Below are current event articles that relate to events, topics, and people found in The Winds of Change.
On December 5, 1930, just over 12 years after the end of World War I, German moviegoers flocked to Berlin’s Mozart Hall to see one of Hollywood’s latest films. But during the movie, a cadre of 150 Nazi Brownshirts, nearly all too young to have fought in World War I, were led into the theater by propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Spewing anti-Semitic invective at the screen, they repeatedly shouted “Judenfilm!” as they tossed stink bombs from the balcony, threw sneezing powder in the air, and released white mice into the theater. A somewhat shocking turn of events, considering the movie was the highly anticipated adaptation of countryman Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, the blockbuster novel that had transfixed the nation months earlier.
They show the battered wrecks of several of the 25 warships - 14 of them British - that were blown up during the Battle of Jutland on 31 May, 1916. Among them is HMS Invincible which was torn apart by a German shell, killing more than 1,000 sailors. HMS Defence and HMS Queen Mary were also scanned during the survey.
When German U-boat Commander Walther Schwieger ordered a torpedo strike on the Lusitania, he didn't know it would be the shot that eventually led the U.S. into WWI. But it wasn't a mistake, either.
You can't drink, you can't smoke and you can't have sex. But there is one human pleasure that's been with astronauts since the dawn of the space age: chocolate.
A hundred years after the outbreak of the First World War, builders renovating a historic castle in Germany’s Ruhr valley have found a time capsule that appears to have been left in memory of soldiers who died in the conflict.
Between 1916 and 1917, the New Zealand Tunnelling Company linked a subterranean system of quarries beneath the Western Front, and named them after New Zealand places to help themselves stay oriented underground.
Originally mined for chalk to build the French town of Arras, the vast network of 200 year-old underground quarries was rediscovered in September 1916. The New Zealand tunnellers were tasked with linking and extending these old quarries in preparation for a major Allied attack on the Germans. Once complete, the quarried spaces would secretly house Allied troops before they took on the enemy in the ‘Battle of Arras’.
History remembers trench warfare as wasteful, futile, and uninspired, but in reality it was a deeply thought-out system that underwent constant revision. Here's how it worked during World War I.
Top image: A painting by Captain Kenneth Keith Forbes shows a Canadian 6-inch howitzer supporting British troops in the attack on Thiepval on 16 July 1916 during the Somme offensive. Via Canadian Artillery in Action.
It was around this time 100 years ago that the mobile battlefield along the Western Front ground to a screeching halt — a 440 mile stretch that barely moved in the ensuing four years.
During World War I, No Man’s Land was both an actual and a metaphorical space. It separated the front lines of the opposing armies and was perhaps the only location where enemy troops could meet without hostility. It was in No Man's Land that the spontaneous Christmas truce of December 1914 took place and where opposing troops might unofficially agree to safely remove their wounded comrades, or even sunbathe on the first days of spring.
Everyone knows about the horrors of life in the trenches of the First World War, but it’s only recently that the anxieties of people back home in Britain have started to be talked about.
At long last, those feelings are being aired more widely, thanks to a new anthology of letters written, at the time, to The Daily Telegraph. The message these missives impart is of a nation that was desperate to provide support, of any kind, to our brave boys fighting on just the other side of the Channel.
The United States had entered the war with high hopes and dreams—aiming to make the world “safe for democracy” as President Woodrow Wilson would proclaim, but by the 1920s there were strong feelings that the U.S. should never have gotten itself involved in the byzantine affairs of the European powers. Isolationist sentiments grew across the country especially after the rejection of the Versailles Treaty by the U.S. Congress in 1920. These feelings of bitterness and disappointment found their fullest expression in the literature of the day, written by members of what has become known as the “Lost Generation,” most notably John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.
In the words of one historian, “Art and war are old companions.” The United States government proved that nearly a century ago when it commissioned eight artists to go to war. Armed with sketchpads, charcoals, pastels and little to no military training, the artists embedded with the American Expeditionary Forces and sketched everything from rolling tanks to portraits of German prisoners. The War Department coordinated the program in the hopes that the artists could provide a historical record and galvanize support for the war.
Britain went to war on August 4 1914. In the second part of a four-day series, we document the dramatic events leading up to the declaration of war as they happened, hour-by-hour.
A light rain was falling on the evening of 2 April 1917 as Woodrow Wilson was driven from the White House to Capitol Hill, escorted by a unit of the United States cavalry, to address a specially convened joint session of Congress. According to contemporary accounts, the 28th president looked pale and nervous. But his words betrayed not the slightest doubt or hesitancy.
