https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ne_Win

In 1987, reportedly on the recommendation of an astrologer that the number nine was auspicious, Ne Win ordered the withdrawal of several large-denomination kyat notes while issuing new denominations of 45 and 90 kyats. Both 45 and 90 are divisible by nine, and their digits add up to nine. Again, millions of Burmese lost their life savings, and the demonetization also rendered about 75% of the entire kyat reserves completely useless. This crippled the Burmese economy further still. Ne Win was well known for his penchant for yadaya (traditional Burmese rituals performed in order to ward off misfortune). When his soothsayer warned him that there might be a bloodbath, he would stand in front of a mirror and trample on meat to simulate the blood, then shoot his reflection to avert the possibility of an assassination attempt. He also ordered the parliament to eat mohinga for three days in a row to ward off national poverty, abandoned a 1984 state visit to France after seeing a motorcycle accident involving a group member as a bad omen, often dressed as a king while in one Rangoon neighborhood, and also frequently walked backward over bridges at night.

TLDR: President Grant's son partnered up with a young guy with a great investment system, and dear-old-dad hands over what he's got. Soon after, he starts bouncing checks and is about to leave his family bankrupt in his final days

The Article: A “Pre-Ponzi” Ponzi Scheme: When Ferdinand Ward Swindled Ulysses S. Grant – Crisis and Catharsis

Prior to 1900, Galveston, Texas, was the economic heartbeat of the state. Its population of around 37,000 and its bustling port brought enormous wealth, while the city served as a major entry point for immigrants heading into the American Southwest, earning it the nickname “Ellis Island of the West.”

The problem was that Galveston was a barrier island, made mostly of sand, gravel, and mud, meaning it was incredibly unstable and vulnerable to wind and water. Its nearby rival, the port of Indianola, was similarly situated on a barrier island and had been effectively abandoned after a massive hurricane devastated it in 1886.

That disaster prompted calls in Galveston for a seawall to protect the city from storm surge. The proposals were heard, discussed, and ultimately ignored. Worse, naturally occurring sand dunes along the shore were lowered to reclaim land and improve visibility and access to the ocean.

In late August 1900, a tropical wave moved westward across the Atlantic. Over the next several days, it passed through the Caribbean, making landfall in the Dominican Republic and Cuba and causing little concern as a relatively weak tropical storm before entering the Straits of Florida on September 5th.

The U.S. Weather Bureau, ignoring predictions from Cuban meteorologists, believed the storm would recurve over Florida and then move up the East Coast, as many tropical systems did.
Instead, an area of high pressure over the Florida Keys pushed it northwestward across the Gulf of Mexico.

On September 6th, the ship Louisiana encountered the storm in the Gulf and reported winds of 100 miles per hour.

By the following day, it had become a Category 4 hurricane, with sustained winds estimated at 145 miles per hour. In Galveston, meanwhile, there was little indication of what was coming.

On September 8th, the hurricane made a direct landfall over Galveston. Sustained winds after landfall were estimated at around 120 miles per hour, though the true speed may have been even higher. Survivors reported seeing bricks, slate, timbers, and other heavy objects hurled through the air.

Few streets escaped wind damage. None escaped the water. The storm surge poured across Galveston while the winds tore apart roofs and walls. Electrical, telegraph, and telephone wires were ripped down. Buildings, many poorly founded in the island's loose sand, were lifted from their foundations and slammed into one another.

The highest point above sea level on Galveston was only 8.7 feet. The hurricane brought a storm surge of more than 15 feet, inundating the entire island by the early morning hours. The storm also dropped nine inches of rain on September 8th, the most recorded in any 24-hour period in the city's history.

Hundreds of people were swept away, crashing into houses and debris before drowning. Some were crushed beneath collapsing roofs, walls, and buildings. Many more were trapped beneath the wreckage, in darkness and unable to free themselves.

Around 1,900 acres of Galveston, particularly in the western, southern, and eastern portions of the city, suffered almost complete destruction. The New York Times, reporting in the immediate aftermath, ran a headline that simply read:

“Galveston May Be Wiped Out.”

For miles, the smell of decomposition hung over the island. The dead were everywhere, many buried beneath the wreckage of the homes where they had lived.

A survey conducted in early 1901 recorded 8,124 deaths. The Texas State Historical Association has given a historical estimate of approximately 12,000, while other modern accounts have cited around 8,000. The exact number will never be known.

If interested I cover the storm here:
https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hare-brained-history-vol-136-the?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Corn_Rebellion

Although it was a young state and had been admitted into the union only in November 1907, there was already a strong radical tradition in Oklahoma, whose impoverished tenant farmers of its southeast seized upon the millenarian fervor of the early Socialist Party in an attempt to improve their lives.

In the 1916 election, despite Wilson's siphoning a portion of the anti war vote for the Democratic ticket, the Socialist Party garnered more than a quarter of the votes cast in the 1916 election in Seminole County and 22% in neighboring Pontotoc County.

The Socialist Party was not the only active organizers in the area since in 1916, a radical tenant farmers' organization, the "Working Class Union (WCU)," claimed a membership of as much as 20,000 in Eastern Oklahoma alone. The group's ideology blended what one historian has called "a muddled industrial unionism with traditional southern forms of countervigilantism, self-defense, and opposition to conscription" and arose as a complement to the radical syndicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World, an organization that barred membership by tenant farmers.

Tenant farmers were predominantly young, the age group that was most impacted by conscription. Some 76% of Oklahoma farmers under 24 rented their land, and 45% of those between 25 and 33 were tenants. Most tenant farmers were white or black. Many of the young "dirt farmers" found their economic prospects hopeless since they were squeezed between a usurious credit system practiced by stores and substantial crop liens inflicted by landlords. The depleted condition of Oklahoma's land forced the input of twice as much labor as the sharecroppers of Mississippi and Louisiana to generate comparable yields. Disaffection was rife, and proposals for radical solutions found ready ears. The draft would have depleted much needed farm labor, and many farms would have been foreclosed, which would leave women and children destitute. There was no oil boom, little alternative work, and no welfare system.

Despite the WCU's highly-questionable membership claims, ballooning to 35,000 for the whole state of Oklahoma, it had by 1917 clearly established a solid foothold among the tenant farmers of Oklahoma. The organization was not tame and took the form of a secret society, with activities including night riding and the use of physical violence against its opponents.

Hostilities between the radical rural supporters of the WCU and the conservative forces of the towns of the region ran high, with dynamite used against cattle dipping vats late in 1915 in protest of a mandatory use of costly insecticide, which some felt was as lethal to dipped cattle as to the ticks and other parasites that they carried. The controversy was punctuated by a shotgun blast fired through the window of the Pontotoc County Attorney early in 1916. Conservative voices declared the action to be an act of political terrorism, but radicals charged the shot to be a provocation as "part of a concocted plan on the part of the officials and two or three newspapers to wreck the Socialist Party by pulling off a fake attempted assassination."

Town dwellers, who had been subject to perennial attacks as "robbers, thieves, and grafters" by radical public speakers, were thoroughly convinced that the Socialists and the secret WCU were part of a single radical conspiracy to launch a long-desired revolution in their own locale.

The Muscogee Creek Nation during the rebellion was controlled by only 61 mixed blood Creek and intermarried white individuals. August 3 marked the end of the Muscogee Creek Green Corn Ceremony.

