ATHENS, Nov 17, 2007 (AFP) - Several thousand Greeks marched in Athens Saturday to commemorate the 1973 student uprising against the country's US-backed former military regime that claimed at least 44 lives.

Bearing banners against NATO and the US and chanting anti-American slogans, over 5,000 people including university students, labour unionists and left-wing youth members participated in the annual demonstration towards the US embassy.

'Long live the Iraqi resistance, and may the (American) conquerors see coffins every day,' one block of demonstrators chanted.

ATHENS, Nov 17, 2007 (AFP) - Thousands of police were deployed around central Athens on Saturday ahead of a march commemorating the 1973 student uprising against the country's former military regime, police said.

Over 8,000 officers have been mobilised to guard against violence that routinely erupts during the annual demonstration, which crosses the city centre and culminates at the US embassy.

Over 4,000 police have been assigned to guard embassies, foreign companies and banks that are often targeted with firebombs and paint during the march.

NOWA HUTA, Poland, Sept 30, 2007 (AFP) - Clad in a dirty blue overall, the young man planted his feet squarely on the floor of the stifling bus, raised his megaphone and hectored the passengers: 'You stinking capitalists!'

Headed by the aging 1960s bus, the rattle-trap convoy of communist-era vehicles, which also included a couple of Trabant and Lada cars, lumbered off to the heart of what was once the showpiece of the People's Republic of Poland.

BERLIN, Sept 30, 2007 (AFP) - The clocks in the reception show the time in Havana and Moscow and communist-era dignitaries glower down from the walls. Eighteen years after the Berlin Wall fell, East Germany is making a comeback in a 'design hotel.'

Opened this year by two enterprising former East Germans who were barely teenagers when Germany was reunited in 1990, the Ostel is riding the wave of nostalgia for eastern European communism.

BERLIN, Sept 30, 2007 (AFP) - Nearly two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German capital is becoming ever more popular with young tourists who have made it Europe's third most visited city, as much for the uber-cool nightclubs as for the history.

Defying all expectations, the city drew more foreign visitors in the first half of the year than in 2006 when Germany hosted the Football World Cup.

PARIS, Sept 30, 2007 (AFP) - The United States has pledged to colonize the Moon by 2020 and send astronauts to Mars, but many scientists say dangerous and costly manned space missions should be a thing of the past, not the future.

Intelligent robots and satellites such as those already exploring the Red Planet, they say, do a good job and are a lot less fragile than human organisms too easily stranded millions of miles from home.

PASADENA, California, Sept 30, 2007 (AFP) - Fifty years after the launch of Sputnik left the United States scrambling to play catch-up in the first Space Race, US scientists fear history may be repeating itself as Asia emerges as the rising force in space exploration.

While the achievements of space programs run by China, Japan and India are modest in comparison to the milestones set by the United States and former Soviet Union, experts at a recent conference in Pasadena believe it is only a matter of time before Asia leads the field.

LAS CRUCES, New Mexico, Sept 30, 2007 (AFP) - A dusty launchpad in a remote region of New Mexico could become one of the first gateways to the heavens for private individuals clamoring to be the pioneer generation of space tourists.

If British billionaire Richard Branson's vision is realised, by 2010, tourists could be paying around 200,000 dollars to board 'SpaceShipTwo' and be rocketed into space to experience weightlessness before returning to earth.

PASADENA, California, Sept 30, 2007 (AFP) - The distorted beeps transmitted back to Earth from Sputnik on its maiden voyage acted as the starting pistol in the Cold War battle for supremacy that became known as the Space Race.

But while NASA was eventually to triumph in the scramble to place a man on the Moon when Neil Armstrong took his one small step in 1969, the mood among US scientists had been shrouded in gloom 12 years earlier.

MOSCOW, Sept 30, 2007 (AFP) - Russia's space machines may have a clunky look but they are reliable and today these workhorses are underpinning a revival of Moscow's ambitions after the financial collapse of the 1990s.