World War One is remembered as the first industrial war. A clash of furnace and factory as much as flesh and blood. The chimneys and cranes of this war machine consumed landscapes across Europe. And few were more dominated than the 12 miles of the River Tyne, from the North Sea to the west of Newcastle, devoted to building the world's ships. It is estimated more than three million tonnes of shipping were built in the yards here, on the nearby River Wear and in other north east yards, from 1914 to 1918.
These days, however, Big Pit digs tourism, not coal; the party descending into the earth are American visitors. There are no working deep-mines remaining in South Wales; already in decline, the area's coalfield was annihilated in the wake of the 1984-5 Miners' Strike, the names of the closed collieries to toll like funeral bells. Mardy. Tower. Deep Navigation. Markham. Lady Windsor. How black was my valley a century ago, on the eve of the Great War, when there were a dozen collieries within sight, and another 600 coal mines across South Wales, employing 232,000 men, who hewed 57 million tons a year, a fifth of the entire output of the United Kingdom. The very earth vibrated to the metronomic percussion of thousands of subterranean men wielding the pick. Coal for the Navy. Coal for industry. Coal for locomotives. Coal for homes.
Movie legends including Charlie Chaplin, Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg have attempted to tackle the First World War, but while some have achieved Oscars and box-office success, others have delayed peace talks and enraged renowned world leaders. One of the most famous films, A Farewell to Arms (1932), directed by Frank Borzage, has been digitally restored and is due for re-release in UK cinemas tomorrow.
1 HORATIO KITCHENER As the first British troops marched whistling off to the front in autumn 1914 the cliche of the hour was: "It'll be all over by Christmas." An experienced campaigner on three continents, Horatio Kitchener from Ballylongford, Co Kerry, knew it would be a long haul. As Secretary of State for War he put together the largest volunteer army the world had ever seen, and put industrial production on an efficient war footing.
The National Archives currently has in its collection 1.5 million pages of handwritten diaries kept by soldiers of World War I. They're some of the most requested documents in the National Archives reading room, but until now have been accessible only to anyone who's made the trip to D.C. But now the archivisits are working to put them online, and you can help them. The project is called Operation War Diary, and it comes from a partnership between the National Archives, the citizen science initiative Zooniverse and the Imperial War Museum in the UK. The diaries have all been scanned and posted online for citizen historians to look at and transcribe. According to the project: "The war diaries contain a wealth of information of far greater interest than the army could ever have predicted. They provide unrivalled insight into daily events on the front line, and are full of fascinating detail about the decisions that were made and the activities that resulted from them."
No one nation deserves all responsibility for the outbreak of war, but Germany seems to me to deserve most. It alone had power to halt the descent to disaster at any time in July 1914 by withdrawing its "blank cheque" which offered support to Austria for its invasion of Serbia. I'm afraid I am unconvinced by the argument that Serbia was a rogue state which deserved its nemesis at Austria's hands. And I do not believe Russia wanted a European war in 1914 - its leaders knew that it would have been in a far stronger position to fight two years later, having completed its rearmament programme.
On the cobbled streets of industrial Sheffield an Indian elephant dutifully lumbered along. Her task was important - she had to cart munitions, machines and scrap metal around the city, a job previously done by three horses taken off to war. Lizzie - as she was known - was used to performing tricks as part of a travelling menagerie. But with the outbreak of World War One she was conscripted to help with heavy labour, fitted with a harness and sent to work at a scrap metal merchants.
British archaeologists recently discovered more than 40 German U-boats sunk during World War I off the coast of England. Now they are in a race against time to learn the secrets hidden in their watery graves. On the old game show "What's My Line?" Briton Mark Dunkley might have been described with the following words: "He does what many adventurers around the world can only dream of doing." Dunkley is an underwater archeologist who dives for lost treasures. His most recent discoveries were anything if not eerie.
When the First World War began, in the summer of 1914, the Lusitania was among the most glamorous and celebrated ships in the world—at one time both the largest and fastest afloat. But the British passenger liner would earn a far more tragic place in history on May 7, 1915, when it was torpedoed by a German submarine off the coast of Ireland, with the loss of nearly 1,200 lives.
Evidence of a megaflood on Mars—a surprisingly recent one that cut a 600-mile (966-kilometer) river channel into the planet—has been detected by radar from an orbiting satellite. Scientists have known for some time about the existence of the Marte Vallis channel system. But the new radar research has doubled the estimated depth of the massive flow and identified the headwaters and floodplain of the river. Both had been covered by lava from a volcanic eruption no more than 500 million years ago. The megaflood and volcano are considered especially significant because they occurred so recently, in geological terms, suggesting that Mars may well remain a geologically active planet today. (Learn about Martian geology.)