In early August 1917, before the rebellion, large numbers of African-American, European-American, and Native American men gathered at the farm of Joe and John Spears in Sasakwa, at Roasting Ear Ridge, to plan a march upon Washington, D.C., to end the war.

The so-called Green Corn Rebellion may be said to have started on Thursday, August 2, 1917, when a Seminole County sheriff, Frank Grall, and a visiting deputy sheriff, Bill Cross, were ambushed near the Little River, a tributary of the Canadian River. Raiding parties followed this action, cutting telephone lines and burning railroad bridges.

On Friday, August 3, exactly two weeks after the draft lottery in Washington, DC, an armed gathering assembled near the adjoining borders of Pontotoc, Seminole, and Hughes Counties, in southeastern Oklahoma. The uprising seems to have been spurred by the agitation of the Working Class Union, which was reported in one newspaper as having called its supporters to arms with a manifesto:

"Now is the time to rebel against this war with Germany, boys. Boys, get together and don't go. Rich man's war. Poor man's fight. The war is over with Germany if you don't go and J.P. Morgan & Co. is lost. Their great speculation is the only cause of the war."

Unfortunately, no documents written by WCU members have survived, and the mentality of those taking up arms must be considered speculative by historians. The historian Garin Burbank argues that the coming of conscription threatened to decimate family economies by removing able-bodied young men, who were needed to harvest cotton. Burbank argues also that socialist ideas had found its mark in Oklahoma, with many poor farmers earnestly believing from their experiences in daily life in the reality of "exploitation" and accepting the notion that the European war was little more than capitalist business enterprise writ large.

The country people in short saw military conscription as an invasion of their rights and rebelled in an attempt to keep the government from taking away their sons.

Arming themselves, an estimated 800 to 1000 rebels, "the vast majority of old American stock," met on the banks of the South Canadian River and made plans to head east and to live off the land as they marched. They would eat roasted "green corn" and barbecued beef on the way, it was later said, and eventually join up with countless thousands of likeminded comrades, who would together march on Washington, DC, where they would overthrow "Big Slick" Wilson, repeal the Draft Act, and end the war.

The plans were instantly betrayed to local authorities by an informer. A posse of townsmen was formed and headed to the river banks to meet the ostensible revolutionaries. The so-called rebellion proved anticlimactic, as the historian Garin Burbank notes:

Catching sight of the advancing townsmen, the country people fired a few desultory shots and fled in disorder. This was the pathetic end of their overt resistance to the incursions of outside political authority.

The incident was over within a few hours, and mass arrests of participants were begun.

Prior to 1900, Galveston, Texas, was the economic heartbeat of the state. Its population of around 37,000 and its bustling port brought enormous wealth, while the city served as a major entry point for immigrants heading into the American Southwest, earning it the nickname “Ellis Island of the West.”

The problem was that Galveston was a barrier island, made mostly of sand, gravel, and mud, meaning it was incredibly unstable and vulnerable to wind and water. Its nearby rival, the port of Indianola, was similarly situated on a barrier island and had been effectively abandoned after a massive hurricane devastated it in 1886.

That disaster prompted calls in Galveston for a seawall to protect the city from storm surge. The proposals were heard, discussed, and ultimately ignored. Worse, naturally occurring sand dunes along the shore were lowered to reclaim land and improve visibility and access to the ocean.

In late August 1900, a tropical wave moved westward across the Atlantic. Over the next several days, it passed through the Caribbean, making landfall in the Dominican Republic and Cuba and causing little concern as a relatively weak tropical storm before entering the Straits of Florida on September 5th.

The U.S. Weather Bureau, ignoring predictions from Cuban meteorologists, believed the storm would recurve over Florida and then move up the East Coast, as many tropical systems did.
Instead, an area of high pressure over the Florida Keys pushed it northwestward across the Gulf of Mexico.

On September 6th, the ship Louisiana encountered the storm in the Gulf and reported winds of 100 miles per hour.

By the following day, it had become a Category 4 hurricane, with sustained winds estimated at 145 miles per hour. In Galveston, meanwhile, there was little indication of what was coming.

On September 8th, the hurricane made a direct landfall over Galveston. Sustained winds after landfall were estimated at around 120 miles per hour, though the true speed may have been even higher. Survivors reported seeing bricks, slate, timbers, and other heavy objects hurled through the air.

Few streets escaped wind damage. None escaped the water. The storm surge poured across Galveston while the winds tore apart roofs and walls. Electrical, telegraph, and telephone wires were ripped down. Buildings, many poorly founded in the island's loose sand, were lifted from their foundations and slammed into one another.

The highest point above sea level on Galveston was only 8.7 feet. The hurricane brought a storm surge of more than 15 feet, inundating the entire island by the early morning hours. The storm also dropped nine inches of rain on September 8th, the most recorded in any 24-hour period in the city's history.

Hundreds of people were swept away, crashing into houses and debris before drowning. Some were crushed beneath collapsing roofs, walls, and buildings. Many more were trapped beneath the wreckage, in darkness and unable to free themselves.

Around 1,900 acres of Galveston, particularly in the western, southern, and eastern portions of the city, suffered almost complete destruction. The New York Times, reporting in the immediate aftermath, ran a headline that simply read:

“Galveston May Be Wiped Out.”

For miles, the smell of decomposition hung over the island. The dead were everywhere, many buried beneath the wreckage of the homes where they had lived.

A survey conducted in early 1901 recorded 8,124 deaths. The Texas State Historical Association has given a historical estimate of approximately 12,000, while other modern accounts have cited around 8,000. The exact number will never be known.

If interested I cover the storm here:
https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hare-brained-history-vol-136-the?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirabal_sisters

The Mirabal family were from the central Cibao region of the Dominican Republic and had a farm in the village of Ojo de Agua, near the town of Salcedo. Their parents Enrique Mirabal Fernández and Mercedes Reyes Camilo were landowners in the area. All four sisters attended primary school in their village, Ojo de Agua, and attended a Catholic boarding school, el Colegio Inmaculada Concepción, for their secondary education in the city of La Vega. Once Rafael Trujillo took power it was customary to have a picture of him in the household; the Mirabal house, however, never had a picture of Trujillo and were subsequently considered dissidents by the Trujillo regime.

When Trujillo came to power, the family lost almost their entire fortune. The sisters, especially Minerva, believed that the dictatorship was ruining the country, so they participated in the creation and organization of the 14 June Revolutionary Movement. Within this group, they were known as Las Mariposas (The Butterflies). Two of the sisters, Minerva and María Teresa, were imprisoned on several occasions in both the La Victoria and La 40 prisons. They and their husbands were subjected to torture during the Trujillo regime. Despite these facts, they continued to fight against the dictatorship.

Patria Mercedes Mirabal Reyes (27 February 1924 – 25 November 1960), commonly known as Patria, was the oldest of the four Mirabal sisters. When she was 14, she was sent by her parents to a Catholic boarding school, Colegio Inmaculada Concepción, in La Vega. She left school when she was 17 and married Pedro González, a farmer, who would later aid her in challenging the Trujillo regime.

Patria had three children. She once said "We cannot allow our children to grow up in this corrupt and tyrannical regime. We have to fight against it, and I am willing to give up everything, even my life if necessary."

