A petition drive to get Confederate-themed clothing banned from school grounds has exposed a rift at Hollywood Hills High. The episode may lead the Broward School Board to examine whether its student conduct code should address the Confederate flag.

Sophomore Ilana Hostyk started a petition this week at Hollywood Hills in hopes of pressing officials to ban the symbol, considered a show of Rebel pride by some and a reminder of Southern race-based prejudice by others.

Former US President Jimmy Carter once complained there were "too many Jews" on the government's Holocaust Memorial Council, Monroe Freedman, the council's former executive director, told WND in an exclusive interview.

Freedman, who served on the council during Carter's term as president, also revealed a noted Holocaust scholar who was a Presbyterian Christian was rejected from the council's board by Carter's office because the scholar's name "sounded too Jewish."

Freedman, now a professor of law at Hofstra University, was picked by the council's chairman, author Elie Wiesel, to serve as executive director in 1980. The council, created by the Carter White House, went on to establish the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

Freedman says he was tasked with creating a board for the council and with making recommendations to the White House on how best to memorialize the Holocaust.

He told WND he sent a memo to Carter's office containing recommendations for council board members.

He said his memo was returned with a note on the upper right hand corner that stated, "Too many Jews."

The note, Freedman said, was written in Carter's handwriting and was initialed by Carter.

Freedman said at the time the board he constructed was about 80-percent Jewish, including many Holocaust survivors.

He said at the behest of the White House he composed another board consisting of more non-Jews. But he said he was "stunned" when Carter's office objected to a non-Jew whose name sounded Jewish.

Freedman said he could not provide the historians name to WND because he did not have the man's permission.

"I got a phone call from our liaison at the White House saying this particular historian whose name sounded Jewish would not do. The liaison said he would not even take the time to present Carter with the possibility of including the historian on the board because he knew Carter would think the name sounded too Jewish. I explained the historian is Presbyterian, but the liaison said it wouldn't matter to Carter."

Freedman said he was "outraged by this absurdity."
...

Its archives hold the Magna Carta, Beatles manuscripts and the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Visitors to its fabled reading room in the British Museum included Karl Marx, Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens and George Bernard Shaw. But the future of the British Library as a world-class, free resource is under threat fromplansto cut up to 7 per cent of its £100m budget in this year's Treasury spending round.

To survive, the library proposes to slash opening hours by more than a third and to charge researchers for admission to the reading rooms for the first time.

All public exhibitions would close, along with schools learning programmes. The permanent collection, which includes a copy of every book published in the UK, would be permanently reduced by 15 per cent. And the national newspaper archive, used by 30,000 people a year, including many researching their family trees, would close.

The news reports that President Bush’s representatives seem to be closing in on a deal to put a half-billion-dollar presidential library and policy institute at Southern Methodist University in Dallas has inspired the predictable lame jokes and references to “The Pet Goat.”

But the project raises issues that are no laughing matter, touching on the writing of history, the university’s scholarly mission, governmental integrity and the rule of law.

S.M.U.’s negotiations regarding Mr. Bush’s library are bound to have a large public impact, which is why I’m hoping that the university’s president, R. Gerald Turner, and members of his board of trustees (presuming Laura Bush, the best-known trustee, has removed herself from the deliberations) can be persuaded to withhold a final go-ahead unless two basic conditions are met.

First, the university should insist that Mr. Bush rescind Executive Order 13233, his 2001 directive that reverses — illegally in the view of many leading historians, journalists and legal thinkers — the strong presumption of a public right of access to presidential papers embedded in the 1978 Presidential Records Act.

Under this early exertion of presidential power, both sitting presidents and former presidents (and even their heirs) can indefinitely postpone public release of sensitive material past the law’s usual 12-year waiting period by simply denying a request for access. No explanation is required, and there is no provision for appealing the denial to a trained professional archivist.

