Site of Caesar's death to open to tourists

From AFP Last Updated: 12:37 PM, October 11, 2012 The area among Rome's ancient ruins where general Julius Caesar was assassinated will be open to tourists starting in 2013 following long-running excavation work, local officials told AFP on Thursday. "Next year we will complete the excavation work and give the area back to visitors," said Umberto Broccoli, the head of cultural heritage for Rome. "It's good to do excavations but we can't keep digging holes," he said. Contrary to legend, Caesar was not killed in the Roman Senate but in the lobby of a theater built by Pompey the Great more than 2,000 years ago. The site is now Torre Argentina square in the centre of the Italian capital. The area is rarely open to tourists and is better known as a stray cat colony. Research carried out recently by Spanish archaeologists in the area has mapped out its layout and could help draw visitors to a site where there is only an old sign saying it was the place where Julius Caesar was killed. An archaeologist working in the area told AFP that a mysterious garland of flowers is left on the site and on Caesar's tomb in the nearby Roman Forum every year on the anniversary of the assassination on March 15, 44 BC.

Skeleton found beneath English parking lot may belong to King Richard III

King Richard III's burial grounds may no longer be a royal secret. Researchers at the University of Leicester say they may have located the English monarch's remains beneath a parking lot in England — though it will be weeks before they can say for sure. "Clearly we are all very excited by these latest discoveries," Richard Taylor, director of corporate affairs at the University of Leicester, told reporters Wednesday. "Our focus is shifting from the archaeological excavation to laboratory analysis. This skeleton certainly has characteristics that warrant extensive further detailed examination." The fully intact skeleton was found within the choir area at the site of the ancient Grey Friars church, which was demolished in 1538 at the order of Henry VIII during the Dissolution of Monasteries. King Richard, the last English monarch to die in battle, is believed to have been buried at the church after he was killed during the Battle of Bosworth Field in August 1485. The adult male skeleton showed signs of trauma to its head and had a barbed arrow head lodged between the vertebrae of the skeleton's upper back — injuries consistent with those sustained in battle. "A bladed implement appears to have cleaved part of the rear of the skull," researchers said in a statement. The skeleton also had spinal abnormalities, suggesting that the person suffered from severe scoliosis. This abnormality would have made the person's right shoulder seem visibly higher than his left — a physical description that matches contemporary accounts of King Richard. Peter Soulsby, Leicester's City Mayor, said that if the remains do belong to the late monarch, the findings will have "enormous implications" for the city. "The discovery of King Richard's final resting place — if this is what we have — will enhance the telling of that story in a way we could never have planned," Soulsby said. This is not the team's first discovery related to King Richard. The archeologists announced last week that they had come across medieval paving stones that may have adorned a garden built in honor of the king by a 17th-century mayor of Leicester, Robert Herrick. In 1612, Christopher Wren, father of the famous architect, visited Herrick and described seeing a three-foot pillar, bearing the inscription, "Here lies the body of Richard III sometime King of England," in the garden. The possible remains of King Richard will now undergo DNA tests. But it will be as much as 12 weeks before researchers can confirm that they belong to the English monarch.

