The road to success for President Obama's Afghanistan strategy runs through India, goes an increasingly familiar refrain. That's because reversing the Taliban's momentum requires getting rid of the movement's sanctuary in Pakistan, where the insurgent leadership is known to be based in and around the city of Quetta. But while Pakistan is aggressively tackling its domestic Taliban, it has consistently declined to act against Afghan Taliban groups based on its soil — because it sees the Afghan Taliban as a useful counterweight to what it believes is the dominant influence in today's Afghanistan of Pakistan's arch-enemy, India. Unless India can be persuaded to take steps to ease tensions with Pakistan, some suggest, Pakistan will not be willing to shut down the Afghan Taliban.

Needless to say, that argument is not exactly conventional wisdom in New Delhi.

Indian influence has expanded after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and toppled the Taliban — it had been a longtime supporter of the Northern Alliance, the anti-Taliban coalition that dominated the Karzai government, and it poured hundreds of millions of dollars of aid into supporting the new regime. That's left many in Pakistan raising the specter of Indian encirclement — a concern noted by U.S. General Stanley McChrystal in September, when he said that "increasing Indian influence in Afghanistan is likely to exacerbate regional tensions." Some U.S. pundits have even called for India to scale back its operations in order to appease the Pakistanis.

Indian officials have little time for such reasoning. Events northwest of the Khyber Pass have had a central place in the strategic calculations of generations of rulers in Delhi, dating back to the imperial Mughals and the colonial British. India's ties with Kabul had lapsed during the bloody civil war that saw the Pakistani-backed Taliban rise to power in 1996, turning Afghanistan into a hotbed of extremism, some of it directed against India. In 1999, an Indian passenger airliner was hijacked by Pakistani nationals and flown to Afghanistan — negotiating for the release of the hostages, India was forced to free three Islamist militants, one of whom was later implicated in the killing of American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. The Taliban also forged links with fundamentalist groups waging war on India in the disputed territory of Kashmir. "The consequences of that vacuum where Pakistan stepped in and meddled were horrendous for India," says Harsh Pant, professor of defence studies at King's College London. "It's a lesson no one in India is in the mood to learn again."...

The fact that there is a hall of ages within the haphazard maze of tunnels and aqueducts beneath Jerusalem’s old city is not a great discovery. Archeologists knew this hall existed for more than 30 years. They Just could not enter the hall because ancient building techniques and materials left the place unstable. The walls were buckling in and part of the ceiling had collapsed. Since thousands of years with no particular strategy in city planning left rooms, hallways and chambers stacked on each other, a collapse of this room could have meant a substantial cave in...

... It was that simple and centuries of history were re-opened for discovery. So much was discovered in this one room that site engineer Ofer Cohen said, “We changed a few of the Archeological books written in recent years.” They could tell by the changing construction techniques that the room had been used and altered by nearly every group of people who stopped in or occupied Jerusalem. Early Jews, the Romans, Persians, Crusaders and Islamists. And apparently ancient people were very sloppy. It seems with every dig, researchers find chards of pottery and old coins which also show the researchers all the different people from all the different ages who entered that hall, hence the name it’s been given: the Hall of Ages.

Americans are turning their backs on the rest of the world, showing a tendency towards isolationism that has risen to the highest level in four decades, according to a poll published yesterday.

Almost half (49 per cent) said the U.S. should 'mind its own business' internationally and let other countries get along as best they can, the Pew Research Center found.

The results appear to conflict with President Obama's activist foreign policy, including a newly announced build-up of 30,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Dr Barrie James, who lives in Great Stukeley, Huntingdon, had his book Hitler's Gulf War: The Fight For Iraq published two weeks ago.

It is his first historical account and focuses on the World War Two battle for Baghdad in spring 1941.

During the 30-day conflict, 1,500 British soldiers managed to fight their way across 500 miles of desert to defeat 30,000 armed Iraqi forces aided by the Germans and Italians.

He said: "It was a fascinating period that has had a regrettably small amount of coverage. In my mind it is a great army victory - we won by the skin of our teeth, and against all the odds."