A blogger passionate about historic photography techniques serendipitously found some old photos inside his newly-purchased camera. As in, World War I old. Last week, Anton Orlov of the Photo Palace blog was cleaning the Jumelle Belllieni stereoscopic camera that he'd bought at an antique store a few days prior, and found the images completely by accident. According to his blog, he opened the film chamber and saw the negatives on a stack of glass plates.
“Five, four, three...” At T-minus three seconds white flames explode from the 22-story rocket. “Two, one. Liftoff.” The night sky erupts with light and fire and clouds of smoke, as nine engines generating 1,320,000 pounds of thrust push the vehicle skyward at NASA’s storied Cape Canaveral launchpad. The road to orbit is short but marked with a series of technical miracles, and the rocket hits them all: 17,000 miles per hour to break from Earth’s atmosphere. First and second stage separation. Second stage ignition. In minutes it’s over: The capsule carrying 1,000 pounds of cargo is in orbit, racing toward a docking with the International Space Station, itself traveling so fast it circles the Earth 15 times a day, the second such flight of the Falcon 9 and its Dragon capsule since May. “It proves that we didn’t just get lucky the first time around,” says the rocket’s chief designer, Elon Musk. “Next year we expect four to five launches, the year after that eight to ten, and the launch rate will increase by 100 percent every year for the next four to five years.” At that rate Musk, a self-taught engineer and Internet whiz kid, will be launching more rockets than even China or Russia.
Today advertisers use futuristic tech like jetpacks and robots in their TV ads so that potential consumers think of their brand as forward thinking and innovative. In the 1920s, the cutting edge gadget that advertisers most wanted to associate themselves with was television. But, since the technology was still in its infancy, they faked it.
Or, that’s what a spacesuit was made from in 1969 when astronaut Neil Armstrong, who died this past weekend, donned the bulky, Pillsbury-Doughboy-looking suit of great engineering and design ingenuity to take humankind’s first steps on the moon. A spacesuit is “the world’s smallest spacecraft,” explained MIT professor, engineer and spacesuit designer Dava Newman at the PopTech conference in 2011. This pressurized outerwear, designed for human survival in space, has to provide an astronaut with protection against the extreme environment, deliver oxygen, modulate temperature and equally important, allow mobility for the wearer to work.
On January 17, 1917, British code breakers in Room 40, the cryptoanalysis office of Great Britain’s Naval Intelligence, intercepted a telegram from Germany. At first, they suspected the coded message was a routine communication. But, soon enough, the cryptologists found that what they held in their hands was a top-secret missive that would shift the tides of World War I. Chances are that you have studied the Zimmermann Telegram in a history class, but have you ever actually seen the coded message? German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann sent the diplomatic message to Heinrich von Eckardt, the German ambassador in Mexico City, instructing him to speak to the president of Mexico. He proposed that the two nations strike an alliance; if Mexico waged war against the United States, thereby distracting Americans from the conflict in Europe, Germany would lend support and help Mexico reclaim Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.
Science enthusiasts and space geeks around the world are eagerly awaiting the landing of NASA’s rover Curiosity on Mars, planned for Monday morning at 1:31 am Eastern time. The Mars Science Laboratory, set to replace Opportunity and Spirit, is our most advanced rover yet, and NASA scientists hope that it will help us learn about the Martian climate and geology, collect data for a potential future manned mission and perhaps even find evidence that life could have existed on the the red planet in the past.
At noon eastern time today, a rocket carrying NASA's newest space telescope dropped from a carrier plane, ignited its engines, and lofted the spacecraft into a picture-perfect equatorial orbit.
A previously unknown postcard sent by Adolf Hitler when he was a soldier in World War I has been uncovered in a European history project. Hitler's postcard, sent in 1916 when he was recovering from a war wound, was found in Munich, Germany. Oxford University is providing expert advice to the Europeana 1914-1918 project which runs history roadshows. When the postcard was identified, the university's Dr Stuart Lee said he "felt a shudder run through me". "I found it hard to believe that at a local event to record ordinary people's stories, I was seeing a previously unknown document in Hitler's own hand," said Dr Lee.
