Historia, filosofía-biografia-pensamiento

As Columbus was ignorant of having found a new continent, so was he denied the honor of giving it a name, this falling by accident, design, or carelessness of truth, to Amerigo Vespucci, a native of Florence, whose active years were spent in Spain and Portugal. Vespucci made three voyages into the western seas. In the second, 1501, he visited the coast of Brazil, and pushed farther south than any navigator had yet done, probably so far as the island of South Georgia, in latitude 54 degrees. His account of this voyage found its way into print in 1504, at Augsburg, Germany, the first published narrative of any discovery of the mainland. Although, as above noted, it was not the earliest discovery of the main, it was widely regarded such, and caused Vespucci to be named for many years as the peer, if not the superior of Columbus. The publication ran through many editions. That of Strassburg, 1505, mentioned Vespucci on its title-page as having discovered a new "Southern Land." Th...

The Aden-Abyan Islamic Army, most recognized for its involvement in the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, is allegedly affiliated with Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network. The Yemen-based group has been implicated in several acts of terror since the late 1990s. Aden-Abyan was formed sometime in either 1996 or 1997 as a loose guerrilla network of a few dozen men—a mix of veterans of the Soviet-Afghan war and Islamists from various countries. In May 1998, it issued the first of a series of political and religious statements on Yemeni and world affairs. In December 1998, Aden-Abyan kidnapped a party of 16 Western tourists in southern Yemen, 4 of whom later died during a botched rescue by Yemeni security forces. The leader of the group, Abu al-Hassan al-Mihdar, was executed for his role in the kidnappings. Numerous connections have been drawn between Aden-Abyan and the Al Qaeda network. After the 1998 attack on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Aden-Abyan claimed it was a “heroic...