Commitment. Dedication. Willingness. Devotion. Mission. There are millions of people who have no idea what that means. There are millions of people who don’t understand those things and don’t even want to. And unfortunately, there is quite a considerable amount of people who hate people with such qualities.
And then there’s this one man whose commitment, dedication, willingness, devotion and sense of mission have been…

Alexander Haig, the Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan, and White House Chief of Staff under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, died today at the age of 85. He was one of my favourite old school politicians.
He was certainly a very interesting character. A general who had fought in Korea and Vietnam, received multiple military awards; a supreme allied commander in Europe; a politician that in this time brought some colour and excitement to Washington …

Today 90 years ago Russia agreed to renounce in perpetuity all rights to the territory and sovereignty of the Republic of Estonia. On the 2nd February, 1918, the Tartu Peace Treaty between Soviet Russia and the Republic of Estonia was signed.
The Tartu Peace Treaty ended the Estonian War of Independence that lasted from 1918 to 1920. It is one of the two wars in the entire history that Russia has ever lost.
The terms of the …

The guard towers of Auschwitz are splintering, the barracks are waterlogged: the concentration camp where over one million Jews were murdered is decaying so fast that conservationists have called on Britain to help to save it, The Times reports.
The theft last month of its distinctive, sinister sign, “Arbeit macht frei” has underlined the vulnerability of the nazi death camp, stretching over 50 acres of southern Poland. “Nobody could have imagined such a horrific act of …

A French catholic priest says that newly-revealed mass graves indicate there may be as many as 1.5 million additional Holocaust victims.
Father Patrick Despois told a meeting of Jewish organisations in New York that he has discovered 700 additional extermination sites in Ukraine, Reuters reports.
“This killing began on the first day of the war, on 23rd June, 1941, and finished the last day of the war,” he said. “Many people think that it was finished when …

The mystery surrounding the death of the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, in an aircraft crash more than forty years ago may finally have been solved by a report which quashes decades of conspiracy theories and says that his death was caused by his panicked reaction after realising that an air vent in his cockpit was open.
Independent Russian investigators say they have uncovered crucial new evidence which finally reveals how the world’s first man …

Vatican has for the first time published documents from its secret archives, some of it dating back more than 1,000 years.
High-quality reproductions of 105 documents, 19 of which have never been seen before in public, have now been published in a book.
Among the published archives there’s a 13-century letter from Genghis Khan’s grandson demanding homage from the pope, a papal letter to nazi Germany’s dictator Adolf Hitler, an entreaty to Rome written on birch …

Archaeologists say they have discovered the first known pieces of a burial shroud from the time of Jesus in Jerusalem, casting doubt on the authenticity of the Turin Shroud, the Daily Telegraph reports.
Researchers believe the fabric of the fragments, the first of their kind to be discovered in Jerusalem, are of a different weave to those of the Turin Shroud, hailed by many as Jesus’s burial cloth but dismissed by others as a fake.
Radiocarbon tests …

Russian authorities are in possession of a skull fragment that they persistently claim to have belonged to nazi Germany’s dictator Adolf Hitler. And despite the fact that scientists say the skull is really that of a woman, the Russians keenly insist that the scientists are wrong and that the skull really belonged to the feared mass murderer. Why on Earth is it so important then for Russians to own this “Hitler’s skull”?

Winston Churchill, inarguably the best Prime Minister in British history, was born today 135 years ago, on 30th November, 1874.
Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born 2 months prematurely in Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, Oxfordshire. He grew up to be a soldier, officer, statesman, orator and a writer. He’s the only British Prime Minister to have received the Nobel Literature Prize, and the first person to be recognised as an Honorary Citizen of the United States.
During his …

20 years ago today I was 10 years old. And frankly, I don’t remember anything from the day the Berlin Wall started to come down and the Iron Curtain was finally lifted. However, I do remember fragments of my trip to East Germany a few months before 9th November, 1989, the date when Europe changed forever.
I think it was either July or August when my parents took me and my brother, then 5, to our …

On 29th October, 1969, first Arpanet network connection between remote computers was established – and the internet was born.
Arpanet was the military precursor to what we now know as the internet (the term “internetting” would not be coined until 1977).
At 10.30pm precisely, the first message was sent over the Arpanet between the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Stanford Research Institute by student Charley Kline. The message itself was the word “login”. The “l” …

Spanish archaeologists are preparing to exhume a civil-war era grave believed to hold the remains of the acclaimed poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, the AP reports.
The Government of Andalucia region says the exhumation will begin today. It will mark the highest-profile step yet in a decade-old drive for Spain to address atrocities committed against civilians during and after the 1936-39 war.
Garcia Lorca was executed by supporters of General Francisco Franco in the opening days of …

A British submarine that Winston Churchill authorised on a mission at the outbreak of the First World War, has been found in the Baltic Sea over 90 years after it disappeared.
Part of an extraordinary naval operation at the outbreak of the First World War, submarine HMS E18 never returned from a routine patrol in May 1916. As no one witnessed her sinking, no trace of her was ever found – until now, Swedish marine survey …

One of the first communist terrorists and the architect of the evil empire of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin (Ulyanov really) died from syphilis, caught from a Parisian prostitute, and not from a stroke, as it has been believed, a new research says.
Helen Rappaport, an acclaimed historian and author, said that books, papers and journals charting Lenin’s last years show that he contracted the sexually transmitted disease and that it ultimately claimed his life, the …

Cambridge University historian Peter Martland says that according to documents, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was on MI5’s payroll back in 1917, when the British agency paid the 34-year-old journalist to publish propaganda in his paper to ensure that Italy fought alongside the Allies in the First World War, the Daily Mail reports.
Martland made the discovery while researching the papers of Britain’s man in Rome at the time, Sir Samuel Hoare, later Lord Templewood.
“Britain’s least reliable …