Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell on Tuesday when he told an audience at the University of Minnesota that the military was running an "executive assassination ring" throughout the Bush years which reported directly to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

The remark came out seemingly inadvertently when Hersh was asked by the moderator of a public discussion of "America's Constitutional Crisis" whether abuses of executive power, like those which occurred under Richard Nixon, continue to this day.

Hersh replied, "After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet."

Hersh then went on to describe a second area of extra-legal operations: the Joint Special Operations Command. "It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently," he explained. "They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. ... Congress has no oversight of it."

"It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on," Hersh stated.

On Monday an international conference organized by the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library and the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London, explored George Bush’s legacy and the significance of his Presidency.

The Right Man? Assessing the Legacy of George W. Bush covered Bush and the Institutions of American Government; Ideology and Ideas in the Bush Presidency; Bush Foreign Policy Legacy; and Ranking the Bush Presidency.

Yet, surprisingly, it was virtually an all-British affair: apart from the plenary address given by Andrew Rudalevige and closing electoral analysis by Larry Sabato each participant was British and teaches in the UK.

The United States Presidency Centre will publish under the Institute for the Study of the Americas an imprint edited collection of essays that are based on the conference proceedings in 2010. Given the quality of papers presented and differing conclusions reached the book is sure to be eagerly awaited.

The Bush administration has been history for seven weeks, and most of the ex-president's senior aides from his eight years in office -- with the notable exception of Karl Rove -- have stayed largely out of public sight. But many are quietly making their mark in the private sector.

For former Vice President Dick Cheney, post-political life will revolve largely around two activities: spending time with his grandchildren and fishing in Wyoming's rivers.

On Jan. 20, Cheney and his wife, Lynne, returned to Casper, Wyo., the small town in the western part of the state where he grew up.

"He's definitely looking forward to more time with the grandkids and enjoying the private life," a source close to Cheney told FOXNews.com, adding that the former vice president built a home in McLean, Va., and he plans to split time between the two states.

Cheney has acquired a BlackBerry since leaving office, the source said, and he's programmed his grandchildren's spring sports schedules into it.

In recent days the former vice president has held "small luncheons" to "invite people to talk about current events -- both on the economic front and on national security issues," the source said. "He follows what's happening very closely."

Cheney is expected to publish two memoirs focusing on his time in the White House and the 40 years he spent serving four presidents. The former vice president has signed with the Harry Walker Agency to pursue various speaking opportunities.

Condoleezza Rice is also reclaiming the life she had before joining the White House in 2001 as Bush's national security adviser and later secretary of state.

Rice has returned to Stanford University -- where she taught in 1981 and later served as provost -- to work as a senior fellow on public policy at the Hoover Institution and as a professor of political science, Rice's chief of staff, Colby Cooper told FOXNews.com.

Feminists of the world sit down before you read this. The Vatican newspaper says that perhaps the washing machine did more to liberate women in the 20th century than the pill or the right to work.

The submission was made in a lengthy article titled "The Washing Machine and the Liberation of Women - Put in the Detergent, Close the Lid and Relax."

The article was printed at the weekend in l'Osservatore Romano, the semi-official Vatican newspaper, to mark international Women's Day on Sunday.

"What in the 20th century did more to liberate Western women?," asks the article, which was written by a woman.

"The debate is heated. Some say the pill, some say abortion rights and some the right to work outside the home. Some, however, dare to go further: the washing machine," it says.

Even in citations, print is the default no more. The seventh edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, released Tuesday, states that the Modern Language Association no longer recognizes print as the default medium, and suggests that the medium of publication should be included in each works cited entry.

Moreover, the MLA has ceased to recommend inclusion of URLs in citing Web-based works – unless the instructor requires it or a reader would likely be unable to locate the source otherwise. “Inclusion of URLs has proved to have limited value… for they often change, can be specific to a subscriber or a session of use, and can be so long and complex that typing them into a browser is cumbersome and prone to transcription errors. Readers are now more likely to find resources on the Web by searching for titles and authors' names than by typing URLs,” states the handbook.

