Bonnie Parker and Clyde Darrow are two of the most legendary outlaws in American history, thanks to their spree of murder and bank robbery in the 1930s. Now you too can own a piece of that history, as Bonnie’s .38-caliber Colt revolver and Clyde’s .45-caliber Colt pistol will join a host of other items in a Sept. 30 auction.

The couple were wearing both weapons when they were ambushed by lawmen on May 23, 1934 and gunned them down; Bonnie’s Colt was discovered taped to her inner thigh and Clyde’s weapon was nestled in his waistband. The leaders of the Barrow Gang were responsible for at least 13 murders and countless robberies during the Great Depression, but their blossoming romance and daring heists made them folk heroes....

While you're enjoying your coffee this morning, half a dozen scientists are already at work. They're not sitting at desks, however, but a few miles off the Florida Keys, 60 feet down on the ocean bottom.

The researchers are living and working this week at Aquarius Reef Base, the world's last undersea research laboratory. The 25-year-old facility, built by the federal government, has hosted everyone from marine biologists studying endangered coral reefs to NASA astronauts training for weightless missions in space. But the Aquarius Reef Base itself is now endangered.

Among marine researchers, there are few people more distinguished or respected than Sylvia Earle. Former chief scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and now explorer-in-residence at National Geographic, she's no stranger to what are called "saturation dives."

Those are dives where people spend days, or even weeks, underwater. This dive, Earle says, marks an important scientific anniversary. It's been 50 years since saturation diving was first pioneered by underwater explorers Ed Link and Jacques Cousteau.

"This is a historic event, and I was invited," Earle said. "I didn't knock on the door; they knocked on my door, and I said, 'OK.' "

In 1970, Earle led the first team of women to conduct a saturation dive — a two-week stay in an undersea lab off the Virgin Islands. She's now 76 years old, and this week marks her 10th extended stay underwater....

A previously unknown version of Martin Waldseemüller’s famous world map has been disocvered in the collections of the University Library in Munich. On this map, the New World appears for the first time under the name “America”, chosen to honor the explorer Amerigo Vespucci (1451 – 1512), whom Waldseemüller erroneously regarded as the discoverer of the continent.

Waldseemüller and his colleague Matthias Ringmann created the map in their workshop in the monastery of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges around the year 1507. Four other versions of the map are known to exist, and one of them was sold at auction in 2005 for $1 million. This fifth version is created in so-called globe segments, which depict the world in twelve individual segments, or rather surface wedges, which taper to a point at each end and are printed on a single sheet, like cut-outs on construction paper. When correctly arranged, they form a small globe of about 11 cm in diameter. And in the three rightmost wedges, one sees a huge, boomerang-shaped landmass in the middle of an immense ocean. The globe places America in the remotest West, seen from Europe and Africa, on the far side of a wide, wide sea....

(RNS) A large-scale Bible museum will open in Washington, D.C., within four years, say planners who have been touring the world with portions of their collection.

Cary Summers, chief operating officer of The Museum of the Bible, a nonprofit umbrella group for the collection of the billionaire Green family of Oklahoma, said they considered Washington, Dallas and New York but decided the nation's capital was the best location. The final name of the museum and its exact location have not been disclosed but planners hope to confirm a location later this summer.

Research they commissioned found that the general population was more willing to travel to the nation's capital for a Bible-focused museum than the other two cities, Summers said....

Washington : Tracking the impact of climate change today has been made possible by tools developed by nuclear scientists to detect radioactivity in the wake of testing of atomic bombs during the Cold War era, says a leading historian.

Their insights and research have contributed enormously to enhancing knowledge about both carbon dioxide, which warms the earth and aerosols, which cool it. Otherwise, scientists today would have been in the dark about atmospheric changes, says historian Paul Edwards from University of Michigan, US....

A former Hungarian police officer accused of responsibility for the deaths of nearly 16,000 Jews in World War II has been found living in Budapest.

Britain’s Sun newspaper reportedly found a man believed to be Laszlo Csizsik-Csatary, now 97, living in the Hungarian capital.

Sun reporters confronted Csatary at his apartment in an upscale suburb of Budapest about Canada revoking his citizenship in 1997.

Answering the door in a long-sleeve shirt and underwear, Csatary told the newspaper, “I don’t want to discuss it.”...

