Frank Woodruff Buckles is stooped and bent from his 107 years, but he is not bowed. His spirit glows with the life he has lived.

First and foremost, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Buckles is America's last doughboy.

Of the more than 4 million who served in World War I, called the Great War, he has outlived everyone. His elder, veteran Harry R. Landis, died at 108 in February in Florida.

Buckles is from an era that has almost disappeared into the dust motes of American history.

Woodrow Wilson was president when a teenage Buckles volunteered almost 91 years ago to serve his nation. He has since seen 16 more men enter the White House.

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Last known WWI veteran honored for Memorial Day

J. Edgar Hoover was FBI director for forty-eight years, and he was also an author--a bestselling author. His Masters of Deceit, published in 1958 by Henry Holt, spent thirty-one weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold more than 250,000 copies. In paperback it sold more than 2 million. But dealing with the director presented unique challenges for Holt. The special relationship is documented in the FBI's 234-page Henry Holt file, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Claire Culleton, who writes about it in her new book Modernism on File: Writers, Artists, and the FBI, 1920-1950 (edited with Karen Leick).

The FBI's Holt file is unique among the millions of files at bureau headquarters: it does not contain the usual reports on an individual's left-wing sympathies and activism but rather information about the firm and its efforts to woo Hoover as an author. The company began courting Hoover when he was known to be agitated about the 1950 publication of the first book critical of the FBI: The Federal Bureau of Investigation by Max Lowenthal. A senior Holt official--his name is blacked out--knew how to get Hoover's attention. The Lowenthal book"makes me a little sick," he wrote to the director."This book should not have been published.... when we are fighting for survival, as God knows we are today, there are certain irresponsible views that need not and should not be expressed." Because of the Lowenthal book,"it is of the utmost importance that an accurate, considered book evaluating the importance of one of our last strongholds against Communism (the FBI) be presented to the public by a responsible publisher." He modestly suggested that Holt fit the bill. He also suggested that the author should be Hoover.

John Updike delivered the National Endowment for the Humanities’ annual Jefferson Lecture Thursday night, accepting the highest honor bestowed by the federal government on humanists. Seizing on the NEH’s Picturing America project, which places reproductions of American art in public schools and libraries across the country, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author toured the artistic landscape to answer the question, “What is American about American art?” After surveying painters from John Singleton Copley and Edward Hopper through the artists of Abstract Expressionism, Updike concluded by applying to American art William Carlos Williams’s assertion that “there are no ideas but in things.” “The American artist,” he said, “first born into a continent without museums and art schools, took Nature as his only instructor, and things as his principal study.” When asked after the talk whether he ever felt the pull of academe, where many of his Jefferson predecessors made their mark on the humanities, Updike told Inside Higher Ed, “I think I’m too mean to be a teacher.” The author, whose father was a teacher, added that summer writing classes he led at Harvard University in the 1960s made him “depressed” with the suspicion that some of his students were better writers than he was.

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John Updike Delivers 2008 Jefferson Lecture

Largely obscured in the understandable uproar over Hillary Clinton's Friday reference to the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy has been the fallacy of the basic point she sought to convey -- that there is nothing all that unusual about the trajectory of her battle with Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nod.

Before invoking the Kennedy killing in comments to a South Dakota newspaper that she quickly rued, Clinton said, "My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary, somewhere in the middle of June, right?"

Actually, wrong in all but the most technical sense.

Bill Clinton became the hands-down front-runner in his party's contest 16 years ago in mid-March, when his main competitor, Paul Tsongas, exited the race. There was an outbreak of buyer's remorse a few weeks later ...

... when California's own Jerry Brown, who initially had been little more than a gadfly in the race, won the Connecticut primary.

But in early April, Clinton crushed Brown in the New York primary, all but ending the competition. And then he ended any doubt by easily winning in Pennsylvania in late April.

Yes, he needed to win the California primary in early June -- along with several others held on the same day -- to officially surpass the magic number of delegates required for the nomination. But it had been crystal clear to all for more than a month that he would do so, and the remaining primaries were mere formalities.

Today one of the last Bowery flophouses leans up against the futuristic steel facade of the New Museum, and a bed at the Bowery Hotel can run $750 a night. After such gentrification, it can be difficult to conjure up the squalid New York that Jacob Riis documented in his groundbreaking 1889 work of photojournalism, “How the Other Half Lives.” Riis was well aware that the “other half” in New York City had become the other three-quarters, with 1.2 million impoverished New Yorkers living in slums, 19th-century tenements that were a public health catastrophe, rife with typhus, diarrhea, cholera and tuberculosis. Employing unsentimental storytelling, reportage, social statistics and the latest advances in flash photography, Riis shed a stark light on the horrific living conditions of New York’s vast population of poor immigrants.

