Russian President Dmitry Medvedev condemned on Sunday what he described as attempts to rewrite wartime history -- an attack the Kremlin said was aimed at Ukraine and the three Baltic states.

In a joint declaration marking the 1941 Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Medvedev and Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko denounced a "politicised approach to history".

Their countries "strongly condemn any attempt at rewriting history and revision of the results of World War Two," they said.

Ukraine and the Baltic states Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have challenged Moscow's view of history, saying their nationals suffered from Soviet as well as Nazi oppression, and a Kremlin spokesman said later the criticism was aimed at them.

Meeting in the Belarussian town of Brest, where Nazi forces first crossed the Soviet border on June 22, 1941, the two leaders said that "a selective, politicised approach to history should be set against honest, scientific debate."

Reporting on the forthcoming book The Case Against Barack Obama (Regnery, 2008), authored by former Human Events writer and National Review Online staff reporter David Freddoso, a June 23 Politico article stated that Marjory Ross, the president and publisher of Regnery Publishing, "likens the goal of Freddoso's book to that of 'Unfit for Command' " (Regnery, August 2004), which was co-authored by Swift Vets and POWs for Truth co-founder John E. O'Neill and Jerome R. Corsi. As Media Matters for America has documented, Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry -- which Regnery touts as among its best-selling publications -- contains false and baseless attacks on Kerry's military service, as documented by Media Matters for America, and in numerous media reports. Media Matters also extensively documented numerous falsehoods put forth elsewhere by O'Neill and other members of Swift Vets and POWs for Truth (previously known as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth).

Regnery, which describes itself as "the nation's leading conservative publisher" and "central to the conservative movement today," has also published books by Dinesh D'Souza, David Horowitz, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, G. Gordon Liddy, Michelle Malkin, Oliver North, and Newt Gingrich.

From the June 23 Politico article:

The same publisher that distributed the 2004 best-seller that took aim at John Kerry's Vietnam service is planning a summer release of what's scheduled to be the first critical book on Barack Obama.

Conservative journalist David Freddoso's "The Case Against Barack Obama" will offer "a comprehensive, factual look at Obama," according to Regnery Publishing president and publisher Marjory Ross.

But the book's subtitle makes clear its perspective: "The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate."

Ross contends that the mainstream media has offered insufficient scrutiny of Obama and likens the goal of Freddoso's book to that of "Unfit for Command," the scathing assessment of Kerry's war record that rocketed to No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list.

Don't tell Indiana Jones, but most archaeologists pack spades, not bullwhips, and big discoveries usually come after lots of digging, not looting. Maya discoveries in Mexico that are rewriting the history of this classic civilization, for example, are coming from years of careful digging, not looted idols.
The classic Maya were part of a Central American civilization best known for stepped pyramids, beautiful carvings and murals and the widespread abandonment of cities around 900 A.D. in southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and El Salvador, leaving the Maya only the northern lowlands of the Yucatan peninsula. The conventional wisdom of this upheaval is that many Maya moved north at the time of this collapse, also colonizing the hilly "Puuc" region of the Yucatan for a short while, until those new cities collapsed as well.

But that story of the Maya is wrong, suggests archaeologist George Bey of Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss., who is co-leading an investigation of the abandoned city of Kiuic with Mexican archaeologist Tomas Gallareta of Mexico's National Institute of Archaeology and History. "Our work indicates that instead the Puuc region was occupied for almost 2,000 years before the collapse in the south," says Bey, by e-mail.

They've been talking about the gold in California's hills since 1849, when tens of thousands of pioneers rushed across the continent or even sailed round Cape Horn to join the fabled gold rush that transformed this remote rural backwater into the beating heart of the American dream.

Today, record gold prices, widespread economic turmoil, and the enduring optimism of America's entrepreneurial classes have combined to entice fresh swarms of prospectors to head west in search of hidden riches beneath the picturesque hills and ravines of the Golden State.

