A Chinese government official said on Thursday that the evidence for the Nanjing Massacre was "ironclad" in response to reports that a Japanese filmmaker in planning a documentary denying the atrocity.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu said Japan should take a correct and responsible attitude to history issues in order to win true trust from its Asian neighbors and the international community.

Jiang made the remarks when asked to comment on the plan to make the film about the Nanjing Massacre in December 1937, when Japanese troops killed 300,000 Chinese.

The film reportedly has the tentative title "The Truth About Nanking". The documentary aims to deny Japanese soldiers massacred Chinese civilians and prisoners of war in Nanjing.

ANOTHER SOURCE SAYS ... Source: Asia Media News Daily (linked on Ramzy piece) Date: January 25 JAPAN: Filmmaker to paint Nanjing slaughter as just myth Filmmakers depiction of Nanking massacre finds broad support from politicians, academics who hail the film as correction of distorted facts Japan Times Thursday, January 25, 2007 By Jun Hongo About 40 people, including Diet members, university professors and critics, rallied Wednesday behind a Japanese director's plan to shoot a film putting his spin on the Nanjing Massacre in which he claims the butchery of Chinese by the Japanese Imperial Army is nothing more than political propaganda. In a news conference held to"strike back against an erroneous understanding of history," people including Upper House members Hirofumi Ryu and Jin Matsubara gathered to support Satoru Mizushima, director and producer of"Nanking No Shinjitsu" ("The Truth About Nanjing"), which will depict the filmmaker's account of what took place in 1937. Though not present at the news conference held at a hotel in Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo, supporters of the film also include Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara and well-known journalist Yoshiko Sakurai."Gov. Ishihara has shown his keen support and I am very thankful," said Mizushima, 57, who has taken part in the production of more than 300 films and documentaries, including the 1995 war epic"Minami No Shima Ni Yuki Ga Furu."

TAIPEI -- The 'Rape of Nanking,' an important part of modern Chinese history, has disappeared from Taiwan's revised history textbook, a newspaper said on Sunday.

The United Evening News said the textbook from one publishing house has ommitted mention of the World War II atrocities committed by the Japanese in China, while the textbooks from four publishing houses only make a brief reference to it...

The 'Rape of Nanking' refers to the massacre which began after Nanking, then the Chinese capital, fell to the Japanese troops on December 13, 1937. Japanese soldiers carried out rape, execution, arson and looting in and around Nanking which lasted for six weeks.

China estimates the total death toll at about 300,000. Japan has denied the Nanking massacre took place and some Japanese rightists plan to make a documentary to deny it happened.

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. -- Visitors to the David Davis Mansion and State Historic Site will soon have the chance to view two rare portraits of a great American president.

Paintings of Abraham Lincoln by Edward Dalton Marchant and Alban Conant were loaned to the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency for temporary exhibits...

"We're very excited because the (Marchant) portrait hasn't been out on exhibit that much," said site manager Marcia Young, explaining the portrait was found in storage at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, then displayed for a short time at Morris Library...

Young said historians believe Marchant's portrait of Lincoln may have served as a model for his most famous portrait, the Union League of Philadelphia, which he painted in 1863 to commemorate the Emancipation Proclamation.

The portrait shows a sitting Lincoln. The background shows a broken chain wrapped around a pillar, which symbolizes the end of slavery.

MONEY, Miss. -— The place where the civil rights movement began now lies in ruin.

Bryant Grocery and Meat Market has been broken by years of neglect and battered by high winds from Hurricane Katrina, but few have forgotten the events during the summer of 1955 that started here with a wolf-whistle and ended with the slaying of a black teenager named Emmett Till.

"Like the Liberty Bell, it's the symbol of the movement," said state Sen. David Jordan, D-Greenwood. "That ought not to be lost."

Leflore County Tax Assessor Leroy Ware said the store isn't worth a penny on the county's books, but that didn't stop owners from initially asking local officials last year for $40 million for the crumbling store before reducing their price to $4 million.

Local officials say they balked at the price, countering with a $50,000 offer. Talks broke off, and the store has continued to rot, despite being placed on the Mississippi Heritage Trust's list of 10 Most Endangered Historic Places.