In “Rediscovering Jacob Riis,” Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom have undertaken a rigorous, scholarly re-examination of Riis’s life and work. While Czitrom, a historian at Mount Holyoke College, places Riis in the context of other 19th-century social crusaders, Yochelson, a former photo curator at the Museum of the City of New York, offers a more critical assessment; she re-evaluates Riis’s photography and questions the mythos that surrounds him.

With the help of an early-19th-century insurance map, archaeologists are having an easier time than usual in excavating an important historical site near Montpelier.

The researchers, including 17 students from James Madison University, are unearthing the South Yard, a residential complex where President James Madison's domestic slaves lived and worked.

The insurance map, which came to light in 2002, is proving invaluable.

"It was a perfect roadmap for us," said Jennifer Gullette, a spokeswoman for Montpelier. "The map basically gave us the site's dimensions and location from the house measured out in feet."

About one year after Madison's 1836 death, his wife, Dolley, insured the 27-room mansion and nearby outbuildings. The map detailed the location of the South Yard's two smokehouses and three residences -- each a duplex for two slave families. The slave complex also included a kitchen and a stable.

Research led by the University of Leeds has discovered genetic evidence that overturns existing theories about human migration into Island Southeast Asia (covering the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysian Borneo) - taking the timeline back by nearly 10,000 years.

Prevailing theory suggests that the present-day populations of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) originate largely from a Neolithic expansion from Taiwan driven by rice agriculture about 4,000 years ago - the so-called "Out of Taiwan" model.

However an international research team, led by the UK's first Professor of Archaeogenetics, Martin Richards, has shown that a substantial fraction of their mitochondrial DNA lineages (inherited down the female line of descent), have been evolving within ISEA for a much longer period, possibly since modern humans arrived some 50,000 years ago.

Moreover, the lineage can be shown to have actually expanded in the opposite direction - into Taiwan - within the last 10,000 years.

Says Professor Richards: "I think the study results are going to be a big surprise for many archaeologists and linguists on whose studies conventional migration theories are based. These population expansions had nothing to do with agriculture, but were most likely to have been driven by climate change - in particular, global warming and the resulting sea-level rises at the end of the Ice Age between 15,000-7,000 years ago."

It's a valuable artifact, which represents one of the worst, most brutal eras ever. Something that belonged to Adolf Hitler, and it's now in the hands of a Houston World War II veteran.

Eyewitness News takes a closer look at the debate over what should be done with this painful piece of history.

it was the summer of 1945 and U.S. troops had just taken over Munich, Germany.

"I was 20 years old and we had just been through a heck of a war," said Jack McConn, brother of former Houston mayor Jim McConn, who was one of the first U.S. soldiers to step foot into the war-torn country.

POLISH war crimes prosecutors today announced they have dropped a probe against John Demjanjuk, 88, an ethnic Ukrainian living in the United States dogged by allegations of Nazi war crimes.

"The investigation was dropped December 19, 2007 due lack of evidence to incriminate Demjanjuk for murder," prosecutor Anna Galkiewicz of Poland's Institute for National Remembrance (IPN) said.

The IPN is charged with investigating and prosecuting Nazi and communist-era crimes.

Twenty years ago eyewitnesses identified Demjanjuk, a retired US autoworker, as "Ivan the Terrible", one of the infamous torturers at the Treblinka Nazi German concentration camp, located in what is now eastern Poland. Demjanjuk was born Ivan, later using the English version of his name John in the United States.

Deported by the US to Israel he was sentenced to death by an Israeli court in April 1988 but then acquitted by Israel's supreme court which used KGB archives to identify a different man, Ivan Marchenko, as "Ivan the Terrible".

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre insists Demjanjuk must be brought to justice for his alleged work as a guard in other Nazi death camps including Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka II.

The last surviving Mitford sister is 88 now, but does not look it. Her sight is not as good as it used to be, though, and her voice comes from another time, the Noël Coward vowels shifting between kind but business-like answers and sudden girlish animation. An old-fashioned deference is alive here (her staff call her Her Grace) and I am not the first interviewer to be struck by her impeccable politeness, the kind of forceful politeness that both puts people at their ease and keeps them at a firm arm's length.

