Documents

Documents dating from the Civil War and others to and from Presidents Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt are among hundreds of stolen documents sold online that EBay is agreeing to buy back and return to New York's archives, a state official in Albany said. The online auction giant has no liability in the sale of the stolen artifacts, but it agreed voluntarily to offer buyers the amount that they paid, according to the official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because not all details of the investigation have been announced.

Los Angeles County auditors accused a private investigations company Wednesday of failing to fulfill a contract that required it to notify troubled parents if a judge was being asked to take away their children. Yoakum Investigations Inc. was hired in December 2005 by the Department of Children and Family Services to deliver notices to parents who were about to lose rights over their children.

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to locate a rare, vintage copy of the nation's founding document, try looking behind the filing cabinet. That was a lesson learned the hard way at the Supreme Court, where a 185-year-old facsimile of the Declaration of Independence gathered dust for seven years, tucked behind the office furniture, a court spokeswoman acknowledged this week.

Bouncing down an empty country road, past browning cotton fields lined with signs advertising church services and cheap guns, historian John A. Lupton hunches over a minivan's steering wheel and ignores his aching back.

The names and public acts of the founding fathers are familiar to many Americans, but their thoughts have remained largely a mystery. "People think it would be difficult to touch them as who they were," historian David McCullough told a recent Senate hearing. "And it is, except in what they wrote." For 65 years, scholars have been compiling, transcribing and annotating the writings of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton.

Iranian documents obtained by the United Nations' nuclear watchdog strongly suggest that Iran was working on a nuclear weapons design as recently as four years ago, U.N. officials disclosed last week in a private briefing. The documents suggest that Iran's research on nuclear weapons continued several months after U.S.

Transcripts from a grand jury investigation into the beating death of a jail inmate are scheduled to be unsealed no later than April 7 under the orders of an Orange County judge who found the Sheriff's Department had no legal standing to block their release. In finalizing a preliminary ruling reached earlier this week, Superior Court Judge James A.

The petition was signed by 195 children in Concord, Mass. Their single request was painfully simple: that the president free "all the little slave children in this country." On April 5, 1864, Abraham Lincoln replied to the woman who had organized the petition, ending his letter, "While I have not the power to grant all they ask, I trust they will remember that God has, and that, as it seems, He wills to do it."

An article and related materials published on the Los Angeles Times website on March 17 have been removed from the site because they relied heavily on information that The Times no longer believes to be credible. The article, titled "An Attack on Tupac Shakur Launched a Hip-Hop War" and written by Times staff writer Chuck Philips, purported to relate "new" information about a 1994 assault on rap star Tupac Shakur, including a description of events contained in FBI reports.

Mohammed Atef was furious. The Al Qaeda leader had learned that a subordinate had broken the rules repeatedly. So he did his duty as the feared military chief of a global terror network: He fired off a nasty memo. In two pages mixing flowery religious terms with itemized complaints, the Egyptian boss accused the militant of misappropriating cash, a car, sick leave, research papers and an air conditioner during "an austerity situation" for the network.