Given the gruesome fate of the last Tsar, Nicholas II, and his family, and the fact that five of the previous 12 Romanov rulers were also murdered, it is easy to regard Russia's imperial dynasty as cursed.

Given the fact that Maine has raised its minimum wage each year for the last five years, that our minimum wage is currently $1.35 above the federal minimum wage and that Maine experienced a net loss of 600 jobs in 2005, one would wonder how it could possibly be true that raising the minimum wage again is going to improve our economy.

A left turn in the fate of Russia is as necessary as it is inevitable.

A racially integrated community is a chronological term timed from the entrance of the first black family to the exit of the last white family.

By the time Napoleon abandoned his army to its fate in Poland - arriving back in Paris on 5 December - it numbered fewer than 10,000 effectives. It was a disaster from which he would never recover.

My forebears were fantastically wealthy Armenians who came to England from India in the 19th century and did what foreign types do - they married into a penniless but well-bred local family.