The Federal Prosecutor's Office in Karlsruhe revealed that genetic material unmistakably belonging to Becker had been found on several envelopes of letters claiming responsibility for the attack on April 7, 1977.

The assassination of Siegfried Buback, a strong opponent of the left-wing extremist terrorist group, marked the beginning of a wave of terrorist acts by the RAF in their radical opposition to the West German government. It remained one of the highest-profile political killings carried out by the RAF throughout the militant group's campaign.

Buback, his driver Wolfgang Goebel, and Georg Wurster, a court officer, were all shot dead on the way to the court house in Karlsruhe. A motorcycle pulled up to Buback's Mercedes when it stopped at a traffic light, and a passenger on the back opened fire with an automatic weapon.

Texas high school students would learn about such significant individuals and milestones of conservative politics as Newt Gingrich and the rise of the Moral Majority — but nothing about liberals — under the first draft of new standards for public school history textbooks.

And the side that got left out is very unhappy.

As it stands, students would get “one-sided, right wing ideology,” said Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio, chairman of the House Mexican American Caucus.

“We ought to be focusing on historical significance and historical figures. It's important that whatever course they take, that it portray a complete view of our history and not a jaded view to suit one's partisan agenda or one's partisan philosophy,” he said.

The State Board of Education has appointed “review committees” made up largely of active and retired school teachers to draft new social studies curriculum standards as well as six “expert reviewers” to help shape the final document.

The standards, which the board will decide next spring, will influence new history, civics and geography textbooks.

The first draft for proposed standards in United States History Studies Since Reconstruction says students should be expected “to identify significant conservative advocacy organizations and individuals, such as Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly and the Moral Majority.”

Chancellor Angela Merkel reiterated her support Saturday for a memorial to Germans forced to relocate from eastern Europe after World War II, but said it did not mean Germany was seeking to diminish responsibility for starting the war.

After the Third Reich collapsed in 1945 and borders were moved westward, millions of ethnic Germans in Poland, then-Czechoslovakia and elsewhere were viewed as traitors and were expelled or fled.

Backed by the German government, a group called the Federation of Expellees is moving ahead with plans for a memorial in Berlin for those dispossessed, which will also include information on expulsions of other people throughout history.

Merkel told the group at its annual meeting that the planned Center against Expulsions was an appropriate way to commemorate the expellees' plight.

They go by such nicknames as "Fat Cat" and "Tomboy." Their simmering power struggles once drove them into the streets, guns blazing. They rule their crime families with steely determination, and also raise the kids and stir the pasta.

Move over, Don Corleone. Godmothers are rising in the ranks of the Camorra, the Naples' area crime syndicate.

Women have long played a strong role in Camorra crime families, muscling, sometimes murdering, their way to the top. Their influence stretches back as far as the 1950s when a pregnant former beauty queen dubbed "pupetta" (little doll) shot dead the man who had ordered a hit on her husband, and allegedly settled into a life of crime.

Now, as the state steps up its war against the Camorra, rounding up scores of mobsters, the women are increasingly taking over the helm from their men.

Is he the evil perpetrator of the deadliest terrorist attack in British history, or a sick old man, a loving father and grandfather, who has suffered a terrible miscarriage of justice? Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi put on a virtuoso performance when The Times came calling yesterday.

He did not come across as bitter or angry but continued to insist on his innocence, as he has done from the day of his conviction. He abandoned his appeal, he said, not because he was guilty but to give himself the best possible chance of going home before he died. He had applied to be freed on compassionate grounds and also to be transferred to a Libyan prison under the terms of an agreement Britain and Libya signed in April. One of the conditions of the latter was that all legal proceedings had to be finished.

He denied reports that he had been pressured to drop the appeal by a Scottish or British government terrified that such a hearing would expose a grave miscarriage of justice, but he added: “If there is justice in the UK I would be acquitted or the verdict would be quashed because it was unsafe. There was a miscarriage of justice.”

