Barack Obama's planned trip to Germany in June is not going to be an official state visit. German diplomatic sources told SPIEGEL ONLINE that the US president is planning a private trip in which he will go on a personal search to places of importance for his family history.

On Tuesday, the news became public that a White House advance team is currently in the eastern German city of Dresden, where they are looking for possible accommodations for the president. In addition to a short visit to the city on the Elbe River, the president is also intending to visit the memorial at the former Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald.

Obama's great-uncle, Charlie Payne, served in the 89th Infantry Division during World War II and participated in the liberation of Ohrdruf, a forced labor camp that was a satellite camp of Buchenwald. It's possible Obama could visit on June 5, one day before his planned participation in the celebrations of the 65th anniversary of the landing of the American troops in Normandy.

In his first public speech since announcing his retirement from the Supreme Court, Justice David Souter argued Tuesday that while most justices and cases are quickly forgotten, they play an “imperative” role in maintaining a safe, stable democracy.

“For most of us, the very best work that we do sinks into the stream pretty quickly," Souter told more than 300 judges at the annual Third Circuit Judicial Conference in Philadelphia....

Quoting a legal scholar who once questioned his place in history, Souter’s answer was that judges must look at the big picture when considering their impact.

“Our value does not come from the moment we all aspire to have---the moment of the error-free trial, of the perfect decision and opinion…(we) thought should get into the case books by next year,” Souter said, noting that there are only a handful of famous decisions remembered beyond 20 years like Marbury v. Madison (1803).

“If we are a lucky we all have a few of those (decisions) in our careers. But if we are honest we have to realize our significance, even if we are lucky, is very slight,” he said.

In a small cemetery on the outskirts of Madrid, the 2,300 British volunteers who risked their lives to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War will finally be remembered in a brief ceremony.

But for almost all those who served with the International Brigades, the granite plaque unveiled in their honour has come too late.

Most of those who travelled to Spain to fight General Franco’s Nationalist uprising are dead. None of the seven frail survivors, now in their 90s, is well enough to travel to the ceremony on Thursday.

The plaque, at Fuencarral Cemetery, north of Madrid, is dedicated to all the English speaking members of the International Brigades who served on the side of the Republican Government between 1936 and 1939.

"Mein Kampf," Adolf Hitler's autobiography, is flying off the shelves at Indian book stores as business students look to Germany's former dictator for inspiration, the Telegraph reported.

Indian students see the book as a self-improvement and management strategy guide, sources told the British newspaper.

Some experts say the book's popularity stems from political reasons, and has little to do with management.

Who in the George W. Bush White House tried to shred a memo challenging the use of torture?

On April 21, Philip Zelikow, who was counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during the Bush administration, revealed on Foreign Policy's "Shadow Government" blog that he wrote a memo in 2005 disputing the conclusions of Bush Justice Department lawyers that torture was legal. The existence of such a memo was a surprise. But Zelikow also disclosed that the "White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo."

This story is not over. Zelikow tells Mother Jones that he doesn't know for sure who in the White House ordered the suppression of his memo, but he says that his "supposition at the time" was that the office of Vice President Dick Cheney was behind the cover-up. In an email exchange with Mother Jones, Zelikow notes that Cheney's office did not have the authority to request that his memo be deep-sixed: "They didn't run the interagency process. Such a request would more likely have come from the White House Counsel's office or from NSC staff." But that request did not reach him in written form. "It was conveyed to me, and I ignored it," Zelikow recalls. But he suspected that Team Cheney was probably behind it.

Zelikow, who is scheduled to testify before a Senate judiciary subcommittee on Wednesday, also notes that his memo was not the only one raising questions about the administration's legal rationale supporting so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques": "There were a number of papers, mainly arguing for alternative legal frameworks." But his memo, he adds, was "a more direct assault on [the Bush Justice Department's] own interpretation of American law."

New archaeological discoveries in Sharjah's Jebel Fayah (United Arab Emirates) showed that human settlements existed in the area over 85,000 years ago. Excavation work was carried out as part of a joint programme between the Directorate of Antiquities at the Culture and Information Department in Sharjah and the Institute of Prehistoric Studies and Research at the German University of Tubengin.

In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge tribunal is providing fresh insights about Pol Pot's bloody regime.

The trial of Kang Guek Eav, also known as Duch, has gone into recess after testimony that ultimate responsibility for death camps like S-21 lay with Nuon Chea. Known as Brother Number Two, he awaits trial.

Duch, who ran the S-21 prison in Phnom Penh, told the court there were 196 such camps, now known as the Killing Fields, between 1975 and 1979. During those years, as many as two million people or a third of this country's population, perished under the Khmer Rouge government.

He said the camps were based on a prototype called M-13, built in 1971 in a communist-held zone when Pol Pot's forces battled the U.S.-backed Lon Nol government.

Duch's preferred weapons for torture were whips and electric shocks, he said, as they were simpler than waterboarding and less likely to kill the victim during questioning. Testimony in the trial resumes later this month.

Theary Seng, executive director of Cambodia's Center for Social Development, says Duch's testimony has gone a long way in telling ordinary Cambodians what happened under the ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge.