The trial in Ward Churchill's lawsuit against the University of Colorado got under way here on Tuesday with lawyers for the opposing sides painting starkly different pictures of both the controversial ethnic-studies professor and the circumstances surrounding his dismissal by the university in 2007.

In delivering their opening remarks in a crowded courtroom, both sides agreed that the university had been under intense outside pressure to fire Mr. Churchill as a result of the media uproar provoked by one of his essays, in which he compared many of those killed in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to a famous Nazi bureaucrat.

But, as they framed the arguments they intended to make during the planned three-week civil trial in a state district court, the lawyers made clear that they would concede nothing regarding their central point of contention: whether the university's decision to investigate, and subsequently fire, Mr. Churchill was motivated by a desire to quell the controversy over his essay—in violation of his First Amendment speech rights—or whether it represented a justified response to alleged academic misconduct on his part.

After a group of Israeli farmers sought last year to expand their property in the hills near Jerusalem, they discovered an archeological gem beneath the dirt.

A team led by Daniel Ein Mor barely had to scratch the surface before finding the remains of a Byzantine monastery, he told CNN on Wednesday.

"The excavation at Nes-Harim supplements our knowledge about the nature of the Christian-Byzantine settlement in the rural areas between the main cities in this part of the country during the Byzantine period," including Jerusalem, Mor said.

With bone fragment analysis, scientists put to rest the rumors that two children might have escaped the royal family's slaying during the Russian Revolution.

As carefully as Barack Obama prepared for it, the presidency has held some surprises for him—some foreseeable, some not, and some of his own making. Seeking to avoid the mistakes of the early Clinton era, Obama concluded that, unlike Clinton, he didn't want to hold the numerous meetings that can chew up so much of the president's time. Instead, according to his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, Obama's style is to drop by an aide's office—a restless man, he roams the White House corridors—or stop an aide in a hallway and ask, "How are you coming on that thing we were talking about?" Gibbs says, "The worst thing is not have an answer." Asked what happens then, Gibbs replied, "He gets that disappointed parent look, and then you better go find an answer."

Obama's publicly announced schedules have large gaps; he makes it a point to set aside time to step back and think—sometimes going for a long, solitary walk around the White House grounds—or make calls, or read. A night owl, he usually takes work home, to be studied after he's tucked his daughters into bed. Aides say he turns around paperwork fairly quickly, responding to and signing off on their memoranda. As for Obama's admission during the campaign that he can misplace papers, Gibbs told me, "It's easier now that he lives over the store."

Of Obama's approach to governing, Gibbs says, "He's not by any stretch a micromanager." According to another close observer, "The boys are running the White House"—by which he meant chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, chief campaign strategist and now senior adviser David Axelrod, and deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, who was also chief of staff of the campaign. Gibbs is often called in for advice, because he's smart and he knows Obama's mind well. This cast of characters—Axelrod has the prized if unglamorous office adjoining the President's study—gives a strong political tone to the Obama White House. To the disappointment of a number of Obama's supporters, he also has continued the widely criticized practice of having an office of Political Affairs in the White House (headed by Patrick Gaspard, national political director of the Obama campaign and a longtime labor activist).

Most Americans (53%) now think the United States is at least somewhat likely to enter a 1930’s-like depression within the next few years.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 39% think this outcome is unlikely.

Nineteen percent (19%) say a Depression is Very Likely while 7% say it is not at all likely.

The latest results are more pessimistic than those found in early January, when 44% said a 1930’s-like depression was likely in the next few years, and 46% disagreed.

He’s touted his father’s Kenyan roots and his mother’s Kansas upbringing.

But Irish Americans say they’re still waiting for Barack Obama to embrace another influential figure from his past: his great-great-great-grandfather Falmouth Kearney.

An Irish immigrant who came to America in 1850, Kearney hailed from Moneygall, County Offaly, a tiny Irish village about an hour and a half west of Dublin. And according to Ancestry.com, this link makes Obama about 3.1 percent Irish.