The "new 49ers," as today's wave of fortune-seekers are known, are a breed apart from their historic predecessors, driving trucks and SUVs down the dusty tracks first created by trains of horse-drawn wagons nearly 160 years ago. But they share with them a timeless predisposition for what veterans call gold fever. "It's like going to Vegas, except with this, we actually get to win something," said Mike Dunn, clutching almost an ounce of nuggets unearthed from the south fork of the Feather river last Sunday. "We've just hit a halo of gold, and this lot alone must be worth between $500 (£250) and $1,500. I've just about paid for my trip already."

The Grade 10 provincial history exam has always been a pressure-cooker test for many students because they need to pass the course to graduate.

It might have been more stressful this year because several history teachers say Monday's provincial exam for the History of Quebec and Canada course was the toughest they've seen in years.
"We're seeing very high failure rates and we're worried about that," said Ken Elliott, director of educational services at the Lester B. Pearson School Board.

"If it's a universal problem and it's because it was too difficult, then we would hope that (the Education Department) would adjust the marks," Elliott said. "But ... that's speculation on my part." They are hearing similar feedback about the exam from other Montreal area boards, Elliott said.

At the Commission scolaire de Montréal - the largest school board in the province - it's the same warning bell, said board spokesperson Alain Perron. Some schools have reported the average mark is 10- to 15-per-cent lower than last year, Perron said.

Shelby Steele, author of A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win (Free Press, December 2007), acknowledged that he thinks Sen. Barack Obama "can definitely win" the presidential election, despite the claim in the book's subtitle -- "Why He Can't Win" -- which he said was an "afterthought" that he "regret[ted]" and which he said did not represent the book's thesis.

Appearing on the June 22 edition of Fox News' Hannity's America, host Sean Hannity discussed with Steele Obama's "chances of making it all of the way to the White House," asking, "All right, so he can't win?" Steele responded: "He can win. I regret that subtitle," adding, "It was an afterthought. And I don't argue that in the book. He can definitely win. There is a powerful desire in American society today to see someone like him move to the White House."

From the June 22 edition of Fox News' Hannity's America:

HANNITY: As the first African-American presidential nominee, Democrat Barack Obama is no doubt running an historic campaign. But will that distinction help or hurt his chances of making it all of the way to the White House? Joining us now, author of a brand new book, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win, Shelby Steele. Shelby, good to see you, my friend. Thanks for being back with us.

STEELE: Good to be here.

HANNITY: All right, so he can't win?

STEELE: He can win. I regret that subtitle.

HANNITY: OK.

STEELE: It was an afterthought. And I don't argue that in the book. He can definitely win. There is a powerful desire in American society today to see someone like him move to the White House.

Saad Eskander,
Director General,
Iraqi National Library & Archives

An Open Letter to the Director of Hoover Institute

I have read Mr. Sousa's letter to Mr. Mark Greene, President of the Society of American Archivists (dated 06-06-08), Mr. Al-Jaberi's statement (dated 27-04-08) and the article published by Stanford University's official site regarding the illegally seized documents of the former Iraqi state and the archive of the Ba'ath Party (dated 18-06-08).

As the national archivist of Iraq, I would like to clarify several points regarding the issue of the illegally seized documents of the former Iraqi state and the archive of the Ba'ath Party.

1. Mr. al-Jaberi does not represent the Ministry of Culture, let alone the current Iraqi government, insofar as the issue of the seized documents is concerned. The statement is written by Mustafa al-Kadhemi, who is the director of IMF and Mr. Makkiya's right-hand man. Al-Kadhemi exploited the good intention of al-Jaberi and persuaded him to sign a statement about a sensitive issue he knows literally nothing about and has no authority to talk about or to deal with.

2. Regarding the retrieval of the seized documents, I have been coordinating my efforts with the Acting Minister of Culture, his deputy Mr. Taher al-Hmud, advisors of the Vice-President, and other important figures inside the Iraqi government as well as a number of Parliamentarians.

