Free Republic

BELFAST (Reuters) - The IRA admitted on Friday to the 1973 killing of a teenage girl that it had blamed on the British army and apologised to her family who had called on the paramilitaries to accept responsibility. Kathleen Feeney was shot dead near her home in Londonderry. At the time, the IRA, which put its violent, 30-year campaign against British rule on hold in 1997, blamed British soldiers for the 14-year-old's murder. "We wish to apologise unreservedly to the Feeney family for the death of Kathleen and all the grief that our actions have caused to them," the IRA...

An intact mortar shell has been discovered at Scotland's Culloden Battlefield by a team of researchers led by Derek Alexander of the National Trust for Scotland and Tony Pollard of the University of Glasgow, according to a Scottish Field report. Fought on April 16, 1746, the battle marked the English government's defeat of Jacobite forces, who supported the return of the exiled Stuart king to the English throne after the Glorious Revolution in 1688. The undetonated shell is thought to have been fired by government troops from a Coehorn mortar and then to have landed on boggy ground, where its...

For centuries, almost all carrots were yellow, white or purple. But in the 17th century, most of those crunchy vegetables turned orange. Why? It may have to do with Dutch politics. Next Nature explains: In the 17th century, Dutch growers cultivated orange carrots as a tribute to William of Orange – who led the the struggle for Dutch independence – and the color stuck. A thousand years of yellow, white and purple carrot history was wiped out in a generation.Although some scholars doubt if orange carrots even existed prior to the 16th century....