WILLIAMSBURG -- A skeptical group of archaeologists and historians will meet here Monday with an embattled Army archaeologist who recently identified a site near Cape Henry in Virginia Beach as a previously unknown early Colonial settlement called Henry Towne.

Made up of prominent figures based in the Williamsburg area, the group believes that the documentary evidence on which the identification is partly based actually refers to a Richmond-area settlement known as Henricus.

They also have questions about the date of a group of artifacts originally recovered at the Lynnhaven River site in the 1950s.

"I'd never heard of any settlement in that area dating to 1610 and - just in case I missed it - I began asking around. No one else had heard of it, either," said archaeologist Nicholas Luccketti, head of the James River Institute for Archaeology and a co-discoverer of Jamestown.

"Everyone agrees that the reference we've seen is to Henricus. So unless he's got something that none of us has ever seen, his documents do not refer to someplace that is now in Virginia Beach."

The calendar boasts plenty of religious holidays, but how many scientific holidays can you name? One of the red-letter days is coming up on Monday, when more than 850 events around the globe will mark Darwin Day, the 198th anniversary of the evolutionary theorist's birth. You can hear about Charles Darwin and the revolution he sparked from hundreds of church pulpits this weekend, as part of a program called Evolution Sunday.

Are those godless secularists trying to take on the trappings of religion? Not at all, says Robert Stephens, one of the organizers behind Darwin Day. "We're not trying to make a saint out of Darwin," he said. "We're just using him as a symbol." Stephens and his colleagues say this long holiday weekend is as good a time as any to turn science into a cause for celebration.

Illinois may not have the ancient Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Colossus of Rhodes or the Great Pyramid of Giza, Egypt.

But it does have the Garden of the Gods in the Shawnee National Forest the southern part of the state.

That is just one in a list of sites and attractions that have been nominated in a contest to choose the Seven Wonders of Illinois.

Anything from historic sites to cheesy tourist attractions can be nominated. ...

Morocco's capital Rabat is rebuilding its seafront and in so doing uncovering a vast treasure trove of relics, artefacts and ruins.


"We have made some fantastic discoveries not only for the history of Rabat but of the kingdom," said archaeologist and historian Mohammed Essemmar.


Essemmar, 43, heads the heritage department of the agency in charge of redeveloping the Bouregreg valley, a watercourse linking the twin cities of Rabat and Sale.


Roman columns and capitals, 12th-century enclosing walls, Islamic ceramics and coins have emerged from the sands.


The prize discovery in the 2,500 square-metre (27,000 square feet) site is the enclosing wall of the Tachfin "ribat,"or military camp, attached to the Oudayas casbah, dating from the 12th century and completed during the brief reign of Almoravid dynasty King Tachfin ben Ali (1143-1145).

BUCHENWALD, Germany (AP) -- The hunt begins with a number.

Harry Stein sits nose-to-screen, squinting at the fuzzy digits in column after column on faded microfilm, searching for clues to a mystery: Who was Auschwitz inmate 185403?

The number was tattooed on the left forearm of one of the thousands who were processed through Auschwitz, shipped off to Buchenwald concentration camp, and never seen again.

Male? Female? Old? Young? Jewish? Christian? Reason for arrest? The list Stein is scrutinizing says nothing. There's only that number.

More than six decades after the Nazi Holocaust ended, historians such as Stein are still struggling with a gargantuan task _ to make a semblance of order among hundreds of thousands of dead by finding, at least, their names.

JERUSALEM -- Israeli police raided the grounds of Islam's third-holiest shrine Friday, chained the compound's gates behind them, and fired tear gas and stun grenades into a crowd of thousands of Muslim worshippers to quell a rock-throwing protest over Israeli excavation work nearby.

The clash outside the Al Aqsa mosque set off protests across the Muslim world and scattered violence in the West Bank. It came a day after the rival Palestinian movements Hamas and Fatah agreed to end months of factional fighting, a step that some Israeli leaders believe could lead to stepped up attacks against the Jewish state.

