In a recent hand-scribbled note, President Bush insisted he is not giving much thought to life after the White House.

"Thanks for 'Second Acts' and your very kind letter," he said in a letter to Mark Updegrove, author of a new book about post-presidential life. "I'm not quite ready to take the stage for the 2nd act. After a two-year sprint, then I'll take the lessons of your book to heart."

Bush may not be thinking about the next act, but planners are planning for it. And they foresee an unprecedented post-presidency, largely because of the war.

The White House sought $5 million in the 2007 budget to begin hiring and training the Secret Service detail that will protect Bush after he leaves office. The money also will be used to protect 2008 presidential candidates.

Congress bumped the appropriation up to $16.5 million.

Articles written by former Chicago Daily News reporter George Weller, suppressed after World War II, are set to be revealed in a new book.

"First Into Nagasaki" is scheduled to be released Dec. 26, and will feature the articles Weller wrote after sneaking into the Japanese city of Nagasaki four weeks after the United States dropped an atomic bomb, the Chicago Sun-Times said.

The articles, being published by Weller's son Anthony, were censored by the U.S. military; U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur had placed Japan off-limits to the media, the Times said.

For the first time, secrets of the Nazi Holocaust that have been hidden away for more than 60 years are finally being made available to the public. We’re not talking about a missing filing cabinet - we’re talking about thousands of filing cabinets, holding 50 million pages. It's Hitler’s secret archive.

The Nazis were famous for record keeping but what 60 Minutes found ran from the bizarre to the horrifying. This Holocaust history was discovered by the Allies in dozens of concentration camps, as Germany fell in the spring of 1945.

As correspondent Scott Pelley reports, the documents were taken to a town in the middle of Germany, called Bad Arolsen, where they were sorted, filed and locked way, never to be seen by the public until now.

A PROPOSAL to run a land train as part of plans for a new £67.5m Stonehenge visitors centre has come under fire during the second week of the Salisbury public inquiry.

The aim is to use the train to transport tourists from the visitors centre to within walking distance of the ancient stones.

But the chairman of the Stonehenge Alliance, George McDonic, said the trains would conflict with both national and international policies that seek to protect the landscape around the World Heritage site.

Pesti Gizella's life took a turn for the better when a guard came to her Budapest prison cell and told her she was about to be executed.

As a student leader in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Pesti expected her days might be numbered after she was captured during the Soviet crackdown. She had been made to lie on a cot beneath a brightly burning light and keep her hands still and plainly visible. She wasn't so much afraid of dying as she was of the insects that would crawl onto the bare bulb and fall on her face.

She could hear the gunshots of executions from her cell. She felt certain her short, hard life -- orphaned and wounded and still only 19 -- had reached an inevitable end.


"I don't really believe in miracles," she says now, "but . . . "A strange thing happened on her way to the firing squad 50 years ago yesterday. She was taken to the office of a Soviet interrogator, who told her he had a family in Russia he might never see again and he had a few hours to save the lives of some young people so he was going to spare hers. She was put on a truck, then a train, where she hid in a coal box. She figured she was headed to Siberia. As the train rumbled along, she passed out.

When she came to, the train had stopped. She slipped outside and asked an old man walking along the tracks where she was. Sopron, he said -- the last city in Hungary before the Austrian border.
Sick, cold and barely clothed, she started walking toward the bright lights of Austria.

A source from the Ministry of Culture said, that the ministry has set up a committee to re-open the Iraqi museum and to provide the necessary supplies, security and to rearrange again.

The Iraqi Museum has been subjected to looting after the fall of the previous regime, where the number of artifacts stolen from the museum was more than eight thousand assorted pieces.

The source pointed out that the Iraqi museum will be re-opening early next year through the provision of electronic protection and iron gates.

BERLIN — In a wacky corner of cyberspace, rubber duckies with Adolf Hitler faces sing in the bathwater. Their voices in unison, they bob to reggae music as bombs fall on Berlin, while the Fuehrer himself, a manic cartoon trapped in a bunker, sings: "Surrender? No, it's not my cup of tea."

The voice belongs to Thomas Pigor, a cabaret singer with a mischievous sense of timing. He and irreverent comic-book writer Walter Moers collaborated on the short video "Adolf — The Bonker." Mocking Hitler's southern German accent with the pronunciation "bonker" instead of bunker, the clip has been viewed more than 4 million times on YouTube and other sites since its Internet debut in July.