Frustrated by the lack of action to overturn the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, Democrats in Congress are calling for at least temporary immunity so gay service members can testify at the Capitol about their experiences.

Rep. Alcee L. Hastings, Florida Democrat, introduced a bill this week to grant immunity to troops who otherwise would run afoul of the policy, which bans gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military. He and other advocates see it as at least a first step to pushing the issue forward.

"You can't expect a legitimate and informed debate over repeal if you keep gay troops in the closet," said Nathaniel Frank, a senior fellow at the Palm Center, which researches sexuality and the military and supports changing the policy.

John Brown, the 19th-century abolitionist who advocated armed violence, is drawing a diverse crowd this week to study how his fight against slavery continues to play in America.

A former Vietnam-era radical, a victim of human trafficking and an award-winning author are joining academics, activists and a descendant of the anti-slavery leader for a two-day symposium. The event commemorates the sesquicentennial of Brown's 1859 burial at his former Adirondack homestead just outside this tourist village in northern New York.

Organizers say the symposium, on Friday and Saturday, will examine the impact of Brown's fight against slavery on America then and how it reverberates today. Speakers include Bernardine Dohrn, one of the best-known leaders of the 1960s radical group the Weather Underground; Maria Suarez, a Mexican immigrant who was virtually enslaved by a Southern California man after being lured to work for him in 1976; Russell Banks, author of the fictional Brown biography "Cloudsplitter"; and Alice Keesey Mecoy, a Brown descendant.

Duke University Press on Thursday released Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia, a book by anthropologist S. Ann Dunham, the late mother of President Obama. The 300-page book, a condensed version of Dunham’s dissertation of the economics of the blacksmith trade on the island of Java in the 1970s and 80s, was unveiled at a press conference at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Ken Wissoker, editorial director of the Duke University Press, called the book “a very prescient work” that “anticipated a lot of what we now know as microfinance” — the movement to give tradespeople in underdeveloped countries access to banking services.

To any who would say that Duke was only publishing Dunham’s book because of the celebrity of her son, Wissoker said anthropologists without such ties stand to benefit from the book's anticipated popularity. “It brings attention to a kind of work that a lot of anthropologists are doing,” he said. “And by publishing it, it enables us to publish more books of this kind.”

Entering the Munich court this week to cover the trial of John Demjanjuk, 89, accused of helping to force 27,900 Jews into gas chambers at an extermination camp in 1943, was like stepping into a history book.

Inevitably, the spotlight was on Demjanjuk himself.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s most wanted Nazi war suspect lay under a white blanket on a mobile bed in the middle of the courtroom. Was this old, expressionless and clearly weak man really the “face of evil”?

Efraim Zuroff, head of the Wiensenthal Center’s Jerusalem office echoed the views of many observers when he told Reuters: “Demjanjuk put on a great act. He should have gone to Hollywood, not Sobibor.”

Even to those who believed he was making the most of his frail condition, it was a pitiful sight.

Perhaps most striking, however, was the presence of other Holocaust victims and witnesses of Nazi atrocities.

It was hard not to be moved as Thomas Blatt, a partially deaf 82-year-old survivor of Sobibor, struggled to follow the proceedings and told Reuters he still had nightmares about his months at the death camp, in what is today Poland...

... These individuals, who belong to a generation that is dying out, said the trial was symbolic. Their main interest was in hearing the truth and being able to tell the world what they witnessed.

It can also be argued that this trial, probably Germany’s last big Nazi-era war crimes case, is crucial for younger generations.

It can help set the record straight on a defining moment in modern European history and even lead to a greater understanding of today’s policies. It helps explain why diplomatic relations between some European neighbours are still highly charged. And why European cooperation after World War Two — which eventually led to the European Union — was so important. Politicians were intent on avoiding another war.

It was supposed to be the beginning of a new era for Germany's Social Democrats (SPD). Following state elections in Brandenburg, held concurrently with the Sept. 27 general elections in Germany, SPD Governor Matthias Platzeck entered into a governing coalition with the far-left Left Party. Such an alliance has long governed the city-state of Berlin. But following the SPD's election-day debacle -- a miserable result of just 23 percent of the vote -- the party saw fit to begin opening itself up to the left elsewhere as well.

