On June 11, a long debate took place in the Swedish Parliament in regard to the Foreign Committee report on Human Rights, including five motions calling upon the Swedish Government and Parliament to officially recognize the 1915 Armenian Genocide

The argumentation for why recognition should be rejected was based on four main assumptions: “no particular consideration regarding the Armenian situation has ever been in form of an UN Resolution, either in 1985 or any other occasion; the Committee understands that what engulfed the Armenians, Assyrian/Syrians and Chaldeans during the reign of the Ottoman Empire would, according to the 1948 Convention, probably be regarded as genocide, if it had been in power at the time.

From January 2009, the European Union will have its own president to chair EU summits and unite the views of 27 member states. Former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing has described the top job as Europe's "own George Washington". The race for the presidency is likely to go down to the wire at the December 2008 summit of the European Council of leaders. Although a decision will be made by majority voting, the 27 member states will be hoping that a unity candidate comes forward.

This interactive webpage from BBC News offers profiles of the nine most discussed names:

click here and

here.

A spokesman for the State Department Historian's Office confirmed that officials had ordered the removal of Secrecy News from the FRUS mailing list in response to our critical coverage.

In an email message to the series editor yesterday, I asked the Historian's Office (HO) to reconsider its action. To do so would serve the best interests of FRUS, I suggested.

"I know that a sizable fraction of my Secrecy News mailing list (which now exceeds 13,500 self-selected subscribers) has an interest in FRUS publications. Many of those subscribers are unlikely to be part of other existing networks of academics and historians through which news of FRUS is disseminated," I wrote.

"I would also willingly publish any criticism of my own writing that HO personnel or HAC [Historical Advisory Committee] members felt was warranted," I added.

The request to reinstate Secrecy News on the FRUS mailing list awaits a decision by the State Department Historian, Dr. Marc J. Susser.

Beauvoir belongs to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the successors of the United Confederate Veterans. Following Davis' death in 1889, Mrs. Davis sold it to the group for $10,000 after refusing 10 times that amount from an organization that wanted to turn it into commercial property. Mrs. Davis stipulated several things, mainly that the house and grounds be used as a retirement home for old soldiers and their widows, and once they were gone, that it be a shrine to her husband and the Confederate States.

It was on an impulse, a chance trip, that Davis first saw Beauvoir on Nov. 18, 1875.

Or was it destiny?

On a business trip to Mississippi City, he had taken time to call on an old friend, Mrs. Sarah Dorsey, who lived in a house named Beauvoir. Davis wrote to his wife, Varina, that it was "a fine place .... a large and beautiful house." He walked the grounds and fell in love with it. The pervading silence, the gentle heaving of the sea - what a blessed place, what a refuge it would be!

Within a year Mrs. Dorsey asked him to stay there, to write his tumultuous history of the Confederate States. In a small library on the grounds, he began the task.

Varina, however, did not come, making various excuses that were really based on unfounded jealousy. Realizing this, Mrs. Dorsey moved away and sold the place to Davis for $5,500 to be paid in three installments. He made one payment before she died of cancer, and in her will she left him the house and all her other property. She had been more than generous with her own ungrateful family, she said, and she greatly admired Jefferson Davis.

The peace at Beauvoir was often broken with those wanting to see the Southern statesman. Those who came were old veterans or their widows or their children; others had been leaders of the South. Some came alone, others in large delegations.

And the famous also came.

The man he most wanted to meet in America, Irish poet Oscar Wilde said, was Jefferson Davis, so in his usual, courteous manner, invited him to supper and to spend the night at Beauvoir. After the meal and a bit of conversation, Davis excused himself and went to bed, but Varina stayed up late into the night enjoying their guest. The next morning, after Wilde had gone, she expressed her displeasure at her husband's action, but he explained: he did not like Oscar Wilde.

A reporter from the Boston Globe who came to Beauvoir in 1885 wanted Davis to criticize Gen. U.S. Grant. Davis refused, telling the man that he knew Grant was dying, and that if it were in his power, "Instead of seeking to disturb his closing hours, I would contribute to the peace of his mind and the comfort of his body."

James Redpath, who had been an abolitionist before the war, was the most popular journalist in America in the late 1800s, and he asked for an audience with Davis where all his preconceived notions "utterly and forever disappeared."

What impressed him most about the elder statesman?

"It was his goodness, first of all, and then his intellectual integrity. I never saw an old man whose face bore more emphatic evidence of a gentle, refined and benignant character. He seemed to me the ideal embodiment of 'sweetness and light.'" He thought Davis "a statesman with clean hands and pure heart, who served his people faithfully from budding manhood to hoary age, without thought of self, with unbending integrity, and to the best of his great ability."

It was a common sight to see Jefferson Davis and his Russian bulldog, Traveller, walking along the beach in front of Beauvoir. The dog acted as a bodyguard, and when Davis would wander, perhaps deep in thought, too close to the waves, Traveller would tug at his trousers and lead him to safety.

One day the dog seemed almost listless and in pain. A physician friend came, but nothing could be done - the work of a poisoner had been carried out too well for remedy. At daylight he died, his head on Davis' knee, and the old man's tears fell like rain upon his faithful pet. "I have indeed lost a friend," he said as family and friends gathered for the burial of Traveller on the lawn.

On a March day in 1888 Jefferson Davis gave a brief address to a group of young men. It was his last speech, and he described himself as "a man without a country, for my ambitions lie buried in the grave of the Confederacy." He broke his silence only because of his love of the South, and he predicted a future for America that would leave all amazed. He asked for a reunited country.

Jefferson Davis died in December 1889 in New Orleans, where he was temporarily interred. His body was later moved to Richmond, Va., the funeral train winding its way across the South, people gathering at crossings and in large cities to pay tribute. The first stop was at Beauvoir where the tracks were covered for a half-mile in magnolia leaves and flowers.

There was a favorite spot, a place by a spring behind Beauvoir, where Jefferson Davis liked to sit and meditate, perhaps about what might have been, or maybe what was meant to be.