Archaeologists a step closer to finding King Richard III's grave

By Stephanie Pappas updated 9/5/2012 4:42:53 PM ET Print Font: The hunt for King Richard III's grave is heating up, with archaeologists announcing Wednesday that they have located the church where the king was buried in 1485. "The discoveries so far leave us in no doubt that we are on the site of Leicester's Franciscan Friary, meaning we have crossed the first significant hurdle of the investigation," Richard Buckley, the lead archaeologist on the dig, said in a statement. Buckley and his colleagues have been excavating a parking lot in Leicester, England, since Aug. 25. They are searching for Greyfriars church, said to be the final resting place of Richard III, who died in battle during the War of the Roses, an English civil war. A century later, Shakespeare would immortalize Richard III in a play of the same name. After his death in the Battle of Bosworth Field, Richard III was brought to Leicester and buried at Greyfriars. The location of the grave, and the church itself, were eventually lost to history, though University of Leicester archaeologists traced the likely location to beneath the parking lot for the Leicester City Council offices. The team announced last week that their first two trenches turned up glazed floor-tile fragments, medieval roof tile and other building fragments, suggesting that they were digging in the right place to find Greyfriars. Now, a third trench has revealed the alignment of the building's walls. "We now think we have evidence for a two-meter-wide (6.5 feet) north-south passageway, which originally had a tile floor — this may be a cloister walk on one side of a cloister garth or courtyard," Buckley said. "At right angles to this is an east-west aligned building some five meters (16 feet) wide, again with evidence for a tiled floor." [ Gallery: Digging for Richard III ] North of the building, there is an open space and then another large building with walls nearly 5 feet (1.5 meters) thick, Buckley said. The archaeologists suspected that the thick wall might be the south wall of the church building, and now the third trench suggests that, indeed, the wall continues and meets up with another wall to the north with a mortar floor in between. "The size of the walls, the orientation of the building, its position and the presence of medieval inlaid floor tiles and architectural fragments make this almost certainly the church of the Greyfriars," Buckley said. The archaeologists now plan to excavate further in search of the church's high alter and choir. The latter spot is recorded in history as the site of King Richard III's grave. If the king's body is found, he will be reinterred in Leicester Cathedral. If he is not discovered, Buckley said, the excavation has been a success in that it has uncovered a medieval church lost for four centuries. "With or without the burial place of Richard III, the investigation has been extremely rewarding and makes a significant contribution in terms of telling the story of medieval Leicester," Buckley said.

Nazis Planned To Kill Churchill With Exploding Chocolate

A possible plot by the Nazis to use exploding chocolate to kill Winston Churchill during World War II has recently been discovered. As the Telegraph reports, the plan called for Adolf Hitler’s bomb makers to coat explosive devices with a thin layer of chocolate wrapped in fancy expensive looking black and gold paper in order to make it look like the Peters Chocolate brand of premium chocolates. These explosive chocolates (capable of taking out anyone within several meters of the device) incorporated a thin piece of canvas that would trigger the explosion 7 seconds after a piece was broken off. The next step of the plot, reports the DailyMail, involved having secret agents the Nazis had working in Britain to secretly place the sweetly disguised goodies in the dining room being used by the War Cabinet along with other fine luxury items. British spies, however, foiled the exploding chocolate plot. The British found out the chocolate bombs were being produced and contacted Lord Victor Rothschild, one of MI5′s most senior intelligence chiefs. Rothschild typed up a letter from his secret bunker in Parliament Street, London, asking artist Laurence Fish to draw up a poster sized image of the chocolate bombs in order to warn the public. Laurence Fish died in 2009 at the age of 89, leaving behind his wife, Jean Bray. This letter was recently discovered by Jean Bray, a journalist, while going through some of his possessions. The letter, which is marked SECRET, describes how the bombs are activated and gives a description of what to look for with a crude sketch. In the letter Lord Rothschild writes: ‘Dear Fish, I wonder if you could do a drawing for me of an explosive slab of chocolate. ‘We have received information that the enemy are using pound slabs of chocolate which are made of steel with a very thin covering of real chocolate. ‘Inside there is high explosive and some form of delay mechanism… When you break off a piece of chocolate at one end in the normal way, instead of it falling away, a piece of canvas is revealed stuck into the middle of the piece which has been broken off and a ticking into the middle of the remainder of the slab. ‘When the piece of chocolate is pulled sharply, the canvas is also pulled and this initiates the mechanism. ‘I enclose a very poor sketch done by somebody who has seen one of these. ‘It is wrapped in the usual sort of black paper with gold lettering, the variety being PETERS. ‘Would it be possible for you to do a drawing of this, one possibly with the paper half taken off revealing one end and another with the piece broken off showing the canvas. ‘The text should indicate that this piece together with the attached canvas is pulled out sharply and that after a delay of seven seconds the bomb goes off.’