"Even for us who have been following the tribunal since its establishment, who have been reading up on the tribunal, on the history of the Khmer Rouge, we have found surprising pieces of information we had not seen or read before," said Seng.

Duch also testified that Chinese diplomats and trade officials were in Cambodia at that time and were shielded from the killings going on behind the scenes.

The Khmer Rouge were ousted in 1979, after Vietnam invaded Cambodia, but many kept fighting in parts of the country into the 1990s. Pol Pot, the leader, went into hiding and was not found until 1997. But he died in 1998, before being brought to trial.

The Cambodian government and the United Nations negotiated for several years on setting up a human rights court to try other senior Khmer Rouge. The Duch trial is the first. But many of his colleagues have died, and the survivors are elderly, raising fears that very few Khmer Rouge leaders will be brought to justice.

Theary Seng says testimony like Duch's is cathartic for the country and is sparking debate among Cambodians who normally prefer not to talk about their tragic past.

"One of the most important aspects of the Duch trial has been hearing his words, his confessions, his explanations directly from himself…. So the Khmer Rouge tribunal is shedding light on this very, very dark period and it's helping to write history for Cambodians," said Seng.

And this, say human rights activists, should go a long way in helping to heal the survivors of the Killing Fields.

It took some detective work, but a Highland Park synagogue now has photographs -- grainy but dramatic -- to commemorate a visit by Rev. Martin Luther King in 1966.

Unearthed from storage by the Highland Park police, a half-dozen black-and-white photos of King and his entourage -- possibly taken for surveillance purposes -- were recently digitized and presented to Congregation Solel.

"We had pretty much given up hope of ever finding any photos from his visit," said Sharon Diaz, executive director of the congregation. "It was a wonderful gift."

One hundred and twenty-three years ago this week, a series of events regarding the burgeoning of the labor movement in the United States culminated into what Howard Zinn, historian and professor emeritus of political science at Boston University, in a phone interview last week, calls "the most dramatic event of that period" and "one of the great judicial scandals in American history." The incident itself, known as the "Haymarket Affair," reads like a macabre drama of triumph and tragedy involving an inspiring social movement struggling against the forces of evil, a retaliatory bombing of police officers and the trial/execution of a group of innocents accused egregiously of the crime.

After having narrated for the Wildcat an American people's history of International Workers Day ("A people's history of May Day" May 1, 2009), Zinn elaborated on the continuing effect of the atmosphere that came to signify the International Workers Day: "The May Day strikes around the country, in Chicago, led to a strike at the McCormick Harvester plant. And the police were called out to break up the strike. And police are not neutral. Police are generally on the side of the bosses, the corporations. The police came out and they killed several strikers," inciting great anger in the labor community.

It's suitable to pause for a moment at the beginning and note the protagonists of the history, American anarchists. Just as in Europe, Zinn recalled, in the U.S. there was a strong anarchist movement, which had its center in Chicago. "And the anarchist organizers in Chicago called for a protest against the killing of the Harvester workers. And so a rally was called for Haymarket Square in Chicago. And there were hundreds of people at the rally, and it was addressed by various people who supported the labor movement, including several anarchist leaders."

For the first time in history, federal money has surpassed sales and income tax collections as the largest source of revenue for state governments, USA Today reports. And the shift is just beginning, with tax collections continuing to sink while the bulk of federal stimulus aid is just starting to arrive. As Indiana State Sen. Jim Buck points out, "This money isn't manna from heaven. It comes with a price." He worries that the federal money will leave states under greater federal control and burden future generations with debt. The federal government plans to provide about $300 billion in extra aid to state and local governments over the next two years, mostly for health care, education and transportation projects. State and local governments spend about $2 trillion a year, and the federal government is now paying about 23 percent of those costs.

Duke University Press will publish a book by S. Ann Dunham, the mother of President Barack Obama, in December 2009. Dunham, who died in 1995, completed the dissertation in anthropology for the University of Hawaii in 1992. The book is based on Dunham’s research, over a period of 14 years, among the rural craftsmen of Java. At the request of Dunham’s daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, two anthro- pologists — Alice G. Dewey, Dunham’s graduate adviser, and Nancy I. Cooper, a fellow graduate student — have revised and edited the dissertation, which is called “Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia.” “Surviving against the Odds” centers on the metalworking industries in the Javanese village of Kajar, and how they offer a viable economic alternative in a rice-dependent area of rural Southeast Asia.

“It is a great privilege for Duke University Press to be publishing this remarkable work by Ann Dunham,” said Ken Wissoker, editorial director of Duke University Press. “Her global perspective and obvious respect for other people’s intelligence and self-direction is a model we all can learn from. Her children clearly have!”

Robert W. Hefner, director of the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs at Boston University and current president of the Association for Asian Studies, wrote the afterword for the book. He said he finds Dunham’s work on metalworkers prescient. “Ann Dunham’s legacy remains relevant today for anthropology, Indonesian studies, and engaged scholarship,” he said. Maya Soetoro-Ng said she was “delighted that our mother’s book is being published, and I am grateful to Duke University for making this dream of hers come true. My hope is that this book will be read by those who come to love the particularities of its world and who also see the myriad potential application of its ideas and methods to other worlds.” ###

A manmade lake project in Brevard County is on hold again, this time after experts say ancient remains were discovered in the lake bed.