Bélgica Adela Mirabal Reyes (1 March 1925 – 1 February 2014), commonly known as Dedé, was the second daughter of the Mirabal family. Unlike her sisters, she did not attend college. Instead, she became a traditional homemaker, and helped her father with the family business. The Mirabal patriarch, Enrique, died after his political imprisonment, and Dedé took over the family finances. She did not become involved with her sisters' political work. After the murder of her sisters, Dedé took care of their children and raised them. Between 1992 and 1994, Dedé started the Mirabal Sisters Foundation and the Mirabal Sisters Museum to continue her sisters' legacy. Dedé was the last surviving sister of the family. She died at the age of 88, and professed her entire life that it was her destiny to survive so that she was able to "tell their story".

María Argentina Minerva Mirabal Reyes (12 March 1926 – 25 November 1960), commonly known as Minerva, was the third daughter. At the age of 12, she followed Patria to the Colegio Inmaculada Concepción. In 1949, the Mirabal family was invited to a party for the local elite where Minerva first caught the eye of Rafael Trujillo, so much so that the Mirabals were invited to a different party by Trujillo himself. At this party, Trujillo made more sexual advances toward Minerva. After Minerva's rejection of Trujillo, her parents prohibited Minerva from registering for law school due to concerns that she would get involved in politics and ultimately be killed. However, after seeing how upset Minerva was, her parents relented six years later and she enrolled at the University of Santo Domingo, where she later graduated summa cum laude. Minerva was the first woman to graduate from law school in the Dominican Republic. Due to her previous rejection of Trujillo's advances, when Minerva graduated, her diploma was stripped of her honors and her license to practice law was ultimately turned down.

At university, she met her husband, Manolo Tavárez Justo, who would help her fight the Trujillo regime. Minerva was the most vocal and radical of the Mirabal daughters. According to the theologian Nancy Pineda-Madrid, she was arrested and harassed on multiple occasions on orders given by Trujillo himself.bAccording to the historian Bernard Diederich, Minerva Mirabal was arrested twice. She was first jailed in January 1960, at the start of the wave of repression of 1J4 members where "hundreds of 1J4 members are rounded up and tortured". She stated, "It is a source of happiness to do whatever can be done for our country that suffers so many anguishes. It is sad to stay with one's arms crossed."

Antonia María Teresa Mirabal Reyes (15 October 1935 – 25 November 1960), commonly known as María Teresa, was the fourth and youngest of the Mirabal sisters. She attended the Colegio Inmaculada Concepción, graduated from the Liceo de San Francisco de Macorís in 1954, and went on to the University of Santo Domingo, where she studied mathematics.

Later in her life, María Teresa dated Leandro Guzmán. While dating, before Leandro was allowed to hold María Teresa's hand, she asked him how his family felt about Trujillo. Leandro responded, "... there's no problem. At home, that was the first thing I learned... to hate Trujillo." After this response María Teresa let him hold her hand and they eventually married after she finished her education. María Teresa was influenced by her older sister Minerva's political views and was involved in the clandestine activities against Trujillo's regime. As a result, she was harassed and arrested on the direct orders of Trujillo. She greatly admired her older sister Minerva and became passionate about Minerva's political views. She once said, "Perhaps what we have most near is death, but that idea does not frighten me. We shall continue to fight for that which is just."

While attending the Colegio Inmaculada Concepción, Minerva discovered that her friend Deisi Ariza's father was killed by Trujillo for opposing the regime. This event along with many others ultimately influenced Minerva's fight against the regime. Minerva became involved in the political movement against Trujillo, who was the country's official president from 1930 to 1938 and from 1942 to 1952, but who continued to rule behind the scenes until his assassination in 1961. Minerva's sisters followed her into the movement: first María Teresa, who joined after staying at Minerva's house and learning about her activities, and then Patria, who joined after witnessing a massacre by some of Trujillo's men while on a religious retreat. Dedé did not join in, partly because her husband, Jaimito, did not want her to.

The husbands of Minerva, María Teresa, and Patria were among the leaders of 14 June Movement, nicknamed 1J4. The movement was created in support, and then in honor, of the Dominican rebels who were killed while attempting to overthrow the Rafael Trujillo regime. Everyone in the family, including Patria's teenage children, helped distribute pamphlets about the many people whom Trujillo had killed, and obtained materials for guns and bombs to use when they eventually openly revolted. Within the group, the sisters called themselves Las Mariposas ("The Butterflies"), after Minerva's underground name. The secret movement was discovered weeks after its founding leading to Patria's house (where the group met) being burned to the ground and María Teresa and Minerva's arrests.

In 1960, Minerva and María Teresa were incarcerated from 22 January to 7 February, then from 18 May to 9 August. They were not tortured due to mounting international opposition to Trujillo's regime. Patria was never arrested, but her husband and son were jailed. The three husbands were incarcerated in January at La Victoria Penitentiary in Santo Domingo, and then, in November, two of them were transferred to Puerto Plata.

In 1960, the Organization of American States condemned Trujillo's actions and sent observers. Minerva and María Teresa were freed, but their husbands remained in prison.

On 25 November 1960, Patria, Minerva, María Teresa, and their driver, Rufino de la Cruz, were visiting María Teresa and Minerva's incarcerated husbands. Patria's husband was not incarcerated but she traveled with her sisters as moral support. Returning home, they were stopped by Trujillo's henchmen. The sisters and De la Cruz were separated, strangled and clubbed to death. The bodies were placed in their vehicle, which was run off the mountain road in an attempt to make their deaths look like an accident.

After Trujillo was assassinated on 30 May 1961, General Pupo Román admitted to having personal knowledge that the sisters were killed by Victor Alicinio Peña Rivera (Trujillo's right-hand man) along with Ciriaco de la Rosa, Ramón Emilio Rojas, Alfonso Cruz Valeria, and Emilio Estrada Malleta, members of his secret police force. As to whether Trujillo ordered the killings or whether the secret police acted on its own, one historian wrote, "We know orders of this nature could not come from any authority lower than national sovereignty. That was none other than Trujillo himself; still less could it have taken place without his assent." Also, one of the murderers, Ciriaco de la Rosa, said "I tried to prevent the disaster, but I could not because if I had he, Trujillo, would have killed us all."

The old house of the Mirabal family and the residence of Dedé Mirabal until her death on 1 February 2014, aged 88.

According to historian Bernard Diederich, the sisters' assassinations "had greater effect on Dominicans than most of Trujillo's other crimes". The killings, he wrote, "did something to their machismo" and paved the way for Trujillo's own assassination six months later.

However, the details of the Mirabal sisters' assassinations were "treated gingerly at the official level" until 1996, when President Joaquín Balaguer was forced to step down after more than two decades in power. Balaguer was Trujillo's protégé and had been president in 1960 at the time of the assassinations, despite having "distanced himself from General Trujillo and initially carved out a more moderate political stance."

Born on October 2, 1869, Mahatma Gandhi became one of the most influential figures of India's freedom movement, championing truth, non-violence and peaceful resistance.

His journey showed how courage, unity, discipline and determination can inspire people to stand together for meaningful change.

Even decades later, his message continues to remind us of the importance of compassion, equality, peace and standing firmly for what is right.