The experiment, as recent events indicate, has been a disaster. On Wednesday, it was revealed that Michael Luthardt, a member of Brandenburg's state parliament, was an informant for the East German secret police, the Stasi. Even worse, his was the seventh such case unveiled since the election.

"What's happening at the moment is extremely painful," Platzeck said this week. He intends to go before the Brandenburg parliament on Friday to address the issue.

Sarah Palin declared on Thursday that the legitimacy of President Obama's birth certificate is "rightfully" an issue with the American public, and that it is "fair game" for politicians to question Obama's citizenship.

The comments came during an interview with conservative radio host Rusty Humphries, who asked Palin whether she planned to "make the birth certificate an issue" if she runs for president in 2012.

"I think the public rightfully is still making it an issue," Palin said. "I don't have a problem with that. I don't know if I would have to bother to make it an issue, because I think that members of the electorate still want answers."

Humphries -- who began the interview with a rendition of the song "Sarah, Queen Of The Wild Frontier" -- followed up: "Do you think it's a fair question to be looking at?"

"I think it's a fair question just like I think past associations and past voting records. All of that is fair game," Palin responded, adding that "the McCain-Palin campaign didn't do a good enough job in that area. We didn't call out Obama and some of his associates on their records and what their beliefs were, and perhaps what their future plans were, and I don't think that was fair to voters to not have done our job as candidates and a campaign to bring to light a lot of things that now we're seeing manifest in the administration."

Palin later referenced "that weird conspiracy theory freaky thing that people talk about that Trig isn't my real son, and a lot of people that went 'Well, you need to produce his birth certificate, you need to prove that he's your kid,' which we have done, but yeah, so maybe we can reverse that, and use the same [inaudible] thinking on the other one."

If Santa is making his list and checking it twice, he may be surprised to find that for the first time since 2005, more American corporations are celebrating Christmas as a part of their seasonal marketing and ad campaigns.

The conservative religious freedom group Liberty Counsel released its annual “Naughty and Nice” list last week, putting businesses in the “naughty” or “nice” column based on whether Christmas is included in advertising and in-store displays.

“There’s far more on the nice side than the naughty side,” Mathew Staver, founder and president of the counsel, told CNSNews.com

Staver said that his organization began its Friend or Foe Christmas Campaign seven years ago to support Christmas and fight its censorship in the public square. Then in 2005, a year Staver said seemed to represent the pinnacle of anti-Christmas sentiment, a spruce bound from Canada to Boston inspired the first “Naughty and Nice” list...

... That year stores like Wal-Mart, Sears and K-Mart made the “naughty” list for forbidding their employees to wish customers “Merry Christmas” and using the label “holiday” in stores to describe Christmas merchandise ranging from trees to decorations.

But since then, Staver said the trend has been that more and more businesses have been putting Christmas back into their seasonal promotions and moving from the counsel’s “naughty” to its “nice list” – including Wal-Mart, K-Mart and Sears.

A graduate student at Utah State University is a new kind of Civil War re-enactor. Instead of dressing up in period clothes, the student, Tom Caswell, uses Twitter to send short messages in the voice of Abraham Lincoln and other historical figures.

Mr. Caswell is one of the organizers of TwHistory, a Web site devoted to historical re-enactments via Twitter. For their first event, they staged the battle of Gettysburg in the voices of a handful of key characters, including Lincoln (whose famous speech there is, appropriately, famous for its brevity).

Where is the intersection of the trial of alleged Nazi guard John Demjanjuk and the Islamic Republic of Iran?

The Demjanjuk trial is an example of Germany grappling with its historic responsibility to the victims of the Holocaust and to universal justice. Yet with regard to its more future-oriented responsibility to prevent Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons and its threats to obliterate Israel, critics say Germany is stumbling.

The cross-paths of Iran and Demjanjuk were evident at the international Mideast Freedom Forum Berlin conference "Time to Act" this past weekend.

The Berlin conference's policy experts, journalists and academics raised questions about Germany's historic responsibility to Israel and the lessons from genocidal Nazi anti-Semitism.