3. The Iraqis inside and outside the country have supported my position and disapproved of Makkiya, al-Kadhemi and the IMF's activities, which are considered to be morally wrong and manifest violations of Iraq's sovereignty.

4. Some parts of al-Jaberi's statement contradict the IMF's claims, not mine, regarding the fact that the National Board of Accountability and Justice (NBAJ) will establish an archive for the records of the Ba'ath Party. I informed al-Kadhemi about this in order to tell him that IMF has no right whatsoever to keep these records abroad. Moreover, the INLA is in constant contact with Dr. Ahmed al-Chalabi, who presides over NBAJ, which replaced the former De-Ba'athification National Board. Dr. Chalabi has expressed his support for INLA's campaign to retrieve all the seized documents, including the Ba'ath Party ones. The two sides (INLA and (NBAJ) hope to work together to return all the seized records.

5. I tried through direct negotiations with IMF's representatives including Mr. Makkiya to reach a satisfactory settlement regarding the issue of the seized documents. Unfortunately the IMF's representatives were not interested in making any compromise that would have put an end to the dispute. For instance, I asked IMF to enlarge its agreement with Hoover so that INLA would be included as the representative of the Iraqi state and people.

6. I would like to draw your attention to Iraqi legislation no. 111 for the year 1969. This legislation imposes severe punishment on those who destroys, hides, steal, forge, publish or remove official Iraqi documents. The legislation also imposes severe punishment (10 year-imprisonment) on those individuals who collaborate with and provide foreign states with Iraqi documents. Therefore, the IMF's confiscation, purchases, scanning, declassification and publication of the Ba'ath documents are incontrovertibly illegal. It also means that the IMF has violated the same Iraqi legislation when it decided to provide the American government with copies of its illegally seized records. In light of that one can say that the letters of clearance IMF received from one or two Iraqi high-ranking officials carry no weight because they went against the above mentioned Iraqi legislation.

7. The IMF has not been authorized by the Iraqi government to ask the Pentagon and the CIA to transfer tens of millions of Iraqi documents they both seized to it. The IMF's action goes clearly against current Iraqi legislations. We all know that IMF has no storage rooms inside or outside Iraq. This means that the IMF will keep tens of millions of Iraqi documents in America by making deals similar to the one it made with Hoover. Thus, the Iraqis, including the scholars and the victims of the former regime will be given no access to their own documents, while the Americans (the occupiers) will continue to enjoy such a privilege. .

8. Makiya's claim that his deal with Hoover is legal because he got the approval of the Iraqi government contradicts his refusal to return the documents to Iraq because he says that he does not trust the intention of my 'bosses' as he puts it. Are not my bosses the same people from whom Makiya has claimed to have obtained approval for the shipment of the records to the US and for the deal he made with Hoover? This is pure hypocrisy.

9. The INLA has never claimed that it should alone decide the fate of the seized documents. On the contrary, its director has demanded from the very beginning the establishment of National Archival Committee to include members from the three branches of government (executive, legislative and judiciary). The Committee will be entrusted with the task of making new legislation for all the records of the former regime including the Ba'ath party.

10. The INLA and other governmental agencies have been gathering information on the activities of the IMF since April 2003. Rest assured that this Foundation has violated Iraqi laws and regulations all the way. It violated the principle of the rule of law and the priority of state-based institutions.

11. I would also like to remind you that the IMF came into being within the framework of the American occupation of Iraq, and thus was an integral part of a grand imperial vision for the New Iraq. This explains why IMF has not been accountable politically, administratively, legally, financially or morally to any Iraqi authority since its formation.

12. The IMF's purchases of illegally seized documents from individuals and private organizations has considerably encouraged the black-market phenomenon, and discouraged local Iraqis from handing over seized documents to the proper authorities.

