Jonathan the tortoise celebrated his 190th birthday as he extends his run as the longest-living land animal in the world.

Jonathan first arrived in his current home on the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic in 1882 as a gift to the governor of the island, which is a British territory. At that time, he was thought to already be 50 years old. //

Locals speculated as to why Jonathan has lived so long, exceeding the expected life of his breed, the Seychelles Giant tortoise, which is 150 years old.

Jonathan was five years old when Queen Victoria – Britain’s second-longest reigning monarch – took the throne, and he outlived both World Wars. He is older than the first photograph and has lived through the administrations of 39 US presidents.

For some of us, few things get the nostalgia flowing like vintage airline advertisements. This one is from Gourmet magazine, of all places, in 1976.

There’s a lot to pull from here…

For starters, looking at the collage of tails, we spy three classic carriers that no longer exist: Sabena, Swissair, and of course Pan Am. Of all the many airlines that have gone out of business, few were more historically significant than these three.

The ad also celebrates the advent of the Boeing 747SP — the short-bodied, long-range 747 variant that debuted in the mid-1970s. This focus on aircraft type is a hallmark of older ads and something rarely seen any more. When was the last time an airline spent advertising dollars to boast about a particular plane? It made sense in the 1970s, when models were vastly different from one another and some, like the 747 or Concorde, were media stars. Nowadays, with jets so tediously similar, carriers don’t bother and passengers couldn’t care less.

With that in mind, notice that every tail in that panel except for one features a 747. The single exception is the Aeroflot image, which shows an Ilyushin IL-62. These were the days when you could be at Kennedy Airport and watch ten or more 747s take off in a row.

And, of course, the whole premise of the ad — Iran Air showcasing a new link between Tehran and New York — is itself striking. How things change. Iran in 1976 was still three years away from its revolution, and the country’s national carrier was a regular visitor to New York.

Neither did they shy away from including an El Al tail (top row, third one in) up there with the others. This implies that El Al offered a connecting service to Tehran from New York, presumably via Tel Aviv, which is maybe the most remarkable aspect of the entire page.

How the borders have changed over time

From 1797 to roughly 1820, the eastern two-thirds of Washington Square Park was a potter’s field, where the bodies of poor and unidentified New Yorkers were unceremoniously dumped in mass graves. For just $4,500, New York City purchased the plot so impoverished locals could afford a decent spot to rest in peace.

Exclusive: the unmarked graves of thousands of sailors are threatened by illegal metal salvagers //

The rusted 70-year-old wrecks are usually sold as scrap but the ships also contain valuable metals such as copper cables and phosphor bronze propellors.

Experts said grave diggers might be looking for even more precious treasures – steel plating made before the nuclear testing era, which filled the atmosphere with radiation. These submerged ships are one of the last sources of “low background steel”, virtually radiation-free and vital for some scientific and medical equipment.

The devastation of the plague pandemic left such an incredible genetic mark on humanity that it's still affecting our health nearly 700 years later.

Up to half of people died when the Black Death swept through Europe in the mid-1300s.

A pioneering study analysing the DNA of centuries-old skeletons found mutations that helped people survive the plague.

But those same mutations are linked to auto-immune diseases afflicting people today.

The Black Death is one of the most significant, deadliest and bleakest moments in human history. It is estimated that up to 200 million people died.

Researchers suspected an event of such enormity must have shaped human evolution. They analysed DNA taken from the teeth of 206 ancient skeletons and were able to precisely date the human remains to before, during or after the Black Death.

The analysis included bones from the East Smithfield plague pits which were used for mass burials in London with more samples coming from Denmark.

The 747 was truly a pioneer. It was the first-ever commercial widebody jet and opened up doors across the whole travel industry. Pan American leader Juan Trippe wanted an efficient way to place 400 passengers on one aircraft. Initially, he felt the best route would be to stack two single-aisle cabins on top of each other. Boeing's engineers came up with the widebody solution with a partial second deck.

