Now that the dramatic, round-the-clock rescue of 33 Chilean miners has finally come to a close, it's worth asking: "Why do we love a story about people in holes?" Call it the "Timmy in a Well trope" -- in news, as in entertainment, we are riveted by people stuck underground.

"I suppose there are mythic elements at work here," says author Melissa Faye Green, who wrote "Last Man Out: The Story of the Springhill Mine Disaster." "These are men who learned something about the beyond. They have literally been buried alive."

There is something uniquely modern about it, too. The first television news event to captivate all of America in real time was about Kathy Fiscus, who fell into an abandoned water well. Stan Chambers of KTLA in Los Angeles covered the story for 27 hours until a doctor was lowered into the well to find her dead from suffocation....

Long after his death we continue to celebrate the brilliance of Ansel Adams, who arguably defined landscape photography, often while working in national parks to capture the magnificence of nature.

Even today, more than a quarter-century after his death, there's a steady clamor for the photographer's images. When word broke earlier this year that an overlooked cache of his negatives had been found at a garage sale, it became national news...and sparked more than a little controversy over the authenticity of those glass slides.

Why are Mr. Adams' images so enduring? Is it because of their composition, or because of the time capsules they represent? Is it both?

No doubt much of the allure for an Adams print can be explained by citing the photographer's own words, those he wrote in 1950 in an introduction to his book, My Camera in the National Parks:

The dawn wind in the High Sierra is not just a passage of cool air through forest conifers, but within the labyrinth of human consciousness becomes a stirring of some world-magic of most delicate persuasion. The grand lift of the Tetons is more than a mechanistic fold and faulting of the earth's crust; it becomes a primal gesture of the earth beneath a greater sky. And on the ancient Acadian coast an even more ancient Atlantic surge disputes the granite headlands with more than the slow, crumbling erosion of the seas. Here are forces familiar with the aeons of creation, and with the aeons of the ending of the world.

While there are numerous books, posters, and postcards where you can see how Mr. Adams transformed those words into images, there's a new one coming out in time for your holiday wish list that contains more than 200 of his images -- 50 of which previously were unpublished....

When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tours Lebanon’s border with Israel today, he may pause a moment to consider that Iran owes its existence as a Shiite nation to the ancestors of those living in these rural hilltop villages.

The links between the Shiites of Lebanon and Iran stretch back 500 years. They endure today in the ideological and material relationship between the Islamic Republic and Hezbollah.

Iran wasn't always the center of Shiite scholarship

In the early 16th century, the center for Shiite scholarship was in an area known as Jabal Amil, a rugged hill country that conforms closely to the geographical perimeters of modern-day south Lebanon. When Shah Ismael I, the Safavid ruler of Iran, introduced Shiism as the state religion in the 16th century, he turned to the scholars of Jabal Amil to help promulgate the new faith.

The Senate recently held its third in a series of hearings on for-profit schools, many of which stand accused of mismanaging federal dollars and employing sketchy recruitment tactics, only to have less than half of their students graduate. Among those under scrutiny are big-name proprietary schools like the University of Phoenix and Kaplan. When undercover investigators applied at 15 for-profit colleges, they found recruiters misleading applicants and encouraging fraud so the would-be students—and ultimately schools—could collect more federal aid. One admissions officer told an applicant to hide $250,000 in savings because “it was not the government’s business”; a representative from a Florida program told an applicant that no one would “come after” her if she didn’t pay back her student loans; still another recruiter called a $14,000 massage therapy course a “good value,” though a nearby community college offered the same certificate for just $520.

“I continue to be amazed by the questionable, and sometimes outright illegal, practices occurring within the for-profit sector,” said Senator Tom Harkin, who is leading the congressional investigation. “Critics say that it is only a few bad apples, but we need to take a hard look at the entire orchard.”

Harkin’s amazement is understandable. But the really amazing thing about this controversy is that it’s all so familiar. Twenty years ago, Senator Sam Nunn, the conservative Democrat from Georgia, led a series of hearings delving into financial aid fraud at for-profit colleges. High-profile investigations had revealed similar abuses—leading, eventually, to a series of reforms and amendments to the Higher Education Act of 1965....

HIBBING — Item No. 8 on the official Bob Dylan Walk tour is a white building with four golden stained-glass windows and a three-color circle with the Star of David at the south peak.