13. The Ba'ath documents are the property of the Iraqis and the institutions that represent them, and so it is arrogant and unethical for one person (an émigré) to decide the destiny of millions of sensitive official documents that have had and will continue to have considerable impact on the private lives of millions of Iraqi citizens. It is not in the interests of Iraqi victims and academic investigation for the IMF to have been using the documents for propaganda, self-aggrandizement and obtaining funding. The Iraqis desperately want to know and confront the realities of their recent past. They need to recognize the suffering of the victims and to identify those who committed crimes, before bringing them to justice. The Iraqis are well aware that any national reconciliation project cannot be successfully implemented without making the seized documents available for both scholars and the public mediated by a responsible agency representative of them..

Last but not least, it should be noted that the Iraqi public, Iraqi intellectuals, and Iraqi media all support the INLA's cause. We also rely on the support of our colleagues abroad, especially in Northern America.

Dr. Saad Eskander,
Director General,
Iraq National Library & Archives

One hundred and twenty Israeli political and cultural leaders --including former Supreme Court justices, cabinet ministers, and cultural figures-- have signed a petition to Yad Vashem, Israel's central Holocaust institution and museum, urging it to add to its exhibits material about the Holocaust rescue activists known as the Bergson Group.

The petition was organized by the Washington,D.C.-based David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.

The Bergson Group was a maverick political action committee in the United States in the 1940s that used rallies and newspaper ads to pressure the Roosevelt administration to rescue Jews from Hitler. Its efforts played a key role in facilitating the rescue of more than 200,000 Jews during 1944-1945.

The signatories on the petition included former Supreme Court chief justice Meir Shamgar and fellow-justice Mishael Cheshin; political leaders from the left such as Meretz Party leader Yossi Beilin and former Education Minister Shulamit Aloni, as well as political leaders from the right such former Defense Minister Moshe Arens and former Justice Minister Dan Meridor; leading novelists and playwrights, among them A.B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, and Yehoshua Sobol; and senior historians such as Pulitzer Prize winner Saul Friedlander and Mordecai Paldiel, former head of Yad Vashem 's Department of the Righteous.

[For a complete list of the signatories, please contact the Wyman Institute.]

A delegation led by Prof. David S. Wyman and Dr. Rebecca Kook, the daughter of Bergson Group leader Hillel Kook (aka Peter Bergson) delivered the petition to Yad Vashem. Prof. Wyman and Wyman Institute director Dr. Rafael Medoff are visiting Israel this week to speak at a conference about the Bergson Group, in Tel Aviv.

The delegation also met with Dr. Dan Michman, chief historian of Yad Vashem, to discuss the importance of adding the Bergson Group to Yad Vashem's exhibit. Michman told them that "as a matter of principle, Yad Vashem will never change any of its exhibits."

The delegation expressed surprise and disappointment at Yad Vashem's stance, especially in view of the fact that last year, in a response to a petition by the Wyman Institute, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C., agreed to add material about the Bergson Group to its permanent exhibit. The Wyman Institute's request to the museum was endorsed former Members of Congress, prominent historians, and Jewish leaders such as Elie Wiesel. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, whose father, Congressman Thomas D'Alesandro, Jr., was a supporter of the Bergson Group, also spoke out about the Bergson Group's achievements.

“This is a truly bipartisan cause,” said Dr. Rebecca Kook, who teaches political science at Ben Gurion University and worked with the Wyman Institute in organizing the petition. “Israeli political and cultural leaders from right to left recognize that the omission of the Bergson Group from Yad Vashem is a terrible injustice which must be rectified.”

Prof. Wyman and Dr. Kook noted that the issue of recognizing the Bergson Group should be of particular interest to Americans, since the group's protests played a central role in pressuring the Roosevelt administration to belatedly create the War Refugee Board in 1944. During the last fifteen months of World War Two, the War Refugee Board helped bring about the rescue of more than 200,000 Jewish refugees. It was the Board which sent Raoul Wallenberg to Nazi-occupied Budapest in 1944 and financed his rescue campaign. (Wallenberg is only one of two non-Americans to ever be granted honorary U.S. citizenship (the other was Winston Churchill). "This crucial chapter in the history of the Holocaust and America's response to the Holocaust will be recognized in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; it should be recognized in Yad Vashem as well, " Dr. Kook said.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans, founded 112 years ago to protect all that is noble about the South, is itself racked by angry divisions these days.

