In a remarkable testament to new technology, the remains of three Minnesotans who died within weeks of one another as prisoners in the Korean War -- their whereabouts unknown for 60 years -- will be back at home within a month of each other.

In a remarkable testament to fate, two of them may have been in the same prison camp at the same time in early 1951.

One was James Sund, an Army corporal whose remains will be flown Friday evening to the airport in Fargo, N.D., and receive military honors. He will be buried Tuesday in his hometown of Highlanding, Minn. The other was Ralph Carlson, an Army sergeant and tank driver who was buried last month in his hometown of Braham, Minn.

The third was Army Master Sgt. Michael C. Fastner, a 31-year-old St. Paul native who died about the same time at another prison camp about 120 miles away. Fastner, a prisoner of war in both World War II and the Korean War, will be buried Friday at Fort Snelling following a funeral service at the Church of St. Agnes in St. Paul....

Gay history is now a requirement in California public schools because of a new state law that says the contributions of gays and lesbians must be included in social studies instruction. Now teachers are figuring out how to incorporate the new material into their classes.

Teachers Take Lessons On New Lessons

Even though the first day of school is a long way off, teacher Eleanor Pracht-Smith is getting her lesson plans together. She's from a small district near Sacramento, but she and other educators traveled to San Francisco to learn about how they can address gay and lesbian issues in the classroom.

"I think it's important to recognize that people from any background can contribute to history, to affirm that they've made accomplishments is nice," Pracht-Smith says. "And I think that helps people who recognize themselves and identify with those groups."

The law adds lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans to a long list of groups that should be represented in social studies classes, such as African-Americans or Mexican-Americans. Pracht-Smith says she's a bit conflicted about how she'll put the law into practice.

"I feel like we're labeling if we're saying that, this person contributed to history and by the way, they are such and such," she says. "It seems like we're meeting a quota, and that I don't like," she says....

As a candidate and in press conferences as president, Richard Nixon argued that the United States and the world would benefit from engaging China. He felt this was intrinsicly important because of China's size and inevitable importance. Nixon also saw China as a useful counterbalance to the Soviet Union. From the first days of his presidency he sought to signal China's leaders that he was willing to talk. The Americans sent private signals through Paris, Warsaw, and via the leaders of Romania and Pakistan. The documents summarized and linked to below detail these efforts which ultimately produced Henry Kissinger's secret trip to Beijing July 9-11, 1971. Kissinger, Nixon's National Security Advisor, flew to Beijing from Pakistan. His meetings there produced an agreement that President Nixon would visit China. Nixon went in February 1972.

These documents are part of the USC U.S.-China Institute's collection of speeches, reports, memos, and images relating to U.S.-china ties. Click here to see other materials. Most of these documents have been declassified over the past decade (click here for National Archives press release). The annotations are by Clayton Dube....

Say what you will about him, but Richard Nixon is one of the most fascinating figures in American history. Just when we think we know everything there is to know about him, we find out something else -- as it was Thursday, when the Nixon library released a new set of recordings.

CBS News senior White House correspondent Bill Plante took a closer look.

The bodies of 11 U.S. soldiers who fought in the Battle of Monterrey in 1846 have been recovered in Mexico, and Bedford County commissioners may join a Lipscomb University history professor in asking that they be brought back to Tennessee for burial at the Mexican War Monument in Gallatin.

Commissioner Joe Tillett, who spoke at Tuesday night's meeting of Bedford County Board of Commissioners' rules and legislative committee, read a July 9 opinion column in the Nashville Tennessean by Timothy D. Johnson, a history professor at Lipscomb, about the discovery of skeletal remains during a construction project in Monterrey, Mexico. The remains have been identified by Mexican archaeologists as soldiers from the army of Gen. Zachary Taylor in the Mexican-American War, and almost certainly members of the First Tennessee Volunteer Regiment, according to Johnson. No specific individuals have been identified.

Bedford County was one of eight counties which supplied volunteers for the regiment.

Mexican archaeologists have moved the remains to Mexico City for safekeeping, but so far, according to Johnson, the U.S. government has shown little interest in retrieving them for proper burial.

Johnson, in his column, asked for readers to contact their congressional representatives to suggest that the remains be brought back to Tennessee and buried at the Mexican War Monument in Gallatin, near other soldiers from that conflict....

