> Secretary Rejects Emergency Antibiotics Ban in Animal Feed
Health and Human Services
Secretary Margaret M. Heckler on Wednesday refused to impose an emergency ban on the use of antibiotics in animal feed. Mrs. Heckler denied a petition filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which had sought to shorten the process by asking the secretary to declare an 'imminent hazard' to public health. Declaring an 'imminent hazard' would invoke emergency powers and allow an immediate ban. The NRDC contended that routine, low-level use of antibiotics in animal feed is allowing drug-resistant bacteria to enter the human food chain, weakening the ability of drugs to fight human disease. The NRDC sought a ban on the use of small amounts of penicillin and tetracycline. Mrs. Heckler's decision does not end the matter permanently, as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) still can ban antibiotics in animal feed through administrative regulations. The issue of antibiotics in animal feed has already been under review at the FDA for more than eight years
Antibiotic resistance predicted all that time back
It's funny that this site's tagline is "Exactly 40 years back, these felt huge. See how they landed with time." but so many of these stories are still just as alarming. If anything it often feels like we should've cared more. At the very least done more
In a similar vein, I think even news from 40 years ago can teach us a lot. The players may be different, but the game is the same. Many of today’s wars and conflicts were already ongoing; big pharma, big food, oil companies, corruption in our institutions, manufactured coups… it all feels like nothing ever really changes.
But the things that do change can be evaluated with the benefit of hindsight, for example the policies promoted by Robert "monopolies are good actually" Bork and Reaganomics more generally. The Wedge didn't open by itself and we are now in a position to judge whether what trickled down was piss or gold.
Yup, on this site today, I see stories about the Reagan/Gorbochav talks. The "not an inch Westward" promise made to the USSR about NATO being repeatedly broken is directly relevant to today's invasion of Ukraine. And I also see stories about Lebanon fighting to end occupation by US and Israeli forces which is quite relevant to the other major conflict the US is tangled up in
I reckon that if there were a similar feed for the Roman Empire, the same would be true. The real issue is that human psychology hasn’t really changed in perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. The only thing that has is technology.
Without mentioning the source of the articles, it's completely useless. It would be hard to detect completely AI hallucinated articles, without a possibility to check the authenticity of the content.
> For example, on Oct 7, 1985, Palestinian hijackers took over the cruise ship Achille Lauro. Reading this on a delay in 2025, the story unfolded over weeks: first they threw an American in a wheelchair overboard, then US fighter jets forced the escape plane to land, leading to a military standoff between US Navy SEALs and the Italian Air Force. Unbelievably, the US backed down, but the later diplomatic fallout led the Italian Prime Minister to resign.
From the perspective of 2025, I can't help but think about the people I know today getting vocally angry about Israeli violence in the Gaza strip, and suggesting that this violence has implications for US politics - and I wonder how many of those people would be happy to throw an American in a wheelchair off a ship in the name of the Palestinian cause.
Reading the wikipedia article about this incident, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achille_Lauro_hijacking , it seems like the hijackers murdered the guy in a wheelchair before they threw his body off the ship, and it's possible but unproven that they picked him in particular either because he was Jewish or because he was in a wheelchair. The hijackers involved were given long prison sentences, but many of them were released decades ago and have fought against US in other ways since then.
I mostly think of the Israel/Palestine conflict as one that I have no dog in - I'm not Jewish, Israeli, or Palestinian myself and have no ties to the region. Nonetheless, pro-Palestine political messaging is something that happens around me all the time today, and knowing that the conflict was happening 40 years ago and that some of the same things that were happening then are akin to what is happening now colors my opinion of what is happening now.
Maybe this is just my bubble, but the messaging I get is that Israel should stop murdering Palestinian civilians and not that Hamas is somehow righteous in their actions.
What I tend to see is mostly an overlooking of one side's actions while condemning the other side, with different people favoring different sides. So you have people who make excuses for Hamas like "they are just responding to an existential threat" while strongly condemning Israel, and people who make similar excuses for Israel while strongly condemning Hamas. Personally I feel that there are no heroes and everyone sucks in this situation, except for the innocent bystanders on both sides who are being caught in the crossfire.