Nazi war crimes suspect arrested in Hungary

(CNN) -- An elderly man suspected of Nazi war crimes has been arrested in Hungary, prosecutors said Wednesday, after a worldwide Jewish rights organization discovered him living in Budapest. Laszlo Csizsik-Csatary is accused of sending more than 15,000 Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp in the spring of 1944, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said. The center considers him its most-wanted Nazi war criminal. The Simon Wiesenthal Center found Csizsik-Csatary as part of its Last Chance project, said Efraim Zuroff, director of the center's Israel office. Csizsik-Csatary served as a senior Hungarian police officer in the city of Kosice, which is now in Slovakia but was under Hungarian rule in the 1940s, the center said. "He was a commander of a ghetto," Zuroff said. Csizsik-Csatary participated in the deportation of 15,700 Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944, witnesses have told the center. He also played a role in "deportations to the Ukraine to be killed: 300 Jews," Zuroff said. "We found eyewitnesses on three different continents," Zuroff said. Those witnesses told the center about Csizsik-Csatary's cruelty to Jewish detainees and his role in the deportations to Auschwitz and Ukraine. Csizsik-Csatary denied the allegations to a reporter from the British tabloid The Sun. A witness to the August 1941 Ukraine deportations had nine family members who were deported, Zuroff said. Csizsik-Csatary made sure four of them were brought back from forced labor with the Hungarian army so they would be deported and killed, according to Zuroff. During the Auschwitz deportations, Csizsik-Csatary "forced these girls to dig a ditch with their hands -- young Jewish girls." Two of the center's witnesses were survivors of that deportation, he said. Using the last name Csizsik, Csizsik-Csatary arrived in Canada in 1949, telling immigration officials he was Yugoslavian, according to The Toronto Star newspaper. Canadian authorities later investigated allegations that he had lied to immigration authorities about his past when he arrived there. Canada revoked his citizenship in 1997 and initiated an investigation. As deportation proceedings were under way, Csizsik-Csatary voluntarily left the country. Csizsik-Csatary returned to Hungary upon leaving Canada, Zuroff said. "Hungarian authorities knew that he was back," he said. Authorities in Hungary launched an investigation in September 2011 after receiving information from Zuroff regarding Csizsik-Csatary's residence in Budapest and his role in the Auschwitz deportations, the center said. Mladic war crimes trial opens

Dali painting snatched off wall at E. Side gallery

A slick art thief snatched a Salvador Dali painting right off the wall of an Upper East Side gallery, dropped it in a shopping bag and calmly strolled unnoticed out the front door, law-enforcement sources said. Famed art dealer and radio baron Adam Lindemann told cops the crook snatched “Cartel de Don Juan Tenorio” from his new Venus Over Manhattan gallery on Madison Avenue at around 4 p.m. Wednesday, the sources said. “During regular business hours, with a security guard,” Lindemann told The Post today. The small watercolor-and-ink painting — a Dali original completed in 1949 — is worth $150,000, insurance adjusters told cops. “We’re cooperating fully with the police and have no further comment,” added Lindemann, a polo-playing socialite who founded a chain of 20 Spanish-language radio stations. Surveillance video shows the crook walking into the darkened, third-floor gallery carrying a heavyweight paper shopping bag, sources said. The thief told a security guard who was keeping an eye on him, “I want to take a picture of this painting,” meaning the Dali, according to a source. The guard told him he could take a photo but could not use a flash. But, distracted by another visitor, the rent-a-cop left. When he returned, it was too late. The surveillance video footage shows the thief slipping out of the gallery with the purloined painting’s frame protruding from his bag. The guard notified Lindemann, who reported the theft to the NYPD today morning. He didn’t recognize the thief from the video. Sources described the crook as a white male, about 5-foot-6, 160 pounds and 35 to 42 years old. He wore dark jeans and shoes and a black-and-white checkered dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Lindemann is an art lover who opened the gallery on May 9 with the kinky exhibition “À Rebours,” which included a few dozen works from the 19th century to the present. He is married to the art dealer Amalia Dayan, granddaughter of former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. In 2006, Lindemann published a collection of interviews with art-world bigs in the 2006 book “Collecting Contemporary.” Art lovers were saddened they couldn’t see the Dali work today. “We went inside to see the show, and we were wondering where the Salvador Dali painting was,” said Jacquie Tellalian, 58. “It’s a small painting, but how did he just put in his bag and walk out like that? I hope somebody finds it.”

