 1972, Capt. Micheel had spent his last five years as commanding officer of Mayport Naval Air Station and chief of staff for Commander, Fleet Air Jacksonville.

Hugh Ambrose, who wrote the book “The Pacific” as a companion to the HBO series of the same name that premiered this year, included Capt. Micheel in the book.

“He was a pivotal person in one of the biggest battles of World War II,” Ambrose said Tuesday in a telephone interview. “He will always be one of my heroes.”

Yet the combat pilot continued to downplay his role in the Battle of Midway. Ambrose said Ensign Micheel had never flown a plane full of bombs off a carrier before taking to the skies with Scouting Squadron Six from the deck of the USS Enterprise on June 4, 1942.

Capt. Micheel’s bombs struck two Japanese carriers: the Akagi, which sank that day, and the Hiryu, which was heavily damaged and stayed afloat for another day.

In an interview with the late Jacksonville Journal writer Ray Knight in 1967, Capt. Micheel offhandedly said of the bombings, “Somebody in our squadron put about four bombs on two carriers in one day, four bombs each on two carriers in one day — and nobody knows who did it, so they gave it to everybody on the flight. We sank the carriers and this was our mission.”...

With sunny suns – despite early morning rain – and temperatures hovering near 90 degrees at 3:30pm it wasn’t exactly close to the conditions that were seen in the early morning hours of June 6, 1944. But for those taking part in the World War II Veterans Day Weekend Re-enactment at Veterans Memorial Park in St. Clair Shores, Michigan it was close enough. A couple dozen of America and Canadian re-enactors gathered up and made the landing while coming "under fire" from the German defenders.

In addition to the "landing" the day included a small militaria fair, musical performances by a 1940s singing group and even a reading by an Eleanor Roosevelt re-enactor. But the real stars of the show were the dozens of period vehicles that were hand to be seen up close. And while early morning weather included a heavy downpour that looked to spoil the day – which was almost fitting given the conditions back in 1944 – it turned out to be picture perfect!