I think it varies. I've seen everything from people simply caring about the wellbeing of Palestinian civilians to rabid Hamas supporters and everything in between. I think it's easy to get stuck in an environment where you mostly see views that align with your own or are the complete opposite (with a corresponding dunk) and it's easy to get rage baited.
With that same logic me objecting to Iraq War I supported Saddam’s terror regime. Just because you think Israel actions are bloody genocidal war crimes does not mean that Hamas terror is justified or that some guy in a wheel chair should be killed. Yes, there is some young people who seem to get all of their information from social media and have absolutely no understanding of what is happening - they support Hamas, or claim that US have no dog in the fight.
Palestina-Syria was a term coined for the region by Emperor Hadrian after the destruction of the Second Temple, so 40 years is nothing in the timeline of this whole conflict. The modern Zionism goes back to the 19th Century and the Israel occupation and oppression of Palestinians at least to 1948. So no, this skirmosh at the sea gave you very litlle understanding of why things are like they are, why the violence continues and how US has been funding this conflict the whole time.
News is often highly decontextualized, to our detriment. This site is a nice idea, because seeing echoes of today in old news is a starting point for adding a little bit of context back in. A lot of people live in a permanent rage-state induced by the simple good vs evil narratives that are so easy to spin when the context is obscured. These narratives break down when you start to piece together why events unfold the way they do.
Reading mainstream coverage of tech is certainly what made me lose confidence in much of their other reporting.
Back when tech was this niche thing 20+ years ago, media's illiteracy on the matter was forgivable. Now that it's omnipresent and represents a huge portion of the economy, not so much. Yet the accuracy of the reporting on events that I have familiarity with has barely improved.*
* Acknowledging that this is subjective and I don't have any way to quantify it.
> India's director of air safety announced that an explosion in the cargo hold apparently caused the crash of an Air-India Jumbo jet last June, killing all 329 people aboard the flight from Canada to Bombay
I like the idea vrry much, also because it brings up news from my childhood so it is cool to see them again now and compare with what I remember from back then.
BUT, as others mentioned, you really need to publish the sources of each article.
I've always wanted a news source with a 4 week delay. This would filter out so much of the noise: rage bait articles about what a politician said, articles about what -may- happen that just promote doomscrolling... Wikipedia sort of does this, but you have to know which articles to look at (though on the upside, you get a lot more historical context).
If something isn't worth knowing about one month later, it probably wasn't news in the first place.
I like doing this with my local paper but from a hundred+ years ago.
It's funny to read that the electric street car opening day was delayed because they built the tracks at the wrong gauge for the street cars. Beaurocratic mismanagement in the 1890's.
My Wikipedia Library membership gives me access to some cool resources that might be of interest:
- Arcanum is the largest and continuously expanding digital periodical database from Eastern Europe, which contains scientific and specialized journals, encyclopaedias, weekly and daily newspapers and more
- NewspaperARCHIVE.com is an online database of digitized newspapers, with over 2 billion news articles; coverage extends from 1607 to the present from US, Canada, the UK, and 20 other countries.
- Newspapers.com includes more than 800 million pages from 20,000+ newspapers. The collection includes some major newspapers for limited periods (e.g., first 72 years of the New York Times), but mostly consists of US regional papers from the 1700s to the late 1980s. Free accounts through the Wikipedia Library include access to Newspapers.com Publisher Extra content.
- ProQuest is a multidisciplinary research provider. This access includes ProQuest Central, which includes a large collection of journals and newspapers, Literature Online, the HNP Chinese Newspaper Collections, and the Historical New York Times.
- Wikilala is a digital repository consisting of more than 109,000 documents in printed form, including 45,000 newspapers, 32,000 journals, 4,000 books and 26,000 articles concerning the history of the Ottoman Empire from its founding to the modern times.