Instead, the executive order requires the person requesting the material to begin a costly and time-consuming lawsuit challenging the stonewalling. It’s a formula for keeping embarrassing facts secret in perpetuity and for thwarting a full and accurate accounting of a president’s time in office, which, presumably, was among S.M.U.’s prime goals in seeking to be home to the new presidential edifice, along with enhancing the university’s visibility, prestige and available financial resources.

Virginia Sen. John Warner's words betray the guilt he still carries about the Vietnam War and help explain why this pillar of the Republican establishment is leading a bipartisan revolt against the war plans of a president in his own party.

"I regret that I was not more outspoken" during the Vietnam War, the former Navy secretary said in an interview in his Capitol Hill office. "The Army generals would come in, 'Just send in another five or ten thousand.' You know, month after month. Another ten or fifteen thousand. They thought they could win it. We kept surging in those years. It didn't work."

Is that a lesson for what's going on in Iraq?

"Well, you don't forget something like that," he answers. There is a long pause, he closes his eyes and his voice gets softer. "No. You don't forget those things."

ROME -- For years it was derided by unwilling schoolboys for being "as dead as dead could be". Now, despite the Vatican's best efforts, the Pope's top adviser on Latin has reluctantly joined them by saying the language of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas is almost extinct.

"It is dying in the Church. I'm not optimistic about Latin. The young priests and bishops are not studying it," said Fr Reginald Foster, 68, a Carmelite friar who was appointed the Papal Latinist 38 years ago by Pope Paul VI.

He said priests were no longer compelled to study Latin at seminaries, and now found it impossible to read vital theological tracts...

Yet even though Fr Foster, who has translated speeches and letters for four popes, says he can see no future for the language, he has just launched a new Latin Academy in Rome, near the Pantheon, in his final effort to prevent it from dying out. He hopes to attract 130 students a year, though he will not say how the new school is being funded.

BERLIN -- The hideaway villa used by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, to entertain his lovers is to be put up for sale in an attempt to bail out the cash-strapped city of Berlin.

The rundown, empty Waldhof estate, set in woodland 40 kilometres (25 miles) north of the city, has become a financial burden for the Berlin council, which has been contemplating the closure of opera houses and other desperate measures to avert bankruptcy...

Goebbels took over the place in 1936. A diary entry for November 6 that year records his enthusiasm: “wonderful autumn weather, the wood is so perfect . . . we have to get rid of the Jewish plague. Completely . . . Otherwise, early to bed. One sleeps so well in the woods.”

The propaganda minister, in charge of film-making, built a cinema on the premises and invited a string of film starlets to the house, including his principal mistress Lida Baarová. She enjoyed swimming in the Bogensee lake. Other glamorous visitors included the Third Reich actresses Zarah Leander and Marika Rökk.

It was not only play for Goebbels. He also wrote his most important speech, calling for Total War, in the study of the house during the winter of 1942-43. “A perfect place for creative thought,” he said.

About half a mile to the east of the bustle of the Kennedy Space Center visitors' center at Cape Canaveral is a little-visited part of American space history. Here the Atlantic breeze sighs among the stunted palms and the palmetto grass and whines through the twisted steel gridwork of abandoned skeletal launch gantries.

It is Launch Pad 34, site of one of the first -- and worst -- disasters in space history. It was here 40 years ago this weekend, on Jan. 27, 1967, that astronauts Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were killed within seconds when a fire swept through the capsule of Apollo 1. The cause was later found to be faulty insulation around a wire, which sparked and ignited the contents of the capsule, pressurized in an atmosphere of pure oxygen. In such an environment ordinary materials burn with blowtorch intensity...

By a twist of fate, this weekend also marks another NASA anniversary of an event in which the culture of haste resulted in tragedy. On Jan. 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launch, killing all seven on board, including teacher Christa McAuliffe. The causes and consequences of that disaster were disconcertingly similar to those of the Apollo 1 fire...

YORKTOWN -- Six feet beneath the grassy lawn outside the circa 1720 Custom House, archaeologists have stumbled upon one of this old colonial port's most deeply buried secrets.