The head of the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism, Dr. Charles Small, rhetorically asked if Germany had extracted lessons from the Nazi period in order to prevent an Iran-organized Shoah. His answer: No. ..

A Medal of Honor recipient in a dispute over his right to fly the American flag in his yard will have another week before D-Day -- when he'll be forced to take down the Stars and Stripes or face legal action.

Ninety-year-old Col. Van T. Barfoot, a veteran of three wars, initially was given a 5 p.m. Friday deadline to dismantle his flagpole or face a legal battle over violating an order from his townhouse community association in Henrico County, Va

Barfoot, who fought in World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam, was told in July that he could not put up his freestanding flagpole in his Sussex Square neighborhood — but he installed it anyway.

When Ira Hayes was alive, his image was captured in one of the most famous war photographs ever taken — the World War II image of U.S. military personnel raising the flag over Iwo Jima.

Last month, 54 years since his death, his family learned that another image of Hayes, a face mask, had been cast in plaster while he lay in a Phoenix mortuary. The mask of Hayes, a Pima Indian from Bapchule, Ariz., was made without the family's knowledge and ended up on display at the Gilbert Ortega Museum Gallery of Scottsdale.

"In Pima culture, when you pass on, everything you own is supposed to go with you," says Sharon Cook, a Hayes family member. "They say because of this, Ira's body was never sent to rest."

Kenneth Hayes, 78, received his brother's mask in November from the gallery. Hours later, relatives returned it to the Gila River Indian Reservation where Ira Hayes was born and died, according to Larry Cook, Hayes' grand-nephew.

The mask was broken to bits and buried near the graves of his parents, Sharon Cook says.

The discovery of the mask adds one more chapter to the odyssey of Hayes, who has been depicted in books, films (including Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers) and music.

Amid the final battles of World War II, Cpl. Ira Hamilton Hayes and five other servicemen were captured by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal as they raised the Stars and Stripes.

The 1945 picture, which came to symbolize American courage and patriotism, transformed a troubled Indian kid into an unwilling national celebrity. Hayes was one of only 27 of the company of 250 to survive the battle on Mount Suribachi, according to historical reports.

President Harry Truman declared Hayes a hero and ordered him back to the states to join a tour raising money through the sale of war bonds.

According to S.D. Nelson, who wrote, Quiet Hero: The Ira Hayes Story, the 23-year-old corporal considered his fallen comrades the true heroes. After his discharge from the Marine Corps, Nelson wrote, Hayes returned to his home in the poverty-stricken Gila River Indian Community, seeking solitude — and often turning to alcohol. Hayes died of exposure in 1955 at the age of 32 after getting into a drunken fight during a poker game. His body was found lying in a creek, Larry Cook said.

Gilbert Ortega Jr., the gallery president, says the history of the mask can be found in a one-page document written in 1986 by Shirley Nelson of Yuma: A Phoenix artist named Hortense Johnson went to the funeral parlor and made a cast of Hayes' face. It was her intent to make a bust of Ira.

After Johnson's death, her husband gave the mask to Nelson and her mother. "My mom and I were the only people who knew what it was, so he gave it to us," she says.

In the early 1980s, artist Robert Yellowhair expressed an interest in making a sculpture of Hayes. Nelson says she gave the mask to Yellowhair.

Yellowhair never created the sculpture and in 1995 gave the mask to Gilbert Ortega Sr., owner of Native American art and jewelry stores.

"My dad always prided himself on the mask," Ortega Jr. says. "There's no way to put a value on something like that."

Larry Cook and his great uncle, Kenneth approached Ortega Jr. about donating the mask to Ira's descendants. "I believe it still has the spirit in there, and that's what led the family here," Ortega Jr. says.

An important new find by a team of Swedish archaeologists indicates that the Finland-Sweden border area around the Torne River Valley was inhabited up to 11,000 years ago.

The discovery, located near Pajala in Sweden’s far north, is the oldest settlement to be found in the county of Norrbotten, according to archaeologist Olof Ostlund. “Now the pages in the National Encyclopaedia regarding inland ice can be torn out and burned,” said Ostlund.