Ancient Scripture Discovered in Former Church Employee’s Garage

The Codex Calixtinus, a 12th-Century religious text, was discovered in a locked garage in northern Spain a year after it disappeared from the Santiago de Compostela Cathedral. By Tim Newcomb The search for the Codex Calixtinus, a 12thcentury collection of illustrated sermons and liturgical passages, an item heisted from a church near the northwest coast of Spain last year, has resulted in the arrest of the church’s former caretaker, his wife, his son and another woman. But up until this week there was no sign of the Codex itself. The man, who worked as the caretaker of Santiago de Compostela Cathedral for 25 years before being fired for forging a work contract, came under intense police scrutiny that led officials to locate about $1.5 million in cash, a key to various church buildings, eight copies of the Codex and other medieval-era books and writings hidden among garages, houses and storage rooms on property the man owned near the church. The Codex, , an ancient five-volume work that explained to pilgrims the best route to get to the cathedral, along with songs to sing and passages to read is considered one of Spain’s most important religious and cultural pieces. It was discovered the day after Wednesday’s arrest as police, still searching in outbuildings located near the church, found the “priceless” in a locked garage near the church property. The Santiago de Compostela Cathedral, which is also the final stop in the famous Camino de Santiago pilgrimage and reported home of James the Greater (one of Jesus Christ’s 12 apostles), had kept the Codex in a safe deposit box; it normally displays a replica of the document under glass.

Report: Hitler ordered his Jewish World War I commander protected

By msnbc.com staff and news services Adolf Hitler personally intervened to protect a Jewish man who had been his commanding officer during World War I, according to a letter unearthed by the Jewish Voice from Germany newspaper. The letter, written in Aug. 27, 1940, by Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazis' feared paramilitary SS, said Ernst Hess, a judge, should be spared persecution or deportation and receive “relief and protection as per the Fuhrer's wishes.” Historian Susanne Mauss discovered the letter. "It was a wonderful chance find," she told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Friday. "There had always been rumors, but this was the first written reference to a protection by Hitler." The letter was found in official archives containing files that the Nazi secret police, or Gestapo, kept on Jewish lawyers and judges. Mauss said its authenticity is corroborated by other documents, including one owned by Hess' surviving daughter, Ursula Hess, 86. Hess, a decorated World War I hero who briefly commanded Hitler's company in Flanders, worked as a judge until Nazi racial laws forced him to resign in 1936. The same year he was beaten up by Nazi thugs outside his house, the paper said. Hitler had ordered the genocide of all Europe’s Jews. His orders led to the deaths of 6 million Jews. In a petition to Hitler at that time, Hess wrote: "For us it is a kind of spiritual death to now be branded as Jews and exposed to general contempt." Hess and his family moved for a time to a German-speaking area of northern Italy but were then forced to return to Germany, where he discovered Hitler's protection order had been revoked. He spent the rest of World War II doing slave labor but he escaped death partly thanks to the fact that his wife was a gentile. Hess' sister died in the Auschwitz death camp, but his mother managed to escape to Switzerland. Hess remained in Germany after the war, becoming head of the Federal Railway Authority based in Frankfurt. He died in 1983. Ursula Hess, still living in Germany, told the paper in an interview that her father had benefited from a chance encounter with another World War I comrade, Fritz Wiedemann. He became Hitler's adjutant and used his influence to win concessions for Hess, she was quoted as saying. Ursula Hess also recalled her father saying that as a young corporal in World War I, Hitler had no friends in their regiment and had kept himself very much to himself. The paper's publisher, Rafael Seligmann, said that whether Hitler had helped protect Hess or not didn't change the Nazi leader's genocidal record. "History won't need to be rewritten because of this," he said.

