How de Gaulle told the SOE to 'go home': 28th October: today's top history news

‘You have no business here’
According to the latest Special Operations Executive (SOE) personnel file released by The National Archives, in September 1944, de Gaulle told the British officer Peter Lake, who trained French resistance fighters in the south of France before D-Day, to ‘go home’. The file contains reports of Lake’s mission in the Dordogne region and of his meeting with de Gaulle three months after D-Day.
The release was reported by the French press agency Agence France Presse (AFP) and on the website of the BBC.
Further information is also available on the website of The National Archives.

Views of German reunification from across the Channel
To mark the 20th anniversary of fall of the Berlin Wall, France has opened some of its diplomatic archives relating to the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification. Yesterday, some of the documents dating back to 1989 were presented to the press for the first time. The remaining archives will be made public on November 9th. The article by the press agency AFP is published on the website of Le Monde.

The Difficulties of Confronting Brazil’s Past
Almost 500 people are believed to have been killed or disappeared in Brazil during the dictatorship between 1969 and 1985. Thousands of others were tortured, exiled or stripped of their political rights. The Brazilian government has recently announced its plans to create a Truth Commission to investigate the crimes committed by the security forces at the time. Jan Rocha reports, on the website of the BBC.

Mystery of Franklin’s Northwest Passage expedition solved at last?
In The Guardian, Maev Kennedy reports on the latest finds by Robert Grenier, the archaeologist who has sought to explain the mysterious disappearance of Sir John Franklin’s two ships, in 1845, for the past 30 years. He will give a public lecture at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich on Friday.