Friday's 90-minute battle erupted at the end of noon prayers and forced about 150 protesters to retreat into the mosque and set up barricades. The standoff ended when an Arab member of the Israeli parliament persuaded the protesters and the 200 police officers to leave the compound peacefully.

Twenty-five years ago, a missile silo south of Tucson was one of the most top-secret places in America. At the height of the Cold War, it was part of a network of nuclear warheads designed to avert a nuclear attack. The silo housed the Titan 2 Missile, which could be launched in less than a minute from its position 150 feet beneath the Sonoran Desert.

The missile was never launched. And the site is now a National Historic Landmark that hosts a museum dedicated to the Titan 2 Missile.

Yvonne Morris led a crew in the 1980s that was trained to respond to launch orders that they hoped would never come...Morris is now the director of the museum where the Titan 2 still rests in its silo. It's the last of 54 such missiles that were clustered in Arizona, Arkansas and Kansas. The rest have been destroyed. The Command Post deep inside the ground is like something from a sci-fi movie. Mint green metal panels are full of blinking lights, large switches, dials, and meters...

By announcing his presidential intentions on Saturday at the Old State Capitol in Springfield, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama is wrapping himself in the mystique of Abraham Lincoln.

The crimson-domed Old State Capitol, just east of the present Illinois capitol, is where Lincoln served his fourth and final term as a state representative in 1840-41. And it's where, in 1858, in a debate with Stephen Douglas during their campaign battle for the U.S. Senate, Lincoln gave his "House Divided" speech...

Such Lincoln associations are golden in American politics.

But the Old State Capitol has other, less attractive associations as well.

A plaque, on a kiosk in the plaza just south of the building, commemorates the spot as "the departure point of the Donner Party on April 15, 1846, for their ill-fated trip to California."...

The "Teaching American History" grants program at the Department of Education would be substantially cut under the Bush proposal. In FY ‘06 the program received $120 million and the administration would slash that by over $70 million to $50 million in fiscal year 2008. The administration’s rationale is “the number of quality applications for assistance under this program in recent years does not justify the current level of funding.” Senator Robert C. Byrd, the original sponsor of the program, chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee. So one can assume that the proposed cut will not likely stand.

The Academies for American History and Civics, which supports workshops for teachers and students in those subjects, would be see their $2 million budget zeroed out.

NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION: The Bush administration’s proposed fiscal year 2008 budget calls for $379.5 million for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). This is an increase of $39.5 million over the FY 2007 appropriations of $340 million which is expected to be enacted as a year-long continuing resolution by the Congress.

Under the President’s FY 2008 request, NARA would receive $312.8 million for operating expenses; an increase of $34.6 million over the FY 2007 expected appropriation of $278.2 million. This includes funds to prepare for the George W. Bush Presidential Library, provide oversight by the agency’s Inspector General of the work to develop ways to preserve electronic records, and to continue work on reducing the backlog of unprocessed text records.

The operating expenses also include funds for the operation of the Richard M. Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, which will become part of the NARA system of presidential libraries this year after being a privately-run institution since 1990.

The National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) once again had its budget zeroed out in the Bush administration’s FY ‘08 budget request, and our annual battle to restore funding for this vital program begins anew.

The Electronic Records Archives (ERA) program, a key NARA strategic goal aimed at providing a means to preserve electronic records and make them more accessible in the future, is funded in the FY 2008 request at $58 million which is $13 million over the expected FY 2007 appropriation. This higher funding level for ERA will allow NARA to maintain progress on increment 1 of the system, which is scheduled to begin this fall.

For repairs and restoration to facilities owned by NARA, such as the National Archives at College Park, the National Archives Building in downtown Washington, and the presidential libraries, the President's FY
2008 budget requests $8.6 million.

NATIONAL PARK SERVICE–HISTORIC PRESERVATION PROGRAMS: Overall, the National Park Service would receive the largest budget increase in its history, an additional $258 million over the amount it received in fiscal year 2006. The centerpiece of the budget is the "National Parks Centennial Initiative," a ten-year effort to improve the nation’s parks prior to the NPS centennial in 2016. In releasing the budget, President Bush announced the “National Parks Centennial Challenge,” which has the potential of providing $3 billion in new funds over the next ten years. It includes a federal commitment of $100 million annually in discretionary funds, and a challenge to the private sector and the public to contribute $100 million, with a match of another $100 million in mandatory federal funding.