Caravaggio claims spark Italian art world dispute

ROME – Caravaggio was notorious for his brawling, so it might be fitting that a claim by two Italian art historians that they discovered as many as 100 drawings by the painter in his boyhood has sparked an art world uproar. The researchers say they found dozens of early drawings by Caravaggio in the collection of master Milanese artist Simone Peterzano, the painter's teacher from 1584 to 1588. Many experts have responded with skepticism to the startling claim: Over the centuries, art historians have never definitively attributed any drawings to Caravaggio, who shook up 16th-century art by using models from the lower walks of life for religious scenes and dramatically counterpointing light and dark. On Friday, the curator of the drawings collection at Milan's Sforzesco Castle, where the collection of 1,500 painting generally attributed to Peterzano is kept, challenged the seriousness of the researchers' methods and contended that the pair had never set foot in the room to scrutinize the works. "We would be happy to have a Caravaggio," Francesco Rossi said, cautioning that it's difficult to be sure of the works' provenance. Making it especially difficult to pin works on Caravaggio was the artist's habit of not signing his own work. Attempts at fakes and uncertain claims of authenticity have been frequent. He dismissed the historians' methods as naive. "What surprised us about this thing is the fact that these experts never came here in the drawings department to see the works," Rossi told The Associated Press. "They evaluated (the drawings) using black and white photographs." The researchers defended their claim, which they made public on Thursday in an interview with the Italian news agency ANSA. Adriana Conconi Fedrigolli, told the AP in a phone interview that some of their research team studied the drawings firsthand. When pressed to identify the other researchers, she said she wasn't authorized to reveal their names and passed the phone to the other art historian, Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz. "I saw the originals," Bernadelli Curuz said. The art historian said he was able to visit the collection `'after hours," thanks to his contacts with a high-level city official who was authorized to enter the drawings department. He declined to identify the city official. But he insisted that he and Conconi Fedrigolli worked `'in a very scientific way" using photos of the drawings and comparing details to those in well-known Caravaggio works. He said it was not logical that among the Peterzano collection drawings there wouldn't be any by Caravaggio, a star pupil then known as Michelangelo Merisi. The artist is better known by the name of the Italian town where he was born. He contended they were able to distinguish drawings by Peterzano from those of his pupils, including Caravaggio. Among the prominent skeptics was Antonio Paolucci, the director of the Vatican Museums and one of Italy's most esteemed art historians and restoration experts, who pointed out that many experts have seen the drawing and "not one of those experts had come up with the name of Caravaggio." Paolucci described the claim as "pure inductive optimism" in the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano on Friday, though he acknowledged it was always possible that "researchers with lesser credentials but with an especially gifted eye, sensitivity and also luck" had pinpointed something new. Paolucci has experienced first-hand the perils of attributing works to great artists, particularly Caravaggio. Two summers ago, the Vatican Museums director wrote an article under the headline "A New Caravaggio? Not really," a week after the Vatican newspaper first suggested that a painting depicting St. Lawrence could be that of Caravaggio -- but then backtracked. Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/07/06/caravaggio-claims-spark-italian-art-world-dispute/#ixzz1zzROzXb0

Napoleon's English homework sells for $415,000

A RARE letter written by Napoleon in English has sold at auction for 325,000 euros ($415,000), five times the predicted price. The standard-sized sheet of paper is a homework exercise Napoleon sent to an English teacher for correction in 1816 and was sealed with the imperial eagle wax stamp. It's one of three such English-language letters by Napoleon in the world, according to the auction organisers, and was bought by Paris's Museum of Letters and Manuscripts in a dramatic bidding war yesterday near the Chateau of Fontainebleau, one of Napoleon's south of Paris. The selling price suggests the document's historic value, as rare proof that Napoleon, who famously dismissed England as a "nation of shopkeepers", learned to speak the language of his opponents late in life. He wrote the letter while a captive of the British in the remote island of Saint Helena following his defeat at Waterloo, according to the Osenat auction house. The house's president, Jean-Pierre Osenat, says Napoleon's English lessons were "very noble, respectful". "He really had a great admiration for England, the rules and history. The English have the wrong idea: Napoleon didn't hate them, he was just a military man, and the French interests were different to the English," he said. But did admiration alone lead the empire-building Frenchman to learn English? It seems that vanity, too, may have played a role - and though he was stranded on the South Atlantic Ocean island, he still cared about what people thought. "Of course, he was always very worried about his image. He wanted to read what was said about him in the English press," added Osenat, with a wry smile. Whatever the reason and despite Napoleon's best efforts - months of hard study, often late into the night - the letter shows he still had some way to go in mastering the language of Shakespeare. It begins: "It's two o'clock after midnight, I have enow sleep, I go then finish the night with you." Napoleon addressed the letter to the Count Las Cases, his teacher, "at his bonk" - thought to be the word "bunk" misspelled. The document offers insight into the historical puzzle of who Napoleon became when imprisoned and in exile. After defeat at Waterloo, under constant watch and allowed only a small entourage, the great leader became depressed and neared death. "It's very moving, since it's one of the last pieces of writings in English before his death," said 19th-century manuscript expert Alain Nicolas. "At the end he's written: 'Four o'clock in the morning,' so he wrote that in two hours. He took some time to write it. ... It shows he couldn't sleep and took his time. He had painful cancer in the stomach. He was an insomniac," Nicolas said. "He had a lot of moments to sit and reflect in Saint Helena. Learning English was a way to fill his time. It was near the end of his life: he used it as a time to think about his life, his campaigns, regrets and remorse," Nicolas added. Napoleon died in island exile on May 5, 1821, aged 52. Read more: http://www.news.com.au/world/napoleons-english-homework-sells-for-415000/story-e6frfkyi-1226390795609#ixzz1xUESlQBZ

Germany looking again into Nazi criminal's case

By VERENA SCHMITT-ROSCHMANN, Associated Press Writer
BERLIN – Germany is looking into the possibility of jailing an 88-year-old man who was convicted of Nazi war crimes in the Netherlands more than 60 years ago, the Justice Ministry said Monday.

