It was built in Belfast, yet no-one bothered to make an application for a museum to commemorate it.

Now a fresh appeal is being made for the establishment of a maritime museum in Belfast linked to the Titanic.

The Heritage Lottery Fund was criticised in Northern Ireland earlier this year, when it allocated £500,000 towards a new museum in Southampton which will include an element dedicated to the liner.

But the body revealed on Wednesday that it had never been asked to fund a Titanic museum in Belfast.

It is a window on the birth of England and a reminder of the often overlooked first King of all of Britain, Athelstan.

It was buried as Viking nobility fled from Yorkshire at a key moment in British history and more than a thousand years later it was discovered by two men with metal detectors in a field near Harrogate in North Yorkshire.

It is the greatest Viking hoard of treasure to be discovered in Britain for more than 150 years.

And now it's been cleaned and prepared for display in York and London - it has revealed its stories.

Records of more than 100,000 British prisoners of war captured during World War II are being published online.

The ancestry.co.uk lists, accessible for a fee, were compiled by the German military authorities under the 1929 Geneva Convention.

They contain details of British and Commonwealth personnel held in Germany, Austria and Poland in WWII.

The records have only now been made public and the website claims to be the first in the world to publish them.

Staff at an 18th Century Scottish castle have been praised for saving it from widespread damage in a fire.

The alarm was raised at 0730 BST at Floors Castle near Kelso after the blaze began near a freezer and spread behind lath and plaster walls.

Roxburghe Estates manager Roddy Jackson said the "quick actions" of staff had limited the damage to one room.

It meant the castle - the family home of the Duke of Roxburghe - was able to open to the public as usual.

The USSR plotted to invade Manchester during the height of the Cold War, it has emerged.

A map drawn up by Soviet generals shows that the military had charted an armoured invasion of the city, for distribution to frontline commanders. The plans would be put into action if relations between the UK and the USSR deteriorated further.

The maps ignored one-way streets and rush hour jams, marking the lines of an assault in bold orange, the Guardian reports. According to the documents, troops would sweep into the centre past Old Trafford and the current site of the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry.

The map came to light after the collapse of the Communist system. Along with similar charts of other western and US strategic centres, it was sold by military mapmakers in the chaotic aftermath of perestroika and glasnost.

In the spring of 2003, the United States Senate was heading for a meltdown. Democrats were blocking confirmation of federal judges. Republicans were set to retaliate with a “nuclear option”: a new rule stripping senators of their right to filibuster judicial nominations.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, fearing for the future of the institution, turned to a historian for help. He invited Robert A. Caro, author of the epic Lyndon B. Johnson biography, “Master of the Senate,” to speak to lawmakers about Senate traditions, and the founding fathers’ vision of it as a place for extended debate.

To Mr. Caro, Mr. Kennedy’s own knowledge of Senate history and reverence for its ideals was yet another reminder of why his host deserved a place in the pantheon of Senate greats, alongside men like Webster and Calhoun and Clay. But it was also a reminder of how much the Senate had changed during Mr. Kennedy’s 46 years there.

“Ted Kennedy was a senator out of another, very different, Senate era: an era in which senators who believed in great causes stood at their desks, year after year and decade after decade, fighting for those causes, and educating the country about them,” Mr. Caro said.

It is a tradition, he said, “that seems all but lost today.”

From physical changes to the chamber — in 1986 the lighting was brightened for television and the slouchy overstuffed couches were cleared away — to the arrival of women, to the disappearance of the conservative Southern Democrats who used their clout to strangle civil rights legislation, the Senate of today is far different from the one Mr. Kennedy joined in November 1962.

Like the nation itself, it has become coarser, more partisan and, many scholars and politicians argue, more dysfunctional. As both parties have moved to their ideological extremes, the center is all but gone.

“When Kennedy came, both political parties in the Senate were internally divided,” said Don Ritchie, the associate Senate historian. “There were as many Eisenhower Republicans as Goldwater Republicans. There were more liberal Democrats but a sizable number of conservative Democrats. There was never a party line vote on anything. There were ideological coalitions rather than partisan coalitions.”

One measure of that partisanship is the rise of the filibuster, once a rarity that was reserved for the great legislative debates of the day. Today, rare is the bill that does not face a filibuster threat. In 1963, Mr. Kennedy’s first full year in the Senate, the leaders filed just one “cloture motion,” Senate parlance for the procedure that can end a filibuster by cutting off debate. Last year, 50 cloture motions were filed.

The Senate was then, and is now, a clubby place governed by its own peculiar rules and conventions. But with the possible exception of Senator Robert C. Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat and longest-serving senator (at 91, having served for 50 years, he is frail and in failing health) today’s senators are rarely acclaimed for eloquent discourse...

... It is tempting to wax nostalgic about the good old days, but some things about the Senate have inarguably changed for the better. Today’s Senate is more diverse, with women especially represented in greater numbers. There were only two women in the Senate when Mr. Kennedy joined, while today there are 17. The women of the Senate share monthly off-the-record dinners (no aides allowed), organized by Senator Barbara Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland and the longest-serving female senator.

The Senate staff is much larger and more professional today, with deep policy expertise. Mr. Kennedy’s staff was widely considered the best and the brightest, with high-powered alumni, among them a Supreme Court justice, Stephen G. Breyer. But Adam Clymer, a Kennedy biographer and former New York Times reporter, says there is a downside to specialization: today’s senators rely more on their aides than on one another...

It was a gilded name in politics, but Ted Kennedy's life was an almost impossible kaleidoscope of outstanding public service, astonishing personal failures and the heavy burden of the unfulfilled legacies and promise of three older brothers: Joseph, Jack and Bobby.

Ted, the youngest of the Kennedys, became the patriarch of the family at 36 when Bobby -- whose 1968 presidential campaign championed the sick, the poor and the elderly -- was assassinated.

He would never be president. The dream of Camelot -- as Jackie Kennedy once described her husband's brief presidency -- was over the night Kennedy conceded the primaries to President Jimmy Carter.

Even before Kennedy's death, colleagues on the right and left mourned his absence in the health care debate. Now they feel it acutely.