However, in 1968, the program cost was already at $1 billion. This figure may not seem like a lot, but today, the cost would be equivalent to approximately $7.61 billion. The initial 747 rolled out of Boeing's assembly line in Everett at the end of September, and the type conducted its first flight on February 9th, 1969. //

A return flight between New York and London was retailing for approximately $550 in 1970. This is $5,350 with inflation. So, the higher business costs were backed by higher ticket prices to balance operations. Overall, flying was more expensive across the board during this period. Regardless, long-haul rates were generally higher pre-jumbo.

With Pan Am's management heavily involved in the launch of the project, the carrier naturally became the first to introduce the plane. In April 1966, Pan Am placed an order for 25 Boeing 747-100s. The total cost of this order was $525 million (~$4 billion today). So, Boeing was already halfway to matching the cost of the program with this invoice alone. Each unit would have worked out to cost approximately $21 million (~$160 million today).

Found documents in Poland detail US spying operations against the former Soviet Union.

The file details a number of bugs found at Soviet diplomatic facilities in Washington, D.C., New York, and San Francisco, as well as in a Russian government-owned vacation compound, apartments used by Russia personnel, and even Russian diplomats’ cars. And the bugs were everywhere: encased in plaster in an apartment closet; behind electrical and television outlets; bored into concrete bricks and threaded into window frames; inside wooden beams and baseboards and stashed within a building’s foundation itself; surreptitiously attached to security cameras; wired into ceiling panels and walls; and secretly implanted into the backseat of cars and in their window panels, instrument panels, and dashboards. It’s an impressive—­ and impressively thorough—­ effort by U.S. counterspies.

We have long read about sophisticated Russian spying operations—bugging the Moscow embassy, bugging Selectric typewriters in the Moscow embassy, bugging the new Moscow embassy. These are the first details I’ve read about the US bugging the Russians’ embassy.

https://thebrushpass.projectbrazen.com/coldwarbuggingsovietunion/

The following is invited public testimony to South Dakota’s Board of Education Standards on September 19, 2022, as written in advance of the hearing. Monday’s was the first of multiple hearings that will occur around the state as part of a curriculum process that began after massive public outcry against a 2021 history curriculum plan that pushed far-left politics.

Gov. Kristi Noem’s chief of staff, Mark Miller, chaired a new commission that started with curriculum guidelines proposed by Hillsdale College and refined them with in-state teachers, tribal leaders, and historians. //

I have read many K-12 standards, and the first standout in these was their clarity. Most curriculum mandates are laden with jargon. Clear language allows everyone to understand what children are expected to learn. This creates unity and accountability for parents, children, teachers, taxpayers, school boards, and state lawmakers.

These requirements are rich in key information and beautifully represent what every American citizen should know (excluding the South Dakota-specific standards, of course). They reflect what research and experience find ensures a high-quality education for all children: core knowledge, carefully arranged and frequently reinforced.

Excellent instruction in the story of humankind helps us all understand human nature, benefit from others’ experiences, and understand our rights and duties. Distributing such core human knowledge broadly, as University of Virginia researchers E.D. Hirsch and Daniel Willingham, and other academics, have shown, reduces social inequality.

Their work also shows what’s wrong with the “critical thinking” canard that pretends filling one’s brain with knowledge is somehow at odds with thinking soundly. It is not, and anyone who says so is poorly informed about cognitive science. Indeed, as Ethics and Public Policy researcher Stanley Kurtz has written of South Dakota’s struggle to update its social studies curricula, “critical thinking” jargon is usually used as a cover for political indoctrination.