"It's a blasphemous joy to see Hitler shrunk into this tiny, pathetic cartoon figure. It destroys the myth of the cult figure some still hold," Pigor said, sitting near a candelabrum on a drizzly afternoon. "I didn't anticipate such a hit. I thought it would only be big on the cabaret scene. But its popularity shows that the time is ripe for breaking the Hitler taboo."

Theorists, novelists and partisans of all stripes have written on war. The Book Review asked a range of writers to recommend titles they find particularly illuminating.

CHEVY CHASE, Md. At the height of the flu pandemic in 1918, William H. Sardo Jr. remembers the pine caskets stacked in the living room of his family's house, a funeral home in Washington, D.C.

The city had slowed to a near halt. Schools were closed. Church services were banned. The federal government limited its hours of operation. People were dying -- some who took ill in the morning were dead by night.

"That's how quickly it happened," said Sardo, 94, who lives in an assisted living facility just outside the nation's capital. "They disappeared from the face of the earth."

Sardo is among the last survivors of the 1918 flu pandemic. Their stories offer a glimpse at the forgotten history of one of the world's worst plagues, when the virus killed at least 50 million people and perhaps as many as 100 million.

I confess to being in the market for an expensive watch. I say I confess because I know the watch I buy for a lot of money will not be more accurate than a watch I could have bought for a lot less, but there you have it. This explains why I gave more than cursory attention to a double-page ad in the Sunday New York Times for expensive watches. One caught my eye. It seemed oversized, which is the fashion these days, and built to take a bullet or two, which is required these days, and undoubtedly water resistant down to where the homicidal stingrays roam, and it was altogether handsome, although not for me. But it was the name that caught my eye: U-Boat.

U-Boat? The Unterseeboot responsible for sinking untold allied ships during World War II, costing many lives and so impressing Winston Churchill that he said, "The only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril"? That U-boat? Yes, apparently. And that raises another question: Who would buy, not to mention wear, a watch named after a killer sub that, while used in World War I, really earned its rep in World War II as a fighter on the side of the Nazis? In other words, who could be so ahistorical, ignorant, or just plain tasteless to wear something on their wrist that immediately brings to mind, among other things, the ovens of Auschwitz?

One answer is that it has to be the same people who will soon bid on the car CNNMoney.com and AOL both called "Hitler race car." This Auto Union D-Type is expected to go for as much as $12 million at a Paris auction. The car was built by Ferdinand Porsche, then with Auto Union, the company now known as Audi. In the '30s, Porsche accepted Hitler's challenge to build a car that would showcase German technological advances....

Rita Weiss has some questions she'd like to put to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Ms. Weiss was just 18 when the Nazis came to her village in Hungary in 1944, and put her entire family on a train to Auschwitz II (Birkenau) concentration camp. She lost her father, her mother, her brother and seven sisters in the gas chambers and crematoria. Of 49 relatives, she was the only survivor.

"I now ask you, Ahmadinejad, what happened to them? Where are they?" Ms. Weiss told a room of diplomats and scholars, her voice creaking with emotion. "They became smoke, ashes, dust."

Ms. Weiss was addressing a conference called "Holocaust denial: Paving the way to Genocide" that was held yesterday at the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, a pointed counterattack to a meeting of known Holocaust deniers being hosted in Tehran this week by Mr. Ahmadinejad.

It's that time of year again for the newsweeklies: Christ-as-Cover-Boy time.

Jesus, of course, is as reliably evergreen a cover subject as they come -- ever-mysterious, ever-controversial -- and one that, naturally, pops up annually on newsstands around Easter and/or Christmas. With the appearance this week of two visually similar Jesus Cover Stories (Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report), we wondered: How has the Jesus Cover Story been packaged over the years? How has it changed (or not)?

Often, such covers involve a painting of a cherubic Jesus cradled in Mary's arms accompanied by a question (some variation on Who Was He?) or a nod to some book or bit of research which shows How Jesus Isn't Who You Thought He Was. Such is the case this week with Newsweek's and U.S. News' dueling Jesus covers -- which, although they feature paintings from entirely different centuries, can be hard to differentiate for a newsstand browser with no art history training.

On U.S. News' cover, reporter Jay Tolson is "In Search of the Real Jesus" -- having apparently lost track of Him sometime after March of 2004 (when Tolson wrote a cover story titled, "The Real Jesus.") While Time "Search[ed] for Jesus" on a December 1996 cover (and "Search[ed] for Mary" back in 1991), its cover has thus far been Jesus- (and Mary-) free this year (ditto the years 2000-2003). Not so Newsweek, with the current cover headline: "The World of the Nativity: How First-Century Jewish Family Values Shaped Christianity" (which reminded us a bit of Tolson's above-referenced 2004 Jesus Cover Story for U.S. News, subtitled,-"How the Jewish reformer lost his Jewish identity.")...