Archeologists unearthed 16,000 year-old mother goddess figurine during excavations in Direkli Cave in the southern province of Kahramanmaras...

... Erek said that the figurine showed that the social status of women was very important 16,000 years ago.

Erek noted that the oldest fired clay god or goddess figurines --unearthed in Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Near East-- were made in 5,000 BC. He added that experts believed that the clay was used earliest in that period, however, the goddess figurine showed that this method was older than thought.

More than 10 years after taxpayers shelled out $27 million to buy the land around the Miami Circle, ground was finally broken Friday on a new park that will open the ancient Native American site to the public.

Located at the mouth of the Miami River, the 2,000-year-old limestone slab was not on display and the park is not scheduled to open until next spring, but local officials said the groundbreaking was an important first step toward developing the historic space.

Archaeologists believe the 38-foot-wide limestone circle's carvings were postholes for a round structure built by the Tequesta, Miami's original inhabitants.

A prehistoric water-filled cave in the Dominican Republic has become a 'treasure trove' with the announcement by archaeologists of the discovery of stone tools, a small primate skull in remarkable condition, and the claws, jawbone and other bones of several species of sloths. The discoveries extend by thousands of years the scope of investigations led Charles Beeker, director of Academic Diving and Underwater Science Programs at IU Bloomington's School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation, and his interdisciplinary team of collaborators.

"The virtually intact extinct faunal skeletons really amazed me, but what may prove to be a fire pit from the first human occupation of the island just seems too good to be true. But now that the lithics (stone tools) are authenticated, I can't wait to direct another underwater expedition into what may prove to become one of the most important prehistoric sites in all the Caribbean," Beeker said. Beeker and researchers Jessica Keller and Harley McDonald found the tools and bones in fresh water 28- to 34-feet deep in a cave called Padre Nuestro.

Geoffrey Conrad, director of the Mathers Museum of World Culture at Indiana University Bloomington and professor of anthropology, said the tools are estimated to be 4,000 to 6,500 years old. The bones might range in age from 4,000 and 10,000 years old. While sloth bones are not uncommon, he knows of only a handful of other primate skulls found in the Caribbean. "I know of no place that has sloths, primates and humanly made stone tools together in a nice, tight association around the same time," said Conrad, "This site definitely is worthy of a large-scale investigation."

Some 2,500 years ago, a mysterious culture emerged in Nigeria. The Nok people left behind bizarre terracotta statues - and little else. Archaeologists are now looking for more clues to explain this obscure culture...

...Like their cemeteries, the temples and huts of the Nok have disappeared without a trace. No one knows what their farm animals, streets or religious ceremonies were like. But the shards of clay statues are everywhere - on rock slopes, in ancient refuse pits and in open spaces. The largest of these impressive figures can stand up to one meter (3.3 feet) tall and resemble what might be kings or members of a social elite. Others wear horned helmets or carved-out gourds on their heads. A third of these figures are women...

... For the time being, though, the purpose of the Nok statues remains unclear. And then there's still the question of whether these objects have anything to do with the Nok people making contact with other people. "There's no doubt that the Nok will continue to baffle us," Breunig says. "We're unearthing a magnificent part of the history of sub-Saharan Africa."

A 5,000-year-old carving discovered in the Orkney Islands is being hailed as the oldest face in Scotland by archaeologists. At first glance, it appears little more than a tiny fragment of sandstone with a few crude scratches on the surface. Yet this precious object is the earliest carving of the human form to be found in Scotland - there are only two others in the whole of the British mainland.

The face and its lozenge-shaped body - measuring just 3.5cm by 3cm - were carved on the Orkney island of Westray between 4,500 and 5,000 years ago. The enigmatic figurine had lain undisturbed in the earth at the Links of Noltland - one of Orkney's richest archaeological sites - until just last week. That was when archaeologists, carefully brushing away the mud from the fragment of sandstone, found Scotland's earliest human face staring back at them.