Since the 1990s, clusters of Sons members have aligned themselves with "heritage groups" like the League of the South and the Council of Conservative Citizens, both considered hate groups by the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center. The center says the Sons itself may have been taken over by extremists.

"We had this group that looked like it had really radicalized to the right," said the poverty law center's Mark Potok. "But as we looked more closely, we realized that this was really a battle from within."

In response to just such charges, the Sons' Florida commander in 2002 sent interracial pornography to a female researcher at the center. John Adams later apologized, but he remains with the organization.

Today, he is co-chairman of the effort to install Confederate flags across Florida. The Sons say they intend to permanently install a giant one near the junction of Interstates 4 and 75 to counter what they consider increasing slights to Southern heritage.

The discovery of an ancient city buried beneath the sands of modern-day Syria has provided evidence for a Hellenistic settlement that existed for more than six centuries extending into the time of the Roman Empire. The site provides a unique insight into the structures of a pre-Roman Hellenistic settlement. The project, funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF, sheds new light on city life in the Hellenistic period.

The Syrian deserts have long kept an important secret hidden deep beneath their sands – the remains of the pre-Roman Hellenistic settlement of Palmyra. Until now, the only evidence for the existence of such a settlement was to be found in historical writing. As part of an FWF-funded joint project, the Institute of Classical Archaeology at the University of Vienna, the German Archaeological Institute and the Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums in Syria have been the first to track down the location of this early city. Moreover, their findings are now producing a unique insight into the structures of a pre-Roman Hellenistic settlement.

"Although a settlement dating back to the second millennium BC has already been identified as Palmyra, a new settlement was evidently established at another site in the third century BC and was later abandoned in the Roman period. While we know a great deal about the later Roman city, the Hellenistic settlement of Palmyra has never been investigated," explains Project Manager Prof. Andreas Schmidt-Colinet from the Institute of Classical Archaeology at the University of Vienna."The current investigation gives us a unique opportunity to analyse the transition from the Hellenistic period to the time of the Roman Empire by studying the settlement structures that have been uncovered here over a wide area."

CHRONOLOGY OF THE SETTLEMENT & TRADE ROUTES In view of the large size of the area, the project has thus far focussed on small sections of the ancient urban settlement structures. This work is already yielding results, particularly as regards the chronology of the individual phases of construction and the trade and commercial background of the Hellenistic"Sand City". The investigations show that building activities were divided across various major phases stretching from the third century B.C. to the end of the third century A.D. This indicates that the site could have fallen out of use around the time when the city was conquered by the Roman emperor Aurelian or around the construction of the wall under the emperor Diocletian.

Pottery finds are particularly important for helping to determine the trade routes used by the citizens of Palmyra. Overall, the archaeologists have found far larger amounts of local domestic pottery than imported ceramic goods from other areas. Nevertheless, amphorae from Rhodes – large clay containers used to transport wine – and goods imported from Africa show that Palmyra had connections with far flung corners of the world from the late Hellenistic period until the late Roman period. Prof. Schmidt-Colinet comments on the team’s discoveries:"Our pottery finds reveal a continuous progression of Hellenistic-Roman ceramics over a period of 600 years. What’s more, we now have the first ever archaeological evidence for a Hellenistic settlement with continuous habitation over six centuries extending into the Roman period."

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The team of archaeologists has also uncovered initial evidence for the keeping and usage of domestic animals."Kitchen waste" shows that the inhabitants kept and ate primarily sheep and goats, as well as dromedaries, cattle and pigs. In contrast, gazelles, wildfowl and fish seldom appeared on the menus of the Hellenistic inhabitants of Palmyra.

Looking to the future, the archaeologists aim to completely uncover a monumental courtyard-type structure at the centre of the Hellenistic settlement that has close parallels with Syrian caravan structures. However, the team is not just hoping to reveal how or why the individual rooms were built, it also wants to determine the overall importance of the structure for the city of Palmyra. At the end of the project, the findings from the excavations, which have been made possible by the FWF, will be combined with aerial photographs and structures that are still visible above ground to provide a topographical map of Palmyra.