Mothballing the shuttles was fine, but it's a little as if America opened an orbital B&B and then junked the jitneys that were needed to get the vacationers back and forth. And with at least 10 more three-person crews queuing up to take their turns aboard in the next few years, those space buses will be sorely missed. The good news is, there's an unlimited number of Russian Soyuz spacecraft to fill the gap. The bad news is, well, there's an unlimited number of Russian Soyuz spacecraft to fill the gap. If the shuttles were business class and the old Apollos were coach, the Soyuz is a little like hiding in the wheel well for a coast-to-coast flight, even if it's a wheel well with an impeccable safety record — at least recently.

The first Soyuz was launched on April 23, 1967 and carried cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov into space. The mission also ended on April 23, 1967 and so, sadly, did Komarov's life, after a series malfunctions occurred in orbit, leading to an emergency reentry. The descent was comparatively routine, but the ship's parachutes never opened, causing the Soyuz to make what engineers call a "ballistic reentry," a return to Earth that is every bit as deadly as it sounds.

Things got better after that and eight different generations of Soyuz over the past four decades have made the craft the workhorse of the Russian manned space program. But a safe ride does not have to mean a comfortable ride, and Soyuz does not waste a lot of money on frills.

The space shuttle can accommodate six astronauts and has a massive habitable volume of 2,500 cu. ft (71.5 cu. meter). Soyuz holds three people in a 141 cu. ft. (4 cu. meter) sphere. OK, it's unfair to compare a reusable space plane to a throwaway pod, but even the old Apollos had about 210 cu. ft. (6 cu. meter) of elbow room. Astronauts riding a Soyuz sit with their knees drawn partway up to their chests and must remain more or less that way throughout the entire flight....

Archaeologists are toiling side by side with construction workers on the Alaskan Way Viaduct and Highway 520 projects.

They're collecting broken bottles, peach pits and peanut shells. But instead of litter sticks and garbage bags, they are wielding trowels and shovels, and paying $342,000 for a space to preserve the junk.

Because one man's trash is another man's ... really, really old trash.

"What archaeology is, is people's garbage," Washington State Department of Transportation cultural-resources specialist Kevin Bartoy said. "But what that garbage is to archeologists is little bits of data."

Though they won't find "the gold idol," archeologists are piecing together a picture of 19th- and 20th-century Seattle society that is not well recorded, Bartoy said....

So much for Hagar the Horrible, with his stay-at-home wife, Helga. Viking women may have equaled men moving to England in medieval invasions, suggests a look at ancient burials.

Vikings famously invaded Eastern England around 900 A.D., notes Shane McLeod of the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Western Australia in the Early Medieval Europe journal, starting with two army invasions in the 800's, recounted in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. The Viking invaders founded their own medieval kingdom, 'the Danelaw', in Eastern England....

Imagine last summer's Deepwater Horizon oil spill happening in slow motion, millions of gallons of oil fouling beaches and fishing grounds over decades instead of months.

That's the kind of long-term disaster federal environmental officials say could happen as thousands of World War II-era shipwrecks erode in coastal waters around the world.

After nearly 70 years under the sea, those ships have reached the point where their steel fuel tanks and cargo holds could soon give way, emptying their contents into the surrounding water.

One of the ships on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's watch list is the Joseph M. Cudahy, which rests in the Gulf of Mexico off southwest Florida.

Three days out of Houston, the oil tanker was bound for Pennsylvania with 77,444 barrels of fuel and lubricating oil....

Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL) has a new collecting focus: African Americans in sports. The collection brings to light the effect athletes and others in the sports world had on the civil rights movement and their struggle to be recognized for the impact of their achievements on society.

Former NFL player Pellom McDaniels III, who is MARBL’s consultant curator for the collection, says many African American athletes were instrumental in the civil rights movement, including Muhammad Ali, Arthur Ashe, Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Curt Flood, and 1968 Olympic track and field medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos. McDaniels, who earned master’s and Ph.D. degrees in American studies from Emory’s Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts, is also an author and an assistant professor of history and American studies at the University of Missouri-Kansas City....