What was once Agudath Achim Synagogue, at 2320 W. Second St., was the site of 13-year-old Bobby Zimmerman’s bar mitzvah. Bobby Zimmerman grew up to be Bob Dylan, and current owners Brenda Shafer-Pellinen and her husband, Eric, are hoping this bit of history piques the interest of one of Dylan’s hardcore fans, who might be interested in buying it.

“People who like Dylan, love Dylan,” Shafer-Pellinen said. “They have an unusual level of devotion to his music — more so than other musical groups or artists.”

Shafer-Pellinen said she posted it on the website Craigslist a few months ago, and that she also has reached out to Dylan devotees on websites such as expectingrain.com and dylanradio.com. The property is being shown by Perella & Associates as a possible single-family home or duplex, and the asking price is $119,000....

Condoleezza Rice's personal memoir of her family history hits the book stands Tuesday. In "Extraordinary, Ordinary People," the former U.S. Secretary of State recalls much of her family's time during the Civil Rights era in Birmingham.

Rice has said that she will write a memoir about her eight years in the White House but felt she could not do so until people understood the "personal and implausible journey" she had taken from being born in 1950s segregated Alabama to being named the first female African-American to lead the State Department.

All of this happened, Rice said, due to her parents, John and Angelena Rice.

A guidance counselor/preacher and school teacher respectively, Mr. And Mrs. Rice never made more than $60,000 annually, Rice said.

Despite being raised in a city resistant to quality education for blacks, Rice's parents used their meager resources to provide their only child with piano lessons at 3. She also took French and ballet....

CHARLOTTESVILLE — Letters, military strategies, meeting notes, journals and other historical documents from the Founding Fathers that illustrate the building of the United States of America more than 200 years ago will be made available to the general public for free, thanks to a cooperative agreement between the University of Virginia Press and the National Archives.

The agreement will create a new website to provide free access to the fully annotated published papers of key figures in the nation's Founding Era. The project is designed to include the papers of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin.

"This award to help the University of Virginia Press create a new online presence for the papers of our nation's founders is great news for the University and for scholars everywhere," U.Va. President Teresa Sullivan said. "For 10 years, the press has built on the pioneering vision of U.Va. faculty to harness digital technology in the service of scholarship and education through the Rotunda imprint....

If history had taken a different turn then Hitler may well have been living in Apley Hall, a glorious historic hall in the heart of the Shropshire countryside.

The Führer is thought to have set his heart on making the hall his home once the intended invasion of Britain was complete.

Clearly the war time leader had a taste for style.

The Grade II* listed house, built with Grinshill stone in a Gothic style, is a breathtaking country home that has been lovingly restored.

Its current owner is the latest in a long line of individuals who have cherished the property which stands near the village of Norton, seven miles from Bridgnorth and Telford....

What are memorials, and is it important that they occupy public space? Certainly they're a call to remembrance and reflection, but does a "digital memorial" leave out something important by letting people choose when they observe it?

In Munich, an audio map titled Memory Loops by artist and musician Michaela Melian has raised questions like these. The project is a digital memorial to the victims of National Socialism in the Bavarian capital. It draws on archival and audio footage relating to the Holocaust and can be accessed online in both German and English.

Melian's project arose from a juried competition in Munich seeking new forms of remembrance for Nazi victims. The event was meant to address a city monument that had become obscure due to increasing car traffic nearby.

"Memory Loops analyzes the most varied historical dimensions by focusing on certain crystallization points in the city of Munich. Using archival material and contemporary witness statements, Melian artistically shapes voice-collages of the highest quality," noted the jury.

But the idea also had detractors, including Munich's mayor, Christian Ude. He reacted to Melian's proposal in 2008 by wondering whether "its means can be used to achieve an appropriate memorial."...

Along the meticulously spaced rows of graves at Arlington National Cemetery, the names of the nation's wars are clearly etched into the headstones: World War I, World War II, Vietnam, Korea, the Persian Gulf.

Soon, a new inscription for troops killed in Iraq could appear: "Operation New Dawn."

Unlike in past conflicts, the overwhelming majority of headstones for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan at the nation's most hallowed military burial ground use the military's official names for those conflicts: Operation Enduring Freedom for Afghanistan, Operation Iraqi Freedom for Iraq. As of Sept. 1, Operation Iraqi Freedom has been rebranded Operation New Dawn....