Workers on the project found bones and teeth fragments in April in Malabar in an area that was set to be flooded to create Lake Lawton. The human remains have been reburied. Thousands of other items including fish hooks and tools believed to be fashioned by American Indians from bones have been sent to a laboratory.

Experts believe the bones and artifacts could be as much as 5,000-years-old.

Work has halted at the site while Federal officials work with the Seminole and Miccosukee Native American tribes to determine the next step.

Chinese scientists will soon launch an excavation at a cave where the first Peking Man skull was found with an aim to find more relics of ape men who were believed to live as early as 770,000 years ago.

The excavation will start in mid May and last two months at the western slope of the Peking Man Site, said Gao Xing, deputy director and a research fellow of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Palaeoanthropology, in an interview with Xinhua on Monday.

Excavations at the Peking Man Site had yielding more than 200 human fossils, 100,000 pieces of stoneware and animal fossils of 98 mammal species and 62 bird species, according to Gao.

The Greek-born fighter survived Auschwitz by participating in win-or-die bouts staged by the Nazis. Decades after the Holocaust, Arouch served as a consultant on a film about his captivity.

Arouch's harrowing series of win-or-die bouts during the final two years of World War II was immortalized in 1989 in "Triumph of the Spirit," the first major motion picture filmed on location at Auschwitz. The film, along with Arouch's inspirational postwar speeches, became part of his legacy in Israel. It has been shown to hundreds of Israelis preparing for visits to the site of the infamous Nazi camp in Poland.

Arouch was a young middleweight boxing star in his native Salonika, Greece, when German forces seized him along with about 47,000 other Jews from the city in 1943 and sent them in boxcars to Auschwitz's gas chambers and labor camps.

A Duke-Durham collaboration merges Google Earth technology with historic city maps to offer a new online resource for educators, historians.

The Digital Durham Web site (http://digitaldurham.duke.edu/) -- which includes U.S. Census data, photographs, personal and public records dating back to post-Civil War Durham -- recently added more than 30 newly digitized maps from the city Department of Public Works and university libraries, including two integrated with Google Earth satellite images of present-day Durham.

Local preservation designer Sara Davis Lachenman said the Digital Durham site already has proved an invaluable resource in her work restoring and remodeling houses in the downtown area.

George W. Bush has often said that historians will vindicate his presidency. And since he left office, he's been moving fast to give them the tools.

Longtime financial backers of the 43rd President have raised more than $100 million for a presidential library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas that will house his official papers, sources close to Bush told TIME. Much of the money was collected in the 100 days or so since Bush left the White House, a pace much faster than that of his recent predecessors. At least so far, none of it has come from overseas, the sources said. (See pictures of George W. Bush as President.)

The Bush fundraising effort, compared with that of his predecessor, is off to a brisk start.

The makers of an acclaimed documentary about the Tiananmen Square demonstrations say that a lawsuit brought against them by one of the leading student activists shows that she has abandoned the principle of freedom of speech.

Chai Ling, once among the most-wanted people in China, is suing the makers of Gate of Heavenly Peace, claiming that a website accompanying the film infringes the trademark of her US-based software firm, Jenzabar Inc. The company claims that Long Bow Group, a small independent organisation based in Boston, is “motivated by ill-will, their sympathy for officials in the Communist Government of China, and a desire to discredit Chai, a former student leader in the pro-democracy movement”.

A court has already dismissed a defamation suit brought by Ms Chai. The claim that the film-makers are infringing trademark by mentioning Jenzabar on their website also looks unlikely to succeed, according to court statements.

But the case has led to accusations that Ms Chai has forgotten the ideals of freedom of speech. Carma Hinton, a founder of Long Bow, told The Times that the former activist appeared to have set aside the ideals of an open society for which she fought so courageously 20 years ago on Tiananmen Square.

Vincent van Gogh's fame may owe as much to a legendary act of self-harm, as it does to his self-portraits. But, 119 years after his death, the tortured post-Impressionist's bloody ear is at the centre of a new controversy, after two historians suggested that the painter did not hack off his own lobe but was attacked by his friend, the French artist Paul Gauguin.

According to official versions, the disturbed Dutch painter cut off his ear with a razor after a row with Gauguin in 1888. Bleeding heavily, Van Gogh then walked to a brothel and presented the severed ear to an astonished prostitute called Rachel before going home to sleep in a blood-drenched bed.

But two German art historians, who have spent 10 years reviewing the police investigations, witness accounts and the artists' letters, argue that Gauguin, a fencing ace, most likely sliced off the ear with his sword during a fight, and the two artists agreed to hush up the truth.

In Van Gogh's Ear: Paul Gauguin and the Pact of Silence, published in Germany, Hamburg-based academics Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans argue that the official version of events, based largely on Gauguin's accounts, contain inconsistencies and that both artists hinted that the truth was more complex.