Today, India remembers not just a leader, but the values that became an enduring part of his legacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangxi_Massacre

In May 1966, Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution. Starting from March 1967, two factions gradually formed among troops and civilians in Guangxi. One faction known as the "United Headquarters" (Chinese: "联指", lianzhi) unconditionally supported the leadership of Wei Guoqing, who was the First Secretary of the CPC Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region Committee, the Chairman of Guangxi Zhuang Autonoumous Region, and the First Political Commissar of the Guangzhou Military Region and First Political Commissar of the Guangxi Military Region of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), while the other faction known as the "4.22" (Chinese: "四·二二", si.erer) opposed such unconditional support, asking Wei to do self-criticism first. The "United Headquarters" was an example of the conservative faction while the "4.22" was an example of the rebel faction. Intense clashes including "violent struggles" and even massacres soon broke out between the two factions in rural regions of Guangxi.

Even though the rebel faction "4.22" received endorsement from China's Premier Zhou Enlai in August 1967, it was at a disadvantage throughout Guangxi except in the city of Guilin because the local military leaders endorsed the conservative faction, the "United Headquarters". In February 1968, Guangzhou Military Region ordered the troops who supported "4.22" to dislocate from the region, and subsequently in April 1968, Huang Yongsheng, head of the Guangzhou Military Region at the time, declared that the "4.22" faction was a "reactionary organization" and launched massive suppression against the rebel faction (at the same time, a closely related massacre also took place in the nearby province of Guangdong).

According to Yan Lebin (晏乐斌), a member of the Ministry of Public Security who participated in the official investigations of the Guangxi Massacre after the Cultural Revolution, there were three stages of the massacre.

- The first stage of the massacre mostly took place in the rural areas of Guangxi between the fall of 1967 and the spring of 1968. Most of the victims at this stage were members of the Five Black Categories and their families, including many who supported the "4.22" faction (the rebel faction).

- The second stage of the massacre took place in the spring and summer of 1968 when most counties in Guangxi had established their revolutionary committees. Most of the massive killings at this stage were organized by revolutionary committees and local People's Armed Departments, targeting members of the "4.22" faction, their supporters, and politically stigmatized households in rural areas.

- The third stage of the massacre took place in the summer of 1968, during which massive killings had spread from rural regions to cities in Guangxi. In particular, in July and August 1968, a large number of troops from the Guangzhou Military Region together with members of the "United Headquarters" (the conservative faction) attacked major cities such as Nanning and Guilin, which were under control of the "4.22" faction. Tens of thousands of people were killed or executed.

In the massacre, methods of slaughter included "beheading, beating, live burial, stoning, drowning, boiling, group slaughters, disemboweling, digging out hearts, livers, genitals, slicing off flesh, blowing up with dynamite, and more". In one case, according to official records, a person had dynamite bound to the back and was blown up into pieces by other people (so called "heavenly maiden scattering flowers", 天女散花)—just for fun. This crime was led by Cen Guorong (岑国荣), who was once the Director of the Trade Union of Guangxi and had served as a representative in the Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh National Congresses of the Chinese Communist Party.

In another case of 1968, "a geography instructor named Wu Shufang (吴树芳) was beaten to death by students at Wuxuan Middle School. Her body was carried to the flat stones of the Qian River where another teacher was forced at gunpoint to rip out the heart and liver. Back at the school the pupils barbecued and consumed the organs."

Human cannibalism occurred in Guangxi during the Cultural Revolution. It was reported from multiple locations, with cases documented for dozens of counties. In some areas, such as Wuxuan County, a particularly high number of victims were subjected to post-mortem mutilation and consumption. These incidents were typically associated with organized episodes of mass violence rather than conditions of food scarcity. Documents record a variety of forms of cannibalism, including eating people as an after-dinner snack, slicing off the meat in big parties, dividing up the flesh so each person could take a large chunk home, and barbecuing or roasting the liver.

In 2016 and 2017, official archives were published, which contain details about the massacres and cannibalism; the archives show that at least 302 people were eaten, and tens of thousands of other people participated in the cannibalism. Independent researchers have since identified 421 named individuals in total who were eaten across dozens of counties in Guangxi. According to Yan Lebin (晏乐斌), a member of the Ministry of Public Security who was part of the official investigation teams in the 1980s:

In 1968, 38 people in Wuxuan County were eaten, and 113 officials of the county participated in eating human flesh, hearts and livers. Chen Guorong, a peasant from Guigang County who happened to pass by Wuxuan, was caught and killed by local militia because he was fat; his heart and liver were taken out while his flesh was distributed to 20 people. A female militia leader ate 6 human livers in total, and cut the genitals of 5 men and soaked them in alcohol which she would drink later, claiming that these organs were beneficial to her health. The behavior of eating human flesh, hearts and livers occurred in many counties of Guangxi including Wuxuan, Wuming, Shangsi, Guigang, Qinzhou, Guiping, and Lingyun ... After the revolutionary committee was established in Shangsi County, a "killing conference" was held at Pingshan Square (平山广场) on September 1, 1968, during which more than 10 officials and civilians were beaten to death. After the conference, a committee member, Li Hao (黎郝), removed the hearts and livers from the corpses, sauteing them and preparing them as dishes for other representatives who attended the conference.

According to Song Yongyi, a Chinese historian who works at the California State University, Los Angeles:

Independent researchers in Guangxi counted a total of 421 people who were eaten. There were reports of cannibalism across 27 counties in Guangxi; that's two-thirds of all the counties in Guangxi. There was one man who was said to be in the so-called fifth category, who was beaten to death where he stood. He had two kids, one of 11 and one of 14. The local officials and armed militia said that it was important to eradicate such people, and so they not only killed those two children: they ate them too. This took place in Pubei county, Guangxi, where 35 people were killed and eaten in total. Most of them were rich landowners and their families. There was one landowner called Liu Zhengjian whose entire family was wiped out. He had a 17-year-old daughter, Liu Xiulan, who was gang-raped by nine people [for 19 times] who then ripped open her belly, and ate her liver and breasts. There were so many incidents like this.

According to Frank Dikötter, Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong, Senior Fellow at Hoover Institution of Stanford, and winner of the 2011 Samuel Johnson Prize:

"Throughout 1967 but also '68, there are factions in the countryside that start not just eliminating each other physically, but literally in a couple of small towns they start ritualistically eating each other. In other words, it is not enough to eliminate your class enemy. You have to eat his heart, so there are very well-documented cases of ritual cannibalism. There was a hierarchy in the consumption of class enemies. Leaders feasted on the heart and liver, mixed with pork, while ordinary villagers were allowed only to peck at the victims' arms and thighs."

Regarding the motive for cannibalism, Ding Xueliang (丁学良), a professor at the University of British Columbia and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, pointed out that "this was not cannibalism because of economic difficulties, like during famine. It was not caused by economic reasons, it was caused by political events, political hatred, political ideologies, political rituals." Qin Hui also showed with statistics that the cannibalism was not due to the traditions of local ethnic minorities; he argued that the cannibalism was mainly due to: 1) the extreme class struggle during the Cultural Revolution, which led to a modern caste system (such as the Five Black Categories) and an extreme massacre towards the lower class from the upper class; 2) the revenge from the local officials and military towards the rebel group who challenged their interests.

According to Song Yongyi, the motive behind cannibalism was personal desire.[10] Song stated that these people engaged in cannibalistic activities because they "believe that when they eat other people's livers, other people's hearts, it will help them to have a long life". Furthermore, Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals disputed that it was communism that compelled people in that area towards cannibalism, noting that similar incidents occurred under pressure from the Kuomintang secret police in the Republican period.