"I thought it was a brilliant idea from the beginning," says Timothy Ferris. Produce a phonograph record containing the sounds and images of humankind and fling it out into the solar system. By the 1970s, astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake already had some experience with sending messages out into space. They had created two gold-anodized aluminum plaques that were affixed to the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft. Linda Salzman Sagan, an artist and Carl's wife, etched an illustration onto them of a nude man and woman with an indication of the time and location of our civilization.
At midnight on November 12, 1870, two French balloons, inflated with highly flammable coal gas and manned by desperate volunteers, took off from a site in Monmartre, the highest point in Paris. The balloons rose from a city besieged "the Franco-Prussian War had left Paris isolated, and the city had been hastily encircled by the Prussian Army" and they did so on an unlikely mission. They carried with them several dozen pigeons, gathered from lofts across the city, that were part of a last-ditch attempt to establish two-way communication between the capital and the French provisional government in Tours, 130 miles southwest.
Where were newlyweds supposed to honeymoon in the future? The moon, of course. Honeymoons on the moon show up in popular culture throughout the 1950s and 60s, in everything from songs to comic strips. The June 1, 1958 edition of the Sunday comic strip "Closer Than We Think" by Arthur Radebaugh claimed that it would be the new default destination for lovebirds, replacing the cliched honeymoon spot, Niagara Falls:
The bodies of 21 German soldiers entombed in a perfectly preserved World War One shelter have been discovered 94 years after they were killed. The men were part of a larger group of 34 who were buried alive when a huge Allied shell exploded above the tunnel in 1918, causing it to cave in. Thirteen bodies were recovered from the underground shelter, but the remaining men had to be left under a mountain of mud as it was too dangerous to retrieve them. Nearly a century later, French archaeologists stumbled upon the mass grave on the former Western Front in eastern France during excavation work for a road building project.
The world's last surviving First World War veteran has died - marking the end of an era in British history. Florence Green, who joined the war effort in September 1918, when she was aged just 17, passed away in her sleep at a Norfolk care home just two weeks before her 111th birthday. The great-grandmother, who lived through all but 400 days of the 20th century, signed up to the Women's Royal Air Force two months before the end of the First World War. She was the last surviving person to have seen active service in the Great War following the death of British-born sailor Claude Choules in Australia last year.
Flanders fields today bears little sign of the four years of war that claimed so many thousands of lives and ravaged this small corner of the Western Front. But further down, deep below the surface there remains a constant reminder of the bravery and daring of the men who risked their lives for their country.
Even at the distance of a century, no war seems more terrible than World War I. In the four years between 1914 and 1918, it killed or wounded more than 25 million people, peculiarly horribly, and (in popular opinion, at least) for less apparent purpose than did any other war before or since. Yet there were still odd moments of joy and hope in the trenches of Flanders and France, and one of the most remarkable came during the first Christmas of the war, a few brief hours during which men from both sides on the Western Front laid down their arms, emerged from their trenches, and shared food, carols, games and comradeship.
On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, an armistice between Allied forces and Germany put an end to the fighting of what was then referred to as the Great War. President Woodrow Wilson declared November 11, of the following year, Armistice Day. In 1938, an act of Congress made the day a legal holiday, and by 1954, that act was amended to create Veterans Day, to honor American veterans of all wars.
Like hundreds of thousands of young American men, Henry Johnson returned from World War I and tried to make a life for himself in spite of what he had experienced in a strange and distant land. With dozens of bullet and shrapnel wounds, he knew he was lucky to have survived. His discharge records erroneously made no mention of his injuries, and so Johnson was denied not only a Purple Heart, but a disability allowance as well. Uneducated and in his early twenties, Henry Johnson had no expectations that he could correct the errors in his military record. He simply tried to carry on as well as a black man could in the country he had been willing to give his life for.
Under the rich Alsatian soil lies a labyrinth of passageways buried into the Lerchenberg hills. Built nearly 100 years ago, they were used by soldiers to shelter from shelling during the Great War. The 21 soldiers were found in passageway known as Kilianstollen, inside their almost untouched living quarters.
It was the great flash point of the 20th century, an act that set off a chain reaction of calamity: two World Wars, 80 million deaths, the Russian Revolution, the rise of Hitler, the atomic bomb. Yet it might never have happened - we're now told had Gavrilo Princip not got hungry for a sandwich.
In April 1949, just as the Cold War was beginning to intensify, actor, singer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson traveled to France to attend the Soviet Union-sponsored Paris Peace Conference. After singing "Joe Hill," the famous ballad about a Swedish-born union activist falsely accused and convicted of murder and executed in Utah in 1915, Robeson addressed the audience and began speaking extemporaneously, as he often did, about the lives of black people in the United States. Robeson's main point was that World War III was not inevitable, as many Americans did not want war with the Soviet Union.