The find was made during a routine search for ancient remains by archaeologists in the area around Kaunisvaar where a new mine is scheduled to open, reports The Local. First located in early September, Ostlund’s team was able to date the settlement with the aid of radiocarbon dating.

“I had been expecting old dates. But when I saw that the first numbers were very high I felt immediately that this was bingo. When the second number was five figures – I felt faint,” Ostlund stated. The scientist compared the discovery to a similar settlement in nearby Kangofors which was discovered five years ago and dated back 10,000 years.

Ostlund related the find to the discovery of stone-age shelters dating back some 6,000 years in Voullerim in the 1980s which caused a revaluation of common assumptions on the historical habitation of the Norrland region.

“So this is important. Especially as in archaeological circles, in southern Sweden, the accepted theory is that there was no ancient age up here in northern Sweden it is thus important to raise the issue,” Ostlund reasoned.

Worn teeth, periodontal diseases, abscesses and cavities tormented the ancient Egyptians, according to the first systematic review of all studies performed on Egyptian mummies in the past 30 years.

After examining research of more than 3,000 mummies, anatomists and paleopathologists at the University of Zurich concluded that 18 percent of all mummies in case reports showed a nightmare array of dental diseases.

"Evidence of dental disorders is plentiful because usually teeth are among the best preserved parts of a body. As for other diseases, the published studies do not always provide in-depth details. Nevertheless, we came across some interesting findings," senior author and medical doctor Frank Ruhli, head of the Swiss Mummy Project at the University of Zurich, told Discovery News.

Published in the Journal of Comparative Human Biology (HOMO), the review takes into consideration all studies published since 1977, when computed tomography was first applied to ancient Egyptian mummies.

CT imaging revealed an impressive collection of diseases, including bone disorders, infections and traumas being the most common disorders.

Out of 85 single-listed mummies, Ruhli and colleagues counted 15 cases of degenerative disorders, with a dominating number of osteoarthritis cases and four cases which specifically diagnosed atherosclerosis (a hardening of the arteries).

Infectious diseases among the mummies were also very common. In three cases the subjects most likely suffered from chronic infectious middle ear disease; other infectious diseases included tuberculosis and gangrenous stomatitis, an often fatal gangrene of the cheek and gums which affects mostly children.

Seven mummies showed evidence of Plasmodium falciparum, the most malignant form of malaria. Ten cases showed symptoms of tumorous lesions, with four of them possibly malignant.

Eleven cases showed evidence of pulmonary diseases, which included pneumonia, emphysema and lung oedema.

"Interestingly, most pulmonary affections were related to the presence of anthracotic pigment [carbon] in the lungs. This suggests air pollution by smoke from fires or oil lamps," Ruhli said.

Bone disorders and trauma abounded. The most prominent cases of fractures in pharaohs included the left middle finger in Ramses II, the third ruler of Egypt's 19th Dynasty, better known as Ramesses the Great, and the skull lesions of Seqenenre Taa II, the 14th pharaoh of the Theban dynasty who probably died in a battle.

Most mummies dated to 3,500 to 2,000 years ago, a period when the embalming process was highly developed. However, despite the large number of reported diseases, much mystery remains about the mummies.

"Sex wasn't determined or reported for about a third of the examined mummies, moreover very few studies mention the cause of death," Ruhli said.

Indeed, for the vast majority of studies, the cause of death -- which came between ages 20 and 40 for half of the mummies -- was either not considered or remained vague.

"The embalming treatment and the nature of certain diseases make it difficult to diagnose mummies. For example, diarrhea, which is still a very common cause of death among children in third world countries, would not really leave visible signs in mummies," Ruhli said.

Only in four cases the cause of death was reported with high certainty, with the culprit being pneumonia, pulmonary oedema, neurofibromatosis and chronic otitis.

In the remaining cases, the possible cause of death seemed to be due to a trauma, infectious diseases, unspecified inflammatory process, malnutrition and in one case, homicide.

"The lack of information about the cause of death in Egyptian mummies can be explained by the embalming process itself, which removed the internal organs. Many diseases involving those organs could not be easily diagnosed," said Gino Fornaciari, professor of forensic anthropology and director of the Pathology Museum at the University of Pisa.