Tracing the path for a new drain line, the scientists knew they might encounter the foundations of the historic Ambler House, which was constructed in the 1740s and destroyed during the Civil War. But no one expected to find the kind of complex structure that has emerged since the first brick foundations began to appear at the bottom of a 4-foot-wide trench late last year.

Uncovered by a team from the James River Institute for Archaeology, the architectural features include not only the east walls of the main house and a large rear addition but also evidence of a covered passageway that connected the dwelling with the Custom House next door.

Archaeologists say they have unearthed Lupercale—the sacred cave where, according to legend, a she-wolf nursed the twin founders of Rome and where the city itself was born.

The long-lost underground chamber was found beneath the remains of Emperor Augustus' palace on the Palatine, a 230-foot-tall (70-meter-tall) hill in the center of the city.

Archaeologists from the Department of Cultural Heritage of the Rome Municipality came across the 50-foot-deep (15-meter-deep) cavity while working to restore the decaying palace.

MADISON — Wisconsin lawmakers on Thursday proposed requiring schools to teach about the Hmong people, saying suspicion of the community could be eased by an understanding of their past as U.S. allies in the Vietnam War.

The bill, backed by a group of state Assembly Democrats, is identical to one proposed in April 2005 that died when lawmakers adjourned last year. Sponsors said racial tensions rekindled by this month's homicide of a Hmong hunter could build support for passage this year...

"All of the difficulties that the Hmong face and experience in the U.S. are due to the fact that there is no formal teaching about the Hmong to the general public," said Za Blong Vang, president of the Hmong Community of Wisconsin. He spoke in Hmong but provided an English translation of his remarks.

Ken Milburn knows he could have sold a pair of boxing gloves that once belonged to late heavyweight champion Joe Louis for a princely sum. But the Windsor man wanted to see this piece of American cultural and political history preserved in what he saw as the proper place — Washington's Smithsonian Institution.

The gloves, worn by Louis in his first fight with German Max Schmeling in 1936, have been in Milburn's family since then. And he wasn't going to sell them.

"The bottom line is, they're not for sale," Milburn told CBC Radio. "They could be worth two cents, they could be worth two million, who really cares?

"My aunt and uncle kept those gloves for at least 60 years. They didn't sell them," he says. "I don't believe the intent is I receive, or anyone receive, any monetary value for them. They are going where they belong."

They might have gone elsewhere.

In an interview with CBC.ca, Milburn says he phoned the International Boxing Hall of Fame three times to tell them about the gloves but "they didn't call back."

He also tried the Canadian Amateur Boxing Association, hoping they might be able to sell the gloves and use the money to help young fighters here, and they didn't call back either.

When Milburn contacted the Smithsonian they phoned right away. Once they had taken a look at them he received another call from the museum's Dr. Ellen Hughes.

"She said, 'Tell us what we can do or say to get the gloves,' " he says.

One expert on boxing memorabilia, Wally Boshyk of Toronto's Legends of the Game, estimates the gloves could bring up to $100,000 US as a base price out on the market. But if two collectors at an auction both wanted the piece, that number could go to $500,000 US.

Louis's gloves came into the family through Milburn's late uncle and aunt, Earle and Beulah Cuzzens.

Uncle Earle, who was at Yankee Stadium for the 1936 fight, was in the same business as both of Louis's managers, "known at the time as 'the numbers,' " Milburn said. "Now, the government runs the numbers [the lottery]. They call it Pick 3."

When Aunt Beulah died in 2003 at 96 years of age, she told her nephew to make sure the gloves, and some photos of Louis and her late husband, went to the right place.

German prosecutors in Mannheim demanded a five-year jail sentence Friday for one of the most high-profile figures in the Holocaust denial movement, Ernst Zündel, in closing arguments at his trial. As one of the most famous Holocaust deniers goes on trial in Germany, the EU takes steps to criminalize denying the Shoah.

Zündel, a 67-year-old German citizen, stands accused of inciting racial hatred for disputing the historical fact that Nazi Germany systematically slaughtered six million European Jews during World War II.