A large number of prehistoric archaeological sites in the Valencia Region (Spain) do not have adequate protection and are open to acts of vandalism and stealing, a report warned. The caves dating back to the Palaeolithic period and in some cases to the Iron Age located in La Safor district have no protection at all...

... All appear to have been forgotten by the authorities in favour of more modern causes such as baroque churches, 19th century buildings and monuments that are less then 100 years old...

... Some of the artwork found on the walls of the caves dates back to between 10,000 to 30,000 BCE. In the case of La Penya Roja, which was discovered in the 80s, items found there date the cave to between 25,000 to 50,000 BCE and the suspicions are that they were inhabited at least 500,000 years ago. Conservationists are calling for urgent action from the government to protect these sites.

China's founding dynasty may just be a myth, say archaeologists. In a news report published in Science magazine, writer Andrew Lawler surveys a decade's worth of discoveries suggesting ancient China sprang from distinct regions, rather than possessing a single national culture some 4,300 years ago. "How China became China is no mere academic topic; it goes to the very heart of how the world's most populous and economically vibrant nation sees itself and its role in the world," Lawler writes.

Since 2004, archeologists headed by Wang Wei of the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing have begun tying together a broader picture of China's origins."Most of us accepted that the Yellow River was the origin of Chinese civilization. But as we've done more research, we have found other cultural areas," Wei tells Science.

Is he the evil perpetrator of the deadliest terrorist attack in British history, or a sick old man, a loving father and grandfather, who has suffered a terrible miscarriage of justice? Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi put on a virtuoso performance when The Times came calling yesterday...

... Al-Megrahi promised that before he died he would present new evidence through his Scottish lawyers that would exonerate him. “My message to the British and Scottish communities is that I will put out the evidence and ask them to be the jury,” he said. He refused to elaborate.

Asked who, then, was responsible for the deaths of 270 people who died in the Lockerbie bombing, al-Megrahi smiled. “It’s a very good question but I’m not the right person to ask.” He insisted that it was not Libya and would not be drawn on suggestions that it was Syria, Iran or the Palestinians.

He said that he understood why many of the victims’ relatives were angry at his release. “They have hatred for me. It’s natural to behave like this,” he said, although he pointedly added that others had written to him in prison to say that they forgave him whether he was guilty or innocent. He appealed for the families’ understanding. “They believe I’m guilty which in reality I’m not. One day the truth won’t be hiding as it is now. We have an Arab saying: ‘The truth never dies’.”

As the conversation grew more serious and more politically sensitive, relatives intervened to say that al-Megrahi was tired and that the interview should end. His mother was led in. She was frail but manifestly buoyed by the return of a son whom she has seen just twice in a decade. “Thank God he’s here again and well,” she said...

A month before Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi plans to visit the U.S. for the first time, his regime Thursday ignored President Obama’s direct appeal not to give the Libyan convicted for his role in the Lockerbie bombing a hero’s welcome on his return to Tripoli.

Former intelligence agent Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, freed by the Scottish authorities on compassionate grounds after serving just eight years of a life sentence, was flown home on Gaddafi’s jet, accompanied by Gaddafi’s son and possible heir.

In Tripoli, he was greeted on his arrival Thursday evening by thousands of jubilant Libyans. Patriotic music played, flower petals were thrown. Some in the celebratory crowd wore t-shirts bearing Megrahi’s picture, and Libyan and Scottish flags were waved.

Civil Rights activist Diane Nash launched Liverpool’s Slavery Remembrance Day Festival (21-23 August) with a free memorial lecture on Friday evening at the Town Hall.

Nash’s hour-long talk, Reflections on the American Civil Rights Movement, focused on her “agaphic energy” during the struggle and was greatly received by a packed council chamber.

This was Nash’s first visit to the UK, and the 71-year-old is set to depart immediately on what is a whistle-blowing tour.