Five Union Army soldiers who died 145 years ago now have grave markers.

The Charlotte Observer reported Friday the graves had been marked only with large stones since they were killed by Confederate soldiers while scouting for supplies....

Almost unnoticed within the confines of the large Hietaniemi area is the Helsinki Jewish cemetery. Surrounded by old moss-covered stone walls, it is separated from the predominant Christian Lutheran graves there, as are the graves of other minority religious denominations in Hietaniemi.

Passing through a gate into the Jewish cemetery, one immediately notices on the right-hand side a small area demarcated by a low fence made of heavy iron chains. Here lie Finnish-Jewish war heroes - young men who fought and died in the wars of 1939-44 between Finland and the Soviet Union. A large black stone slab with the dates 1939-1944, a Star of David and a picture of a hand brandishing a sword engraved in it, dominates the small plot where the graves are arranged in rows. Each grave is marked by a marble slab bearing the name and dates of birth and death of the person buried there....

The Jewish war heroes' graves and the monument on the hill are emblematic of the fate of Jews in Finland during the years 1941-44, when the country was allied with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union, their common enemy. The fact that Finnish Jews fought in an army allied with Hitler's Germany is very peculiar - not only in the history of Finland, but also in that of World War II, when the Nazis put their lunatic racial fantasies into practice and declared that Jews all over the world were enemies who had to be exterminated down to the last soul....

The Winter War (1939-40 ) between Finland and the Soviet Union broke out after the Finnish government rejected Stalin's territorial claims and demands for military bases to be built inside the country. In that war, Finland fought bravely, and alone, against the overwhelmingly more powerful enemy. It lost important areas to Russia, the Finnish Karelia among them, but was not occupied. Finnish Jews fought in the Winter War on equal footing with their countrymen; 15 were killed on the battlefield. Altogether about 25,000 Finns lost their lives in that war. Among them were 1,000 civilians who died in the bombardments of cities and towns.

I meet Aron Livson in his beautiful terraced house in the lush area of Espoo, the Western satellite town of the greater Helsinki area. Livson is 94 years old but still in good shape both physically and mentally. He's the chairman of the Finnish-Jewish War Veterans' Association, which was established in 1979 and belongs to the national war veterans' organization.

Livson has made his living in private business. His father was originally a skilled artisan, who established a factory called Eastern Finland's Cap Factory, in Vyborg (in Finnish Viipuri ), the main town of Finnish Karelia, during the early years of the country's independence. The younger Livson performed his military service in the infantry regiment of Vyborg's famous Karelian Guard. After completing his peacetime service and returning to civilian life, Livson was again called to arms in 1939 just before the Winter War broke out.

During that war, Livson fought in the Karelian Isthmus, defending this legendary and nostalgia-ridden area between Lake Ladoga and the Gulf of Finland, which the country lost at the end of the war, reconquered during the first phase of the Continuation War in 1941, and finally lost again after heavy battles in the summer of 1944.

When the Continuation War broke out in June 1941, Aron Livson found himself fighting again in the Isthmus. After the Finnish forces had crossed the old border, with some disgruntlement among the ranks, they advanced, captured East Karelia's capital Petrozavodsk and reached the important river Svir, which flows from Lake Onega to Lake Ladoga....

Livson recalls that he was always the only Jew in the units where he fought, and he never saw any German officers at the front. The first Germans he came across during the war were in Kotka when he was doing office work. His father had established a shop in the same town. "My father never let German soldiers enter his boutique," Livson notes....

Three Finnish Jews were awarded the German Iron Cross for their courage in battle, but all of them quite demonstratively refused to accept it. One of them was Captain Salomon Klass, who saved a German unit from a siege in one of his military exploits. Klass, whose family came from the Baltic countries, had been active in the right-wing Civil Guard in Finland before the war. In the late 1930s, he lived for four years in Palestine, where he was a member of the Etzel underground. Klass was still in Palestine in 1939 when he got the call to serve in Finland's army, before the outbreak of the Winter War....

In honor of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War in 2011, NOAA has assembled a special historical collection of maps, charts, and documents prepared by the U.S. Coast Survey during the war years. The collection, “Charting a More Perfect Union,” contains over 400 documents, available free from NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey website.