In fact, instruction rich in factual knowledge, such as these proposed standards require, is exactly what’s required for critical thinking — because knowledge is the basis of all critical thinking. And it’s clear from almost any data you look at that American children are not being given such core knowledge in most publicly funded schools. //

South Dakota’s constitution rightly observes, “The stability of a republican form of government depend[s] on the morality and intelligence of the people.” Therefore, the lack of strong history and civics instruction is an existential crisis. //

https://doe.sd.gov/contentstandards/ss-review.aspx

Monarch who through her seven decades of public service became a figure of fascination by remaining steadfastly private //

The 42nd of a line of kings and queens of first England, then Britain, then the United Kingdom, since William the Conqueror, she was also the sixth queen-sovereign of England and the fourth of the UK. In addition, she was queen and head of state of 15 other countries, stretching from Fiji, Australia and New Zealand to the Bahamas and Canada, all once part of the former British empire. She was for seven decades head of the Commonwealth, whose 54 countries comprise 2.1 billion people, a third of the globe’s population.

In accordance with the precedent established by Henry VIII, the Queen was also Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England, a role she took much more seriously in both her private and public lives than many of her predecessors. //

During the course of her reign she was served by 15 prime ministers, from Winston Churchill to Liz Truss. She met more than a quarter of all the American presidents who have ever lived, five popes, hundreds of national leaders, from the saintly, such as Nelson Mandela, to the tyrannical, including Robert Mugabe and Nicolae Ceausescu, as well as thousands of celebrities and – it is calculated – more than 2 million more “ordinary” people. She was easily the most travelled monarch in British, indeed world, history: criss-crossing the globe regularly to visit the Commonwealth and just about every other significant country in the world, into her 90th year, and touring Britain year in and year out even longer. //

Yet through all this exposure, renown and public fascination, she never engaged in partisan politics, uttered a truly controversial remark, scarcely expressed an opinion and only rarely showed emotion: exasperation occasionally, but never temper.

OceanGate Expeditions shot the footage earlier this year with a manned submersible.

Not only didn’t Gorbachev bring communism to an end or intend to “liberate” anyone, if it were up to him The Warsaw Pact would still exist, tens of millions of Eastern and Central Europeans would still be under the grip of Moscow, and hundreds of millions more would still be living under communism. This isn’t counterhistorical speculation. Decades after the Iron Curtain came down, Gorbachev was still openly lamenting the fall of the USSR, one of the most nefarious empires man has ever known:

The Soviet Union offered lots of prospects to those who lived there, and it could have had a future if it had modernized and adapted to new challenges. Yes, I regret [its collapse] very much.”

In other words, Gorbachev didn’t believe real communism had been tried yet.

Perhaps the best one could say about the man was that he led from behind. Indeed, the world was blessed that such a weak and feckless man, forced to his knees by the failures of a socialist economy and the bravery of others, resisted the impulse to deploy force to keep long-occupied European nations in the Soviet fold as had his predecessors. .... Of course, not being Stalin is perhaps the lowest moral bar that exists in the universe. Gorbachev passed it, winning the Nobel Peace Prize for “the leading role he played in the radical changes in East-West relations.”

The Western sanctification of Gorbachev was a function of a media abhorring the notion of giving Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher or Pope John Paul II any credit for creating the economic, political, moral, or military conditions that forced Gorbachev to move forward with glasnost and perestroika. (Read Margot Cleveland’s excellent piece on the topic.) Even Boris Yeltsin, Gorbachev’s successor, pushed for quicker democratizing and reforms of the Soviet political system and, in the end, impelled the last strongman to abdicate his power and call it a day.

But more than any of those men and women, it was Hungarian Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth who deserved to win the Nobel Peace Prize and whose actions in 1989 hastened the end of the Iron Curtain and Berlin Wall.

In March of 1989, Nemeth informed Gorbachev — not the other way around — that the small nation was going to “remove completely the electronic and technological protection from the Western and Southern borders of Hungary.” A few months later, East German tourists began testing the Hungarian border and succeeded in escaping to the West. By August of 1989, the Hungarians had opened the Austria frontier, allowing 13,000 East Germans join the West. Tens of thousands would follow.