In speaking at Liverpool, Nash follows in the footsteps of Jesse Jackson who delivered a public lecture in the city last December.

The idea that primitive hunter-gatherers lived in harmony with the landscape has long been challenged by researchers, who say
Stone Age humans in fact wiped out many animal species in places as varied as the mountains of New Zealand and the plains of
North America. Now scientists are proposing a new arena of ancient depredation: the coast.

In an article in Friday’s issue of
the journal Science, anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Oregon cite evidence of sometimes serious damage by early inhabitants along the coasts of the Aleutian Islands, New England, the Gulf of Mexico, South Africa and California’s Channel Islands, where the
researchers do fieldwork.

He is accused of stealing a priceless first edition work of Shakespeare – and arrived at court in a horse-drawn carriage, wearing Highland tartan and swigging from a bottle of Drambuie.

Raymond Scott, who claims to be distantly related to Bonnie Prince Charlie, faced a judge at Durham Crown Court dressed in a kilt of Royal Stewart tartan, a Harris Tweed jacket, cravat and a pair of limited edition £1,000 Fendi sunglasses.

The eccentric antique book dealer, who faces charges relating to the theft of a Shakespeare first folio that went missing from Durham University Library more than 10 years ago, answered "Aye, that I am" to questions from the judge.

He then gazed, with his head tipped back, at the ceiling lights as his lawyer discussed a date to fix his trial.

Mr Scott, 52, faces a total of eight charges including stealing the book, and an alternative charge of handling stolen goods. He will face trial next summer, when expert witnesses from the US and Cuba will be called to give evidence by video link.

Russia has declassified top-secret surveillance documents in an attempt to justify its occupation of Eastern Europe under the Nazi-Soviet pact, signed 70 years ago on Sunday.

The hidden protocols of the pact, in which Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler agreed to carve up Poland and other sovereign states, were denounced by the Soviet parliament in 1989, shortly after they were revealed for the first time.

But the pact, which lasted until Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, is now being rehabilitated to chime with Kremlin ideology that claims a Russian sphere of interest in the "near abroad" former Soviet republics.

It’s no contest: Teddy Roosevelt’s post-presidential vacation puts other presidential vacations to shame. Three weeks after he left the White House in 1909, Roosevelt embarked on an African safari that lasted nearly a year. He’d always wanted to hunt the continent’s big game, but he also wanted the trip to be a scientific one—so he invited the Smithsonian Institute to come along, and donated animal trophies to the institute, providing dozens of new species for its collections. As if the safari wasn’t productive enough, Roosevelt wrote a series of articles about it for Scribner’s magazine, for a fee of $50,000. In 1910, the articles were published in a book, African Game Trails

The Pakistani government has lifted a ban on political activities in its tribal areas along the Afghan border, including a ban on membership in political parties that dates to colonial times.

President Asif Ali Zardari announced the changes last week in hope that tribesmen would begin a political opposition to Taliban and al Qaeda sympathizers, who hold sway in mosques.

Previously, about 4 million residents of seven Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) could not belong to a political party or run for public office on any political party's ticket, and politicians from elsewhere in the country could not hold rallies, make speeches, register voters or engage in any other political activity...

... This, he said, enabled the Taliban to increase its influence on Pakistan's side of the border, especially after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S.

Candidates backed by the Taliban won all 12 National Assembly seats from FATA in 2002 and most of the seats in 2007 elections, Mr. Wazir said.

"The problem is that [members of parliament] from FATA have become virtual spokesmen of Taliban and advocates of their agenda," said Ijaz Khattak, another Peshawar-based analyst.

Pakistani religious parties formed an alliance back in 2001, first called the Afghan Defense Council and later Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, to support the Afghan Taliban regime and resist the U.S.-led coalition's military operations in Afghanistan...

