News and features related to historical or contemporary topics written about in my novels.
Select which book you would like to see news for...
Nasa says it will be a harmless flyby by the giant rock, one of several near-Earth objects slated to swing by the planet this week. An asteroid as big as a skyscraper will pass within 1.7m miles (2.7mkm) of Earth on Friday. Don’t worry: there’s no chance of it hitting …
Throughout his decade as leader of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis has allowed debates on previously taboo topics and set in motion subtle shifts toward liberalizing changes that have enraged conservatives for going too far and frustrated progressives for not going far enough. This month, starting on Wednesday, Francis’ …
The mythical female pope is back in the news as an academic uses medieval coins to look for physical evidence of her reign In the late Middle Ages, a popular legend advanced the story of a medieval woman who disguised herself in men’s clothing and ascended to the role …
There may be an undiscovered Earth-like planet lurking within the solar system, according to a team of astronomers looking at the movement of objects in the Kuiper Belt. Finding planets is no simple task, now that we’ve found the ones like Jupiter which were helpful enough to be fairly visible …
For nearly a century, the University of Michigan possessed a piece of paper that it considered “one of the jewels” of its library. Believed to have been written in 1609 and 1610 by astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei, it features a letter signed by the scientist describing a new …
From The Atlantic, February 23, 2023 At the small elementary school in Jouy-sous-les-Côtes, in northeastern France, Gisèle Marc knew the rumor about her: that her parents were not her real parents, and her real mother must have been a whore. It was the late 1940s, just after the war, a …