The Battle of Fromelles has long been seen as the darkest day in Australian military history, not just because it was the highest single day of casualties in the nation's history but also because of reports of German brutality.

Tom Weber, a historian at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, said the Australian perception that the enemy had behaved badly in abusing prisoners and shooting some of the wounded was an exaggeration that might have grown up as an attempt "to make sense of the enormous sacrifices that Australia suffered".

Dr Weber said he formed his "more balanced view" of the tragedy at Fromelles while researching his book Hitler's First War, which discredits the Nazi leader's World War I record....

...Meet John Rolczynski: The Grand Forks, N.D., resident has been trying to tell his legislators that an error in the state's founding document means that technically, North Dakota is not a state....

Here's the story: Back in 1889, North Dakota was carved out of the Dakota Territory and admitted to the Union at the same time as South Dakota. Or so everyone thought.

But the state founders who drafted the constitution left out the key requirement that the governor and other top officials take an oath of office, putting the state constitution in conflict with the federal one. So Rolczynski has been arguing for the last 16 years that the omission made the state illegitimate....

Five Saddam-era officials, including two of the late dictator's half-brothers, will be executed within a month after being handed over to Iraqi authorities by the US military, an official said on Friday.

The group, transferred to Iraqi custody on Thursday morning, were among 206 high-value detainees still being held by American forces ahead of a US military pullout due by the end of the year.

“We received the final 206 Iraqi prisoners being held by US forces, including five senior officials from the former regime,” said justice ministry spokesman Haidar al-Saadi. “They (the five officials) will be executed within one month.

“They include Watban Ibrahim Hassan and Sabawi Ibrahim al-Tikriti,” two half-brothers of former dictator Saddam Hussein....

DENVER (CNA) — An expert on Pope Pius XII says new discoveries show that the Jewish community strongly supported the Holy Father for his stand against anti-Semitism and support for Jewish rights during World War II.

Researcher William Doino outlined evidence that he says makes it clear the late Pope “wanted to break down walls of anti-Jewish prejudice, not erect them.”

Doino shared his findings exclusively with CNA, pointing to magazine articles from the 1930s that feature Jewish-American veterans lauding Pius XII for his deep respect for the Jewish community and their customs.

In April of 1939, just one month after Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli was elected Pope, the U.S. Jewish Veteran magazine called the new Pope’s leadership “a source of great satisfaction to Jews.”...

JERUSALEM — Israel has approved the start of work on a controversial Museum of Tolerance that will be built on the site of an old Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem, a spokeswoman said on Wednesday.

The project, organised by the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre, was the subject of a lengthy legal battle, with Palestinians and some Israeli supporters arguing the museum would desecrate the burial site.

Israel's courts rejected the argument, saying the site was deconsecrated decades ago, and the project has received planning approval from local authorities despite the protests....

Under a non-descript Old Montreal parking lot, archaeologists are combing for evidence of an early Canadian parliament burned down by rioters in 1849.

The building was burned down by an English-Canadian mob following the passage of the Rebellion Losses Bill, a controversial bill that gave government compensation to participants in an 1837 anti-government uprising. Mobs used a fire truck to smash their way through the building’s locked doors and began flipping over tables and slashing paintings. The fire erupted when a protester hurled rocks at a gas chandelier. 

Canadian parliament buildings are remarkably flammable. In 1854, just months after their completion, fire consumed a set of replacement parliament buildings constructed in Quebec City. Most recently, in 1916, an unattended cigar burned down a set of 1866-vintage Parliament buildings on their current site.... 

If your heritage is non-African, you are part Neanderthal, according to a new study in the July issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution. Discovery News has been reporting on human/Neanderthal interbreeding for some time now, so this latest research confirms earlier findings.

Damian Labuda of the University of Montreal's Department of Pediatrics and the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center conducted the study with his colleagues. They determined some of the human X chromosome originates from Neanderthals, but only in people of non-African heritage. 

The ancestors of Neanderthals left Africa about 400,000 to 800,000 years ago. They evolved over the millennia mostly in what are now France, Spain, Germany and Russia. They went extinct, or were simply absorbed into the modern human population, about 30,000 years ago.

Neanderthals possessed the gene for language and had sophisticated music, art and tool craftsmanship skills, so they must have not been all that unattractive to modern humans at the time....