Journalist Dave Gilbert is hanging up his hat after 13 years working in online news - much of it with the BBC website. But before he goes, he can't help but marvel at how the net has gone from an eccentric side project to being at the heart of all modern news rooms.

BBC NEWS | Magazine | I remember when all this was 'cranky'

The government said it will on Friday pay back the final instalments of loans taken out at the end of World War Two to finance vital reconstruction.
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"This week we finally honour in full our commitments to the U.S. and Canada for the support they gave us 60 years ago," Treasury minister Ed Balls said on Thursday.

"It was vital support which helped Britain defeat Nazi Germany and secure peace and prosperity in the post-war period. We honour our commitments to them now as they honoured their commitments to us all those years ago," he added.

Britain borrowed a total of $4.3 billion from the United States in 1945, followed in 1946 by a loan of $1.2 billion from Canada -- both at an interest rate of just two percent.

thank you America

but bear in mind how long this has taken us as you ramp up debts to pay for Iraq
fiscal rectitude seems a virtue rediscovered by the center-left and forgotten by the right - how times change

Britain to pay final World War Two loan instalment�|�Top News�|�Reuters.co.uk

Though Bush may be viewed as a laughingstock, he won't have the zero-integrity factors that have kept Nixon and Harding at the bottom in the presidential sweepstakes. Oddly, the president whom Bush most reminds me of is Herbert Hoover, whose name is synonymous with failure to respond to the Great Depression. When the stock market collapsed, Hoover, for ideological reasons, did too little. When 9/11 happened, Bush did too much, attacking the wrong country at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. He has joined Hoover as a case study on how not to be president.

Move Over, Hoover - washingtonpost.com

In the grand narrative of World War II, the Battle of Bryansk is a minor conflict, barely deserving of a footnote. But Bryansk has another place in history. It was there that a then-unknown tank commander named Mikhail Kalashnikov decided that his Russian comrades would never again be defeated. In the years following the Great Patriotic War, as Soviet propagandists dubbed it, he was to conceive and fabricate a weapon so simple, and yet so revolutionary, that it would change the way wars were fought and won. It was the AK-47 assault rifle.

Weapon Of Mass Destruction - washingtonpost.com

The complete works of one of history's greatest scientists, Charles Darwin, are being published online.

The project run by Cambridge University has digitised some 50,000 pages of text and 40,000 images of original publications - all of it searchable.

Surfers with MP3 players can even access downloadable audio files.
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Darwin Online features many newly transcribed or never-before-published manuscripts written by the great man.

These include a remarkable field notebook from his famous Beagle voyage to the Galapagos Islands, where detailed observations of the wildlife would later forge his scientific arguments.

wow a Darwin Galapagos field notebook
how cool is that?
like seeing the sunrise of a potent and seminal meme
it needs Strauss' Also sprach Zarathustra as a soundtrack

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Charles Darwin's works go online

World War II veterans are preparing to show the public how they cracked the Nazi Enigma codes for the first time since VE Day in 1945.

Enthusiasts have spent 10 years building a working replica of the code-breaking machines that were used to decipher thousands of Nazi messages.

BBC NEWS | UK | WWII Nazi code-break re-enacted