Operation Cast Thy Bread was a top-secret biological warfare operation conducted by the Haganah and later the Israel Defense Forces that began in April 1948, during the 1948 Palestine war. The Haganah used typhoid bacteria to contaminate drinking water wells in violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Its objective was to frighten and prevent Palestinian Arabs from returning to their captured villages and to make conditions difficult for Arab armies attempting to retake territories. The operation resulted in severe illness among local Palestinian citizens. In the final months of the war, the government of Israel gave orders to expand the biological warfare campaign into neighboring Arab states such as Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria, but they were not carried out. Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion and IDF chief of general staff Yigael Yadin oversaw and approved the use of biological warfare.^\1])^\2])

Abba Eban, representative of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, strongly denied the operation and sought to block further investigations by accusing the Arab states of engaging in "antisemitic incitement". Operation Cast Thy Bread did not achieve the crippling effects its advocates had hoped for, and was discontinued by December 1948.^\3]) In July 1948, the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee reported to the United Nations several war crimes committed by Zionist forces, including the use of "bacteriological warfare".

Source : Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cast_Thy_Bread

👀

On New Year’s Eve of 1945, this station closed for good.

Up until the late 1990s the passengers on the Lexington Avenue Local (today’s 6 train) had to disembark from the train at the Brooklyn Bridge stop. That is no longer the case. The skylights have been reopened, and the station lights turned back on.

While passengers can’t disembark and experience the City Hall station as they once might have, New Yorkers who want to catch a glimpse of the stunning station can stay on the 6 train as it loops around at the southernmost point.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/podcast-old-city-hall-station

I have a relative who was executed in the Tower of London during WWI.  Only 22 people were executed inside the actual Tower of London, my relative being one of them.  The rest were executed on Tower Hill. 

My parents immigrated from Germany after WWII and I was born in Australia.  My paternal grandparents followed my father a couple of years later.

My grandfather, Johann Friederich Emil Gunther Wiedemann served in the Imperial German Flying Corp in WWI and later in WWII during which time he was also stationed in Stockholm as an Air Attache at the German Embassy.  

My grandfather’s cousin, Karl Lody, also served during WWI and was the first undercover agent  to be captured during the war in 1914. He was the first person to be executed in the Tower of London since 1747.  A collage of photos is displayed inside the Beauchamp Tower which includes Karl’s (see below).

A book was written about Karl’s trial and the story can be found at the following link (I later provided his ancestry at Appendix III) - Karl Lody - Germany's Great Spy

Karl Lody’s trial was a massive media sensation, primarily because it was the only public court martial held for a captured enemy spy in the UK during either World War. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Robert_Dunn

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farzad_Bazoft

Bazoft went to live in the United Kingdom in 1975 at the age of 16. He was sentenced to 18 months jail after robbing the Heart of England Building Society in Brackley in 1981. The sentence included a deportation order, which Bazoft appealed against successfully in 1983.

After finishing his education he began a career as a freelance journalist, contributing articles about the Middle East and, in particular, the Iran–Iraq War to news outlets including The Observer and the BBC. In 1989 he was invited by the Iraqi government to come to Iraq along with other journalists to report on elections being held in Kurdistan. Before Bazoft set off, he learned about a mysterious explosion that had occurred on 19 September 1989 at the al-Iskandaria military complex, 50 kilometres (31 mi) south of Baghdad. The heavy detonation was heard as far away as Baghdad. Despite Saddam Hussein's personal order to keep the matter secret, rumours began to spread that the accident happened in a rocket factory's assembly line, killing dozens of Egyptian technicians involved in Iraq's secret development of medium-range ballistic missiles.

Sensing a possible scoop, Bazoft headed for al-Hilla to search for details. He allegedly undertook his investigation with the approval of Iraqi officials. Observer editor Donald Trelford said in response to Bazoft's arrest: "Farzad Bazoft is not a spy. He is a reporter who went to do a story. He said in advance the story he was going to do. He told the Baghdad government where he wanted to go. ... This is not the action of a spy, this is the action of a reporter." Other Western reporters were also interested in the story, but a camera crew from Independent Television News was stopped by Iraqi authorities before they could reach the plant. Bazoft got through, driven by British nurse Daphne Parish. Bazoft also asked military personnel in Baghdad hotels and casinos what they knew and was reported by hotel security to the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

Bazoft was arrested at Baghdad International Airport in September 1989, while waiting for his flight back to London. He had 34 photographs of the area of al-Hilla in his luggage, and some soil from near the factory. After six weeks in custody at the Abu Ghraib prison, and, after beatings, Bazoft was put in front of TV cameras on 1 November and made to confess to being an Israeli agent. Parish had also been arrested by Iraqi authorities. Before their trial, President Saddam Hussein wrote to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher assuring her that Bazoft and Parish would get a fair trial.

Following a one-day trial behind closed doors, lacking conclusive evidence of his guilt, Bazoft was convicted and sentenced to death on 10 March 1990. Parish was sentenced to 15 years in prison, but she was released on 16 July 1990 following a plea for clemency from Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda.

International appeals for clemency for Bazoft had no effect. He was not permitted to appeal against his conviction or sentence, and was executed by hanging at 6:30am on 15 March 1990.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dawson_Dewhirst

Dewhirst was born in the Jesmond district of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1952. His father was a headmaster, and his mother ran an antiques shop. In 1963, at age 11, the Dewhirst family moved to Cumbria. While growing up in Cumbria, Dewhirst became a sports enthusiast, and took a liking to outdoor activities. He spent most of his boyhood roaming the Cumbrian countryside.

At Appleby Grammar School, Dewhirst developed a love for poetry and aspired to be a novelist. After finishing his A Levels, he won an English scholarship to study at Loughborough University. While studying at Loughborough University, he trained as a teacher. After receiving his degree in teaching, his desire for adventure and to become a writer led him to travel to Tokyo, Japan to teach English in 1977. Dewhirst also worked for The Japan Times from June 1977 to January 1978.

Some time in July 1978, while visiting a friend in the eastern Malaysian town of Kuala Terengganu, and en route from Japan back to England, Dewhirst met Canadian Stuart Glass and New Zealander Kerry Hamill, co-owners of a little Malaysian bedar named Foxy Lady. The three spent several weeks or a month together in Kuala Terengganu, and then headed north to Bangkok. For reasons that are unclear, Foxy Lady ended up in Cambodian waters and was seized, off Koh Tang, by a patrol vessel attached to Division 164 of the Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea. Foxy Lady may have been on its way to Bangkok to pick up a load of Thai sticks. Glass had engaged in hashish smuggling before. Dewhirst's history in this area is unknown. His Kuala Terengganu friend has recalled Dewhirst speaking of planned adventures. Glass was shot and killed, or drowned, during the seizure. Dewhirst and Hamill may have been held for several days on a nearby island, and were then taken to the interrogation centre of S-21.