"I looked at the archaeological evidence. There is absolutely no doubt that is a De Soto contact site, and I am 99.99 percent sure this is the town of Potano, the major Indian town," said Jerald Milanich, the author of multiple books about De Soto's expedition and curator emeritus in archaeology of the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida.

"Until now, we really had no one location until all the way up to Tallahassee. Now we have a midway place."

LUCKY FIND

White's initial discovery was less a product of painstaking exploration than dumb luck....

White himself had walked his family's property for two years looking for remnants of what he thought was a 17th century Spanish cattle ranch. He found little more than Indian artifacts.

Then in 2005, a series of hurricanes and storms inundated the 700-acre property owned by his wife, Michelle White, a bioarchaeologist....

The African Union has chosen South African Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma as its leader, making her the first woman to hold the post.

Dlamini-Zuma beat incumbent Jean Ping of Gabon after a closely fought contest for the chairmanship of the organisation.

In January, neither got the required two-thirds majority, leaving Mr Ping in office for another six months.

The dispute has overshadowed other issues, especially security and trade.

Voting had been broadly split along linguistic lines, with English-speaking countries tending to support Ms Dlamini-Zuma and French-speaking countries lining up behind Mr Ping.

Senior officials had warned that failure to resolve the leadership deadlock would divide the AU and undermine its credibility....

Scientists studying how North America was first settled have found stone spearheads and darts in Oregon, US, that date back more than 13,000 years.

The hunting implements, which are of the "Western Stemmed" tradition, are at least as old as the famous Clovis tools thought for a long time to belong to the continent's earliest inhabitants.

Precise carbon dating of dried human faeces discovered alongside the stone specimens tied down their antiquity.

It has published the scholarly findings of an international team investigating the Paisley Cave complex in south-central Oregon....

Maybe the 1992 movie Brendan Fraser film Encino Man wasn’t too far from the mark?

Fossilized human feces and other evidence from a West Coast cave demonstrates the existence of a long-lost, 13,500-year-old American culture, scientists said Thursday. 

The fossilized feces, known to researchers as a coprolite, from the Paisley Caves in Oregon has turned assumptions about the history of the Americas on its ear.

“Coprolites are as good as a human skeleton,” Dr. Thomas Stafford, Jr. of Stafford Research Laboratories said during a briefing for science journalists. This particular one left him stunned....

Organizers have canceled the 25th annual 2012 Scopes Festival, citing "unforeseen circumstances."

"We appreciate the efforts by those who have been working hard to prepare for a festival that would be both entertaining and educational and regret that we will not be able to produce the festival this year," Scopes Festival Chairman Tom Davis said in an email....

The Pentagon reversed course Tuesday and said it may create a database to allow the public to check on the veracity of people's claims to have earned military honors—a project officials previously said was impractical.

The Supreme Court last month struck down a 2006 law that made it a federal crime to lie about receiving military medals, adding in the ruling that a database would be a better way to head off false claims.

In a 2009 report to Congress, the Pentagon concluded a database wouldn't be practical because privacy concerns would prevent the use of social security numbers or birth dates needed for an accurate public record....

Beginning a new chapter in one of America's oldest conservation battles, environmental groups Monday are expected to turn in enough signatures to qualify a November ballot measure in San Francisco that would require the city to draw up a plan to drain Hetch Hetchy Reservoir.

The reservoir in Yosemite National Park and the Tuolumne River that flows into it are the main water source for 2.5 million Bay Area residents who live in San Francisco or on the Peninsula, as well as in parts of San Jose and Alameda County....

Every president is fascinated with presidential history.

But President Barack Obama’s interest is deeper and wider than most, and more public. He’s invoked Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and even Richard Nixon. He’s mocked Ulysses S. Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes.

For Obama, presidential history is less textbook and more guidebook — and his shifting focus on particular presidents has both reflected and informed his shifting sense of his own presidency.

Obama came into office aiming to be a transcendent, uniting figure in the mold of Lincoln. He hoped to guide the nation with a common purpose through an economic crisis, like FDR did.

Four years later, Obama has retrenched and recalibrated, adopting more populist rhetoric to fight the forces aligned against him and to portray himself as a champion of the middle class....

BERKELEY —

Interviewers at the Bancroft Library’s Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) are betting there are just as many cool stories to tell about the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as its colorful cousin across the bay.