WA's national treasure Claude Choules, Australia's oldest man and the world's last surviving World War I veteran, has died in Perth aged 110. Mr Choules was a man who made the best of life and devoted himself to his family and country. His fighting spirit helped him survive two world wars, and also live long enough to become the oldest man in WA and the last World War I veteran living in Australia.
So you want to open sealed envelopes without getting caught? Here's the secret, according to one of the six oldest classified documents in possession of the Central Intelligence Agency: "Mix 5 drams copper acetol arsenate. 3 ounces acetone and add 1 pint amyl alcohol (fusil-oil). Heat in water bath - steam rising will dissolve the sealing material of its mucilage, wax or oil." But there's a warning for the intrepid spy: "Do not inhale fumes."
1. "The U.S. space program enjoyed broad, enthusiastic support during the race to land a man on the Moon." Throughout the 1960s, public opinion polls indicated that 45 to 60 percent of Americans felt that the government was spending too much money on space exploration. Even after Neil Armstrong's "giant leap for mankind," only a lukewarm 53 percent of the public believed that the historic event had been worth the cost.
For much of their history, Americans dealt with racial differences by drawing a strict line between white people and black people. But Daniel J. Sharfstein, an associate professor of law at Vanderbilt University, notes that even while racial categories were rigidly defined, they were also flexibly understood and the color line was more porous than it might seem. His new book, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, traces the experience of three families "the Gibsons, the Spencers and the Walls" beginning in the 17th century. Smithsonian magazine's T.A. Frail spoke with Sharfstein about his new book.
A U.S. soldier who had been missing in action for 92 years will be buried with full military honors Thursday. On Wednesday, the Department of Defense's POW/Missing Personnel Office said the remains of Army Private Henry A. Weikel, 28, of Mt. Carmel, Pennsylvania, had been identified and returned to his family for burial. Weikel will be laid to rest in Annville, Pennsylvania, the office said in a statement.
As the space shuttles complete their final missions, curator Valerie Neal at the National Air and Space Museum highlights the spacecrafts history and legacy in manned space flight.
On its 60th Anniversary, the Korean War looks much like Vietnam, a pointless conflict that gained nothing for those who began it: North Koreas Kim Il-sung and South Koreas Syngman Rhee, with the consent of the Soviet Unions Joseph Stalin and Chinas Mao Zedong.
You can't breathe on the moon, but now you can smell it. A Scottish printmaker has released a series of works that publicize a fact known to astronauts for decades: The moon smells like gunpowder. Apprentice printer Sue Corke worked with flavorist Steven Pearce of Omega Ingredients and Apollo 16 astronaut Charles M. Duke Jr. to create "scratch-and-sniff" moon prints. The two men designed the scent, which was converted into a printable ink by The Aroma Co. for the art, according to Newslite.tv.
Germany will make its last reparations payment for World War I on Oct. 3, settling its outstanding debt from the 1919 Versailles Treaty and quietly closing the final chapter of the conflict that shaped the 20th century. Oct. 3, the 20th anniversary of German unification, will also mark the completion of the final chapter of World War I with the end of reparations payments 92 years after the country's defeat.
World War I drew in people from around the world, including 140,000 Chinese workers who served on the Western Front. A new museum exhibition in Flanders, Belgium, highlights China's role in the war. It appears the curators have had to cancel plans to take it to China.
Bayonet: In the early 17th century, sportsmen in France and Spain adopted the practice of attaching knives to their muskets when hunting dangerous game, such as wild boar. The hunters particularly favored knives that were made in Bayonnet a small French town near the Spanish border long renowned for its quality cutlery.
In September 1914, at the very outset of the great war, a dreadful rumor arose. It was said that at the Battle of the Marne, east of Paris, soldiers on the front line had been discovered standing at their posts in all the dutiful military posturesbut not alive. Every normal attitude of life was imitated by these dead men, according to the patriotic serial The Times History of the War, published in 1916. The illusion was so complete that often the living would speak to the dead before they realized the true state of affairs. Asphyxia, caused by the powerful new high-explosive shells, was the cause for the phenomenonor so it was claimed.
On October 11, 1918, late in the afternoon, a platoon of American doughboys marched to the front in eastern France, passing shattered villages, forests reduced to matchsticks, and water-filled shell craters. At every step the Americans struggled to free their boots from the slopping mud. Icy wind and rain slashed at their clothing, and water poured in steady streams from the rims of their helmets, somewhat obscuring the devastation.