The 2008 budget includes $63.7 million for historic preservation programs. The budget allocates $10 million for the "Save America’s Treasures" program, $10 million for "Preserve America," and $43.7 million for historic preservation grants-in-aid to states, territories and Indian tribes. It would also establish a National Inventory of Historic Properties grant program. Matching grants of $4 million would be available to states, tribes, local governments, and federal land management agencies to make inventories more accessible. The budget also provides $10 million for heritage areas. The Heritage Partnership Program provides seed money for congressionally designated, but locally managed, national heritage areas.

NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES: The National Endowment for the Humanities would see a small increase of $400,000 over the amount the administration requested last year for total funding of $141 million. The “We the People” initiative that focuses on the teaching and learning of American history and culture would receive $15.2 million. Two new “We the People” programs would be initiated. The “We The People Videoshelf” would distribute American films that focus on historical events and themes to libraries nationwide. The second program would be run in conjunction with the State Department and bring foreign school teachers and humanities practitioners to the U.S. to participate in Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshops.

The NEH’s new Digital Humanities Initiative would receive funding of $1.4 million, which will support projects that use, or study the impact of, digital technology on research, education, preservation, and public programming in the humanities.

Funding for NEH’s Federal and State Partnership programs would increase by $133,000, but Education, Preservation and Access, Public Programs, Research, and Challenge Grants would all be cut.

The National Endowment for the Arts would receive $128.4 million or a $4 million increase.

SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION: The budget request for the Smithsonian is $678.4 million. Of that amount, $571.3 million is for salaries and expenses and the facilities capital budget is $107.1 million. Included in the request is nearly $10 million for planning and staffing of the new National Museum of African-American History and Culture, which will eventually be built on the National Mall. The capital budget will help fund the continuing renovation of the National Museum of American History-Behring Center, which is scheduled to reopen in 2008.

INSTITUTE OF MUSEUM AND LIBRARY SERVICES: The President’s budget request for the Institute of Museum and Library Services is $271 million, which is
$24 million or almost 10 percent more than it received in 2006. Library grants would be funded at $214 million and museum grants at almost $40 million. These amounts reflect nearly $8 million in new funding for each grant program.

Both the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation would be flat-funded at $9 million and $6 million respectively.

Michelangelo lived in a small room inside Rome's
Basilica of St Peter's during the last 17 years of his life, according to a report Friday in daily La Repubblica. The report cites a recently discovered receipt dating back to March 1557, in which an engraver was paid "10 scudi" for making a key
for a chest "in the room in St Peter's where Master Michelangelo retires to."

Historians had always suspected that the great Renaissance artist spent his last years inside the Vatican. But this is the first time that evidence has been found to corroborate their theory and pinpoint its exact location.

"Michelangelo lived inside the basilica. No one before had been able to verify it. This document casts new light on a theory that until yesterday we could only imagine," art historian Maria Cristina Carlo-Stella told La Repubblica.

Michelangelo's alleged room is now a library inside the basilica's Historic Archive, which is positioned behind the church's dome. Researchers use it to study its documents and commonly refer to it as "Michelangelo's room."

Michelangelo is thought to have lived there from January 1547 until his death, which took place on February 18, 1564. The basilica was still under construction at the time.

The artist had previously worked on his famous Last Judgment fresco in the Vatican's Sistine Chapel, between 1534 and 1541.

Prime Minister Tony Blair has revealed that he does not keep a diary - but wishes he had.

The news will raise questions over the memoirs Mr Blair is expected to write after he leaves 10 Downing Street later this year.

Publishers are believed to be queuing up to get their hands on what will be one of the biggest political books of the decade, potentially earning millions of pounds for Mr Blair.

But they now know that he will not have the benefit of a detailed record of his private thoughts, discussions and feelings to draw on when recreating the story of his 10 years in office.

