Museum honors rescuers of Jews

RIGA, Latvia » Israeli President Shimon Peres on Tuesday took part in a ceremony to open a museum honoring a couple who saved about 50 Jews from extermination in Nazi-occupied Latvia.

The museum in downtown Riga, Latvia’s capital, is next to the property once owned by Zanis Lipke, a port worker who together with his wife hid Jews in an underground pit measuring about 90 square feet.

The three-story museum of dark gray wood resembles an overturned ship and is designed to give visitors a claustrophobic sense of life in a tiny bunker.

In 1966, Yad Vashem, an Israeli-based center for studying the Holocaust, recognized Zanis and Johanna Lipke as rescuers of Jews.

Lipke died in 1987 and his wife in 1990.

Fungus limits access to bats’ caves

WEST FORK, Ark. » A fungus that is deadly to bats has been detected in two Arkansas caves, and restrictions will remain in place to keep people out of most caves across the state.

The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission said Monday that the fungus that causes white-nose syndrome in bats has turned up in a cave in Devil’s Den State Park and in a cave on private land in Baxter County.

Wildlife officials say swabs taken from hibernating bats revealed the fungus was present.

The fungus (Geomyces destructans) was first detected in the eastern United States and Canada. Officials have blocked access to caves to try to keep the fungus from spreading west.

Safe haven for slaves recognized

HATTERAS, N.C. » A site on the Outer Banks is being added to the National Park Service’s Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.

A monument is scheduled for dedication Wednesday at the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras to the Hotel de Afrique. The site is considered the first safe haven for runaway slaves in North Caro­lina.

After Union troops captured the area early in the Civil War, dozens of slaves fled there. In return for food and shelter, they helped federal forces load ships and build fortifications.

The freed slaves stayed in as many as 12 wooden buildings, one of them called the Hotel de Afrique.

The network includes sites important to the underground railway, which was the system of safe houses used by slaves escaping north.