I remember once standing in Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University (one of dozens on the university grounds) and thinking how no one could possibly read even a fraction of the books it housed, let alone know them well. I had a similar feeling reading through Crossways’ catalog (again, one of dozens of Christian publishers) and wondering who was possibly reading all these books and why they were being written. //

[The] point, ... is that drawing from our accumulating knowledge — trying to build up a comprehensive conception of the true — is like drinking from the proverbial firehose. We may swallow something, but we might not be better for it.

The solution does not seem to be adding one’s voice for the sake of having a voice. The volume is already loud and the frequencies crowded. Too many thoughts have been better stated and then forgotten, and I do not need to contribute to that forgetting. Instead, I could contribute to remembering.

One can at best hope to understand one’s own corner of accumulated knowledge, wisdom, and experience and to try to transmit it well — transmit it so that those who follow can build off your work and not have to redo or undo it.

New photos from Hostomel Airport outside Kyiv confirm that the Antonov AN-225 ‘Mriya’ (Dream) has been destroyed, likely beyond repair. Here’s a look back at the life of the world’s largest cargo aircraft and single most popular aircraft to track on Flightradar24 ever.
In need of a giant—building the AN-225

The Antonov An-225 ‘Mriya’ was originally developed as a transport for the Buran space plane and the rocket boosters that would carry it to space. It was slated to replace the Myasischev VM-T Atlant as the Soviet Union’s heaviest lifter. Based on the smaller An-124, the An-225 shares a similar forward loading method of ‘kneeling’ to load cargo through its large open front when the nose is tilted skyward. The empennage was redesigned with twin vertical stabilizers to enable the carriage of large external loads, like the Buran, leaving the An-225 without a rear cargo door.

Landmark stones recorded low-water levels during droughts to warn future generations.

The owner of the most comprehensive collection of washing machines walks us through the overlooked history of this iconic appliance.

Like so many kids who grew up in the Los Angeles area in the ’80s (or the ’60s, or the ’70s, or the ’90s — well, you get the picture), for me, Vin Scully was the voice of summer. Yes, the Dodgers were our boys of summer, but the names on the backs of the jerseys frequently changed. Vin Scully, and the traditions he started and maintained, were our stability, our reassurance in turbulent times.

It wasn’t just that Vin was a great announcer. As is widely acknowledged – even by Yankees, Giants, and RedSox fans – Vin was the GOAT. He was also the embodiment of the type of brother, dad, uncle, grandfather, or friend we would all like to have, and the type of quiet leader. //

Vin Scully was a bit of an enigma. He was exceedingly approachable, but also a man no one wanted to disappoint. He was so kind and welcoming to Dodgers players regardless of how the fan base felt that one could conclude that he was a bit of a pushover, yet he survived for 67 years in a cutthroat business, and with the same organization that employed the famously explosive Tommy Lasorda.

The now-renowned Schengen Agreement was signed in a tiny village in Luxembourg’s south-east, a location that was drenched in symbolism. //

Just as I thought I was running out of country, I arrived at tiny Schengen, tucked in among the vines on the western bank of the Moselle. With fewer than 520 residents, it’s certainly not the big-name, bright-lights destination one might expect for an agreement that would change the way people travelled in Europe. Nevertheless, it was here, on a murky morning on 14 June 1985, that representatives of Belgium, France, Luxembourg, West Germany (as was) and the Netherlands gathered to officially seal the deal on this revolutionary new border-free zone. //

As Luxembourg was soon to take over the EEC presidency, the small nation was entitled to choose where the signing of this treaty would take place. It just so happens that Schengen is the only place where France and Germany both join with a Benelux member, securing it as the destination of choice.

As the meeting place of three countries, the choosing of Schengen was drenched in symbolism. To ensure it was a neutral affair, the signatories were assembled on a pleasure cruiser, the MS Princesse Marie-Astrid, to put pen to paper. The cruiser was moored as close as possible to the tri-point border, which runs down the middle of the Moselle River. //

Today, the Schengen Area comprises 26 member states. Of these, 22 are members of the EU, while four (Iceland, Switzerland, Norway and Liechtenstein) are not. //

...the European Museum. Here, the story of how the Schengen Area came to exist is expertly told through interactive displays inside and a variety of monuments outside.