[Last] week in Amsterdam, Sotheby's [began] selling 76,000 pieces of Chinese Export porcelain recovered from a circa 1725 shipwreck off the coast of present-day Vietnam. Because it was bound for the western market, the cargo reveals the era's fads and fashions in Europe, and precise details about the arduous journey made by goods in demand...

"In the 18th century, if it took two years to get something, it was still worthwhile doing," says Marcus Linell, Sotheby's Export-porcelain expert in London. "There was this incredible passion in Europe, and America as well, for tea and for coffee -- stimulating drinks that were not alcoholic. And if you want to drink a hot drink, unless you have porcelain to drink out of, it's something of a problem."...

The cargo [being] sold at Sotheby's...includes thousands of tea bowls, teapots, jugs, mantel vases and figural pieces, such as a rare ewer in the form of a monkey. Though many pieces were recoverable in good condition, the sale also includes lots of fascinating "sea sculptures" - nested porcelain pieces welded together by encrustations.

The sale is being held in Amsterdam because the wreck took place on the trading route of the Dutch East India Company, as the loaded junk made its way from Canton to the trading center at Batavia (modern-day Jakarta)...

"The cargo was an accidental find by Vietnamese fishermen. They pulled up their nets, and there was porcelain in them. They quickly discovered that the porcelain was valuable, and they went out day after day trawling for porcelain. In fact, they brought up 35,000 pieces."

When news of the find reached the Vietnamese press in 1998, Linell says: "The government jumped in, mounted an official salvage operation, and forced the fishermen to return what they had found." Eventually, 130,000 pieces were recovered from one ship, an indication of the huge amounts that were exported each year.

Thousands of men conscripted into the pits as miners during World War II are to be recognised for their contribution to the war effort.

Up to 50,000 young men became Bevin Boys, named after wartime minister Ernest Bevin, who devised the scheme to maintain the mining industry's output.

The Bevin Boys Association has long campaigned for its members' efforts to be recognition as war service.

Veterans Minister Derek Twigg agreed to badges being struck for the survivors.

It was in 1942 that, due to a serious shortage of coal, Ernest Bevin introduced various schemes to get extra men to go into the coal mines.

Charles Darwin could have saved himself from some of his first critics if he had remembered to include his preface in the first edition of his influential book on evolution and natural selection, "The Origin of Species."

A new study shows that Darwin was composing the introductory chapter to his book as early as 1856, even though that preface remained unpublished for six years until Origin's second edition. The findings suggest Darwin also wrote the chapter on his own accord and not in reaction to people who had read the book.

The original edition of the landmark book was published in 1859, without any introductory material. Still a public flash point today, "Origin" drew initial outcries, in part for the missing preface in which an author of the time typically would have credited and thanked his intellectual predecessors. One scientist accused Darwin of plagiarism for failing to acknowledge the giants whose work allowed him to see farther.

A year later, a new edition of the classic was published with a preface describing and crediting the intellectual work upon which natural selection rests.

Darwin historians have assumed the chapter "Historical Sketch" was penned as an afterthought, in response to his critics and accusations that his ideas were not original. However, Darwin's personal correspondence shows that the sketch was actually written prior to the first printing of the book, said political historian Curtis Johnson of Lewis and Clark College, whose detailed study of the preface is published in the January issue of the Journal of the History of Biology.

Polish nuns withstood pressure from communist secret police better than male clergy, according to research by the country's women religious orders.

Nuns who researched Interior Ministry files found that no more than 30 people associated with women religious had been recruited by secret police during the 1980s, when collaborators were most active, said Mother Jolanta Olech, a member of the Ursuline Sisters of the Sacred Heart of the Agonized Jesus and president of Poland's Conference of Superiors of Female Religious Orders.

"Even the 30 informers we know about could include laypeople who worked in convents, as well as priests who came as chaplains and are noted as agents," Mother Jolanta said.

The communist secret police "tried to catch anyone of importance: superiors, catechists, sisters working for church institutions, even nuns from closed orders who seldom left their convents," Mother Jolanta said. "But they didn't succeed.

