The boyhood home of a future U.S. president wouldn't normally be associated with buried treasure, but there must be something intriguing about the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site.

In recent weeks three individuals have been cited by park rangers for using metal detectors to search the grounds of the site for significant artifacts.

According to a park release, two "relic hunters" were apprehended a week ago with metal detectors and shovels on the not-quite-200-acre historic site in West Branch, Iowa.

The two unidentified men, both from Iowa, were cited for possessing and using metal detectors on federal lands. They had their detectors impounded until they paid fines and underwent a "background check to determine if either individual had a previous history of such violations."

No artifacts were taken from the park, according to the report, which did not specify what the men were looking for....

The first British warship to visit Cuba since before the 1959 revolution sailed into Havana Bay on Monday, where it was greeted by a Cuban Navy band playing "God Save the Queen."

With its colours flying and bright red Sea Dart missiles poised on deck, the destroyer HMS Manchester pulled into port opposite Old Havana, the historic centre of the Cuban capital, at the start of a five-day visit to the Communist-led island.

The ship's officers were to meet with their Cuban counterparts to discuss collaboration on counter-drug and disaster relief operations in the Caribbean region.

The last time a British warship stopped at the island was in 1957 when the frigate HMS Bigbury Bay visited Havana....

The idea that human ancestors were using stone tools about 3.4 million years ago has been challenged by a Spanish-led team of researchers.

The original claim was based on what were purported to be butchery marks on animal bones found in Ethiopia.

It pushed back the earliest known tool-use and meat-eating in our ancestors by some 800,000 years.

But Manuel Dominguez-Rodrigo and his team tell PNAS journal that the marks are more likely to be animal scratches.

"A mark made with a stone tool could be morphologically similar to a mark that is accidentally made by an animal trampling on a bone, if the bone is lying on an abrasive [surface]," said Dr Dominguez-Rodrigo from the Complutense University of Madrid.

"We can match mark-by-mark every single mark on the fossils with marks that we obtain using trampling criteria," he told BBC News....

LOS ANGELES — Three months after the mummified corpses of two infants were found wrapped in 1930s newspapers in a basement steamer trunk here, the police said DNA evidence showed them to be the children of a Scottish-born nurse who owned the trunk and lived in the building during that time.

Janet Mann Barrie, the babies’ mother, died in Canada at age 97 in 1994.

Autopsies revealed no signs of trauma, and on Tuesday the police said they had closed the case. But lingering questions — like how the infants died and why they remained packed in a trunk for decades — allowed some of the speculation and mystery that have grown around the case since summer to continue....

London's Natural History Museum has suspended a planned expedition to a remote region of Paraguay after protests that it might disturb one of the world's last uncontacted tribes.

Campaigners had warned that the expedition to the Chaco region was likely to encounter the Ayoreo people.

Contact might expose them to infectious diseases that could wipe them out.

The 100-strong expedition was due to set off in the next few days in search of new species of plants and insects.

The Natural History Museum said the trip would now be delayed while its partners, the Paraguayan environment ministry, consulted further with indigenous representatives.....

It was another day on the rocky hillside, as archaeologists and laborers dug out statues of Buddha and excavated a sprawling 2,600-year-old Buddhist monastery. A Chinese woman in slacks, carrying an umbrella against the Afghan sun, politely inquired about their progress.

She had more than a passing interest. The woman represents a Chinese company eager to develop the world's second-biggest unexploited copper mine, lying beneath the ruins.

The mine is the centerpiece of China's drive to invest in Afghanistan, a country trying to get its economy off the ground while still mired in war. Beijing's $3.5 billion stake in the mine — the largest foreign investment in Afghanistan by far — gets its foot in the door for future deals to exploit Afghanistan's largely untapped mineral wealth, including iron, gold and cobalt. The Afghan government stands to reap a potential $1.2 billion a year in revenues from the mine, as well as the creation of much-needed jobs....

In 1969, Richard Nixon was eager to spend time at the Catoctin Mountains retreat reserved exclusively for the fraternal order he had just joined: U.S. presidents. His daughter Julie accompanied him as he whisked into the secluded sylvan enclave, where a jarringly simple sign announced their arrival in "Camp 3."

What happened to "David"? The disappearance of that name erased a dictate of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the GOP general Nixon had served as vice president. It was also a dismissal of the tribute Ike had paid to his grandson, whom Julie Nixon had just married. "I tell ya -- within one hour, they found the shed," Julie recalls over coffee one afternoon with her husband at their suburban Philadelphia home. "My dad got the sign back up." There would be no doubt when future visitors arrived: This place was Camp David.

Nixon's gesture further sealed a unique bond between two presidential families that are still linked four decades later in America's collective memory as a love-locked dynasty. American presidents come and go, but the fascination with their family trees endures. The presidential family diaspora carries with it many obligations, perceived and unperceived, imposed and organic. There are kin who buff legacies and kin who stain them. There are kin who demand attention and kin who disappear.

And then there are the archivists, the accumulators of arcana and tidbits, a particular breed of presidential kin that gathers and collates, often as part of a very public exercise in trying to understand the very non-public selves of their unknowable forebears. These days, David Eisenhower -- a Pulitzer finalist for his 1986 book, "Eisenhower at War" -- and his wife aspire to be this last kind of presidential kin. Julie chimed in three years ago with the book, "Pat Nixon: The Untold Story." And now she has collaborated with her husband in a reminiscence about Ike's retirement years, the just-released "Going Home to Glory: A Memoir of Life With Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961 to 1969."...

Peruvian archaeologists have discovered six mummified dogs, all dating from the 15th century and apparently presented as religious offerings at a major pre-Columbian site just south of Lima.

The mummified remains of four children were also found at the site, archaeologists said.

The experts believe the dogs are neither Hairless Peruvian Dogs -- an ancient native breed -- nor sheepdogs found at gravesites of the Chiribaya culture, which flourished in southern Peru between the years 900 and 1350....