As Russia commemorates the 50th anniversary on Thursday of the launch of Sputnik 1 and the start of the Space Race, there is a sense of cautious optimism among its space scientists, says Igor Lysov, an expert with monthly magazine Space Industry News.

Next year, state spending on space is projected to equal about 1.5 billion dollars (one billion euros).

MOSCOW, Sept 30, 2007 (AFP) - Wavery and high-pitched, the beep-beep signal picked up on Earth signalled the dawn of a new era.

Thursday marks the 50th anniversary of the Soviet Union's launch, on October 4, 1957, of Sputnik 1, the starting signal for the Space Race and a propaganda coup that Russia's present leaders can only envy.

The launch of the world's first man-made satellite, a silvery orb with four frond-like antennae and two radio transmitters, was at first obscure.

MOSCOW, Sept 28, 2007 (AFP) - Russian pathologists believe it is 'very probable' that bones found in the Ural region of Russia are those of the teenaged son and one of the daughters of last tsar, Nicholas II, they announced Friday.

'According to results of the anatomic and morphological inquiries, one could conclude preliminarily that the remains belong to... tsarevich Alexei and princess Maria,' the deputy head of the regional forensic medicine office, Vladimir Gromov, said during a press conference in Yekaterinburg, where the remains were found.

ATHENS, Sept 28, 2007 (AFP) - Greece's decision this week to kill a history schoolbook bashed by clerics and nationalists for being too soft on traditional foe Turkey has damaged the ruling conservatives' credibility, analysts say.

Coming a few days after Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis promised to give the book a fair hearing, the move could also set a precedent of concessions to the far-right that is politically ascendant after elections this earlier month.

MOSCOW, Sept 27, 2007 (AFP) - The Russian Orthodox Church stated Thursday that it felt calls for rehabilitation of Tsar Nicholas II and his family -- who were overthrown and shot by the Bolsheviks in 1918 -- as a needless exercice.

'No one thinks that Nicholas II and his family are criminals or traitors. People who are calling for rehabilitation are knocking on an open door,' Bishop Mark of Yegoryevsk, deputy chief of the Moscow patriarchate's external relations department, was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

TALLINN, Sept 27, 2007 (AFP) - The remains of a fourth Red Army soldier exhumed from the site of a World War II memorial in Estonia's capital Tallinn were Thursday handed over to a relative from Russia, authorities said.

The remains of Mikhail Kulikov, born in 1909, were handed over to his granddaughter Anna Sokolova, who travelled from her home in the Yaroslavl region of western Russia, Estonian foreign ministry spokesman Mariann Sudakov told AFP.

WARSAW, Sept 27, 2007 (AFP) - Nearly two decades after the fall of communism, Europe's former Moscow-dominated states are using the Internet to make public the files of the security services that helped keep their regimes in power.

In the latest step, the body in charge of Poland's communist-era secret police files began Tuesday posting documents related to top officials, including the President Lech Kaczynski and his identical twin Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

WARSAW, Sept 25, 2007 (AFP) - The body in charge of Poland's communist-era secret police archives announced Tuesday that it was posting the files of top officials, including the president, on the Internet.

Janusz Kurtyka, head of the National Remembrance Institute (IPN) told reporters that the agency was bound by a wide-ranging law which was piloted by Poland's conservative rulers, the Kaczynski twins, who have made coming to terms with the communist past a major plank of their policy.

LUCKNOW, India, Sept 25, 2007 (AFP) - A group of Britons in India cancelled plans to honour their ancestors who crushed an anti-colonial revolt after authorities warned of protests and security fears, an official said Tuesday.

Hindu nationalists and some Muslim groups have already protested the visit by the Britons who had intended to follow a trail across several sites in north India which are associated with the revolt that shook the empire 150 years ago.