It was one of the things she appreciated about her brother-in-law, the fascist leader Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists. "Oh yes, he was one of those marvellous Englishmen who don't exist any more, who had those beautiful manners. It's gone with the wind, and it's thought to be, I don't know, subservient or something - I don't know what it's meant to be - to have good manners. But the fact of the matter is, if you're among people the whole time, it simply oils the wheels of relationships. At least that's what I think. It makes life much pleasanter. I don't mean the sort of manners of getting up when somebody comes into the room, those sort of manners. It's just probably speaking to the most boring person in the room - those sort of good manners. That just doesn't exist anymore. People just go to the one they're interested in." Which, I agree, is quite the best kind of manners. It's just a pity they came with those particular political views.

France may posthumously clear the names of hundreds of soldiers shot for refusing to obey orders to fight during World War One, the minister in charge of veterans' affairs has told a newspaper.

"I am considering a way of rehabilitating, on a case by case basis, those shot as an example during the First World War," Jean-Marie Bockel told Monday's edition of Le Figaro.

"My officials are considering the overall dossier minutely because not all the cases are the same," he said. "We want to find those who were shot as an example, for example for refusing to fight or for mutiny, such as the mutineers of 1917."

The clean-up of a former plant which made horrific German poison-gas shells used in the First World War is complete after 20 years of work, an official told legislators Thursday. The Espagit factory in Hallschlag, Rhineland Palatinate state accidentally exploded in 1920 when an estimated 20,000 poison-gas shells were on the premises. The debris meant the site was an ecological disaster area for decades.

Attacks with gas clouds on enemy lines during the First World War left huge numbers of men maimed or blinded. The Allies also resorted to the tactic. The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) now outlaws stockpiling and use of chemical weapons.

For more than 30 years, members of the clandestine Naval air squadron VO-67 could not talk about their role in the Vietnam War.

Now, as they prepare to go to Washington on Wednesday to receive the presidential unit citation – the highest award for heroism given to a military unit – they find the recognition bittersweet....

In late 1967, the members of naval anti-submarine patrol units began receiving orders to report for a special operation.

The 300 officers and enlisted men were formed into squadron VO-67, equipped with specially modified P-2V5 Neptune patrol planes and sent to Thailand under top-secret orders. It was not lost on anyone involved that there were no submarines there.

In Thailand, they were told they could not tell anyone what they did, not even family. The unit was soon known as the "Ghost Squadron," since it didn't exist.

"We had no idea what we were getting into," said Herb Ganner, 65, of Hurst, who served as a bombardier and backup pilot. "We soon found we were part of a new type of warfare."

The squadron's mission was to fly over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a complex network of trails, roads and truck routes that fed supplies through Laos to North Vietnamese units in South Vietnam.

They flew at treetop level, low and slow, and dropped a variety of electronic sensors and listening devices along the trail. Specially equipped planes flying at higher altitudes picked up signals of North Vietnamese supply and troop movements and relayed them for bombing missions.

HNN received the following announcement from Calvin E. Johnson, Jr. It is self-explanatory.

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Is the "War Between the States" still taught in our schools?

The Jefferson Davis State Historic Site in Fairview, Kentucky marks the spot where Jefferson Davis was born on June 3, 1808. Plans are underway to celebrate Davis' 200th birthday on June 7th 8th, there, in the shadow of a 351-foot monument to Davis.

Earlier, an official dedication and grand opening of "Jefferson Davis Park" took place at beautiful Clark County, Washington on Sunday, April 27, 2008. This project was made possible by the local Sons of Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy. http://JeffersonDavisPark.org

Many 200th birthday tributes are planned for Davis.....

But, what do our children know about Abraham Lincoln (1809- 1865) and Jefferson Davis (1808-1889?) These men were born nearly 100 miles of each other in Kentucky, served as War Between the States presidents and America will remember the 200th birthday of both men soon.

A news reporter wrote that the 200th birthday commemoration for Abraham Lincoln will take place on February 12, 2009, but many people would rather forget the bicentennial birthday of Jefferson Davis on June 3, 2008.

Why the negative slant on Jefferson Davis?

The Sons of Confederate Veterans are sending a positive message by proclaiming 2008 as the "Year of Davis" www.scv.org...And last February, Bertram Hayes-Davis, the great-great grandson of Jefferson Davis, recreated the 1861 swearing-in ceremony of his grandfather as Confederate President in Montgomery, Alabama. Bertram Davis told reporters:

"I stand here representing a family that is very proud of their ancestor."

The Davis event of the year might be the June 3, 2008 reopening of "Beauvoir" the last home of Jefferson Davis and his family. The Davis home was severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Read more about Jefferson Davis and his Mississippi Gulf Coast home at: www.beauvoir.org. The birthday festivities begin at 10 AM.