As Mexicans debate last week’s Supreme Court ruling vacating the conviction of 20 men for the Acteal massacre, newly declassified documents from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency describe the Army’s role in backing paramilitary groups in Chiapas at the time of the killings. The secret cables confirm reporting about military support for indigenous armed groups carrying out attacks on pro-Zapatista communities in the region and add important new details. They also revive a question that has lingered for almost 12 years: when will the Army come clean about its role in Acteal?

Since the brutal attack of December 22, 1997, the Mexican government has offered multiple versions of the military’s involvement in the conflictive Chiapas zone around Acteal. The problem is the accounts have been incomplete or untrue. The most important of the DIA documents directly contradicts the official story told about the massacre by the government of then-President Ernesto Zedillo.

In the report issued by the nation’s Attorney General Jorge Madrazo in 1998, Libro Blanco Sobre Acteal, the government asserted that “The Attorney General’s office has documented the existence of groups of armed civilians in the municipality of Chenalhó, neither organized, created, trained, nor financed by the Mexican Army nor by any other government entity, but whose management and organization respond to an internal logic determined by the confrontation, between and within the communities, with the Zapatista bases of support.”

But in a telegram sent to DIA headquarters in Washington on May 4, 1999, the U.S. Defense Attaché Office in Mexico points to “direct support” by the Army to armed groups in the highland areas of Chiapas, where the killings took place. The document describes a clandestine network of “human intelligence teams,” created in mid-1994 with approval from then-President Carlos Salinas, working inside Indian communities to gather intelligence information on Zapatista “sympathizers.” In order to promote anti-Zapatista armed groups, the teams provided “training and protection from arrests by law enforcement agencies and military units patrolling the region.”...

Former US homeland security chief Tom Ridge charges in a new book that top aides to then-president George W. Bush pressured him to raise the "terror alert" level to sway the November 2004 US election.

Then defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and attorney general John Ashcroft pushed him to elevate the color-coded threat level, but Ridge refused, according to a summary from his publisher, Thomas Dunne Books.

"After that episode, I knew I had to follow through with my plans to leave the federal government for the private sector," Ridge is quoting as writing in "The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege ... And How We Can Be Safe Again."

Some of Bush's critics had repeatedly questioned whether the administration was using warnings of a possible attack to blunt the political damage from the unpopular Iraq war by shifting the debate to the broader "war on terrorism," which had wide popular appeal.

After we conducted polls over the last couple of weeks finding significant numbers of 'birthers' in North Carolina and Virginia, we decided to take the question national but also drum down more specifically on where exactly the people who think Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States do think he's from.

The answer is that 62% of Americans think Obama was born here, while 24% think he was not and 14% are unsure.

10% of the country thinks that he was born in Indonesia, 7% think he was born in Kenya, and 1% think he was born in the Philippines.

That leaves 20%, which includes at least some people who correctly believe that Obama was born in Hawaii, but who don't consider Hawaii to be part of the United States. You read that right- 6% of poll respondents think that Hawaii is not part of the country and 4% are unsure.

It's hard to say what the rest of that 20% thinks. We did ask them if they thought Obama was born in France and while less than half a percent of respondents did, two thirds of that remaining 20% said they 'weren't sure' whether Obama was a Frenchman.

It's a funny thing about Boston: A city rich with nearly 400 years of history doesn't have a museum of Boston history.

But developer Frank Keefe and a high-powered team of civic leaders hope to change that. They're working to get rights from the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority to build a Boston Museum on a vacant parcel between the Rose Kennedy Greenway and Haymarket outdoor fruit and vegetable market. It's officially called Parcel 9 on plans for post-Big-Dig redevelopment of Boston.

"This is going to be a very successful museum,'' said Keefe, a former top aide to former Massachusetts governor Michael S. Dukakis who went on to become a private developer building projects like the Hotel Commonwealth in Kenmore Square and others. "Boston has history, more history than any other city in America. People come here for history, and we only show them a tiny slice of the history we have.''