Odd though it may seem, ideological conservatives used to be fierce critics of “executive supremacy.” For instance, in 1940, when Franklin D. Roosevelt sought a precedent-breaking third term, the archconservative Herbert Hoover warned that Roosevelt was a virtual dictator whose growing “personal power over the last seven years” came at the expense of a “disastrous weakening of the legislative and judicial branches ” with Congress “reduced to a rubber stamp for the executive.”

As the cold war raged, conservatives opposed to the centrist policies of President Dwight D. Eisenhower backed a constitutional amendment granting Congress the authority to curtail presidential treaty-making powers. It came within a single vote of passage in the Senate in 1954.

The battle was also fought on the intellectual front. In his book “Congress and the American Tradition,” the conservative thinker James Burnham argued that the Founders had envisioned a government in which “the preponderating share of power was held and exercised by the legislature,” primarily the House, since its members were directly accountable to their local constituents, unlike presidents, who wielded power through Caesarist manipulations of “the mob.”

Obama has released his first post-primary ad, a 60-second spot that's airing in 18 battleground states. In effect, "Country I Love" is Obama's first ad of the general election campaign, and as such it invites scrutiny. (FactCheck will address McCain's first general election ads in a separate article.) We don't find this ad egregiously misleading, but it paints a picture of Obama's accomplishments that could leave viewers with a misimpression or two.

His description of his upbringing and work history are accurate. He describes the "strong values" he says he learned from his mother and her parents. But when Obama discusses his legislative accomplishments, he leaves out some important context.

The ad talks about laws that Obama "passed," but in fact, he sponsored only one of the three bills mentioned and cosponsored another. The third included provisions from some bills he'd sponsored earlier, but his name wasn't attached to the one that passed. And two of the three laws were accomplishments of the Illinois Legislature, not the U.S. Senate.

The Monmouth Junction route of the proposed Monmouth-Ocean-Middlesex rail line may have met its Waterloo in the Monmouth Battlefield State Park.

A May letter from the state Department of Environmental Protection's Division of Parks and Forestry gave a thumbs down to the Monmouth Junction route's proposed crossing of the famed Revolutionary War battle site.

The letter cites adverse effects from commuter trains on the park — which is crossed by rails where a freight train runs — and from more drivers using Route 522 to reach a proposed station in Manalapan near the park.

Gen. William T. Sherman’s Atlanta campaign was bad news for the Confederacy in 1864. But almost 150 years later, it’s good news for Georgia’s economy.

With Gov. Sonny Perdue’s final approval of $3 million in bonds last month, local and state officials believe the development of a Resaca Battlefield park near the Gordon-Whitfield county line is secured.

The facility will become a clearinghouse of Civil War information, and be complete before an influx in heritage tourists expected in 2011, the 150th anniversary of the war’s beginning.

Groundbreaking on the visitors center is expected late this summer.

“The Resaca battle was the beginning of the end of the Confederacy,” said John Culpepper, chairman of the Georgia Civil War Commission and Chickamauga city manager. “The war ended in Georgia.”

Preservationists say it is not enough to protect the grounds at Manassas National Battlefield Park without protecting its views as new development spreads in fast-growing Prince William County.

Researchers extensively photographed and mapped the home of the first major land battle of the Civil War for months, selecting 25 lookouts, including the 10 most pivotal ones to visitors, that they will attempt to preserve from new construction of roads, office parks and apartment buildings.

“When you are trying to visualize the battles, you don’t want to have those distractions,” said Bill Olson, vice chairman of the Prince William Conservation Alliance. “You don’t want to look out on traffic jams or cell phone towers just beyond the fringe of the battlefield.”

Tours chronicling the rise of notorious dictator Adolf Hitler have been met with a flurry of interest by foreign tourists in the southern German city of Munich, where Hitler nurtured the Nazi Party and mounted the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.

