History

Martina Metzler peers at the piles of paper strips spread across four desks in her office. Seeing two jagged edges that match, her eyes light up and she tapes them together. "Another join, another small success," she says with a wry smile -- even though at least two-thirds of the sheet is still missing. Metzler, 45, is a "puzzler," one of a team of eight government workers that has attempted for the last 14 years to manually restore documents hurriedly shredded by East Germany's secret police, or Stasi, in the dying days of one of the Soviet bloc's most repressive regimes.

At a reception in the mountains above Santa Cruz, dozens of surfers of a certain age, balancing wine glasses and pizza slices, basked in their closeness to a little piece of their sport's history. The celebrants at the San Lorenzo Valley Historical Museum had known the basic story for a while: In 1885, three Hawaiian princes visiting Santa Cruz on a break from military school wowed the locals with, as a newspaper report put it, "interesting exhibitions of surf-board swimming as practiced in their native islands."

It's a tale of toil, starvation and death, set forth in messages from the grave. The saga of life in 17th century America -- "Written in Bone" -- goes on display today at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Some 340 objects -- including artifacts and human bones -- are on display for two years, with discussions of how cold cases from colonial times shed light on what life was like for some of the earliest English...

France's top judicial body formally recognized the nation's role in deporting Jews to Nazi death camps during the Holocaust but in effect ruled out further reparations for the deportees or their families. Jewish groups welcomed the Council of State ruling. Nearly 70 years ago, the Vichy government helped deport about 76,000 people, including 11,000 children, from Nazi-occupied France to concentration camps. Fewer than 3,000 returned alive.

Helicopter executive: An article in Business on Monday about Lynn Tilton, chief executive of MD Helicopters Inc., quoted her as saying, "Well-behaved women seldom make history." The article should have said Tilton was repeating a phrase coined by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.

Good start: The premiere of "The Vampire Diaries" on Thursday night was watched by about 4.84 million people, the most for any series debut in the CW's three-year history.

The first sentence of Martin Miller's article about his trip to Gettysburg ["Living History," Sept. 6] reveals that he must be from the East Coast. Who else but an East Coaster could buy into the idea that California doesn't have history? In these times of reduced family travel budgets, it does a great disservice to readers of the Los Angeles Times, the vast majority of whom are Californians, to imply that they can't experience history in their own state. Christine Elowitt Thousand Oaks

Japan's Emperor Akihito, marking the 20th anniversary of his coronation, says he is concerned that young people are forgetting their history. Akihito said Japan must not forget its past -- and especially the turbulent years his father, the late Emperor Hirohito, was on the throne -- if it is to learn from its mistakes. The 75-year-old monarch said at a brief news conference that it was regrettable Hirohito would be remembered by history for World War II and Japan's military advances into Asia prior to its defeat in 1945.