"The ministry thinks it might be possible to enforce the Dutch sentence in Germany," spokesman Ulrich Staudigl said. Former SS member Klaas Carel Faber was convicted on several counts of murder in 1947, but fled to Germany in 1952 and has lived freely in Bavaria for decades.

Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger has asked Bavarian authorities re-examine the case, Staudigl said.

However, Bavarian prosecutors in Ingolstadt and Munich who have dealt with the case told The Associated Press that, without new evidence or a renewed request for help by the Netherlands, no action can be taken.

"Judging from current knowledge, we have no option to do anything," said Helmut Walter of the prosecutor's office in Ingolstadt, where Faber lives.

Likewise, Munich prosecutor Thomas Steinkraus-Koch said the evidence currently available is not enough to reopen the case.

Faber, who was born in 1922, is currently number 5 on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's "most wanted Nazi war criminals." The Wiesenthal Center, based in Los Angeles, works to hunt down Nazi criminals and fight anti-Semitism.

According to the Center, Faber volunteered for Hitler's SS, a paramilitary organization loyal to Nazi ideology, during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in the 1940s.

"He came from a Dutch Nazi family," the Wiesenthal Center's Jerusalem branch director, Efraim Zuroff, told the AP in a telephone interview from Jerusalem. "He was a Nazi," he said of Faber....

Central Europe faces massive flood cleanup

By VANESSA GERA, Associated Press Writer
WARSAW, Poland – Swollen rivers surged north Monday in central Europe after carving a swath of destruction across Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic. Hundreds of people had to be evacuated and one monastery suffered the worst flood damage in almost 800 years.
Days of flooding have killed at least 11 people in central Europe and damaged hundreds of homes and businesses.
The southwestern Polish town of Bogatynia, on the border with the Czech Republic, was one of the worst-hit areas. Video from the TVN24 news station showed roads that were torn up, rubble strewn all over and heavy damage to many homes. One house was left tilting badly.
A bridge in the town was also badly damaged, and soldiers had to set up a temporary crossing to bring in food and other supplies.
TVN24 reported that some vendors were taking advantage of food shortages and charging 20 zlotys ($6.60) for a loaf of bread, far above the usual price.
In Germany, the situation was most critical in the state of Saxony, along the Neisse River, which forms the border with Poland. Hundreds of residents had to be evacuated.
"We will have massive damage to the infrastructure, but of course also to private property," Saxony governor Stanislaw Tillich said. He asked Polish authorities to explain how a retaining dam on their side broke down, making the situation worse, the German news agency DAPD reported.
A 775-year-old Cistercian monastery near the Neisse, St. Marienthal, was also flooded and the diocese said the damage will likely reach several million euros (dollars).
"Inside the church, the water was about two meters (6 feet) high," a statement said, calling it the worst flooding since the monastery's founding in 1234....

Former Nazi SS officer Steidtmann dead at 95

BERLIN – A German newspaper says that former Nazi SS officer Erich Steidtmann, suspected but never convicted of involvement in World War II massacres, has died at age 95.

The Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported Wednesday that Steidtmann died Sunday from a heart attack at his home in Hannover.

Steidtmann was a captain in the Nazi's elite SS force who led several battalions which allegedly carried out the mass murder of Jews, and he was long sought by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

The center expressed its frustration to The Associated Press on Wednesday that Steidtmann died before he could be prosecuted.

Steidtmann was investigated several times for his alleged involvement in killings at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 and two massacres in the Polish city of Lublin.

Winston Churchill's false teeth go on sale

LONDON – Part of a set of dentures used by Winston Churchill to disguise a lisp is going on sale.

The partial dentures are being put on auction with an estimated value of 4,000 pounds to 5,000 pounds ($6,200 to $7,800.)

A duplicate set is kept by the Royal College of Surgeons of England. The organization says the dentures were a tool that the wartime British Prime Minister relied upon to overcome a childhood lisp.

