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Two cities, Seville (Spain) and Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) claim that they have the remains of the great explorer.

Some revere him for boldly sailing west from Europe at a time when to do so was considered certain death, finding continents never dreamed of by Europe's most ancient civilizations. Others see him as a cruel, ruthless man who brought disease, slavery, and exploitation to the pristine New World. Love him or hate him, there is no doubt that Columbus changed his world.

He died in Valladolid in May of 1506, and he was at first buried there. But Columbus was, then as now, a powerful figure, and the question soon arose as to what to do with his remains. He had expressed a desire to be buried in the New World, but in 1506 there were no buildings there impressive enough to house such lofty remains. In 1509, his remains were moved to the convent at La Cartuja, an island in a river near Seville.

Is the Christopher Steele dossier fake news?

Donald Trump has called the Christopher Steele dossier "fake news" and "phony stuff," but is it? The Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, sent a trusted staff member to London to obtain a copy and deliver it to the FBI for investigation, according to the UK newspaper The Independent.

President Trump is strongly considering Christopher P. Liddell, a White House official who was an executive at Microsoft and General Motors, to succeed his departing top economic adviser, Gary D. Cohn, according to two people briefed on the discussions.

The president has always wanted a prominent business figure to oversee the council, according to people who have spoken with him. But his aides, mindful of the difficulties they have had attracting people from outside the White House, have been looking internally, and a successor could be named as early as next week.

Others noted that Mr. Liddell had a role in selecting personnel during the transition, an endeavor that has been widely perceived as subpar.

In 1954, Denis Mack Smith, who has died aged 97, produced his first book – and his masterpiece – Cavour and Garibaldi 1860: A Study in Political Conflict. Written with verve and style, it unpicks a crucial year in Italian history, undercutting a series of accepted truths concerning Italy’s unification and, in Jonathan Steinberg’s words, telling Italians “what they did not want to hear”.

Denis was a rarity, a true populariser of history, who wrote in a clear, readable and engaging style. His writing was full of quotable lines. He wrote of Cavour that he had “managed to persuade people to back a revolution on the excuse that this was the way to prevent a revolution”.

In 1949, Denis met one of Garibaldi’s daughters in Rome, and she invited him to visit the family home on the island in Caprera. He later said that it was one of the great regrets of his life that he had not been able to do so.

Between 1405 and 1433, Ming China under the rule of Zhu Di, sent out enormous armadas of ships into the Indian Ocean commanded by the eunuch admiral Zheng He.

dwarfed European ships of that century — even Christopher Columbus's flagship, the "Santa Maria," was between 1/4 and 1/5 the size of Zheng He's.

Along with dozens of baoshan, each armada included hundreds of smaller ships.

NPR Short Wave host and reporter Emily Kwong is a third generation Chinese American, but she's never spoken her family's language.

At age 30, she's trying to learn the language for the first time, and unpacking why she never learned it in the first place.

Emily's father, Christopher Kwong, stopped speaking his first language — Mandarin Chinese — when he was five-years-old. Born in New York City in 1958, he struggled to communicate with his kindergarten teacher and classmates.

Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, who will leave office in less than a week. stated that he 'cannot wait to leave this job," according to a transcript released by the Department of Defense.

The comments came the same day the Pentagon said at least 21,000 National Guard are being mobilized in Washington, DC, amid security concerns around next week's inauguration following the deadly riots at the Capitol.

Miller was asked about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), a fifth-generation fighter jet considered the most expensive weapons program in history used by the Air Force, Marines and Navy. After clarifying that the question is about the F-35 and not a different weapons system, Miller begins his answer by saying, "I so...I mean, I cannot wait to leave this job, believe me."

Influenced by an eclectic range of thinkers, including sociologists Christopher Lasch and Philip Rieff, political theorist Wilson Carey McWilliams, Catholic philosopher David Schindler, and poet and essayist Wendell Berry, the Porchers see conservatism as a disposition or way of living locally, within moral, religious, economic, and environmental limits, in tightly knit, sustainable community with neighbors and the natural world.

it’s an ideology of rootedness, as applicable in the suburbs

a communitarianism that just tells people to “stay put!” more generally, whether in cities or suburbs or exurbs, is likewise insufficient … because to a surprising extent, Americans are already doing just that.