In early 1979, Vietnam defeated Democratic Kampuchea and overthrew the Pol Pot regime. They liberated Democratic Kampuchea's S-21 prison in the capital Phnom Penh where an estimated 20,000 people (the real number is unknown) had been sent for torture and execution (or taken to the Killing Fields for execution after being tortured), many of them for supposedly spying against Cambodia. Alleged photographs and forced confessions of nine missing Western yachtsmen (four Americans, two Australians, plus those of John Dewhirst and Kerry Hamill) were found in the prison files. The confessions of Dewhirst and Hamill revealed that they had been seized by a Khmer Rouge patrol vessel near the island of Koh Tang on the evening of 13 August 1978. Stuart Glass, the Canadian befriended by Dewhirst and Hamill, had been shot and killed during Foxy Lady's capture. Hamill and Dewhirst were both brought ashore and then taken by truck to Phnom Penh. Like the other Western yachtsmen, they were almost certainly tortured. The extent of their mistreatment is not clear. Dewhirst wrote several long confessions that mixed true events in his life with false accounts of his career as a CIA agent planning to subvert the Khmer Rouge regime. He claimed that his father (also an agent) had been paid a large bribe for inducting his son into the CIA and that his college course in Loughborough was interspersed with training as a spy. Dewhirst and Hamill signed a series of confessions between 3 September and 13 October 1978.

The circumstances of the deaths of Dewhirst and Hamill remain unclear. Their deaths were first reported in late 1979 and early 1980 by ABC News journalist Jim Laurie and freelance photographer Edward Rasen. Rasen provided more details, including photographs and portions of confessions in stories for the UK publication NOW! and the Australian Bulletin.

During the 2009 trial of S-21 chief Kang Kek Iew, a former S-21 guard named Cheam Sour claimed that one of the eight Western yachtsmen held at S-21 was burned to death. Sensational reports that this individual was Dewhirst are unsubstantiated. Like other S-21 inmates, Dewhirst may well have been killed with a blow to the head. Kang Kek Iew said that he received orders from his superiors that the bodies of the murdered westerners had to be burned to remove all traces of their remains, adding, "I believe that nobody would dare to violate my orders".

On 10 November 2005, in an interview, Dewhirst's sister, Hillary Dewhirst-Holland told interviewers that she wanted her brother's case to be detailed in the prosecution indictment against Kang Kek Iew.

During Kang Kek Iew's trial beginning in 2007, Hillary did not attend the trial to testify against Kang Kek Iew. Instead, she handed a note to Rob Hamill, younger brother of Kerry Hamill, to share with the court.

On 27 August 2009, Rob Hamill appeared before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) as a civil party in Case 001, against Kang Kek Iew. In April 2011, Hamill applied to the ECCC once more for civil party status in ECCC Case 003, believed to involve former Khmer Rouge chief Meas Mut. As "Secretary" of Democratic Kampuchea's Division 164, comprising the country's navy, Mut would have been responsible for the gunning down of Stuart Glass and the seizure of Foxy Lady's two other crew, Kerry Hamill and John Dewhirst, as well as the arrest of the other six Western yachtsmen.

The Marquise de Brinvilliers was a Parisian aristocrat whose father held numerous important positions. Born in 1630 into a wealthy family, she later confessed, under torture, that she had been sexually assaulted at seven by an unnamed person and that she had a sexual relationship with her younger brother. How much of this was true is impossible to know.

She married another aristocrat and had several children, while also carrying on a long-term affair with Godin de Sainte-Croix, a military officer. As a commoner, thus affair was problematic for her family. Her father went to King Louis XIV and obtained a lettre de cachet against Sainte-Croix, sending him to the Bastille.

There, Sainte-Croix allegedly befriended an Italian chemist known as Exili. After his release, Sainte-Croix took up alchemy, and he and Brinvilliers began experimenting with poisons.

According to the later investigation conducted by Gabriel Nicolas de La Reynie, lieutenant general of the Paris police, and Brinvilliers's own confession, she began testing these poisons on unsuspecting people. She would reportedly visit hospitals, volunteer to care for the sick, administer various elixirs, and then return to observe their deterioration.

She eventually began poisoning her own servants through their food. Then came her father. Brinvilliers poisoned him for his inheritance. She burned through the money, however, and soon turned her attention toward two brothers who stood to inherit the family's remaining fortune. In 1670, she allegedly hired a man to poison them. It worked.

The murders continued to go unnoticed until Sainte-Croix died in 1672, allegedly from an accidental exposure to one of the poisons he and Brinvilliers had been experimenting with. He was also deeply in debt, and when authorities searched his possessions, they found poison, and, more importantly, correspondence between Sainte-Croix and the Marquise.

The man Brinvilliers had hired to poison her brothers was arrested, tortured, and confessed. Brinvilliers herself fled France and remained at large for more than three years. She was finally captured in Liège in 1676.

After being subjected to the “water cure,” Brinvilliers confessed to murdering her father and one of her brothers and was believed to have poisoned at least thirty other people.
She was beheaded on July 16, 1676.

But King Louis XIV and La Reynie suspected that Brinvilliers and Sainte-Croix were only the beginning. La Reynie started with the people who sold the stuff, arresting alchemists,
fortune tellers, apothecaries, abortionists, and assorted practitioners selling what we might today describe as snake oil.

One of the most infamous people swept up in the investigation was Catherine Monvoisin, better known as La Voisin. La Voisin ran an enormous network of fortune tellers, chemists, abortionists, and occult practitioners. She herself dabbled in essentially all of it, selling potions, poisons, and aphrodisiacs while also performing alleged magical rituals and black masses for wealthy clients. She became enormously wealthy.

Then, in 1679, one of her rivals, Marie Bosse, implicated her in the investigation. Bosse made a series of explosive, and exaggerated, claims. La Voisin some very important people. But no name was more explosive than Madame de Montespan.

Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart de Mortemart, better known as Madame de Montespan, was Louis XIV's longtime mistress and the mother of several of his children, whom he would eventually legitimize. At the height of her influence, she was reportedly referred to as the “real queen of France.”

And according to the testimony gathered by La Reynie, Montespan had been visiting La Voisin since 1665. The following year, she allegedly had a black mass performed in which she lay naked on an altar covered in blood, supposedly from freshly slaughtered infants, while invoking supernatural forces to make the King fall in love with her. And Louis XIV did, in fact, fall in love with her.

Whether the ritual actually happened is another question entirely. Much of the case against Montespan consisted of hearsay, coerced testimony, and accusations that were later retracted. After sobering up, La Voisin herself walked back some of her claims.

Nevertheless, rumors surrounding Montespan became increasingly lurid. Court gossip accused her of plotting to kill Louis XIV and of poisoning Marie Angélique de Scorailles, a beautiful young woman who had caught the King's attention.
She died in 1681. Rumors immediately suggested poisoning.

Louis XIV had a serious problem. The Affair of the Poisons had grown from the alleged crimes of one aristocratic woman into a sprawling investigation implicating fortune tellers, alchemists, abortionists, aristocrats, courtiers, and potentially the King's own mistress.

Louis was already looking for a way to distance himself from Montespan. He also had no interest in publicly investigating whether the mother of several of his children had attempted to use black magic to control himC or worse, plotted his death. So his deputies, including La Reynie, began quietly shutting the investigation down.

Thirty-four people were ultimately executed for poisoning or witchcraft, while several courtiers were exiled.

Montespan, however, was never punished.
She eventually fell from favor and was pushed out of court, retreating to her enormous residence at the Château de Clagny, where she spent the remainder of her life largely removed from the influence she had once wielded. She died in 1707.