“People are planning now for their visits to Civil War sites next year, and we want to give them an opportunity to visualize the terrain, ports, and coasts as they were from 1861 to 1865,” said Meredith Westington, NOAA’s chief geographer. “Most people wouldn’t think of turning to NOAA for historical Civil War documents, but the agency has an amazing legacy.”

Coast Survey’s collection includes 394 Civil War-era maps, including nautical charts used for naval campaigns, and maps of troop movements and battlefields. Rarely seen publications include Notes on the Coast, prepared by Coast Survey to help Union forces plan naval blockades against the Confederacy, and the annual report summaries by Superintendent Bache as he detailed the trials and tribulations of producing the maps and charts needed to meet growing military demands....

During the Troubles, hundreds of men and women were convicted of terrorist activities on the basis of convictions that in many cases were beaten out of them in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Among them were children as young as 14 and 16 who were tortured for days on end.

The Diplock court system allowed for convictions on the basis of confessions only, and non jury trials.A pervasive culture of forcing confessions to win convictions has now been revealed by a Guardian newspaper investigation

The Guardian report probes the outcome of The Criminal Cases Review Commission, which investigates possible miscarriages of justice in England, Wales and Northern Ireland,. The commission to date overturned 24 convictions in Northern Ireland and it says that it has received applications from 200 people who claim torture while in custody during the Troubles.

According to officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC,) interviewed by the Guardian the torture began after the establishment of the Diplock Courts in 1973, a system of non-jury courts named after Lord Diplock. The courts treated terrorist offences as criminal rather than political, and with the case heard in front of a judge rather than a jury, a confession alone could secure a conviction....

The schoolchildren in Boyd Elementary School file in and take their seats on the auditorium floor. Many have been looking forward to meeting this special guest—they’ve been studying world history and conflict resolution.

The visitor is a pilot from World War II. Her name is Millicent Peterson Young, and she is one of the few surviving Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs.

She and over 1,000 other women flew military aircraft within the US during the war—often ferrying planes from the factory to the military base, or helping out with military training.

On this day, she’s telling the schoolkids what her specific role was.

Young: “So does everyone know what a windsock is now?”
Kids: “Yeah!”
Young: “Well, I towed one of those 100 feet behind my airplane…”

She towed aerial targets behind her plane. As she told me later in an interview, the male student pilots would shoot at these targets before heading overseas to fly in combat missions....

The international rights to a book telling the stories of six classmates of Anne Frank, who unlike her survived the Holocaust, went up for sale on Thursday at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

"It's a very simple and dignified book, which is receiving strong interest," Robert Walsh, the literary agent
who holds the rights, told AFP.

Of the 21 children in Anne Frank's class at the Jewish school she attended in Amsterdam, 11 survived World War II and six are still alive today....

THE Olympic Delivery Authority has insisted that its Stratford stadium is safe, amid claims that there could be an unexploded bomb lying beneath it.

According to Government records, a German bomb dropped in a tip on the exact site of the stadium just south of Leyton during the Blitz.

Records of bombings during the war state that a large hole was left in a rubbish shoot at the refuse site after an air-raid, but despite several searches throughout the 1940s, no bomb was uncovered there.

A report by weapons company BAE Systems for the Government in 2007, which was recently uncovered by a Stratford resident concluded that explosive material must lie beneath the site of the stadium because of how intense air raids in the area were during the war....

Options are shrinking and time is running out for a small citizens group seeking to keep the historic Justice William Smith House intact and in Mercersburg.

Bids to demolish -- or possibly relocate -- the building will be opened Oct. 28.

Among the bidders is likely to be an outdoor museum in Northern Ireland that would like to disassemble the structure and ship it to Europe. Under that scenario, the stone house would be rebuilt on the grounds of the Ulster American Folk Park in County Tyrone.

"I think we are getting close to the end of the line," said Karen Ramsburg, president of the Committee to Save the Justice William Smith House.

Folk park curator Phil Mowat has said that relocation of the Smith House to Northern Ireland would be a last resort if the building cannot remain in its original spot.

The regional fire department that owns the land on which the 18th century house stands bought the property last year with an eye to expanding its own aging facilities....