The bill was introduced by Congressman Robert Goodlatte (R-VA) and supported by eleven members of the Virginia Congressional delegation. The bill sought to authorize the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to make a grant contribution of an undisclosed amount at some future undisclosed date toward the establishment of the "Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library" in Staunton, Virginia.

This legislation was never subjected to the scrutiny of a congressional hearing. It was rammed through the House in late September in an effort to enact the measure and provide federal funding for a private museum in Virginia prior to the 150th anniversary of the birth of President Woodrow Wilson on 10 December 2006. If enacted the bill would have diverted NARA funds to a private museum that has neither any significant library holdings nor any archival collection associated with President Wilson (the Wilson papers, for example, are housed at Princeton University). The measure specified that federal money would be channeled to the site by NARA to "provide interpretive and educational services that communicate the meaning of the life of Woodrow Wilson," with the proviso that "the Archivist shall have no involvement in the actual operations of the library, except at the request of the non-Federal entity responsible for the operation of the library."

National Archives insiders report strong opposition to the legislation by professional staff. According to one source, had the measure come to hearing, NARA would have opposed the bill for a variety of reasons, perhaps chief of which would be that the bill would have set a dangerous precedent in which other private presidential museums and historic sites would feel at liberty to pursue special earmarked funding for their private institutions as well. With NARA running a $10-$12 million projected shortfall in FY 2007, the agency clearly cannot afford a diversion of limited funds to such special-interest purposes. In addition, designations by small historic sites and museums claiming to be "presidential libraries" add to the already confusing miscellany of nomenclature relating to presidential libraries, thus making it that much harder for the general public to understand what is and what is not a true presidential library.

For the reasons cited above, the National Coalition for History opposed enactment of this measure and communicated that opposition to Virginia senators and key members of the Senate, including members of the Homeland Security Committee to which the bill was referred for consideration.

While the measure was not acted on in the 109th Congress, according to a spokesperson for Representative Goodlatte, the Congressman plans to reintroduce the bill and hopes to see the measure enacted early in the 110th Congress.

Readers who reside in Virginia who wish to make their voices heard on this measure are encouraged to contact their House member or senator and express your views on the proposed legislation. Member offices can be reached via the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121.

The Government's case for going to war in Iraq has been torn apart by the publication of previously suppressed evidence that Tony Blair lied over Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

A devastating attack on Mr Blair's justification for military action by Carne Ross, Britain's key negotiator at the UN, has been kept under wraps until now because he was threatened with being charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act.

In the testimony revealed today Mr Ross, 40, who helped negotiate several UN security resolutions on Iraq, makes it clear that Mr Blair must have known Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction. He said that during his posting to the UN, "at no time did HMG [Her Majesty's Government] assess that Iraq's WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK or its interests."

Shopping for nativity scenes? At Macy’s you have two options to choose from: "The Vatican Edition" and "The Byzantine Edition." The first comes with a set of white figurines, including a red-headed Mary, a brown-haired Joseph and a blue-eyed baby Jesus. In the second, all three are black, as are the shepherd and three wise men. Both cost $10, and more than likely, both are historically inaccurate.

While we can never be exactly sure of what Jesus, Mary and Joseph actually looked like, we know they were not fair-skinned, flaxen-haired Europeans. And, though an emerging fringe of historians would argue otherwise, it’s fairly certain they weren’t black Africans. In all likelihood, what they were was something in between: olive-skinned, dark-featured Semitic Jews living in Israel. Yet depictions of them as such are exceedingly rare compared to the countless number of images that have proliferated through the millennia portraying them as Caucasians.

Until now. With New Line Cinema’s new movie, “The Nativity Story,” we finally get what many historians agree is a more accurate representation of the Holy Family. Cast with a group of dark-haired, dark-complexioned actors whose nationalities range from Guatemalan to Australian and Irish to Israeli—those who aren’t Middle Eastern certainly look like they could be—the movie strives for physical accuracy, and in doing so may challenge some Christians’ notions of what the story’s central characters looked like: the Angel Gabriel, for one, is played by Sudanese actor Alexander Siddig, who you might have caught this time last year playing the part of an Iranian prince in “Syriana.” (Ethnically ambiguous baby Jesus gets only about a minute of screentime at the end.)