The guided walking tours showcase historical city sites where significant events in Hitler's life took place, many of which most Munich natives today are no longer aware of, including the world-famous Hofbraeuhaus beer hall, where Hitler gave his first public speech in 1918.

Born in Braunau, Austria, Hitler made Munich his home in 1913, before World War I.

Eric Loerke, 57, a U.S. national and longtime Munich resident, conducts the walks in English for tour guide firm Munichwalktours, with a maximum of 25 visitors on each Third Reich Tour.

Two wine presses found in Egypt were likely part of the area's earliest winery, producing holy wine for export to Christians abroad, archaeologists say.

Egyptian archaeologists discovered the two presses with large crosses carved across them near St. Catherine's Monastery, a sixth-century A.D. complex near Mount Sinai on the Sinai Peninsula.

Putnam County prides itself on its 196-year history and promotes tourism by touting its Revolutionary War roots.

But some Putnam officials now say the paid post of county historian is expendable. Eliminating it would require a charter change but would save the financially strapped county about $31,000 a year in part-time salary and benefits.

Under a proposal informally presented to the Legislature by the administration, the nine town and village historians would elect one of their own to serve unpaid, rotating stints as county historian.

Opponents say the underlying goal is to remove current County Historian Alan Warnecke, long a thorn in the side of County Executive Robert Bondi and the Legislature for his efforts to preserve and promote the late 18th-century Hill-Agor farm in Mahopac.

"They're trying to push him out and shut him up," said William McCormack of Mahopac Falls, a member of the now-defunct Lake MacGregor advisory board. In 2003, the county purchased the Hill-Agor farm as part of a 375-acre open-space acquisition that included a former airstrip and what is now the 18-hole Putnam National Golf Club.

Joe KLEIN in the new Time magazine – “Obama says he wants to hire a Team of Rivals for his Cabinet. He should start by keeping Robert Gates”: “Barack Obama has never been shy about comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln. … Obama has said he admires Doris Kearns Goodwin's wonderful Lincoln biography, ‘Team of Rivals.’ ‘He talks about it all the time,’ says a top aide. He is particularly intrigued by the notion that Lincoln assembled all the Republicans who had run against him for President in his war Cabinet, some of whom disagreed with him vehemently and persistently. ‘The lesson is to not let your ego or grudges get in the way of hiring absolutely the best people,’ Obama told me. ‘I don't think the American people are fundamentally ideological. They're pragmatic ... and so I have an interest in casting a wide net, seeking out people with a wide range of expertise, including Republicans,’ for the highest positions in his government. … ‘I don't want to have people who just agree with me,’ he said. ‘I want people who are continually pushing me out of my comfort zone.’

“Obama said he'd be particularly interested in having high-ranking Republicans advising him on defense and national security. ‘I really admire the way the elder Bush negotiated the end of the cold war—with discipline, tough diplomacy and restraint ... and I'd be very interested in having those sorts of Republicans in my Administration, especially people who can expedite a responsible and orderly conclusion to the Iraq war—and who know how to keep the hammer down on al-Qaeda.’ When I asked him specifically if he would want to retain Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense, Obama said, ‘I'm not going to let you pin me down ... but I'd certainly be interested in the sort of people who served in the first Bush Administration.’ Gates was George H.W. Bush's CIA director—and he has been a superb Secretary of Defense … Associates say Gates might stay if he believed the security of the troops was at stake.”

After 700 years, Dante Alighieri, Italy's most famous poet, will have his criminal record scrubbed clean.

Florence's city council has approved a motion revoking a sentence on Dante from 1302 which stated that he would be executed if he stepped foot in the city again.