On the evening of July 8, 1959, six of the eight American advisers stationed at a camp serving as the headquarters of a South Vietnamese army division 20 miles northeast of Saigon had settled down after supper in their mess to watch a movie, The Tattered Dress, starring Jeanne Crain. One of them had switched on the lights to change a reel when it happened.
The waters beside Biloxi, Mississippi, were tranquil on April 24, 1960. But Bishop James Blacks account of how the harrowing hours later dubbed Bloody Sunday unfolded for African-American residents sounds eerily like preparations taken for a menacing, fast-approaching storm.
Gazing up at the Texas night sky from his ranch, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson did not know what to make of Sputnik I, the first artificial Earth satellite launched into orbit by a Soviet missile on October 4, 1957.
Forty years ago, for several unbearably tense daysApril 13 to April 17, 1970the whole world watched as NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz led a team that worked around the clock to rescue Apollo 13 astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise. After an explosion of an oxygen tank partially crippled the moon-bound spacecraft, NASAs mission was to bring the trio safely back to Earth.
Chinese on the Western Front? Many Australians have grown up hearing stories from the battlefields of WW1, but Chinese men on the Western Front? How did this happen, and why? Between 1914 and 1918, the governments of France and Britain recruited thousands of Chinese labourers and transported them to Europe to help the Allied war effort, thousands died by enemy fire. A few were executed by their employers.
On February 1, 1960, four young African-American men, freshmen at the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina, entered the Greensboro Woolworths and sat down on stools that had, until that moment, been occupied exclusively by white customers. The fourFranklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr., Joseph McNeil and David Richmondasked to be served, and were refused. But they did not get up and leave. Indeed, they launched a protest that lasted six months and helped change America.
Germany is still paying off 50million of the 'reparations' demanded from it after the end of First World War. The German Finance Agency, its authority on debt management, said tens of millions of euros are still being transferred to private individuals holding debenture bonds as agreed under the Treaty of Versailles signed on June 28, 1919.
In the summer of 1969, all eyes turned to a spit of land on Florida's Atlantic coastthe site of the Kennedy Space Center, named for the president who had challenged the nation to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. That July, the Apollo 11 mission would attempt just that. I was 22, a year out of Colorado College and working as a photographer at Time magazine's Miami bureau. In the days before the launch, thousands of people drove from all over the country to see it firsthand, converging on Titusville, across the Indian River from NASA Launch Complex 39-A.
Treasures from 6,000 years of Mesopotamian history are just a click away, now that Italy has put the National Museum of Iraq online. The Virtual Museum of Iraq, viewable in Arabic, English, and Italian, lets visitors "walk" through eight virtual halls and see works from the prehistoric to the Islamic periods, while video clips reconstruct the history of Iraqs main cities. Looted after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, the museum partially reopened in February after six years, but the Web site will make its most important artifacts accessible to everyone.
They grew up as the leftovers of an unpopular war, straddling two worlds but belonging to neither. Most never knew their fathers. Many were abandoned by their mothers at the gates of orphanages. Some were discarded in garbage cans. Schoolmates taunted and pummeled them and mocked the features that gave them the face of the enemyround blue eyes and light skin, or dark skin and tight curly hair if their soldier-dads were African-Americans.
**Webmaster's note: This article is linked to this Indy chapter because it represents the end of World War I, a time when a massive flu pandemic killed millions across the globe.
Robert Webster was in the backyard of his home in Memphis doing some landscaping. This was in the early winter of 1997, a Saturday. He was mixing compost, a chore he finds enchanting. He grew up on a farm in New Zealand, where his family raised ducks called Khaki Campbells. Nothing pleases him more than mucking around in the earth. He grows his own corn, then picks it himself. Some of his friends call him Farmer Webster, and although he is one of the worlds most noted virologists, he finds the moniker distinguishing.
North Korea is preparing to launch a short- or medium-range missile, possibly right after it carries out its plan to fire a long-range rocket in early April, a Japanese newspaper reported Sunday.
When John Wesley Powell and his nine men pushed their four boats out into the roaring Colorado in 1869, they had no idea what lay downriver. They set out with the knowledge that they might not returnand several did not. As I reflect on the last decade's adventure of designing, building, testing, launching, and operating two complex and hardy robotic space vehicles on Mars, I cannot help but wonder if we were just as naive when we started out.