Catherine Pollard, who became the Boy Scouts of America's first female U.S. scoutmaster after a years-long legal fight, died Wednesday. She was 88.

Pollard, who volunteered with the Scouts in Milford, died in Seminole, Fla., said Shawn Smith of Smith Funeral Home in Milford, which is handling arrangements.

Pollard ran a Milford troop from 1973 to 1975 when no men volunteered. But her application for a leadership position was denied when the Boy Scouts contended a woman was not a good role model for young boys enrolled in Scouting.

Doubling the time that schools devote to math and reading in response to state and federal testing requirements won’t truly prepare young Americans for life in the 21st century. It probably won’t even boost reading and math scores long term, concluded a conference of policymakers, business leaders, and educators today.

At the event, hosted by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and supported by the Louis Calder Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, scholars and education leaders highlighted alternatives to a hyper-narrow curriculum, including testing added subjects like history, lengthening the school day to encompass art and music, and providing stronger curricular guidance and instructional materials for teachers.

“Narrowing the K-12 curriculum isn’t just a problem that arrived with No Child Left Behind,” said Fordham president Chester E. Finn, Jr. “Since the dawn of standards-based education reform, some states and schools have reacted to pressure for better basic skills by squeezing out history, civics, literature, and the arts. This is wrong. Our kids need both to walk and chew gum and our schools must prepare them accordingly, ensuring that they’re adept in the basic skills while also acquiring a broad liberal arts education.”

Business leaders, including technology mastermind Dr. Sidney Harman; artists, including poet and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts Dana Gioia; statesmen, historians, and practicing educators from around the country gathered at the Fordham symposium, Beyond The Basics: Why reading, math, and science aren’t sufficient for a 21st century education, to ponder possible remedies, including:

Increasing instructional time in U.S. classrooms. According to data newly analyzed by Kate Walsh, president of the National Council for Teacher Quality, students in some cities (e.g. Chicago) spend the equivalent of eight weeks less in school per year than their peers in other cities (e.g. New York). Such sharp differences mean less time for learning basics—and everything else.

Adding subjects to the testing docket. Brown University scholar Martin West presented research showing that, at a national level, instructional time for reading has risen dramatically while time for non-tested subjects such as history has eroded. However, states that test students in history haven’t experienced these same declines; their students spend more time studying history than in other states. UNESCO researcher Aaron Benavot also found that U.S. primary schools spend more time on reading instruction—and less on the arts—than do other OECD nations.
Equipping teachers with better instructional materials and professional development to teach a well-rounded curriculum. A range of leaders including Kati Haycock of the Education Trust, E. D. Hirsch, Jr. of the Core Knowledge Foundation, and Antonia Cortese of the American Federation of Teachers faulted states for lacking a coherent curriculum that teachers can use in class. As most state standards are too vague to be helpful, teachers crave clear expectations and powerful classroom tools.

“The narrowing of the curriculum is not an inevitable response to testing and accountability,” said education historian Diane Ravitch. “Some schools, districts, and states have done a better job ensuring a broad education for all of their students, and they deserve to be emulated. The educators in charge of schools must hew close to a vision of a good education for their students, regardless of NCLB requirements.”

In the coming months, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute will release a volume highlighting today’s discussions and conclusions.

The author of a recent book about President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust has admitted that he wrongly portrayed two Holocaust rescue activists as draft-dodgers.

South Carolina attorney Robert N. Rosen, author of Saving the Jews: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust, has admitted that he was wrong to claim that Yitshaq Ben-Ami and Dr. Alexander Rafaeli, two leaders of the activist Bergson Group, "sat out the war in America, preferring to agitate for the overthrow of the British in Palestine rather than enlist and fight Nazis themselves."

Rosen's admission came in response to protests by the families of Rafaeli, Ben-Ami, and other Begson Group leaders, represented by Washington, D.C. attorney Jeffrey Weiss.

Rosen's book staunchly defends FDR's response to the Holocaust and harshly attacks those who, in the 1940s, pressed the Roosevelt administration to aid Jewish refugees. Rosen devotes a portion of the book to attacking the Bergson Group, a Jewish activist group that used rallies, newspaper ads, and lobbying Congress to try to bring about U.S. rescue of refugees from the Holocaust. One of the major points of Rosen's attack on the Bergson Group is his claim (on p.313) that the group's leaders "sat out the war in America, preferring to agitate for the overthrow of the British in Palestine rather than enlist and fight Nazis themselves."

