MIDDLE EAST NEWSMARCH 31, 2011 In Key Defection, Libyan Minister Resigns His Post By DAVID GAUTHIER-VILLARS, ALISTAIR MACDONALD and MARGARET COKER In a major diplomatic setback to Col. Moammar Gadhafi, Libya’s foreign minister Moussa Koussa resigned from his position and may announce his defection as early as Thursday, European government officials said. A British Foreign and Commonwealth office spokesman said. Mr. Koussa arrived in England from Tunisia Wednesday where he resigned his position as Libyan Foreign Minister, Reuters Libyan Foreign Minister Moussa Koussa in 2010. “He travelled here under his own free will,” the spokesman said. The U.K. is currently in discussions with Mr. Koussa, the spokesman said, declining to…

  Albert Einstein The German-born physicist Albert Einstein developed the first of his groundbreaking theories while working as a clerk in the Swiss patent office in Bern. After making his name with four scientific articles published in 1905, he went on to win worldwide fame for his general theory of relativity and a Nobel Prize in 1921 for his explanation of the phenomenon known as the photoelectric effect. An outspoken pacifist who was publicly identified with the Zionist movement, Einstein emigrated from Germany to the United States when the Nazis took power before World War II. He lived and worked in Princeton, New Jersey, for the remainder of his life.…

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire   On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York City burned, killing 145 workers. It is remembered as one of the most infamous incidents in American industrial history, as the deaths were largely preventable–most of the victims died as a result of neglected safety features and locked doors within the factory building. The tragedy brought widespread attention to the dangerous sweatshop conditions of factories, and led to the development of a series of laws and regulations that better protected the safety of workers. The Triangle factory, owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, was located in the top three floors of the…

The 900-day Siege of Leningrad This was undoubtedly the most tragic period in the history of the city, a period full of suffering and heroism. For everyone who lives in St. Petersburg the Blokada (the Siege) of Leningrad is an important part of the city’s heritage and a painful memory for the population’s older generations. Less than two and a half months after the Soviet Union was attacked by Nazi Germany, German troops were already approaching Leningrad. The Red Army was outflanked and on September 8 1941 the Germans had fully encircled Leningrad and the siege began. The siege lasted for a total of 900 days, from September 8 1941…

March 26, 2011 By SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE London A REVOLUTION resembles the death of a fading star, an exhilarating Technicolor explosion that gives way not to an ordered new galaxy but to a nebula, a formless cloud of shifting energy. And though every revolution is different, because all revolutions are local, in this uncertain age of Arab uprisings and Western interventions, as American missiles bombard a defiant Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya, as the ruler of Yemen totters on the brink and Syrian troops fire on protesters, the history of revolution can still offer us some clues to the future. The German sociologist Max Weber cited three reasons for citizens to obey…

(CBS/AP) Last Updated 1:25 p.m. ET BOSTON – Geraldine Ferraro, the former New York Representative who became the first woman to run on a major party’s presidential ticket, has died. She was 75. Ferraro suffered complications from multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that she had battled for twelve years. She passed away just before 10 a.m. Saturday morning at Massachusetts General Hospital, surrounded by her family, said Amanda Fuchs Miller, a friend acting as a spokeswoman for the family. Ferraro was the first woman to run for U.S. vice president on a major party ticket, when the obscure New York City congresswoman was catapulted to national prominence at the 1984…

  A piece of the preserved Heslington brain after it was removed from the skull in which it was found. CREDIT: York Archaeological Trust  A 2,500-year-old human skull uncovered in England was less of a surprise than what was in it: the brain. The discovery of the yellowish, crinkly, shrunken brain prompted questions about how such a fragile organ could have survived so long and how frequently this strange type of preservation occurs. Except for the brain, all of the skull’s soft tissue was gone when the skull was pulled from a muddy Iron Age pit where the University of York was planning to expand its Heslington East campus. [Britain’s…