ATHENS, Sept 25, 2007 (AFP) - Greece's education ministry on Tuesday said it was pulling from schools a sixth-grade history book savaged by the Orthodox Church and nationalists for allegedly obscuring Turkish atrocities.

'We have decided to withdraw the book and temporarily replace it with the previous edition taught in past years,' said Education Minister Evripidis Stylianidis.

He said a new book would be commissioned after the state education institute which evaluates Greece's school policy expressed 'important reservations over the suitability' of the last version.

NEW YORK, Sept 25, 2007 (AFP) - A rare copy of the Magna Carta, a 13th century English document enshrining the rule of law, is to go on sale in New York in December, in one of the most important ever sales of a document.

The royal charter, dated 1297 and bearing the seal of King Edward I, is expected to fetch up to 30 million dollars when it goes under the hammer at Sotheby's, the auction house said in a statement Tuesday.

BERLIN, Sept 25, 2007 (AFP) - The West German intelligence services recruited some 10,000 spies in East Germany during the Cold War and had given advance warning of plans to build the Berlin Wall, according to an historian of the period.

In an interview published Monday in the Berliner Zeitung daily, Matthias Uhl told said the BND, the foreign intelligence service, had elaborated a scenario where the communist East regime erects a wall dividing Berlin well before it happened overnight on August 13, 1961.

'But the politicians did not want to believe it,' Uhl said.

MELBOURNE, Sept 25, 2007 (AFP) - As a five-year-old, Alex Kurzem watched Nazi soldiers slaughter members of his Jewish family in 1941, little realising that he would spend the rest of World War II acting as a child mascot for the Latvian SS.

Forced to hide his Jewish background from the terrifying stormtroopers who became his protectors, Kurzem told no one of his wartime experiences for more than 50 years before finally unburdening himself to his son.

YANGON, Sept 24, 2007 (AFP) - Myanmar has been under military dictatorship almost continuously since 1962, but the origins of its current crisis can be traced back to a failed revolt in 1988.

The country, which was then still known to the outside world as Burma, was no stranger to coups, and had suffered periodic instability both before and after its independence from Britain in 1948.

In 1988, the Burmese population was suffering from a deteriorating economy heavily dependent on agricultural commodities, which were falling in value.

LUCKNOW, India, Sept 24, 2007 (AFP) - Several hundred Hindu nationalists protested Monday against a visit by a group of Britons to honour their ancestors who crushed an anti-colonial uprising in India in 1857.

The activists from India's main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) shouted 'English go home' and 'Hail Mother India' in Lucknow city, where the visitors were due to arrive later Monday.

The British tourists intend to follow a trail across several sites in northern India which are associated with the revolt that shook the empire 150 years ago.

BEIJING, Sept 24, 2007 (AFP) - A state-run cafe has opened in Beijing's Forbidden City on the premises where Starbucks closed down earlier this year amid charges the US chain sullied the site, state media said.

The 'Forbidden City Cafe,' managed by the authorities that oversee the historic imperial quarters, serves both coffee and traditional Chinese tea, the Xinhua news agency reported late Sunday.

LUCKNOW, India, Sept 23, 2007 (AFP) - A visit planned Monday by a group of Britons to honour their ancestors who crushed an anti-colonial uprising in India in 1857 has sparked nationalist calls for protests.

The tourists intend to follow a trail across several sites associated with the revolt that shook the empire 150 years ago.

But India's main opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party vowed at the weekend to stop them.

KIEV, Sept 23, 2007 (AFP) - About a hundred people gathered in the Ukrainian capital Kiev on Sunday to commemorate one of the most infamous massacres of East European Jews during World War II, the Babi Yar massacre.

Relatives of the dead laid flowers, candles and small stones according to Jewish tradition at a monument formed in the shape of a menorah, or seven-branched candelabrum.

Prayers were said in Hebrew by Ukrainian chief rabbi Yakiv Blaykh.