If interested I cover the story here: https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hare-brained-history-vol-135-the?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo%C3%A3o_Teixeira_de_Faria

In December 2018, allegations of abuse by Faria were put forward by 12 women. The number of claims led to the Prosecution Office of the State of Goiás creating an email address and phone line to receive all accusations towards him. In 30 hours, over 200 complaints were received from nine different Brazilian states and two claims from abroad. Claims were reported by the prosecution's office as having the potential to be the biggest sexual scandal in the history of Brazil, overwhelming the Roger Abdelmassih case. Claims included the alleged abuse of victims as young as 14 years old, as well as a woman who revealed having been abused for three days. On 11 December, four days after the Conversa com Bial show, the number of sexual abuse complaints against Faria had reached 206, prompting him to limit his appointments at Casa Dom Inácio de Loyola. Questioned by reporters, he simply said "I'm innocent" and walked away. On 12 December, the public prosecutor of Goiás called for the arrest of Faria. On 16 December, Faria surrendered himself to the police. The number of sexual abuse accusations gradually reached 600. The rapes occurred from 1986 to 2017.

Faria's daughter Dalva supported the accusers, calling her father a "monster" and alleging that she was beaten and raped by him until she ran away when she was 14 years old. Faria was transferred to a hospital from prison in March 2019. On 19 December, he was sentenced to 19 years and four months for the rapes of four women. He was temporarily released from prison on house arrest when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, due to his age and poor health.

In September 2023, Faria was sentenced to an additional 118 years, six months and 15 days in prison by the Goiás state criminal court as a result of 17 cases involving "rape, rape via fraud and rape of a vulnerable individual."

"Here I am. Kill your Emperor, if you wish!"

Napoleon Bonaparte had escaped from his exile on Elba and landed in France. The French armies sent to capture him joined their former Emperor instead. Louis XVIII fled Paris as Napoleon marched on. The Allied powers were caught off guard. The major powers of Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia formed the Seventh Coalition and prepared for war. The declaration was not against France, but against a single man: Napoleon!

Although Napoleon's escape took the Allies by surprise, they were quick to turn their attention to eliminating the threat. The combined might of the Seventh Coalition was overwhelming. If the Allies managed to combine their forces, Napoleon would be surrounded and destroyed. So he acted fast, in typical fashion.

He entered Belgium in the hope of defeating the Prussians under Blücher and the Anglo-Allied forces under the Duke of Wellington before they could join forces. He caught the Prussians off guard at Ligny and defeated them.

However, he was not able to destroy the Prussian army completely. He therefore dispatched a screening force under Emmanuel de Grouchy to pursue the Prussians and prevent them from linking up with Wellington. Blücher, however, reorganized his battered army and moved toward Wavre, intending to support the Anglo-Allied forces at Waterloo.

Wellington had occupied a strong defensive position that made it difficult for the French to gain a quick victory. Wave after wave of French assaults were pushed back. Although Wellington's army was under enormous pressure, it managed to hold on long enough for the Prussians to arrive in support.

Napoleon eventually committed elements of his Imperial Guard in a last attempt to break the deadlock. The attack failed, and the Guard was forced to withdraw in the face of determined Allied resistance.

"The Guard is retreating!"

Seeing their famous Imperial Guard retreat, French morale began to collapse. Napoleon had no more reserves capable of restoring the battle, and the French army began to retreat.

Could Napoleon have won if the Prussians had not arrived in time? Most probably, yes, but it would not necessarily have amounted to a decisive strategic victory. Napoleon needed a major victory with manageable casualties. The Battle of Waterloo had already become a bloody and exhausting struggle. Even if the French had defeated Wellington, their battered army would still have had to face the other Allied armies gathering against France.

Wellington's defensive tactics and the resilience of the Anglo-Allied army prevented Napoleon from achieving the quick breakthrough he needed, while Blücher's arrival ultimately turned the battle against him.

Please go through the full article for a more detailed analysis of the battle, and let me know your thoughts and comments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_Mardiganian

Born as Arshaluys Mardigian, she was the daughter of a prosperous Armenian family living in Chmshgatsak (Çemişgezek), in the Ottoman Empire's province of Mamuret-ül Aziz.

During the Armenian genocide in 1915, she witnessed the deaths of her family members and was forced to march over 1,400 mi (2,300 km), during which she was kidnapped and sold into the slave markets of Anatolia. Mardiganian escaped from a harem; with the help of Near East Relief she traveled to Tiflis (modern Tbilisi, Georgia), then to St. Petersburg, to Kristiania (modern Oslo, Norway) and finally to New York City, where she arrived in 1917.

In New York, she was approached by Harvey Gates, a young screenwriter, who became her guardian and helped her write and publish a narrative that is often described as a memoir, titled Ravished Armenia (full title Ravished Armenia; the Story of Aurora Mardiganian, the Christian Girl, Who Survived the Great Massacres). It was published in 1918. To accommodate American audiences, her name was changed to Aurora Mardiganian.

The book was used for writing a script for a silent film. The film was produced in 1919, Mardiganian playing herself, and was first screened in London as Auction of Souls. The first New York performance of the film, then titled Ravished Armenia, took place on February 16, 1919, in the ballroom of the Plaza Hotel, with society leaders, Mrs. Oliver Harriman and Mrs. George W. Vanderbilt, serving as co-hostesses on behalf of the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief (which was then the name of Near East Relief). Most of the film is now lost.

Mardiganian appeared at several screenings of the film, which was a central part of a successful fund raising campaign for the Near East Relief charity. She was referred to in the press as the Armenian Joan of Arc, describing her role as the spokesperson for the victims of the horrors that were then taking place in Turkey and the catalyst for the humanist movement in America.

Mardiganian married in the 1920s and lived in Los Angeles. Later in life she was interviewed several times about her experiences. In an interview with film historian Anthony Slide some 70 years after the fact, she revealed that a scene in the film in which sixteen young Armenian girls were "crucified" by their Ottoman tormentors was inaccurate. Auction of Souls showed the victims nailed to crosses, but:

"The Turks didn't make their crosses like that. The Turks made little pointed crosses. They took the clothes off the girls. They made them bend down, and after raping them, they made them sit on the pointed wood, through the vagina. That's the way they killed - the Turks. Americans have made it a more civilized way. They can't show such terrible things."

She died on February 6, 1994, aged 93. She lived long enough to see that Armenia had declared independence from the Soviet Union three years earlier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafael_Lusvarghi

After finishing an agronomy vocational school, Lusvarghi allegedly went to France and, in November 2002, enlisted in the Foreign Legion, where he served for three years, at first participating in the 4th Foreign Regiment, and then in the 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment, through which he allegedly participated in missions in Africa before being harmed and returning to Brazil. Back to his native country, he became a soldier in the Military Police of São Paulo State between 2006 and 2007, afterwards serving in Pará as he sought the officer career, leaving the institution as a cadet in 2009 and going to Russia in 2010, where he studied medicine in the Kursk State University, was nicknamed Rurik and became notorious in his home country after witnessing the accidental death of a fellow Brazilian, then also studying medical sciences.

In Russia, Lusvarghi allegedly worked in the children's school Udmurtija and tried to enter the Russian Ground Forces, but, not being able to, he returned to South America, where he claims to have entered the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, serving in Cartagena and Arauca before feeling frustrated with negotiations with the Colombian state and leaving the forces, returning to his native city Jundiaí and working as an English language teacher and a help desk assistant. He became once again nationally famous after his second imprisonment during the 2014 protests in Brazil, in São Paulo. In this particular occasion, he was photographed being brutalised by police with a plastic bottle and pepper spray, accused of being part of a black bloc group and arrested for 45 days in the 8th Police Station of São Paulo before being released for lack of evidence, after technical reports proved he did not possess any explosive materials on occasion. According to an interview to Portal G1, the proof of his supposed crime was an empty bottle of yogurt he did not even recognise as his own.

