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British heritage sites under threat

The World Monuments Fund (WMF), a non-profit organisation dedicated to the preservation of historic buildings and attractions, included the sites on its annual watch list.They include Newstead Abbey, the ancestral home of Lord Byron, the ruins of Coventry’s old cathedral, which was struck by bombs during the Second World War, the isolated island of St Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean, where Napoleon was imprisoned and died, and Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight.Birmingham Central Library, The Hayward Gallery in London and Preston Bus Station, a trio of concrete buildings grouped under the umbrella “British Brutalism”, were also declared under threat.“The World Monuments Watch is a call to action on behalf of endangered cultural heritage sites across the globe,” said Bonnie Burnham, the WMF president, at a press conference in New York....

Adolf Hitler auction causes uproar

ORGANISERS of an auction of Adolf Hitler's reading glasses and other personal effects were on the verge of abandoning the sale last night after an outcry over profiting from Germany's Nazi past. The Fuhrer's glasses were due to be put up for auction for a reserve price of €4800 ($A6700) at a Munich auction house this month, while bidding for a silver cigarette case monogrammed with the initials of the non-smoking dictator was set to begin at €10,000.  Stung by accusations that the sale was a "stain" on modern Germany, Hermann Historica, the auction house, issued a statement last night insisting that it never intended to cause offence and had not sought publicity for the items on sale.   But it refused to confirm who would receive the money, although some items, such as a fob watch starting at €10,000, were believed to originate from the estate of Rudolf Hess, Hitler's former deputy....

Was William Shakespeare a fraud? The debate continues.

Did he or didn’t he? That is the question. The debate over whether William Shakespeare could write his own name, let alone the body of works considered among the greatest in English literature, has consumed minds for more than 150 years.Now a new film, Anonymous, by Independence Day director Roland Emmerich, is about to throw more fuel on the fire.Anonymous, released on October 28, is set in the political snake-pit of Elizabethan England. It asserts that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the true author of the Bard’s plays. And Shakespeare, an actor, was a mere provincial frontman for the plays so Oxford’s authorship could remain secret.

Vladimir Putin diving discovery was staged, spokesman admits

In an uncharacteristically unguarded admission, the Russian prime minister's spokesman conceded that the amphorae had been planted in shallow water for Mr Putin to find by well-meaning archaeologists keen to please the Russian strong man."Putin did not find the amphorae on the sea bed that had been lying there for thousands of years," said Dmitry Peskov, the spokesman. "That is obvious. They were found during an (archaeological) expedition several weeks or days beforehand. Of course they were then left there (for him to find) or placed there. It is a completely normal thing to do."The archaeologists had wanted the 58-year-old politician to experience what it was like to be on an expedition, he added....

Queen Anne's expedition under way

CARTERET COUNTY — A four-week fall expedition at the Queen Anne’s Revenge shipwreck site is under way, and the first look at the wreck site since Hurricane Irene brought good news.The hurricane swept the North Carolina coast in late August without causing major disruption to the shipwreck site, said QAR Project Director Mark Wilde-Ramsing.A sand berm placed near the site several years ago seems to be helping protect the site from storm damage, including minimizing scour, where sand is washed away and exposes artifacts.“Last week we did a check of the site. We were very concerned after Hurricane Irene, but the site seems to have weathered the storm pretty well,” Wilde-Ramsing said. “It was not scoured out and, also, it was not completely covered up (by sand).”...

Monument to U.S. president Wilson unveiled in Prague

A monument to former US President Woodrow Wilson was unveiled in central Prague on Wednesday, 70 years after the occupying Nazis tore down a nearby statue during World War II.About five hundred people gathered outside Prague's main railway station -- once dubbed Wilson Station -- for the unveiling of the 3.5-metre (12-foot) statue commissioned by the American Friends of the Czech Republic society."Much of the damage that the Nazis caused can never be undone, but returning the monument of Woodrow Wilson to its proper place is a direct reply to Hitler," Prague-born former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright said at the unveiling.Wilson, born in 1856, was US president from 1913 to 1921. He died in 1924.