BERLIN, Sept 23, 2007 (AFP) - Hollywood superstar Tom Cruise at the weekend observed a minute of silence for the slain German resistance hero he portrays in a new World War II film, the German press reported on Sunday.

Cruise made the respectful gesture before shooting a scene of 'Valkyrie' at the historic Bendlerblock building in Berlin, where authorities originally refused to allow the crew to film, before reversing their ban 10 days ago.

TALLINN, Sept 22, 2007 (AFP) - The anniversary of the 1944 Soviet occupation of Estonia passed off peacefully here Saturday despite fears of a repeat of the violence sparked by the removal of a Soviet war memorial in April.

Estonians view September 22, 1944, as the start of the second occupation of their country by the Soviet Union. The first occurred between 1939 and 1941, when Soviet troops were forced out by the Nazis.

BRATISLAVA, Sept 20, 2007 (AFP) - Slovak lawmakers overwhelmingly voted on Thursday for a far-right motion backing laws that paved the way for the expulsion and expropriation of Germans and Hungarians after World War Two, in a move set to strain Slovak-Hungarian relations.

The motion, drawn up by a handful of lawmakers from the Slovak National Party (SNS), was approved by 120 members of the 150-seat parliament.

PRAGUE, Sept 20, 2007 (AFP) - Czechs got the chance to examine the world's biggest medieval manuscript, the 'Codex Gigas' or 'Devil's Bible,' for the first time in almost 359 years on Thursday when the precious work went on show as part of a four-month-long exhibition.

The 13th century masterpiece, considered at the time as the eighth wonder of the world, was carried off as booty by Swedish troops from Prague during the Thirty Years' War but has returned at the end of painstaking negotiations and preparations between Prague and Stockholm.

MOSCOW, Sept 20, 2007 (AFP) - The self-declared heir to Russia's murdered last tsar Nicholas II urged on Thursday an 'honest and serious' probe into the discovery of suspected remains of two of Nicholas' children.

Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna, who styles herself 'Head of the Russian Imperial House', said she hoped the discovery of what may be Nicholas' last two unaccounted-for children, Alexei and Maria, would not prompt the kind of in-fighting that surrounded a previous 1998 reburial ceremony.

BERLIN, Sept 19, 2007 (AFP) - The German government on Wednesday said it would pay compensation to some 50,000 Jews who were forced by the Nazis to work in ghettos but failed to qualify for pay-outs from a fund for former slave labourers.

The finance ministry will pay those who come forward 2,000 euros (2,789 dollars) each, government spokesman Ulrich Wilhelm said.

TALLINN, Sept 18, 2007 (AFP) - Estonia's President Toomas Hendrik Ilves on Tuesday reignited the Baltic state's verbal battle with Moscow, likening the World War II Nazi occupation to the Soviet rule that followed it.

'From the Estonian viewpoint, there is no difference between Nazis and Communists. Both acted brutally and repressed Estonians. Neither the Nazis nor the Communists tolerated democracy, and that's a fact any Estonian knows,' Ilves said.

SHENYANG, China, Sept 18, 2007 (AFP) - The lucky ones among Japan's Chinese prisoners in the 1930s and 1940s got a bullet. For the others, there was 'the rolling cage.'

The two-metre (six-foot) metal cylinder with hundreds of inch-long razor-sharp nails on the inside, was used to roll people to a slow and agonising death. But these days, it serves a different, political purpose.

It is part of the graphic displays in the September 18 Museum in northeast China's Shenyang city, where history is in the service of the Communist Party, with visible results.

BERLIN, Sept 17, 2007 (AFP) - A Sudanese man who died in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp has become the first African among thousands of victims of the Nazis to have a memorial pavement plaque created in his honour in Berlin.

A bronze plaque bearing Mahjud bin Adam Mohamed's name and 1941, the year he was arrested, was last week cemented into the pavement in front of the apartment block where he lived with his German girlfriend and their children.