The sentence forced Dante into exile and he spent the last 20 years of his life wandering through Italy, finally ending his days in Ravenna in 132

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There is a common misconception among Americans that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves with a stroke of his pen. Yet the Emancipation Proclamation, which went into effect on Jan. 1, 1863, did no such thing — or, at least, it didn't do a very good job of it. Two and a half years later, on June 19, 1865, Union soldiers sailed into Galveston, Texas, announced the end of the Civil War, and read aloud a general order freeing the quarter-million slaves residing in the state. It's likely that none of them had any idea that they had actually been freed more than two years before. It was truly a day of mass emancipation. It has become known as Juneteenth.

Since then, Juneteenth has been a day of celebration for many African Americans, a de facto second Independence Day commemorating the end of slavery and a first step toward inclusion in the greater American dream. It's a bittersweet holiday, "a time of celebration, but also a time of reflection, healing, and hopefully a time for the country to come together and deal with its slave legacy," says the Rev. Ronald V. Meyers, chairman of the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation. Meyers has worked for almost 15 years to get Juneteenth recognized by state legislatures. Currently, a little more than half of U.S. states acknowledge Juneteenth in some form or another, usually on the third Saturday of June.

The yellow crates haunted Aditya Arya. A successful advertising photographer whose clients have ranged from India's luxury Oberoi Hotel chain to Russia's Bolshoi Ballet, Arya inherited the crates from a family friend, an old photojournalist named Kulwant Roy, in 1984. And for more than two decades, Arya had hauled the increasingly dusty trunks around a succession of studios, stashing them in out of the way corners and closets. He had a vague sense of what the crates contained - bundles of prints and negatives - and at least once a year his mother would nag him about them. But he was always too busy with his own assignments to spend time pouring over someone else's fading pictures.

Then, in December, Arya finally opened the crates. What he discovered is a remarkable photographic record of modern Indian history, including thousands of images from the last days of the Raj through the 1960s, many of which have never been published. The archive has excited historians who believe it may shed new light on key moments in India's independence movement. It has also attracted attention for the commercial value of its images of historical figures ranging from Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru to Jacqueline Kennedy.

"It is a real find," said Raghuraj Sing Chauhan, director of public relations and exhibitions at India's National Museum. "They are historically important for the freedom struggle because many of these are quite rare photos."

The North Carolina Museum of History has acquired a Confederate battle flag associated with a major turning point of the Civil War – the death of Lt. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson.

The flag was carried by the 18th Regiment North Carolina Troops, which was responsible for the accidental shooting of the Confederate general at Chancellorsville, Va., on May 2, 1863. Severely injured by gunfire, Jackson died a week later of pneumonia.

The regiment's battle flag was captured by Union soldiers during the battle, and the Museum of History never knew of its existence until 1992, when the flag's eventual owner sent museum officials a letter.

Tom Walsh, a New Jersey college professor, loaned the historic banner to the museum in 1993, and it was conserved and appeared in a previous exhibit. Recently, Walsh offered to donate a partial value of the flag to the museum, and the museum purchased the remaining value last month.

Fifty years ago, the CIA embarked on a project to intercept Soviet and East German messages transmitted via underground cable. Intelligence was collected to determine the best place to hit the target, and then concrete planning for a new collection site was begun.

The tunnel was 1,476 feet in length and consumed 125 tons of steel liner plate and 1,000 cubic yards of grout . . . This was not a small operation!

He was El Salvador's equivalent of Oskar Schindler, a man who was given a chance to do something about the Holocaust - and took it.

Now, six decades after José Castellanos helped to save 25,000 Jews by granting bogus nationality certificates, the story of the central American nation's consul general to Switzerland during the second world war has been rediscovered.

"The memory of our father is out of the desk, out of the drawers and on the table again," Frieda Garcia, one of the diplomat's daughters, told a news conference at El Salvador's embassy in Washington this week, amid calls for Castellanos to be honoured posthumously by Israel.

Castellanos, an army colonel, served as a diplomat in Liverpool and Hamburg before being posted to Geneva in 1942 where he befriended a Romanian Jew, Gyorgy Mandl.

To protect Mandl he appointed him to the fictitious post of first secretary and amended his name to the more Latino-sounding George Mandel-Mantello.