Inside a grave in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is DNA that could finally put to rest debate about whether Abraham Lincoln's killer escaped capture and lived for years before committing suicide.

What's that you say? Wasn't this all solved 145 years ago? That depends on who you ask.

The way it's written in history books, John Wilkes Booth was cornered 12 days after shooting President Lincoln at Ford's Theatre and killed in a tobacco barn before being laid to rest in a family plot. But there have been several historians over the years not entirely satisfied with this version....

NEW YORK – Scientists have recovered the DNA code of a human relative recently discovered in Siberia, and it delivered a surprise: This relative roamed far from the cave that holds its only known remains.

By comparing the DNA to that of modern populations, scientists found evidence that these "Denisovans" from more than 30,000 years ago ranged all across Asia. They apparently interbred with the ancestors of people now living in Melanesia, a group of islands northeast of Australia.

There's no sign that Denisovans mingled with the ancestors of people now living in Eurasia, which made the connection between Siberia and distant Melanesia quite a shock....

The village of Erdemli in Central Anatolia contains the ruins of a small Byzantine village and is like a museum. An eight-year research project in the village has been completed and the structures in the Byzantine village identified and documented. The research team leader says their goal is to publish a scientific article about the structures in the valley and call for them to be restored.

Dozens of houses and churches carved into the rock faces of a valley in the Central Anatolian province of Kayseri have revealed 500 years of Byzantine history and high-quality Istanbul-style paintings....

ZAGREB -- A memorial service was held at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Zagreb on Tuesday evening for Ante Pavelić.

The service also mentioned Jure Francetić, commander of the Ustasha Crna Legija (Black Legion).

The service was held by priests Vjekoslav Lasić and Stanislav Kos, who in referred to Pavelić as a respectable man who made sacrifices for all of Croatia....

Before the steady stream of Emmy Awards and Grammy nominations and Oscar consideration came The Idea -- the one that producer-director Lee Mendelson, nearly a half-century later, calls with a certain zest "the best idea I've had in my entire life."

"I'd just made a documentary about the best baseball player in the world," Mendelson tells Comic Riffs, referring to his award-winning NBC work about Willie Mays. "So I decided to make a documentary about the worst baseball player in the world."

That, naturally, would be Charlie Brown. Mendelson read a "Peanuts" strip about the perennially losing hurler and thought: Why not make a documentary about the cartoon's creator?

It turned out to be the best pitch Mendelson ever made....

A hospital graveyard in western Austria could contain the remains of up to 220 people killed by the Nazis.

The hospital holding company said it became aware of the possibility during planning to dig up the graveyard in Hall, Tyrol province, to make way for a construction project....

The eldest son of Hitler‘s deputy Martin Bormann has been accused of sexually abusing a young boy when he was a priest 50 years ago.

Martin Bormann Jr., 80, who has struggled to come to terms with the murderous past of his father all his life, is said to be 'destroyed' by the allegations.

A 63-year-old man said his mistreatment at the hands of Bormann took place in the early 60s when he was a Catholic priest teaching at the Hearts of Jesus monastery in the Austrian city of Salzburg....

SARATOGA SPRINGS — As the nation prepares to observe the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, the New York State Military History Museum and Veterans Research Center is making capsule histories of 360,000 New York Civil War soldiers available online.

The entire roster of New Yorkers who served during the Civil War years, 1861-65, is now available online, as well as the five annual reports issued by the Bureau of Military Statistics from 1864 to 1868 that chronicle the accomplishments of New Yorkers in battle....

ATLANTA — Murals of slaves harvesting sugar cane on a Georgia plantation and picking and ginning cotton are coming off the walls of a state building on the order of a new agriculture commissioner.

The murals are part of a collection of eight works painted by George Beattie in 1956 depicting an idealized version of Georgia farming, from the corn grown by prehistoric American Indians to a 20th century veterinary lab. In the Deep South, the history in between includes the use of slave labor.

"I don't like those pictures," said Gary Black, the newly elected agriculture commissioner. "There are a lot of other people who don't like them."...

Civil War Medical Museum To Manage Missing Soldiers Office, National Museum of Civil War Medicine, Press Release.

The National Museum of Civil War Medicine (NMCWM) will open the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum this year at 437 7th St. NW, Washington. The General Services Administration (GSA), which owns the building, chose the Frederick, Md., non-profit museum whose mission is preserving and researching the legacy of Civil War medicine, to operate the museum.

Barton lived in the third-floor rooms during and immediately after the war. Her living quarters and office were there until 1867. During the war supplies for her nursing work were stored in these rooms. In 1865 Barton hired staff and opened the Office of Correspondence with the Friends of the Missing Men of the United States Army.