Don’t miss the cabinet of official border control caps from the member states at the time they joined the area, each a piece of national identity that was surrendered in order to make Schengen work. Poignant sections of the Berlin Wall sit perfectly placed in front of the museum, set there to remind us all that walls – in this case, world-famous reinforced concrete from one of its founding members, no less – don’t have to remain in place forever.

In Roman times, the island was known as "Pausoa", the Basque word for passage or step. Then the French translated this as "Paysans", meaning peasant, before transposing it as "Faisans", for pheasant. Over time, the name Île des Faisans stuck.

The humble island finally came into prominence in 1648, following a ceasefire at the end of the Thirty Years' War between France and Spain, when it was chosen as a neutral space to demarcate the new borderlands. In fact, 24 summits took place, with military escorts on standby should talks breakdown. Eleven years later, the Treaty of the Pyrenees peace accord was struck.

To honour the occasion, a royal wedding was mooted, and, in 1660, French King Louis XIV married the daughter of King Philip IV, Maria Theresa of Spain, on the spot of the declaration. Wooden bridges were built to ease passage, royal parties arrived in state barges and carriages, and tapestries and paintings were commissioned. Diego Velázquez, court painter to Philip and whose magnum opus remains Las Meninas (a portrait of Margaret Theresa with her maids of honour) was put in charge of arranging much of the festivities.

So symbolic was Pheasant Island as a metaphor of peace, in fact, that it was decided both countries would have joint custody of the territory. Spain would hold stewardship from 1 February to 31 July each year, while Pheasant Island would become an official part of France for the other six months. In that moment, the world's smallest condominium was born.

By definition, condominiums are places determined by the presence of at least more than one sovereign state. The sense is derived from Latin, with "com" implying "together" and "dominium" meaning "right of ownership". And over the centuries, numerous countries have become embroiled in geographic tug o' wars over condominiums, with governments spending decades happily arguing the finer points of who owns what and why. Most aren't centres of empire, but rather experimental, geopolitical addendums.

At least for now, there are eight in the world, including Lake Constance, the tridominium between Austria, Germany and Switzerland; the Brčko District shared by Bosnia and Herzegovina; and the disputed territory of the Republika Srpska. Then there is the Joint Regime Area, a shared maritime zone between Colombia and Jamaica; and the Abyei Area contested by South Sudan and Sudan.

Another is the Moselle river and its tributaries the Sauer and the Our – a riverine condominium shared between Germany and Luxembourg; while the Gulf of Fonseca is a tripartite condominium portioned up by Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Antarctica is the last but also the largest and most momentous, a theoretical continental condominium, governed by the 29 signatories of the Antarctic Treaty that have consulting status.

On the day of my visit to Pheasant Island, the territory was in the hands of the Spanish. A group of kayakers was exploring its nooks from the water, and, on land, only one passer-by stopped to take photographs. Besides administering the gardening, maintaining the boat landing site, discussing fishing rights and monitoring the water quality, there isn't much for the Spanish to do on a month-to-month basis. Visitors are only allowed onto the island on rare occasions: either on one of the bi-annual handover days, when the island is abuzz with activity during the official ceremony, with flags, delegates, diplomats and plenty of formal pomp; or as part of ad-hoc, occasional heritage tours.

When Cate & McGlone of Hollywood produced the film “JET MAINLINER Flight 803” for United Airlines in 1960, the subject of the film, the Douglas DC-8-21 airliner, had been in production for only a few months. Many of United’s initial batch of DC-8s were DC-8-11s which were upgraded to DC-8-12s and subsequently brought up to the DC-8-21 specifications over the next few years. United eventually became the largest DC-8 operator. The film, uploaded to Youtube by PeriscopeFilm, stars the United Airlines DC-8-21 Jet Mainliner.