Black and white WW II vets meet up

NBC features a reunion of black Tuskegee airmen and white soldiers who met by accident in World War II. (Video)

Washington Monument external earthquake inspection complete

For days, inspectors dangling from ropes pored over the weathered marble of the Washington Monument, gently “sounding” the stone with mallets, like doctors checking an elderly patient. They studied every block — each of which is numbered — for damage from the Aug. 23 earthquake that rattled the East Coast. On Wednesday morning, they finished the examination. Initial diagnosis: substantial cracks here and there, with minor displaced stone. Overall, the usual aches and pains of a 127-year-old who has just come through an earthquake.

Bible manuscripts from Damascus go on rare display

JERUSALEM (AP) — Precious Bible manuscripts originating in the Jewish community of Damascus, Syria, went on display for several hours Wednesday, offering a rare glimpse at a collection that includes books spirited to Israel in clandestine operations before the ancient community disappeared at the end of the 20th century.The books are held at Israel's national library. Because of security and conservation concerns, most of the collection has been on display just once before, also for just a few hours, more than a decade ago.The collection includes 11 volumes. Three, including the oldest and most important book in the collection, were brought out of the library's vaults and displayed during a symposium Wednesday evening....

Long-Secret Fallout Shelter Was a Cold War Camelot

PEANUT ISLAND, Fla. — A nuclear bomb shelter was a must-have in the 1950s and ’60s.Magazines displayed backyard do-it-yourself versions. Castro Convertibles pitched its foldaway “jet beds” as bunker-ready. And a pair of publicity-savvy newlyweds actually spent their honeymoon inside one for 14 days.President John F. Kennedy, who was facing a series of nail-biting face-offs with the Soviets, even recommended a fallout shelter for all Americans “as rapidly as possible” in an October 1961 speech. Two months later, Kennedy was presented with his own top-secret tropical bomb shelter off Palm Beach, Fla., on an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean.Few even know it is here, but some area residents believe that the bunker is a must-see attraction that could put Peanut Island, a manmade islet, on the map....

An uneven battle in the field kitchens of Gallipoli

A SIMPLE Ottoman kitchen - complete with brick oven - discovered during a survey of Gallipoli has highlighted the extremes of life on the 1915 battlefield.While the Anzac Diggers were surviving on bully beef and other canned and processed food, their Turkish opponents ate fresh produce prepared in a terraced kitchen.The field kitchen, where researchers also found ceramic roof tiles as evidence of other permanent structures, was built much closer to the front line than the allied food area, which was littered with tins and jam jars. Located during the second phase of a five-year joint Australian, New Zealand and Turkish project to survey the famous battlefield for the first time ahead of the 2015 centenary, the Ottoman kitchen was among the most revealing discoveries made last month, according to survey archaeologist Tony Sagona, from Melbourne University....

New Connecticut law restricts access to privileged records

An amendment to Connecticut open record laws now allows state agencies to refuse to release records which are covered by a legal confidentiality privilege, regardless of whether such a privilege existed when the materials were created. For example, agencies may refuse to release records containing communications which are protected from disclosure by the doctor-patient or therapist-patient privileges.Previously, Exemption 10 to the Connecticut open records law allowed agencies to withhold, among other things, records which are covered by only one privilege: the one between attorneys and their clients. The amendment expands this language to include records which fall under other privileges, such as those existing between doctor-patient and therapist-patient. However, the amendment also exempts records covered by “any other privilege established by the common law or the general statutes,” and even those “made prior to the establishment of the applicable privilege.”

New technology helps Hispanics trace their roots

MIAMI (AP) — Programs such as NBC's "Who Do You Think You Are?" and PBS' "Faces of America" are helping fueling the trend in genealogy. But for many Hispanics, tracing the family tree hasn't been so easy.Now that's changing for America's largest minority group as a wealth of genealogical data, including a landmark 1930 census in Mexico, is going online. Discovering information about one's great-great grandparents and other relatives could be keystrokes away for many of the nearly 32 million Mexican-Americans — a group long left out of the sleuthing done largely by European-Americans and some African-Americans.The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, long America's largest aggregator of genealogical records, this year completed its more than three-year-old project to create a searchable digital index of Mexico's massive 1930 census. It has also made the information available to the Internet genealogy company, Ancestry.com....