The relationship is a stretch, but the Irish — both in the U.S. and abroad — have since become fixated with turning Obama into O’Bama...

In Moneygall, there’s been a move to build an Obama exhibit near Kearney Gardens, ancestral land that officials say belonged to the Kearney family.

Margo M. Loflin teaches sophomores in Oklahoma, a state that was once part of the Dust Bowl of the Great Depression era. But most school years, her high school students don’t find the struggles of Oklahoma farmers to combat drought and financial hardship in the 1930s relevant to their lives. That's not true this year.

"I've taught [the Great Depression] for a long time. Usually, kids are not interested at all. They were very interested this year," she said recently.

Ms. Loflin, who teaches U.S. history at Norman High School in Norman, Okla., is among a number of history and social studies teachers who have found that because of the parallels they're able to draw between the current economic crisis and the Depression, their students are seeing that history is relevant. They’re engaging more deeply in history lessons than they have in previous years.

The remains of a medieval "vampire" have been discovered among the corpses of 16th century plague victims in Venice, according to an Italian archaeologist who led the dig.

The body of the woman was found in a mass grave on the Venetian island of Lazzaretto Nuovo. Suspecting that she might be a vampire, a common folk belief at the time, gravediggers shoved a rock into her skull to prevent her from chewing through her shroud and infecting others with the plague, said anthropologist Matteo Borrini of the University of Florence.

In the absence of medical science, vampires were just one of many possible contemporary explanations for the spread of the Venetian plague in 1576, which ran rampant through the city and ultimately killed up to 50,000 people, some officials estimate.

Not content to emulate Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, Republican icons for whom President Obama has expressed admiration in the past, Obama has aligned himself with a third GOP hero on the issue of health care.

"The problems we face today are a direct consequence of actions that we failed to take yesterday," Obama said, opening a health care conference in the East Room of the White House on March 5. "Since Teddy Roosevelt first called for reform nearly a century ago, we have talked and we have tinkered. We have tried and fallen short, we've stalled for time, and again we have failed to act because of Washington politics or industry lobbying."

We wondered whether Roosevelt really proposed reform on the scale of the near-universal health care Obama advocates, or if the new president was pushing the whole bipartisan-appeal thing a bit far.

We consulted two well-regarded biographers of Roosevelt, H.W. Brands and Kathleen Dalton. Both confirmed that in 1912, when the former Republican president was running as a Progressive Party candidate for what would have been his third term (after a four-year break), the party advocated national health insurance in its platform .

In the early hours of a July day in 1918, one of history's most infamous murders was perpetrated on parents, their five children and their loyal servants in a cellar in the city of Yekaterinburg, central Russia.

The gunshot-and-bayonet murder of the Romanovs – the family of the last Tsar and Tsarina of Russia – spawned countless conspiracy theories, including the belief that at least one child had survived to escape abroad.

Since that fatal dawn, about 200 people have claimed to descend from one or other of the Romanovs who had somehow survived the slaughter in the basement of Ipatiev House. But now a scientific study based on meticulous DNA evidence has finally provided irrefutable evidence to show that all five children had indeed perished with their parents at the hands of nervous Bolsheviks of the Ural Soviet, worried about a possible rescue bid by nearby White Russian troops.

Scientists have pieced together DNA evidence from two graves near Yekaterinburg and have conclusively shown that Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, the Tsarina Alexandra, died with all five of their children, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and their haemophiliac son, the crown prince, Alexei. The only remaining mystery is whether the girl buried alongside Alexei in a separate grave from the rest of the family was Maria or Anastasia, says a study printed in the online journal Public Library of Science.

The classification was carried out by a joint team of Italian-Iranian experts led by Iranian archaeologist Mansur Sajjadi over the 12th season of excavation that began in late December 2008.

This season was more focused on classification of those artifacts discovered in the Burnt City so far, Sajjadi told the Persian service of CHN on Tuesday.