Did you know that Jefferson Davis adopted a black child, Jim Limber, as his son? The Sons of Confederate Veterans are planning a Davis Memorial Statue, in Virginia, depicting the forgotten story of the Jefferson Davis family and Jim Limber.

Sons of Confederate Veterans Commander-In-Chief Christopher Sullivan said of this project "This will be our token of gratitude for what Jefferson Davis did and what he stood for."

Please ask your local newspaper, radio and TV for equal-time in covering the birthday of Jefferson Davis. Our American Media will no doubt cover the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln next February 12th but shouldn't they also cover the Davis birthday of June 3rd? This seems to me the "Fair and Balanced" thing to do as the USA remembers two American presidents.

Who was Jefferson Davis?

Jefferson Davis was born on June 3, 1808, in Christian County, Kentucky that would become Todd County.

Davis' father, Samuel Emory Davis, served in the Revolutionary War and participated in the siege of Savannah. Three of Jeff's older brothers served in the War of 1812, two under General Andrew Jackson. His father was from Georgia and mother Jane Cook Davis, daughter of a noted Baptist Preacher, was from North Carolina.

Jefferson Davis, who would become the first and only President of the Confederate States of America, was a strong Unionist and a strong defender of the United States Constitution. Our founding Fathers believed in the sovereignty of the states and do did Jefferson Davis.

At the young age of 16, Jefferson Davis received an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York by President Monroe. He graduated in 1828 with the commission of 2nd Lieutenant.

Jefferson Davis fought valiantly in the War with Mexico, served as the United States Senator from Mississippi, served as Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce and was the first to suggest the transcontinental railroad to link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Jefferson Davis' last marriage is said to have been a good one to Varina, who gave her husband three sons and two daughters (Jefferson Joseph, Billy, Margaret and Winnie.) Joseph was killed in an accidental fall at the Confederate White House in Richmond, Virginia in 1864, and an abused black child named Jim Limber was adopted by the Davis family.

Jefferson Davis died in New Orleans, Louisiana in December 1889, and the New York Times ran a 2,000 word tribute to the funeral of Davis on December 12, 1889. The following is a small part of the news report from New Orleans, Louisiana:

"He suffered many and grievous wrongs. Suffered mostly for the sake of others, and those others will remember him and his unflinching fidelity with deep gratitude while the Potomac seeks the Chesapeake or the Mississippi sweeps by Briarfield on its way to the Mexican Sea."

A birthday ceremony will be performed on June 7, 2008, at 10 AM at the grave of Jefferson Davis at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia.

Let's remember all those who helped make America great!!

John Hagee, the controversial evangelical leader and endorser of Sen. John McCain, argued in a late 1990s sermon that the Nazis had operated on God's behalf to chase the Jews from Europe and shepherd them to Palestine. According to the Reverend, Adolph Hitler was a "hunter," sent by God, who was tasked with expediting God's will of having the Jews re-establish a state of Israel.

Going in and out of biblical verse, Hagee preached: "'And they the hunters should hunt them,' that will be the Jews. 'From every mountain and from every hill and from out of the holes of the rocks.' If that doesn't describe what Hitler did in the holocaust you can't see that."

He goes on: "Theodore Hertzel is the father of Zionism. He was a Jew who at the turn of the 19th century said, this land is our land, God wants us to live there. So he went to the Jews of Europe and said 'I want you to come and join me in the land of Israel.' So few went that Hertzel went into depression. Those who came founded Israel; those who did not went through the hell of the holocaust.

"Then god sent a hunter. A hunter is someone with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says -- Jeremiah writing -- 'They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and from the holes of the rocks,' meaning there's no place to hide. And that might be offensive to some people but don't let your heart be offended. I didn't write it, Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel."

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McCain Denounces Hagee

THE last time they had the chance to offend anyone was 2700 years ago, when they were wandering around ancient Egypt.

Since then, as mummies, they have given little cause for annoyance, spending the last 120 years in a museum where countless thousands of visitors have managed to see them without becoming the least upset.

No longer, it appears.

As a result of complaints, the naked remains of Asru, a chanter at the Temple of Amun in Karnak, the partially wrapped male Khary, and a child mummy have all now been covered in shrouds, supposedly to protect their modesty.

The decision, which has prompted wholesale derision, came after Manchester Museum said it had received feedback from the public that it was insensitive to display unwrapped mummies.