Germany reopens investigations into Nazi death camp guards

Prosecutors in Germany have reopened hundreds of investigations of former Nazi death camp guards and others who might now be charged under a precedent set by the conviction of John Demjanjuk, a guard at Sobibor camp in Poland in 1943.Given the advanced age of the suspects – the youngest is in his 80s – the head of the German prosecutors' office dedicated to investigating Nazi war crimes said authorities would not wait for the Demjanjuk appeal process to finish. "We don't want to wait too long, so we've already begun our investigations," Kurt Schrimm said.The Simon Wiesenthal Centre's chief Nazi-hunter, Efraim Zuroff, said he would launch a campaign in the next two months – a successor to his Operation Last Chance – to track down the remaining war criminals.He added that the Demjanjuk conviction had opened the door to prosecutions that were never thought possible. "It could be a very interesting final chapter," he said by telephone from Jerusalem. "This has tremendous implications, even at this late date."...

Apology demanded for black teenager executed in South Carolina in 1940s

Mona Lisa’s mystique may be all in background

...The enigmatic work, which hangs in the Louvre in Paris, has been the subject of speculation for centuries. Now Donato Pezzutto, a Canadian doctor and amateur art historian, has come up with a startling theory about the work’s background.He maintains if the right and left halves of the painting are reversed and aligned, the landscape that emerges is a scene from central Italy which corresponds to the da Vinci’s own map of the area....

Beheaded Archbishop's Face Revealed

The face of a 14th-century former Archbishop of Canterbury has been revealed 630 years after he was beheaded by angry peasants.Resembling a character out of a science fiction movie, the medieval cleric Simon of Sudbury now stares at visitors in St. Gregory's Church at Sudbury in Suffolk, where the 3-D model is on permanent display alongside the original skull."There was a gasp when people saw what he looked like as his sculpture was unveiled. He was compared to characters such as Spock and Shrek, and some were surprised by the size of him. Indeed, he is quite a big guy," forensic artist Adrienne Barker from the University of Dundee told Discovery News.Simon of Sudbury, who was Chancellor of Salisbury and Bishop of London before becoming Archbishop of Canterbury in 1375, crowned King Richard II at Westminster Abbey in 1377....

Human Crises Linked to Climate Change, Study Suggests

Historically, changes in climate have not only been tied to increased food prices, but also economic crises, social upset and wars, new research suggests.

'Dumb' Neanderthals Likely Had a Smart Diet

Instead of Neanderthals being dim-witted hunters who only dined on big game, new findings suggest they had more balanced diets, with broad menus that may have included birds, fish and plants.Neanderthals are currently our closest known extinct relatives, near enough to modern humans to interbreed, with Neanderthal DNA making up 1 percent to 4 percent of modern Eurasian genomes. A host of recent findings suggest they were not only close genetically, but may have shared many other traits with us, such as creating art.Still, the term "Neanderthal" has long been synonymous with "stupid." "Since they went extinct, conventional wisdom says they were dumber than us," said researcher Bruce Hardy, a paleoanthropologist at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio....

Effort to repeal gay history law prompts complaint

SAN FRANCISCO—California's largest gay rights group on Monday accused the backers of a ballot measure seeking to repeal a law requiring gay history to be taught in public schools of deliberately hiding the size and source of campaign contributions. Two conservative groups behind the Stop SB 48 campaign "may have engaged in an unlawful scheme" to violate campaign reporting rules, Equality California Executive Director Roland Palencia said in a complaint filed with the state Fair Political Practices Commission. Palencia's group accuses Capitol Resource Institute and Pacific Justice Institute, the organizations that have taken the lead on undoing the first-of-its kind law, of raising and spending money to qualify the repeal referendum for the June 2012 ballot without registering as campaign committees.Under California's strict campaign finance laws, political entities that receive more than $1,000 in contributions are required to register with the secretary of state, said Cary Davidson, an election law lawyer on the Equality California board....