The set to be auctioned Thursday by Keys Auctioneers is being sold by the son of the dental technician who was commissioned to make them.

Third most-wanted Nazi suspect charged in Germany

By KIRSTEN GRIESHABER, Associated Press Writer
BERLIN – The world's third most-wanted Nazi suspect, who lived undisturbed for decades after World War II, has been charged in Germany with participating in the murder of 430,000 Jews while serving as a low-ranking guard at a death camp.

Samuel Kunz, 88, had long been ignored by the German justice system, partly because of a lack of interest in going after relatively minor Nazi figures. But in the past 10 years, a younger generation of prosecutors has sought to bring all surviving suspects to justice.

Authorities recently stumbled over Kunz's case as they were studying old documents from German post-wars trials about an SS training camp named Trawniki. The papers were being reviewed in connection with the trial of John Demjanjuk, the 90-year-old retired autoworker on trial in Munich for allegedly serving as a guard at the infamous Sobibor camp.

Kunz was named the No. 3 suspect in April by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. He ranked fairly low in the Nazi hierarchy, but he was among the most-wanted suspects because of the large number of Jews he is accused of helping to kill.

Kunz had been living quietly at his home near the western city of Bonn. He received a letter last week saying he had been charged with three different cases of participating in the murder of Jews, authorities said.

He allegedly served as a guard at the Belzec camp in occupied Poland from January 1942 to July 1943.

In addition to those charges, he is accused of fatally shooting 10 Jews in two other incidents related to unspecified "personal excesses," prosecutor Christoph Goeke told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Prosecutors allege both Kunz and the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, who was deported to Germany from the U.S. last year, trained as guards at Trawniki. In the 1960s, Kunz testified about his time there in a different trial, but he was never indicted himself....

Rare 3D film shows Warsaw devastated after WWII

By MONIKA SCISLOWSKA, Associated Press Writer
WARSAW, Poland – The plane slowly descends from white clouds and sweeps over a panorama of a city destroyed by the Nazis: the skeletons of bombed bridges jutting from a quiet river, the empty walls of burned-out houses, the Jewish ghetto totally flattened.

It is Warsaw in the spring of 1945, just after World War II.

The sea of rubble that Warsaw was reduced to during the war is vividly reconstructed in a 3D film that historians and computer graphics experts showed for the first time in Warsaw on Wednesday.

The goal of the film, which must be seen with special 3D glasses, is to bringing home to a young generation the scope of the wartime devastation of Poland's capital.

"Young people do not understand what it means that Warsaw was in ruins; they think it was just a few collapsed houses," Jan Oldakowski, the director of the Warsaw Uprising Museum, told reporters at a screening of the film "City of Ruins."

"Nor were we, at the museum, fully aware of what the city looked like," he said.

The 1939-45 destruction was the result of bombings carried out by Nazi Germany, which invaded Poland in 1939 and occupied it for six years, killing millions of people. Most of the damage resulted from the German army's revenge for the city's 1944 uprising against its brutal rule.

The uprising failed after 63 days of an uneven struggle, but as one of Europe's most dramatic acts of resistance to Nazi rule remains an important element of Polish national identity. The heroism shown by the insurgents — among them women and teenagers — is a source of deep pride to this day

Ship lost for more than 150 years is recovered

TORONTO – Canadian archeologists have found a ship abandoned more than 150 years ago in the quest for the fabled Northwest Passage and which was lost in the search for the doomed expedition of Sir John Franklin, the head of the team said Wednesday.

Marc-Andre Bernier, Parks Canada's head of underwater archaeology, said the HMS Investigator, abandoned in the ice in 1853, was found in shallow water in Mercy Bay along the northern coast of Banks Island in Canada's western Arctic.

"The ship is standing upright in very good condition. It's standing in about 11 meters (36 feet) of water," he said. "This is definitely of the utmost importance. This is the ship that sailed the last leg of the Northwest Passage."

The Investigator was one of many American and British ships sent out to search for the HMS Erebus and the Terror, vessels commanded by Franklin in his ill-fated search for the Northwest Passage in 1845.

Environment Minister Jim Prentice said the British government has been notified that one of their naval shipwrecks has been discovered, as well as the bodies of three sailors.

Captained by Robert McClure, the Investigator sailed in 1850. That year, McClure sailed the Investigator into the strait that now bears his name and realized that he was in the final leg of the Northwest Passage, the sea route across North America.