Also most newspapers maintain their own archives, usually accessible online. Here's some I get access to: The Corriere della Sera (one of Italy's oldest and most read newspapers); The Corriere della Sera (a century of historical archives); The Times of Malta (Founded in 1935, it is the oldest daily newspaper still in circulation in Malta); ZEIT ONLINE (online version of Die Zeit, a German weekly newspaper) — and quite a few more
Nope, there's no way to pay for access to the bundle as it's meant solely for core Wikipedia contributors. However, many of these services independently offer paid access
Thanks, I figured as much. I looked at a few of the sites you mentioned and saw they have subscription offerings. I'm not shy about subscribing to stuff, but my use of it would be so seldom I can't justify it.
Maybe I'll just 10x how often I make edits so that I'm merely 59 years away from hitting 500.
Copyright issues will stop this soon. 40 year old newspaper articles aren't public domain yet in most countries. A gray area could be a newspaper that went out of business decades ago. Or maybe some government run newspaper that was public domain in the first place.
"We Didn't Start the Fire" covers 1949-1989, it just barely manages to avoid both WWII and the fall of the USSR and therefore _understates_ its case, if anything.
I remember seeing "Germany 9PM News 30 years ago" reporting about the quite accidental opening of the Berlin Wall.
This YouTube channel posts the news bulletin of 45 years ago, daily: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS7E58zLcws . For our American readers, it has the exoticism of 70's/80's Europe.
I have a pet peeves to report: the dark vs. light mode switch should have three choices: light, dark and system. I just can’t believe how many sites don’t do that properly.
That would be really fun. Unfortunately, I'd be surprised if the recordings still exist from the pre-"it's all digital" era, which is more recent than most people would think.
An interesting twist would be to somehow (not sure how) have a followup on the later importance of the news item, which was so worthy of news at that time. I'd guess the vast majority would be "not important by next year". You'd need a creative way to define and convey it, while still being accurate.
Some years ago I had a similar thing happening to me based on a friend who would gift me his finished The Economist issues with usually a 1 or 2 week delay.
When you read the news even one week later you already realize which stories didn't stay in the public's interest or didn't develop further and you just skip them, while those which did allow you to actually read the first hand accounts without much of the spin added afterwards.
It also removed most of the urge for being angry or sensational about stuff because you realize many stories aren't as bad as it seems on the day they are published (The Economist as a weekly publication does a lot of filtering of course anyway due to their publishing schedule).
>A reminder that urgency fades, context grows, and perspective is a habit.
That is such a great line. I also feel like 99% of the news is just noise, in terms of not adding anything actionable to our lives, nor is it growing our perspective.
In contrast, I really like Wikipedia articles about current events. They feel much more to the point than news articles.
> Secretary Rejects Emergency Antibiotics Ban in Animal Feed Health and Human Services
Secretary Margaret M. Heckler on Wednesday refused to impose an emergency ban on the use of antibiotics in animal feed. Mrs. Heckler denied a petition filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which had sought to shorten the process by asking the secretary to declare an 'imminent hazard' to public health. Declaring an 'imminent hazard' would invoke emergency powers and allow an immediate ban. The NRDC contended that routine, low-level use of antibiotics in animal feed is allowing drug-resistant bacteria to enter the human food chain, weakening the ability of drugs to fight human disease. The NRDC sought a ban on the use of small amounts of penicillin and tetracycline. Mrs. Heckler's decision does not end the matter permanently, as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) still can ban antibiotics in animal feed through administrative regulations. The issue of antibiotics in animal feed has already been under review at the FDA for more than eight years
Antibiotic resistance predicted all that time back
It's funny that this site's tagline is "Exactly 40 years back, these felt huge. See how they landed with time." but so many of these stories are still just as alarming. If anything it often feels like we should've cared more. At the very least done more
In a similar vein, I think even news from 40 years ago can teach us a lot. The players may be different, but the game is the same. Many of today’s wars and conflicts were already ongoing; big pharma, big food, oil companies, corruption in our institutions, manufactured coups… it all feels like nothing ever really changes.