In fact, the ROHO team at University of California, Berkeley, is issuing a widespread appeal for accounts from the people who designed, built and painted the Bay Bridge as well as its toll takers, managers and maintenance teams, engineers, painters, architects, and others involved from the early days of the span’s construction and through the 1950s.

“This is part of an oral history series that will explore the role of the iconic bridges in shaping the identity of the region, as well as their place in architectural, environmental, labor and political history,” said Sam Redman, a historian and director of ROHO’s Bridges and the San Francisco Bay Oral History Project....

The West African city of Timbuktu used to be one of Africa's richest and most important, a nexus of trade across the Sahara and a center of religious and scientific learning as far back as the 1400s. The relics of that history still stand in the form of such world heritage sites as the University of Sankore. More recently, this city in the sprawling West African country of Mali has been a tourism draw. But, on April 2, it came under new ownership: rebels from an ethnic minority known as Tuareg, who'd sought independence for years. Five days later they got it, declaring northern Mali as the independent country of Azawad. Then, on June 1, breakaway rebels with the extremist Islamist group Ansar Dine (translation: "Defenders of Faith") took control of Timbuktu.

In their first month of rule, Ansar Dine has shut down the tourism industry ("We are against tourism. They foster debauchery," a representative said), sent locals fleeing, and, over the past four days, destroyed half of the shrines that mark Timbuktu's ancient and remarkable history. The United Nations condemned the destruction and the International Criminal Court suggested it could be a war crime, but Ansar Dine insisted they won't slow down, later pulling a beautiful Gothic door off the Sidi Yahya mosque that became one of the world's great centers of learning during the 1400s. They follow an extreme form of Islam (though a relatively modern one; it emerged in late-1700s Saudi Arabia) that sees Timbuktu's shrines and mosque-universities as sacrilegious; a form of idol-worship. Their campaign is still going -- it's been compared to the Taliban's early-2001 destruction of ancient Buddha statues -- and some observers worry that many of Timbuktu's historical treasures, which have survived countless invasions and empires, won't live out the month....

Researchers at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library are marveling over the historical equivalent of buried treasure: an up-to-now undiscovered account of the night Lincoln was assassinated, written by the first doctor to treat him.

Dr. Charles Leale was a 23-year-old army surgeon who was in attendance at Ford's Theatre when John Wilkes Booth entered the presidential box and shot Lincoln days after the conclusion of the Civil War. 

Abraham Lincoln researcher Helena Iles Papaioannou discovered Leale's account while searching the records of the surgeon general in the National Archives in Washington, DC. The 21-page report is Leale's own retelling of the tragedy, written just hours after the president died the following morning....

British Defense Secretary Philip Hammond confirmed in a statement to parliament today that the British Army will be slashed by 20,000 troops over the next decade as part of a new strategic plan called Army 2020. Nearly one-fifth of standing forces will be relieved of their duties as 17 major units are culled and many others shrunk in the effort to limit the army's force numbers to 82,000, its lowest level since the Napoleonic Wars.

In a video interview with the Telegraph, Hammond cited a "black hole in the defense budget" and a need for the military to contribute to "the wider package of fiscal correction." Calling Army 2020 "an army designed package to create an army fit for the future," Hammond called for a reorientation of British security policy as the country withdraws from its active combat role in Afghanistan. 

"It will be one of the most effective armies in the world, best of its class supported by a defense budget that is still going to be above the four or five largest in the world," Hammond predicted, declaring that increased integration of reserve forces and heavier use of private contractors would produce an army that was "more agile...able to do all the tasks set out for it in the strategic defense and security review."...

On Thursday, Algerians marked 50 years since their country won independence from France, ending decades of colonial rule. A key question now is what role awaits young Algerians like Mr. Osmane as aging leaders enter their twilight and a generation that has a much more pragmatic view of how their country should interact with France, and with the Western world, starts to take over. The Algeria this generation will inherit is a work in progress, in apparent mid-step between the socialist anticolonialism of decades past and a turn toward free-market economics and partnership with Western countries. 

France and Algeria remain closely linked by, language, migration, and a complex history. For Osmane, a Paris-educated business consultant, the country that tortured his grandfather is also the one that helped offer him a path to achievement.

“I’d have liked to study in the UK or US, but it’s more complicated,” he says. “France for us is the gateway to the West.”...