In fact, two of the group's five leaders, Ben-Ami and Rafaeli, enlisted and fought in the U.S. Army. Ben-Ami fought in the Battle of the Bulge and elsewhere; Rafaeli fought in Normandy, the liberation of Paris, the Battle of the Ruhr, and the liberation of Maastricht (in Holland), and served in the army's Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC). The other three Bergson Group leaders --Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook), Samuel Merlin, and Eri Jabotinsky, were classified 4-F and thus exempt from military service.

The families, in requesting an apology and retraction from Rosen, pointed out that Rosen had access to accurate information about the Bergson leaders' military service, since that information appears in other books which Rosen mentions in Saving the Jews.

In correspondence with Mr. Weiss in recent weeks, Rosen acknowledged that his statement about Ben-Ami and Rafaeli was wrong, and promised that it would not appear in any future editions of the book. At the same time, however, the families expressed their strong disappointment that Rosen, instead of issuing an unambiguous public apology, claimed that his statements had been misunderstood.

The families of Ben-Ami, Rafaeli, and a third Bergson group leader, Eri Jabotinsky, issued this statement through The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies:

"Robert Rosen's error about our parents is not some minor point; it is an important part of his book's attempt to denigrate all those who challenged FDR's refusal to rescue Jews from the Holocaust. The draft-dodging charge is an attempt to undermine the credibility and integrity of the Bergson Group. In his book, Rosen smears our parents as fascists and terrorists who were supposedly disloyal to the Allied war against Hitler. This accusation is blatantly false. We are glad that his erroneous statement about Yitshaq Ben-Ami and Alexander Rafaeli will not appear in future editions of his book. We are disappointed that he refused to issue a simple, clear, public apology for smearing our parents. We are equally disappointed that the publisher of his book, Thunder's Mouth Press, has not had the decency to publicly apologize for publishing erroneous statements that harm a person's good name."

Earlier this year, fifty-five leading Holocaust scholars denounced Rosen for writing, in Saving the Jews, that criticism of President Franklin Roosevelt's response to the Holocaust is "anti-American" and "America-bashing." The scholars' protest was the subject of a recent feature story in the Washington Post. (For the full text of the petition and the list of signatories, call the Wyman Institute at 202-434-8994 or visit www.WymanInstitute.org)

Humans first moved out of Africa about 70,000 years ago, but 30,000 years later some of them moved back.

That's according to a new study based on DNA evidence from ancient human remains found in Africa.  The findings are reported in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science.

THE iPod is five years old this autumn. It already has its own biography*, by the journalist Steven Levy, who considers the gizmo an icon of modern times. Its birthday generated glowing tributes in newspapers from India to Egypt to Brunei. And this is just one of the many anniversaries that the computer industry has seen fit to celebrate this year.

Last month the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California hosted a symposium commemorating the 35th anniversary of Intel's 4004 microprocessor, which revolutionised computing by combining disparate functions into a single chip and was Intel's first step towards becoming the world's biggest chipmaker. Other notable dates this year include the 25th birthday of the IBM personal computer, the 50th anniversary of the first hard-disk drive and the 60th anniversary of the first general-purpose digital electronic computer, the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), which weighed 27 tonnes and contained over 19,000 vacuum tubes. Never before has the computer industry seemed so preoccupied by such historical milestones.

“History”, said Cicero, “illuminates reality, vitalises memory, provides guidance in daily life.” By that measure, there is a lot of illumination and guidance going on in Silicon Valley. Any excuse to celebrate an anniversary is seized upon and milked for all it is worth. Why?

History seems to be in a hurry to judge Donald H. Rumsfeld.

And despite his half century in public service, a defense secretary who served three presidents and oversaw two wars is being sized up not by the long reach of his career but by its ending - the body slam of Iraq.

With an eye on his legacy, Rumsfeld asked to be judged by the extraordinary nature of today's threat, like none that has come before.

``There's no road map, no guidebook,'' he said. ``The hope has to be - not perfection - but that most decisions, with the perspective of time, will turn out to be the right ones and that the perspective of history will judge the overwhelming majority of those decisions favorably.''

In the early going, the assessment is harsh.

Ex-generals asserted he was a failure months before his continued service became untenable, an extraordinary airing of protest. Then came a clamor from Democrats and some Republicans for President Bush to show the door to a man who leaves the Pentagon on Monday after nearly six years on the job....