The Atlantic Home todaysDate();Monday, March 7, 2011Monday, March 7, 2011 Go Follow the Atlantic » Politics Presented by The Rise and Fall of John Ensign Chris Good Sarah Palin Feud Watch Tina Dupuy In Wisconsin, the Mood Turns Against Compromise Natasha Vargas-Cooper Business Presented by Credit Card Balances Resume Their Decline Daniel Indiviglio 5 Ways the Value of College Is Growing Derek Thompson America's 401(k)'s Are a Mess, Are Its Pensions? Megan McArdle Culture Presented By 'Spy' Magazine's Digital Afterlife Bill Wyman http://as

To many on the right, this inequality is a non-issue, and in an abstract sense, I agree. Penalizing people for their success does not help the less successful. But at a time of real sacrifice, it does seem to me important for conservatives not to ignore the dangers of growing and vast inequality - for political, not economic, reasons. And by political, I don't mean partisan. I mean a genuine concern for the effects of an increasingly unequal society.

it increasingly seems wrong to me to exempt the very wealthy from sacrifice, in the context of their gains in the last three decades, if we are to ask it of everyone else. It's not about fairness. It isn't even really about redistribution, as we once understood that from the hard left. It's about political stability and cohesion and coherence. Without a large and strong middle class, we can easily become more divided, more bitter and more unstable. Concern about that is a legitimate conservative issue. And if someone on the right does not find a way to address it, someone on the left may well be empowered to over-reach.

Director Christopher Wray is forcing the Trump White House to choose between the national interest and President Donald Trump's political hide.

Wray's formal opposition to the release of a secret partisan memo, supported by Republicans critical of the bureau, also sets the stage for a showdown over the future of the nation's most revered law enforcement agency which, before Trump, enjoyed longstanding support from the GOP.

According to Politico, Trump decided in mid-January that he would attack his own administration's Justice Department and FBI in response to the Robert Mueller probe.

the dispute will be whether the King of England or of France shall be the Monarch of the West Indies, for the King of Spain cannot hold it long

The wars between the Kings of France and Britain were, on the contrary, waged for supremacy in the Caribbean itself and it was this aspect that gave West Indian history, from Cromwell’s Protectorate to the battle of Trafalgar, its special stamp

a handful of stubborn and self-reliant Commonwealth soldiers within five years got the better of the King of Spain

an assortment of QAnon kooks has taken to claiming that Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20 was unconstitutional and that Donald Trump will be returning in splendor on March 4 for the real inauguration.The rumors swirling about the possibility of violence on March 4 were given legitimacy on Wednesday, when the Capitol Police released a statement saying, “We have obtained intelligence that shows a possible plot to breach the Capitol by an identified militia group on Thursday, March 4.”

Meaning that domestic terrorists have succeeded in shutting down the government again. This time it happened without anyone breaching a single security fence. The threat of another national security event, however remote, was enough for them to win

At Wednesday’s hearing with FBI Director Christopher Wray, for example, instead of focusing on the individuals who planned the attack and the spectacular security failures that allowed it to unfold, senators spent much of their time promoting or refuting, depending on their party affiliation, the claim that Antifa was responsible.

One of humanity’s greatest achievements has been mastering routes across the world’s oceans.

Customs have been decisively altered by the movement of ships across the oceans. No one drank tea in medieval Europe, but once contact had been made with the tea-drinking Chinese, tea became the obsession of millions of people from Sweden to the United States

We tend to think that the opening of the oceans was the work of the great explorers, especially the 15th century pioneers who edged their way through uncharted waters to southern Africa, the Indian Ocean and the spice lands of the Indies. These were sailors such as Christopher Columbus, who chanced upon unsuspected lands that blocked the expected sea route from Europe to China and Japan. But while these men did give the Age of Discovery its name, they didn’t start the exploration of the world’s oceans

until about 10 years ago, when authorities discovered some of these treasures had been stolen and replaced with forgeries. So began a modern kind of trans-Atlantic quest, as investigators in the U.S. and Europe worked to recover Columbus' missing missives and solve this most unusual international mystery.  

It was here in 2011 that Vatican officials first discovered that one of their prized items, a Columbus letter, had somehow been stolen and replaced with a fake.  

Jay suspected the library's letter had been stolen and put up for sale, which meant whatever was currently in their collection was a fake.

The era known as the Age of Exploration, sometimes called the Age of Discovery, officially began in the early 15th century and lasted through the 17th century.

The period is characterized as a time when Europeans began exploring the world by sea in search of new trading routes, wealth, and knowledge. The impact of the Age of Exploration would permanently alter the world and transform geography into the

modern science it is today.

Christopher Krebs, who led the federal government's efforts to secure the 2020 election, was fired by President Trump last month for saying the election went smoothly and with no signs of cheating or interference.

Krebs told NPR he has no regrets.

Krebs, a self-described "lifelong Republican," has become something of a symbol for government officials who see their work as nonpartisan even as politicians try to paint them otherwise.