World War II, we know on good authority, was unnecessary, the authority being none other than Winston Churchill. By unnecessary Churchill meant that if the Allies' appeasement of Hitler hadn't taken place earlier, the war wouldn't have to have been to fought later.

Now, in this country at least, a current of opinion is gaining strength that stands Churchill on his head. It wasn't appeasement that brought about the disaster of the conflict, but warmongering on the part of the Allied leaders, Churchill first and foremost among them.

The new revisionism makes no excuses for Hitler, but it sees the war through a lens of moral relativism: Yes, the Nazis were evil, but so were the Allies, whose leaders were mendacious, committed unspeakable atrocities and hoodwinked the public into believing that the war was a noble one, fought on behalf of decency and against an evil more colossal than any previous evil in human history.

For those of us, including myself, who have long believed that the Allied war effort was indeed noble, it might seem that such a point of view could only emanate from the dank quarters of some lunatic fringe, perhaps holed up in a Rocky Mountain redoubt and eating conspiracy theories for breakfast.

But on the contrary, the view seems to be the province of entirely respectable and thoughtful people of literary bent. The most visible proponent of the unnecessary war theory is the novelist Nicholson Baker, an accomplished, gentle and entirely civilized man, whose book "Human Smoke" has made him a darling of leftist critics of the American role in the world.

Part of the Great White Fleet arrives in Puget Sound in 1908. The fleet was the greatest concentration of warships seen before or since in the Sound.
In our history, the hearts of the American people have experienced certain moments of patriotic pride and joy. These include hearing the news that World War II had finally ended or watching television screens in wonder as an American made history by walking on the moon.

The awe-inspiring deployment of the Navy's "Great White Fleet" 100 years ago was another such moment. In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt conceived the idea of sending 16 battleships on a 14-month around-the-world cruise — a feat never attempted before. Those battleships, with hulls painted white, became known as the Great White Fleet.

This week, Navy ships return to Seattle as part of the centennial celebration recalling the fleet's visit to Seattle May 23, 1908. The port call garnered much attention, with Seattle Mayor John F. Miller presenting Rear Adm. C. S. Sperry with the key to the city (made from Klondike gold). The newspapers were full of stories profiling the ships, the commanders, and Roosevelt's naval and foreign policies.

They keep waiting, but longtime aides to former President Lyndon B. Johnson, LBJ historians, and even his daughter Lynda Bird Robb say it doesn’t look like today’s politicians are ready to give the Texan credit for laying the groundwork on the programs and civil rights advances they are building on today. At a huge LBJ homecoming this week to celebrate the former president’s 100th birthday, his former domestic policy aide, Joseph Califano Jr., named names--John Edwards, Sen. Barack Obama--in a keynote address urging that Washington and the public pull the “invisible president” out of the shadow of Vietnam to herald his long list of domestic achievements.

“Throughout this year, and last week in endorsing Barack Obama, John Edwards made reducing poverty a centerpiece of his presidential campaign. Yet he never mentioned Lyndon Johnson, the first--and only--president ever to declare war on poverty and sharply reduce it,” Califano told the Centennial Celebration for President Lyndon Baines Johnson at the Kaiser Family Foundation. Then he added, “A few weeks ago in his eloquent victory speech in Raleigh, N.C., Barack Obama followed a familiar pattern of omission. In recounting the achievements of previous Democratic presidents, he mentioned the pantheon of FDR, Harry Truman, JFK--but not LBJ. Not Lyndon Johnson--not the man who would be proudest of Barack Obama’s candidacy and what it says about America, the president uniquely responsible for the laws that gave this man (and millions of others) the opportunity to develop and display his talents and gave this nation the opportunity to benefit from them.”

Robb hailed the event and the fact the Democrats are running a woman and black for the first time in history, but added that she’s disappointed her dad never gets mentioned by the candidates. “Well, I guess it hurts. It makes you feel sad that people who from our perspective you would think would see that.” But she added, “Daddy would be so excited that we have a person of color and a woman running.”

Sen. Hillary Clinton did mention LBJ once, but it backfired because it was seen as a slight toward Martin Luther King Jr.

Others at the event added that the reason LBJ doesn’t get his due is because of the Vietnam War. Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who mentions LBJ often and even sat at Johnson’s Senate desk, said, “It is true that Vietnam has been an obstacle for many and hard to overcome.” Califano agreed, but urged his audience to get over Vietnam. “It’s time to take off the Vietnam blinders and let our eyes look at and learn from the domestic dimension of this presidency. Let everyone think what they will about Vietnam. But let us--especially Democrats--also recognize the reality of this revolutionary’s remarkable achievements,” he said.