The office responded to more than 63,000 letters seeking information about soldiers and published lists of missing men. The fate of more than 22,000 soldiers had been learned by the time the office closed in 1867. The doors to the apartment were closed in 1875. The suite of rooms was discovered in 1997 as GSA workers were preparing the building for demolition....

In early November a building where athletes once trained to fight collapsed into a pile of rubble. Since then, structures have been tumbling down at an astonishing rate. Huge sections of a garden wall around the House of the Moralist fell on two separate occasions. In early December an ancient shop and the House of the Small Lupanare were reduced to heaps of mortar. Shelves regularly fall from the moldings, and a wooden scaffolding put in place a half-century ago is visibly rotting. Reports in the local newspaper suggest that many more buildings have crumbled without a mention. The government blames an unusually rainy autumn for the recent damage, but since 2008 there have been 15 major catastrophes that experts attribute to neglect. The irony is that if any city should know how to deal with ruins, it’s this one: Pompeii.

The ruins of Pompeii, destroyed after the Italian volcano Mount Vesuvius blew its top in A.D. 79, have actually been falling apart for years. “The real truth is, no one has done anything to secure these ancient excavations since they were excavated,” says Claudio D’Alessio, mayor of Pompeii. “You’d think that at least [the recent destruction] would have prompted an intervention to prevent new collapses, but there’s not much more than a few fences to make sure the next collapse doesn’t hurt anyone.” Pompeii has intermittently been on the World Monuments Fund’s list of endangered sites to watch, and UNESCO dispatched an unprecedented emergency mission to the city in early December after the House of Gladiators fell. Experts from the International Council on Monuments and Sites studied the damage at more than a dozen of Pompeii’s most popular relics and demanded that streets be closed on Jan. 1 while emergency fortifications are put in place. But those Band-Aids have about as much chance of saving the city as the locals did when Vesuvius erupted. Some experts predict that Pompeii as we know it is unlikely to survive even beyond the next decade....

That generation of Americans raised on “Leave It to Beaver,” who came of age during the battles over racial segregation, fought in (or over) the Vietnam War, joined the Peace Corps, marched for women’s rights, and populated suburbia with their offspring are now senior citizens.

We’re talking about baby boomers here – people born between 1946 and 1964, the first of whom turned 65 on New Years Day.

OK, so it’s mainly a big deal for demographers, wonkishly charting and graphing society....

Beyond image is the reality of a generational cohort that sent astronauts (of both genders and all races) into space, built a post-war economy on everything from Chevrolets to computer chips, invented “exurbs” and the shopping mall … and failed to heed Dwight Eisenhower’s warning about a “military-industrial complex” as the United States became the most powerful nation in human history – and consequently was at war or involved in military intervention someplace on the planet virtually the whole time since 1946....

When National Park Service rangers fired a New Year's cannon shot at this Civil War battleground to hail the arrival of 2011, they also ushered in the start of a four-year commemoration of the war's 150th anniversary.

The events include a multitude of battle re-enactments, lecture series, readings, concerts and plays that will be held on the battle fields tended to by the Park Service and in private estates from the shores of the Gulf of Mexico to New York.

But the slate of commemorations is also fraught with political peril. Deep divisions over why the war was fought persist, especially in the South. The debate still roils over slavery's role as the principle cause of the war. The first commemoration, a private "secession gala" organized by the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Charleston on Dec. 20, did not signal an auspicious start to the upcoming calendar of events.

The date marked the 150th anniversary of the day South Carolina became the first of 11 states to secede. Inside the ballroom, elected officials and others in period costume celebrated the courage of their fore-bearers to stand up for their state's right to leave the Union. Outside, on the sidewalk, the NAACP led 100 demonstrators who viewed the event as a celebration of a treasonous act against the federal government in order to protect the institution of slavery

Mark Simpson, the commander of South Carolina's division of Sons of Confederate Veterans, defended the gala, saying it was not about denying slavery as "an issue" in the war, but honoring South Carolina's rights....

Sri Lanka's government has decided to change the names of all state institutions still bearing the nation's former British colonial name, Ceylon.

The government wants the country's modern name to be used instead. The decision comes 39 years after the country was renamed Sri Lanka.

The change will be made as early as possible in 2011.

Reaction has been mixed to the new year's resolution that gets rid of what some see as a vestige of colonialism.

The minister of energy submitted a cabinet memo this week to change the name of the Ceylon Electricity Board, whereupon the president suggested the name Ceylon be removed entirely....