But the things that do change can be evaluated with the benefit of hindsight, for example the policies promoted by Robert "monopolies are good actually" Bork and Reaganomics more generally. The Wedge didn't open by itself and we are now in a position to judge whether what trickled down was piss or gold.
Yup, on this site today, I see stories about the Reagan/Gorbochav talks. The "not an inch Westward" promise made to the USSR about NATO being repeatedly broken is directly relevant to today's invasion of Ukraine. And I also see stories about Lebanon fighting to end occupation by US and Israeli forces which is quite relevant to the other major conflict the US is tangled up in
I reckon that if there were a similar feed for the Roman Empire, the same would be true. The real issue is that human psychology hasn’t really changed in perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. The only thing that has is technology.
Without mentioning the source of the articles, it's completely useless. It would be hard to detect completely AI hallucinated articles, without a possibility to check the authenticity of the content.
> For example, on Oct 7, 1985, Palestinian hijackers took over the cruise ship Achille Lauro. Reading this on a delay in 2025, the story unfolded over weeks: first they threw an American in a wheelchair overboard, then US fighter jets forced the escape plane to land, leading to a military standoff between US Navy SEALs and the Italian Air Force. Unbelievably, the US backed down, but the later diplomatic fallout led the Italian Prime Minister to resign.
From the perspective of 2025, I can't help but think about the people I know today getting vocally angry about Israeli violence in the Gaza strip, and suggesting that this violence has implications for US politics - and I wonder how many of those people would be happy to throw an American in a wheelchair off a ship in the name of the Palestinian cause.
Reading the wikipedia article about this incident, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achille_Lauro_hijacking , it seems like the hijackers murdered the guy in a wheelchair before they threw his body off the ship, and it's possible but unproven that they picked him in particular either because he was Jewish or because he was in a wheelchair. The hijackers involved were given long prison sentences, but many of them were released decades ago and have fought against US in other ways since then.
I mostly think of the Israel/Palestine conflict as one that I have no dog in - I'm not Jewish, Israeli, or Palestinian myself and have no ties to the region. Nonetheless, pro-Palestine political messaging is something that happens around me all the time today, and knowing that the conflict was happening 40 years ago and that some of the same things that were happening then are akin to what is happening now colors my opinion of what is happening now.
Maybe this is just my bubble, but the messaging I get is that Israel should stop murdering Palestinian civilians and not that Hamas is somehow righteous in their actions.
What I tend to see is mostly an overlooking of one side's actions while condemning the other side, with different people favoring different sides. So you have people who make excuses for Hamas like "they are just responding to an existential threat" while strongly condemning Israel, and people who make similar excuses for Israel while strongly condemning Hamas. Personally I feel that there are no heroes and everyone sucks in this situation, except for the innocent bystanders on both sides who are being caught in the crossfire.
I think it varies. I've seen everything from people simply caring about the wellbeing of Palestinian civilians to rabid Hamas supporters and everything in between. I think it's easy to get stuck in an environment where you mostly see views that align with your own or are the complete opposite (with a corresponding dunk) and it's easy to get rage baited.
There’s a lot of ideological snap-to-grid.
With that same logic me objecting to Iraq War I supported Saddam’s terror regime. Just because you think Israel actions are bloody genocidal war crimes does not mean that Hamas terror is justified or that some guy in a wheel chair should be killed. Yes, there is some young people who seem to get all of their information from social media and have absolutely no understanding of what is happening - they support Hamas, or claim that US have no dog in the fight.
Palestina-Syria was a term coined for the region by Emperor Hadrian after the destruction of the Second Temple, so 40 years is nothing in the timeline of this whole conflict. The modern Zionism goes back to the 19th Century and the Israel occupation and oppression of Palestinians at least to 1948. So no, this skirmosh at the sea gave you very litlle understanding of why things are like they are, why the violence continues and how US has been funding this conflict the whole time.
