Free Republic

Fifty years ago, the dawn of the Seventies, the sound of spring on the British Hit Parade: There was rock (Canned Heat, "Let's Work Together"), soft rock (Simon & Garfunkel, "Bridge Over Troubled Water"), folk-rock (Judy Collins, "Both Sides Now"), pop (Steam, "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye"), session-group pop (Edison Lighthouse, "Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes"), Motown (Jackson Five, "I Want You Back"), country (Bobbie Gentry & Glen Campbell, "All I Have to Do Is Dream"), all to one degree or another the soundtrack of the era. But the Number One bestselling record exactly half a century...

Ninety-nine years ago today, April 25, in the very early hours before dawn, some 1200 kilometers from Jerusalem, members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps – or ANZACs – landed on the western shore of the Gallipoli Peninsula, in modern-day Turkey, at a place we now call Anzac Cove. At roughly the same time, British forces landed at the southern tip of the Gallipoli Peninsula, at Cape Helles, whilst French forces went ashore at Kum Kale, on the Turkish mainland just opposite Cape Helles. Indian and Canadian troops later joined the campaign. This multinational invasion force was to...

was like something from a film - what started as a farce ended as a tragedy. When Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrived in Sarajevo on June 28 1914, someone threw a bomb at him but it missed. Gavrilo Princip was meant to shoot him there and then but couldn’t get a clear shot. So he went to sulk in a café instead. It was only when Ferdinand’s car later went down the same street by the same café and got stuck in the road - that Princip took his chance and shot the Archduke dead. But what if Princip had missed?...

The shot that changed the world rang out on a sunny summer's morning in Southeastern Europe. No one knew then that the assassin's bullet would spell the death not just of an Austrian aristocrat but the entire global order, with four empires and millions of lives lost in a conflict on a scale never before seen.. Exactly 100 years ago Saturday, Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and his wife, Sophie, were shot at close range by a young Serbian nationalist on the streets of Sarajevo. The assassination set off a chain reaction that, barely a...

Archduke Franz Ferdinand is best known as the man whose assassination is widely believed to have led to the outbreak of World War I. But behind that figure lies a story of forbidden love, an obsession with hunting, and a near-miss that could have killed the archduke months before he was shot dead with his wife Sophie in Sarajevo 100 years ago.

ANDRIĆGRAD -- Plans for the start of World War I existed 13 months before the Sarajevo assassination and 14 months before Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia.The Serbian Kingdom soldiers are seen during the Battle of Kolubara (Wikipedia) This can be inferred from a copy of the letter that Director of the Archives of Serbia Miroslav Perišić presented in Andrićgrad, in the RS, Bosnia. Governor of Bosnia-Herzegovina Oskar Potiorek sent this letter to the then Minister of Austria-Hungary Bilinski on May 28, 1913, and its copy was made public at the history department of Kamengrad (Andrićgrad) on Sunday. Perišić noted that...