This past week the news broke that Anthony Shadid had died on assignment... Immediately the encomiums started to flow - "... In an era ...

November 11th, 2009 is the fifth anniversary of the death of Yasser Arafat ... Back in a January 2002 entry (reprinted below), this blogger ...

Jacques Piccard, Swiss oceanographer and underwater explorer passed away this month. From the family web site "... Born in Brussels on...

The end of August 2008 saw the passing of Indian industrialist K.K. Birla , at the age of eighty nine. Birla took the company founded by hi...

Gulag - the "Glavnoe Upravlenie Ispravitel-no-trudovykh Lagerei" a.k.a the Chief Directorate of Prison Camps (in the former Soviet...

Many know of Commodore Perry (and his "black ships") who ended Jpanese isolationism... However, it was Townsend Harris who was inv...

"Dr. Michael Ellis DeBakey, internationally acclaimed as the father of modern cardiovascular surgery — and considered by many to be the...

Field Marshal Sam Hormusji Framji Jamshedji Manekshaw died in Wellington, India last Friday, aged 94. He was the best-known soldier in India...