If you actually want to understand what this conflict feels for a regular Palestinian just trying to live, listen this interview: https://pca.st/episode/4f0099d2-2c6e-4751-b1e1-e0913fa25734
News is often highly decontextualized, to our detriment. This site is a nice idea, because seeing echoes of today in old news is a starting point for adding a little bit of context back in. A lot of people live in a permanent rage-state induced by the simple good vs evil narratives that are so easy to spin when the context is obscured. These narratives break down when you start to piece together why events unfold the way they do.
“To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
A similar result can be found by reading coverage of events you witnessed or topics you know well.
Reading mainstream coverage of tech is certainly what made me lose confidence in much of their other reporting.
Back when tech was this niche thing 20+ years ago, media's illiteracy on the matter was forgivable. Now that it's omnipresent and represents a huge portion of the economy, not so much. Yet the accuracy of the reporting on events that I have familiarity with has barely improved.*
* Acknowledging that this is subjective and I don't have any way to quantify it.
Reading almost any mass media article on encryption makes me want to scream.
> India's director of air safety announced that an explosion in the cargo hold apparently caused the crash of an Air-India Jumbo jet last June, killing all 329 people aboard the flight from Canada to Bombay
I forgot what tab opened and I assumed that the report for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_India_Flight_171 was out. Took me a few minutes to realize this wasn't the same crash.
Source or country of origin would be nice.
“Opposition leader Aquino” in article without any other context could be confusing
I like the idea vrry much, also because it brings up news from my childhood so it is cool to see them again now and compare with what I remember from back then. BUT, as others mentioned, you really need to publish the sources of each article.
I've always wanted a news source with a 4 week delay. This would filter out so much of the noise: rage bait articles about what a politician said, articles about what -may- happen that just promote doomscrolling... Wikipedia sort of does this, but you have to know which articles to look at (though on the upside, you get a lot more historical context).
If something isn't worth knowing about one month later, it probably wasn't news in the first place.
I like doing this with my local paper but from a hundred+ years ago.
It's funny to read that the electric street car opening day was delayed because they built the tracks at the wrong gauge for the street cars. Beaurocratic mismanagement in the 1890's.
That must be what inspired them to approach San Francisco's Central Subway in a similar fashion!
Good idea and execution. Adding the metadata mentioned by others in the thread would improve. Otherwise this is a legit cool project.
> The system ingests raw newspaper scans and uses a multi-step LLM pipeline to generate the daily edition
This is neat! But I wonder about longevity of the project if it relies on scanning newspapers.
Do you have an endless suply? Perhaps there is some digital archive you could use?
My Wikipedia Library membership gives me access to some cool resources that might be of interest:
- Arcanum is the largest and continuously expanding digital periodical database from Eastern Europe, which contains scientific and specialized journals, encyclopaedias, weekly and daily newspapers and more
- NewspaperARCHIVE.com is an online database of digitized newspapers, with over 2 billion news articles; coverage extends from 1607 to the present from US, Canada, the UK, and 20 other countries.
- Newspapers.com includes more than 800 million pages from 20,000+ newspapers. The collection includes some major newspapers for limited periods (e.g., first 72 years of the New York Times), but mostly consists of US regional papers from the 1700s to the late 1980s. Free accounts through the Wikipedia Library include access to Newspapers.com Publisher Extra content.
- ProQuest is a multidisciplinary research provider. This access includes ProQuest Central, which includes a large collection of journals and newspapers, Literature Online, the HNP Chinese Newspaper Collections, and the Historical New York Times.
- Wikilala is a digital repository consisting of more than 109,000 documents in printed form, including 45,000 newspapers, 32,000 journals, 4,000 books and 26,000 articles concerning the history of the Ottoman Empire from its founding to the modern times.