German authorities say Zündel operated a website from Canada on which he expressed anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi views and presented "revisionist" history. He left Germany for Canada at the age of 19 but was deported in March 2005 on a German arrest warrant.

Denying the Holocaust is a crime in Germany and if convicted, Zündel faces up to five years in jail.

The trial began almost a year ago but has run into several legal hurdles. It follows a high-profile case in which controversial British historian David Irving spent 13 months in jail in Austria for questioning the Holocaust before being released last month.

In the area that runs up from Bleecker to West Third, from Sixth Avenue to as far east as Broadway, histories as well as tales passed down from one generation to the next document a vibrant outcropping of establishments that served men and women who enjoyed same-sex desire--including cheap restaurants, saloons, and tea rooms--and sat close by brothels of a more traditional kind as well as Catholic churches that served the neighborhood's emerging working class Italian-American community.

By 1925, at the northwest corner of Bleecker and MacDougal Streets, the neighborhood supported a tonier watering hole, the San Remo, that for decades to come drew what cultural historian Steven Watson has called "the younger generation of bohemians," a group that could also be thought of as perhaps proto-metrosexuals-including Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Frank O'Hara, Larry Rivers, Gore Vidal, Dorothy Day, Miles Davis, Jackson Pollack, James Agee, and Jack Kerouac.

This-and more-is part of the rich cultural stew brought together and to light in an 82-page report released two weeks ago by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Presentation and authored by Columbia University architectural historian Andrew S. Dolkart.

The report was presented to Robert Tierney, the chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), the city agency that oversees the designation of buildings, blocks, and neighborhoods worthy of protection against adverse development. The commission has created more than 80 such districts citywide, and GVSHP is seeking approval for a South Village Historic District comprised of 40 blocks and roughly 800 buildings.

If approved, the district would run from the West Fourth Street southern boundary of Washington Square Park as far south as Watts Street, and from Sixth Avenue, and in places Seventh, east to West Broadway/ LaGuardia Place.

In his introduction to the report, Andrew Berman, GVSHP's executive director, after noting that "Greenwich Village, one of New York and the world's most venerable and beloved neighborhoods, owes much of its continuing appeal to its well-preserved architecture, its palpable sense of history, its charm, and its human scale," warns that the South Village's "historic buildings could be lost at any time."

Major portions of Greenwich Village have been protected since 1969, when the LPC created the city's first "truly large-scale neighborhood historic district," in Berman's words. Since then, additional portions of the Village have also won protection, most recently last year, when the Weehawken Street Historic District was created in a relatively compact area running north and east from the corner of Christopher and West Streets, another area of critical historical significance for the LGBT community.

A recently unearthed human skull believed to have been used as a ceremonial trophy by the people of an ancient Peruvian empire gives new insights into the nature of warfare in the society, archaeologists say.

The Wari Empire, a society that predated the Incas, ruled over parts of Peru 1,500 to 1,000 years ago.

While exploring a Wari cemetery last summer in Peru’s Huaro Valley, archaeologists discovered what they consider to be an elite section of the graveyard when they came across llama bones arranged in a special pattern, often a marker of something special when it comes to Wari remains.

Beneath the bones, the team found a skull with several unusual holes and marks that seem to indicate it was revered. Circular holes cut at the skull’s base and back suggest it was held on poles or worn as a large pendant during special ceremonies.

A line cut across the front of the skull indicated that the scalp may have been removed either for cleaning or as a ceremonial vessel, and was later reattached with gold-alloy pins.

The archaeologists think the skull belonged to a warrior because of healed-over scars and abrasions on it. They estimate the warrior was about 30 years old when he died.

For his skull to be displayed in ceremonies, the man must have been a well-respected warrior.

“The trophy skull adds a new dimension to our understanding of the role of warriors and warfare in Wari culture,” said team leader Mary Glowacki of the Earthwatch Institute. The expedition was funded by volunteers who join Earthwatch scientists on field missions.