“Classifying the artifacts was very essential for us… so they were categorized as pottery works, metal artifacts, tiny relics, human remains, animal remains, and fabrics,” he explained.

“The fabrics comprise ropes, cloths, and wickerworks. The classification of the fabrics was very important because they were in danger and in poor condition.

“The fabrics are currently kept in special cases and have been provided with cards bearing information about the objects.”

Similar steps have been taken for the animal remains, which are to be studied by archaezoologists in early April.

Additional excavations were also carried out in the Burnt City during the 12th season of studies.

As the nation prepares to celebrate Women’s History Month in March, New Jersey women past and present give visitors and residents plenty of reasons to explore the contributions of the Garden State’s fabulous females – while exploring New Jersey.

“From historically important women to pioneering female sports figures, New Jersey has a rich history of groundbreaking women residents,” notes New Jersey Secretary of State Nina Mitchell Wells. “Our state – and in fact, the nation – continues to benefit from the contributions of these strong women.”

Whether for a girls’ getaway, a mother-daughter weekend or simply time well spent with an important woman in your life, the New Jersey Division of Travel & Tourism offers 10 terrific reasons to explore the state in celebration of Women’s History Month.

In Boston, history is always just below the surface. And in Charlestown, underneath a row of genteel gardens, in the middle of a teeming city, is believed to be a mass grave containing the bones of possibly dozens of British soldiers killed in one of the most important battles in American history.

The site, part of the sprawling Bunker Hill battlefield, has been pinpointed by a curator from Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia and a Charlestown historian who are confident they know where the bodies were buried - 15 feet underground in what had been a rebel-dug ditch that featured some of the day's most ferocious fighting.

Above ground, few residents on quaint, stately Concord Street appear to know they might be living atop a historic, makeshift grave.

How did humans living in the third millennium BCE manage to find sufficient quantities of meat in the arid desert regions? A new study of the "desert kites" that are spread across the expanses of Israel's Negev and Arava desert region, carried out by researchers from the University of Haifa, unearths the answer to this riddle.

Already in the early 20th century, British pilots flying over the Middle Eastern deserts identified strange forms spreading over hundreds of meters, sometimes even over a few kilometers. The shapes looked like two long walls that meet at angles and at the meeting point of each wall was a round-shaped trench.

Tomorrow's commuter trains and a railside development could rob Utahns of a full understanding of their state's ancient past if the Legislature allows construction on the site of a buried village in Draper, archaeologists say. It's a site where a preliminary dig in 2007 found tantalizing evidence that archaic American Indians up to 3,000 years ago were farming and cooking corn -- hundreds of years before modern scientists previously believed farming had reached the Great Basin.

"It could reshape our understanding of the development of agriculture in the West," said Matthew Seddon, a consulting archaeologist and member of the Utah Professional Archaeological Council.

The idea that a comet blasted into eastern North America about 10,900 years ago has been receiving a lot of media attention lately.

The explosion, which is said to have been equivalent to a 100-million-megaton bomb, supposedly caused the extinction of the giant mammals of the ice age as well as the people who lived then.

R.B. Firestone of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and numerous co-authors presented the basic argument in an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2007. Since then, other research has cast considerable doubt on the claim.

"LOUGH GUR, one of Europe's most important archaeological sites and located in Co Limerick, could soon be awarded world heritage status."

One of Ireland's most important archaeological sites, Lough Gur, has been put on the tentative list of World Heritage sites. The application was made by Limerick County Council. The Lough Gur site dates back to the Neolithic period and there are many megalithic remains beside the lake. It boasts the largest stone circle in Ireland at Grange, and the remains of at least three crannogs within the lake.

The Supreme Court narrowed the reach of the Voting Rights Act, ruling that a measure aimed at helping minorities elect their preferred candidates only applies in electoral districts where minorities number more than 50% of the voting-age population.

The decision could make it harder for some minority candidates to win election and for Southern Democrats, in particular, to draw friendly electoral boundaries after the 2010 Census.