"Overall, nuns probably weren't as interesting ... as priests – we don't hold high positions in the church or have the same possibilities," she said. "But the documentation shows nuns were much tougher to recruit than priests. We can certainly say that, in this very difficult situation, the sisters passed the test."

At least 10 percent of priests are estimated to have acted as informers under communist rule, which lasted in Poland from 1947 to 1989, according to the official National Remembrance Institute.

Most of the country's 44 dioceses and at least 30 religious orders have set up commissions to investigate possible collaboration following the early January resignation of Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus of Warsaw after he admitted to working with communist secret police. Some Catholics have criticized the commissions because they are staffed by clergy and have not said when they would publish their findings.

Mother Jolanta said the secret police showed most interest in larger orders.

Police "were interested in absolutely everything, from the color of someone's stockings and what they ate for breakfast, to really important things such as attitudes to the Second Vatican Council," she said. "Their aim was to collect lots of little stones and form a mosaic."

A Polish church historian, Jan Zaryn, told the Gazeta Wyborcza daily Feb. 7 religious sisters were harder to blackmail than male clergy because of their stronger rules and traditions of obedience.

He added that unsuccessful efforts were made to force nuns to place bugs in local rectories or to accuse priests of sexual harassment.

It's a 261-year-old tragedy.

On September 12, 1745, the Swedish ship East Indiaman Gotheborg almost reached the Gothenburg dock on Sweden's west coast after completing 30 months of her third voyage to China.

The ship -- belonging to the Swedish East India Company, which was established in 1731 to trade in southeast Asia -- was on a trade voyage, with goods like tea, porcelain, silk and spices worth millions on board. But she sank at the entrance of the dock.

The world forgot about her, till December 1984 when amateur divers working for the Marine Museum of Sweden found a part of the shipwreck -- a small piece of wood -- beside the submerged rock, Hunnebadan, 900 metres from the New Elfsborg Fortress.

That was when the idea to make a replica of the Gotheborg originated. In June 1995, the keel of the new Gotheborg was laid at Gothenburg's Terra Nova shipyard. On October 2, 2005, the new Gotheborg left on its first two-year-long sailing expedition on the historical route to China.

En route to China, the Gotheborg called on several ports, including Cadiz in Spain, Cape Town in South Africa, Fremantle in Australia, Jakarta in Indonesia, and Singapore, before arriving in Chennai, India.

WASHINGTON and LINDON, Utah -- Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein and Footnote, Inc. Chief Executive Officer Russell Wilding today announced the release of Footnote.com in all the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) locations nationwide [list at http://www.archives.gov/locations]. This new service at the research centers will provide patrons free access to NARA content that Footnote has digitized and indexed.

[Searching and index browsing is free online outside the NARA centers at Footnote.com but external access to most content is by subscription. See http://www.footnote.com/freedocuments.php]

According to Professor Weinstein, "It [the new service] will immediately allow much greater access to approximately 4.5 million pages of important documents that are currently available only in their original format or on microfilm." Professor Weinstein, along with Mr. Wilding, will be at Archives I in Washington DC to commemorate this important occasion.

NARA and Footnote, Inc. previously announced an agreement to digitize selected records from the vast holdings of the National Archives. This non-exclusive agreement, beginning with the sizeable collection of materials currently on microfilm, enables researchers and the general public to access millions of newly-digitized images of NARA historical records, which now can be accessed for free at the NARA research centers.

ROME -- A Jewish academic has shocked Italy by stating that Jews murdered Christians during the Middle Ages so that their blood could be used in ritualistic ceremonies.

The details were revealed in yesterday's Corriere Della Sera newspaper which published extracts of the book by Professor Ariel Toaff, "Easter of Blood: European Jews and Ritual Homicides".

Last night his claims were denied by leading Jewish figures including his father Elio, once chief rabbi of Rome.

In the book, Prof Toaff describes the mutilation and crucification of a two-year-old boy to recreate Christ's execution at Pesach, the Jewish Easter. The festival marks the fleeing of the Jews from Egypt and Prof Toaff says Christian blood was used for "magic and therapeutic practices."