An antiques dealer has been jailed for eight years for handling a stolen copy of Shakespeare's first folio.

Raymond Scott, 53, from County Durham was cleared of stealing the treasure, but found guilty of handling stolen goods at a trial in June.

The 1623 work was taken from a display cabinet at Durham University in 1998.

Judge Richard Lowden called the folio "quintessentially English treasure" and said damage to it was "cultural vandalisation".

The case related to one of the surviving copies of the 17th Century compendium of Shakespeare's plays.

It was handed in by Scott to the world-renowned Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC a decade later.

The Newcastle Crown Court trial was told Scott kept the badly-damaged volume, estimated to be worth about £1m, at his house for a decade before taking it to the Folger library where staff called police.

It was alleged Scott hoped to sell the treasure at auction and share the money with friends in Cuba.

Passing sentence, Judge Richard Lowden said: "You are to some extent a fantasist and have to some degree a personality disorder and you have been an alcoholic.

"It is clear that from the (psychiatric) report you are not suffering from any mental disorder."...

TIMBUCTOO, N.J. -- In Timbuctoo lies a hill. Underneath that hill lies a house, or what archaeologists think might have been a house once upon a time. The silver clasp of a woman's handbag, piles of Mason jars, chips of dinner plates and an empty jar of Dixie Peach Pomade lie among the bricks that have broken away from the foundation.

These are crushed fragments of a past life when free black people lived in this New Jersey community almost 200 years ago -- free even then, 45 years before Emancipation. "Most of the history of this country is in that house," says David Orr, a classical archaeologist and professor of anthropology at Temple University. Orr is standing at the site down a gray road in Timbuctoo. A hot wind is blowing.

Orr said that the buried community has the potential to be a very important find in African American history. "Timbuctoo is great in a larger context because it lasted, some of it, into the 20th century," he said. "It also has a very large descendant community, so ethnographically it is important."

Timbuctoo was founded by freed blacks and escaped slaves in the 1820s. It was probably named after Timbuktu, the town in Mali near the Niger River, although researchers are still trying to find out how and why it got its name. The neighborhood still exists in the township of Westampton, N.J., about a 45-minute drive northeast of Philadelphia, an enclave of many acres, so tiny and tucked away that when you ask someone at the store two miles away, he tells you he has no idea where it is.

Timbuctoo has always been a secret kind of a place. Had to be, because it was part of the Underground Railroad. There are newer houses here now where some descendants of original settlers still live. But much of the physical history of Timbuctoo is buried underground. Based on a geophysical survey, archaeologists believe that foundations of a whole village of perhaps 18 houses and a church dating back to the 1820s lies beneath layers of dirt.

In June, those archaeologists from Temple University in Philadelphia began unraveling Timbuctoo's secrets, excavating the hill next to a Civil War cemetery where African American troops are buried. The discoveries are fragile and ordinary artifacts of everyday life -- jars for medicines and cosmetics, pieces of shoes, dinner plates -- but to the people unearthing them, they are invaluable.

Archaeological excavation of African American communities such as Timbuctoo is booming across the country, spurred by an increasing number of prominent black academics and politicians and a proliferation of museums dedicated to African American history, whose curators are eager to display the artifacts. (Archaeologists had known about the hill in Timbuctoo for years, but it wasn't until a recently appointed black mayor of the township of Westampton, Sidney Camp, pursued a geophysical survey did the excavation begin.)...

Campaigners against fox hunting have found an unlikely ally: Winston Churchill.

Documents found in the National Archives show that the former Tory prime minister supported attempts to stop British troops fox hunting in occupied Germany after the Second World War.

The commander of the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR), Sir John Harding, wrote to the government to ask for help in attempting to stop the activity being banned.

It had been banned under the Nazis who, to the continuing bafflement of many historians, said torturing animals was beneath them, the Guardian reported.

But it was reinstated after the Allied forces occupied Germany, much to the pleasure of many British officers....

Monkeys on cocaine. New windows for a closed visitor center. Modern dance as a tool for software development.

A report to be released Tuesday by conservative Republican Sens. Tom Coburn and John McCain cited these and 97 other projects as leading examples of misguided or wasteful spending under the Obama administration's $862 billion economic stimulus bill.
Titled "Summertime Blues," the report is the third by the two senators targeting projects that they say fail to meet the job-creation goal of spending under the Recovery Act of 2009.

"We owe it to all Americans that are paying taxes and struggling to find jobs, to rebuild our economy without doing additional harm, and to do it in a way that expands opportunities for future generations," said the introduction to the report by Coburn, R-Oklahoma, and McCain, R-Arizona. "Too many stimulus projects are failing to meet that goal."

While some projects in the report "may have merit," they are "being mismanaged or were poorly planned," the report said.

The Recovery Act, which was passed a few weeks after President Barack Obama took office, was a government-funded effort to kick-start economic activity in response to the ongoing recession....