But before he could sail into the Beaufort Sea, the ship was blocked by pack ice and forced to winter-over in Prince of Wales Strait along the east coast of Banks Island.

The following summer, McClure tried again to sail to the end of the Passage, but was again blocked by ice. He steered the ship and crew into a large bay on the island's north coast he called the Bay of Mercy.

There they were to remain until 1853, when they were rescued by the crew of the HMS Resolute. The Investigator was abandoned.

"This is actually a human history," said Bernier. "Not only a history of the Passage, but the history of a crew of 60 men who had to overwinter three times in the Arctic not knowing if they were going to survive."...

Ex-Romanian dictator Ceausescu and wife exhumed

By ALISON MUTLER, Associated Press Writer BUCHAREST, Romania – The mystery of where former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena were buried moved closer to resolution Wednesday after forensic scientists dug up their official graves in a hunt for DNA. Ceausescu ruled Romania for 25 years with an iron fist before being ousted and executed during the 1989 anti-communist revolt in which more than 1,000 people were killed. Many Romanians have doubted for years that the Ceausescus were really buried in the Ghencea military cemetery in west Bucharest. Still, they were shocked by the unannounced early-morning exhumation, part of a five-year lawsuit. "I never thought this would happen," said Ioan Mirichi, 81, a former engineer visiting a family grave early Wednesday. "I didn't believe the rumors he wasn't buried here ... but I suppose the family must decide." Conspiracy theories have ranged from the graves being empty to the Ceausescus' bodies being spirited off by supporters and replaced in their coffins by anonymous victims of Europe's bloodiest anti-communist revolt...

18th-Century Ship Found at Trade Center Site

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

In the middle of tomorrow, a great ribbed ghost has emerged from a distant yesterday.

On Tuesday morning, workers excavating the site of the underground vehicle security center for the future World Trade Center hit a row of sturdy, upright wood timbers, regularly spaced, sticking out of a briny gray muck flecked with oyster shells.

Obviously, these were more than just remnants of the wooden cribbing used in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to extend the shoreline of Manhattan Island ever farther into the Hudson River. (Lower Manhattan real estate was a precious commodity even then.)

“They were so perfectly contoured that they were clearly part of a ship,” said A. Michael Pappalardo, an archaeologist with the firm AKRF, which is working for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to document historical material uncovered during construction.

By Wednesday, the outlines made it plain: a 30-foot length of a wood-hulled vessel had been discovered about 20 to 30 feet below street level on the World Trade Center site, the first such large-scale archaeological find along the Manhattan waterfront since 1982, when an 18th-century cargo ship came to light at 175 Water Street.

The area under excavation, between Liberty and Cedar Streets, had not been dug out for the original trade center. The vessel, presumably dating from the mid- to late 1700s, was evidently undisturbed more than 200 years....

Restored Da Vinci painting reveals hidden details

LONDON – A restoration project for Leonardo da Vinci's "Virgin of the Rocks" has revealed new details and suggest the Renaissance artist may have painted all the picture himself, instead of with his assistants as previously thought, a British gallery said Wednesday.

The 18-month conservation project involved removing much of some badly degraded varnish that was applied to the painting in the late 1940s, enabling experts to take a much closer look at the picture's brush strokes and styles, the National Gallery said.

The cleaning revealed the painting's full tonal range, especially in the darker areas, and resulted in a clearer sense of how the artist intended for space to recede through the rocky landscape, the gallery said.

It also affirmed that Leonardo likely painted the entire picture himself and intended for it to be unfinished.

The restored painting showed a range of completion from the barely sketched hand of the angel to the fully realized heads of the main figures — consistent with many of Leonardo's works. The Italian artist, said to be the "eternal perfectionist," is thought to have left his pictures unfinished because he wished to return to them later, gallery spokesman Thomas Almeroth-Williams said.

In the past, scholars believed the different levels of finish in "Virgin of the Rocks" showed that Leonardo was helped by assistants.

The painting dates from about 1491 to 1508 and is a later version of one on display in the Louvre in Paris.

The latest cleaning project followed years of scrutiny of the masterpiece.

In 2005, experts using infrared technology found two drawings hidden beneath the surface of the picture — one design was never painted, and the second one revealed Leonardo changed his mind about the subject several times.

The painting goes back on display in the National Gallery on Wednesday.