Also most newspapers maintain their own archives, usually accessible online. Here's some I get access to: The Corriere della Sera (one of Italy's oldest and most read newspapers); The Corriere della Sera (a century of historical archives); The Times of Malta (Founded in 1935, it is the oldest daily newspaper still in circulation in Malta); ZEIT ONLINE (online version of Die Zeit, a German weekly newspaper) — and quite a few more
That's very cool, but I lack the 500+ total edits on Wikipedia to qualify.
My first edit was 20 years ago this month and at my current pace I'll be able to access that in another 588 years.
Is there some other way to pay [Wikipedia/WMF] for access to that bundle?
Nope, there's no way to pay for access to the bundle as it's meant solely for core Wikipedia contributors. However, many of these services independently offer paid access
Thanks, I figured as much. I looked at a few of the sites you mentioned and saw they have subscription offerings. I'm not shy about subscribing to stuff, but my use of it would be so seldom I can't justify it.
Maybe I'll just 10x how often I make edits so that I'm merely 59 years away from hitting 500.
Copyright issues will stop this soon. 40 year old newspaper articles aren't public domain yet in most countries. A gray area could be a newspaper that went out of business decades ago. Or maybe some government run newspaper that was public domain in the first place.
As OP said, these aren't the newspaper articles. They're AI generated stories based off the facts of the events.
We didn't start the fire... as a service.
"We Didn't Start the Fire" covers 1949-1989, it just barely manages to avoid both WWII and the fall of the USSR and therefore _understates_ its case, if anything.
You know the rules… and so do I
I remember seeing "Germany 9PM News 30 years ago" reporting about the quite accidental opening of the Berlin Wall.
This YouTube channel posts the news bulletin of 45 years ago, daily: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS7E58zLcws . For our American readers, it has the exoticism of 70's/80's Europe.
There's one front page new that allude to events happening in December 7th and 8th despite dating to November 22nd.
I assume you select the stories automatically, but the time of the story might not be correct.
> uses a multi-step LLM pipeline
LLM? Ok thanks but no thanks.
Cool concept!
I have a pet peeves to report: the dark vs. light mode switch should have three choices: light, dark and system. I just can’t believe how many sites don’t do that properly.
Also (unrelated to my knowledge): https://olduse.net/
I've wanted a way to listen to a local radio stations broadcast--including ads and dj banter--from this day X years ago.
That would be really fun. Unfortunately, I'd be surprised if the recordings still exist from the pre-"it's all digital" era, which is more recent than most people would think.
I like it.
An interesting twist would be to somehow (not sure how) have a followup on the later importance of the news item, which was so worthy of news at that time. I'd guess the vast majority would be "not important by next year". You'd need a creative way to define and convey it, while still being accurate.
Some years ago I had a similar thing happening to me based on a friend who would gift me his finished The Economist issues with usually a 1 or 2 week delay.
When you read the news even one week later you already realize which stories didn't stay in the public's interest or didn't develop further and you just skip them, while those which did allow you to actually read the first hand accounts without much of the spin added afterwards.
It also removed most of the urge for being angry or sensational about stuff because you realize many stories aren't as bad as it seems on the day they are published (The Economist as a weekly publication does a lot of filtering of course anyway due to their publishing schedule).
>A reminder that urgency fades, context grows, and perspective is a habit.
That is such a great line. I also feel like 99% of the news is just noise, in terms of not adding anything actionable to our lives, nor is it growing our perspective.
In contrast, I really like Wikipedia articles about current events. They feel much more to the point than news articles.
Woha! Cool stuff. Would be fantastic to be able to configure the number of years back.
I like this because I can read the newspapers of my youth, when I couldn't read international papers like a can today, not that I read any papers.
Fun fact: I emigrated on the Achille Lauro , half way around the world, over a decade before it was hijacked.
Wow, that's wild
One of my favorite website is the one that replays 9/11 live on 9/11 every year.
sweet
clicks on home page
> FBI Agents, White Supremacist Leader Engage in Deadly Standoff
> Police Fire on Black Protesters in Pretoria Suburb; Deaths Reported
> Something about Jewish people
> Communism
I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same eh.