Jeff Idelson, a spokesman for the Hall of Fame, said: “There’s no way of pinpointing where the game was first played.”. The father of the American businessman who was beheaded in Iraq directly blamed President George Bush and his Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, yesterday for the death of his son. I’m sure Pittsfield will live off this for a while.”Ron Latham, director of the Berkshire Athenaeum library, where the document was found, said: “We knew we had the document catalogued in our vault. In 2001 a librarian at New York University found two newspaper articles published on 25 April 1823 which show that an organised game called “base ball” was being played in Manhattan.Ted Spencer, chief curator of the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, said the document, authenticated by the Williamstown Art Conservation Centre, was currently the undisputed earliest reference to baseball “This is a wonderful story,” he said.

“This is a great piece of history in the development of the game.”Once the latest discovery was authenticated, Mr Thorn contacted the former New York Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton, who is involved in a project to renovate and reopen Pittsfield’s historic Wahconah Park, which was built on a site where the sport has been played since 1892 Mr Bouton said: “This was a lucky stroke. It was growing everywhere, like a field of dandelions.”Legend has always had it that baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday, in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839, although experts no longer believe the story to be true. Mr Thorn said: “It’s clear that not only was baseball played here in 1791, but it was rampant. It was rampant enough to have an ordinance against it.”The message here is that baseball grew up in rural areas and in urban areas, too. Apparently the authorities in the Massachusetts town were worried about their windows being broken.The by-law says: “For the Preservation of the Windows in the New Meeting House … no Person or Inhabitant of said town, shall be permitted to play at any game called Wicket, Cricket, Baseball, Football, Cat, Fives, or any other game or games with balls, within the Distance of Eighty Yards from said Meeting House.”The 213-year-old document was discovered in the town’s library by the historian John Thorn, who was researching a book on the origins of the sport and found a reference on the internet to the bylaw, mentioned in a book about the town from 1869.

On radio, the Public Order minister, George Voulgarakis, said angrily that Olympic security was “not a game”. He summoned the British ambassador, David Madden, to complain.Athens is already in a dispute with Canberra after Australia issued a travel advisory, and the South Korean gymnastic team said they were reconsidering plans to train in the capital.Many Athenians have been taken by surprise. The city is perceived to be among the safest in the world by the people who live in it.. A newly discovered document dating from the late 18th century proves that baseball, America’s so-called national pastime, was being played here almost half a century earlier than was previously thought. The pair, from The Times, were given a warning first, then detained on a second attempt. They rarely lead to injuries and are usually staged in the pre-dawn hours.

Authorities had hoped they had seen the last of domestic guerrilla groups after the conviction last year of 15 members of the November 17 group, and the arrest of suspected members of another militant organisation, ELA.International terror groups in the mould of al-Qa’ida are regarded as the biggest threat. Security experts doubt the ability of local extremists to operate during the security measures that will be imposed. All venues and Olympic sites will undergo a detailed security sweep in July before being “locked down”, with entry and entrance only for accredited personnel.Greek taxpayers are footing the bill for an unprecedented billion-dollar Olympic security budget, more than three times what Sydney, the previous hosts, had spent.Two British journalists trying to enter the main Olympic sports complex received the first indication of tightened security when they were arrested on Tuesday night. “We are preparing well for the safety of the Olympic Games to avoid and prevent any potential threat,” he said.A government spokesman, Theodoros Roussopoulos, said the authorities were working on the assumption that yesterday’s claim comes from the same Revolutionary Struggle group that attacked a court complex in Athens last September, injuring a police officer.The Greek capital is plagued by small-scale arson and bomb attacks against targets ranging from diplomatic offices to multinational companies and police stations. The home-made bombs were made with an alarm clock taped to dynamite sticks.The group said that the blasts demonstrated “vulnerability” and that the “famous dogma of total security is meaningless”.The claim from Revolutionary Struggle coincided with an arson attack, thought to have been made by a separate group, on a branch of a Greek bank in central Athens. An unexploded device was discovered outside a separate multinational bank.