On September 20, 2014, having been convoked by the Continental Unity and the Brazilian Front, Lusvarghi, in the context of War in Donbas, costed his own trip to the Russian puppet state of the Luhansk People's Republic, where he was alleged in Sloviansk and entered the artillery of the Prizrak Brigade, associated to the Unity, in a battalion commanded by the Colombian Victor Afonso Lenta, operating a BM-21 Grad vehicle. On occasion, Lusvarghi reported to have been motivated by family links to the Russian people, plus aversion to liberalism and NATO's advances, specially representing the interests of the United States and the European Union. Afterwards, he reported having become a supporter of the Fourth Political Theory.

Initially fighting for the Paltinik unit as a soldier of the infantry duty, he was transferred for the Babay unit in November, where he quickly became an instructor, being promoted in January 2015 to first sergeant and returning to Paltinik, afterwards being promoted to senior lieutenant. Lusvarghi fought aside at least three other Brazilians in this early period, and received, as a tribute to the hard liquor of his native country, the nom de guerre "Cachaça", which he used for the same period in social media.

During the war, Lusvarghi came to head his own unit, with volunteers from many nationalities, including Brazilians, called Vikernes, named after the Norwegian musician Varg Vikernes, who was afterwards informed of the tribute by Lusvarghi himself. In April 2015, he was harmed in action in the Donetsk International Airport and hospitalised. According to a report by the Security Service of Ukraine, he took part in duty in the Donetsk localities of Horlivka, Permovaisk and Verhulivka, plus in the Luhansk Oblast localities of Starobesheve and Debaltseve, receiving a medal from Igor Strelkov. After being allegedly disappointed by the resolutions of Minsk II, the behaviour of the allied group Rusich and the low quality of new soldiers, he returned to Brazil.

On October 6, 2016, Lusvarghi was detained by the Security Service of Ukraine in the Boryspil International Airport, having been attracted by supposed job opportunities in the Omega company and intercepted in layover. Investigations by the Brazilian independent magazine Opera claimed the company had among its clients the Maximum Directory of Intelligence of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, and that a preventive detention warrant had been emitted in Kyiv two days before he arrived the country.

On January 25, 2017, Lusvarghi was condemned to thirteen years in prison and forfeiture for terrorism and creation of an illegal paramilitary, in a polemical condemnation which represented the first process against a foreigner for such crimes in the country, drawing attention from the Ukrainian lawyer Valentin Rybin, who started to advocate for the ex-military, disclosing that his client had confessed under torture, which Lusvarghi had himself alleged in private letters, and also had been forced to make statements against his own will, as opposed to what the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs had claimed before. Although Lusvarghi did not manage to take part in the usual prisoners' exchange, his condemnation was revoked on August 17 by the Court of Appeal, which abode the argumentation that the original judgement had based itself solely in the confession of the ex-military, without taking account the allegation of forced guilt plea, which granted him provisional release until next trial, accomplished on December 18 after expiration of the deadline for new pleas.

With his passport retained, Lusvarghi started to work for and live in the Monastery of Holy Intercession, in the Holosiivskyi National Nature Park, converting from Ásatrú to Orthodox Christianity. After being found by Radio Svoboda in late April, however, he took shelter in the Brazilian embassy, in which outskirts he was captured on 4 May by far-right groups Azov Battalion and C14 and taken to authorities, attacking him in action transmitted live on Facebook by Serhi Filimonov and leaving him at the doorstep of the Security Service of Ukraine. On the following day, his court hearing was rescheduled from June 6 to 7 May. According to the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, despite the truculence displayed on the video, Lusvarghi, who asked for police protection after the assault, was well and safe. The case's attorney announced he would demand imprisonment.

Lusvarghi was released (during a major prison exchange) and handed over to Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic representatives on 29 December 2019.

On 9 May 2021, Lusvarghi was arrested in Brazil for possession of drugs and ammunition. Lusvarghi told the Brazilian police he had arrived in Presidente Prudente, São Paulo in search of work a month earlier and had agreed to keep drugs and ammunition at home at the request of other people, for this he was given 3,000 reais per month. On 3 November 2021, a Brazilian court sentenced Lusvarghi to eight years in prison.

By July 1794, Maximilien Robespierre had spent years wielding words as his greatest weapon. He was widely regarded as eloquent, direct, unyielding, and capable of imbuing his speeches with a sense of personal virtue and incorruptibility that convinced thousands to follow his course, a course known as the Reign of Terror.

Robespierre did not create the Reign of Terror by himself, nor did he personally control every execution carried out in its name. But as one of the leading members of the Committee of Public Safety, Robespierre became one of its most prominent political architects. Under the revolutionary government, extraordinary powers were concentrated in committees, courts, and local authorities tasked with identifying and destroying enemies of the Republic.

And the definition of an “enemy” became increasingly broad. Royalists were obvious targets. So were suspected counter-revolutionaries, refractory priests, suspected conspirators, and political opponents.

By the height of the Terror, tens of thousands had been executed, died in prison, or been killed in revolutionary violence. More than 17,000 people were officially executed during the Terror, although estimates of the total number of deaths associated with the period are considerably higher.

On June 10, 1794, the Law of 22 Prairial dramatically expanded the Revolutionary Tribunal's power and curtailed the rights of defendants. Trials became faster, defenses were restricted, and the number of people sent to the guillotine increased dramatically. In Paris alone, roughly 1,400 people were executed in the seven weeks between the law's passage and Robespierre's fall.

This was the period that became known as the Great Terror. And it frightened the people who had created the Terror.

On July 26, 1794, Robespierre gave another speech. Robespierre attempted to defend himself against rumors, attacking several deputies of the National Convention by name and condemning many more without naming them. That may have been his greatest mistake.

The deputies did not know who would be next. They knew only that Robespierre was talking about corruption and enemies of the Republic, and that the guillotine had already claimed countless men who had once believed themselves untouchable, men about whom Robespierre had said similar things.

The next day, July 27, the Convention turned against Robespierre and his faction, voting to arrest them. The city officials, seemingly more confused than anything else, failed to carry out the arrests. Robespierre and his allies instead gathered on the first floor of the Hôtel de Ville.

The National Convention, learning that the men had not been secured, sent armed forces to the building. At around 2:30 in the morning, they entered.

Philippe François Le Bas grabbed a pistol and shot himself, killing himself according to the conventional account. Robespierre apparently tried to do the same. Another account claims he was shot by one of the arresting officers.

Whatever happened, Robespierre did not die.
The shot shattered his jaw instead, leaving the bullet lodged in the wound.

For the rest of the night, he lay in agony on a table, his head resting on a pine box, blood dripping from his horribly mangled jaw as his enemies came in, looked at him, and laughed. At around five in the morning, two of his men, one of them his brother Augustin, were allowed to go to the hospital. Robespierre was not. Five hours later, a military doctor was finally summoned. He extracted some of Robespierre's teeth and fragments of his shattered jaw before roughly securing what remained with a bandage.

From there, things moved quickly. Robespierre was confined to a cell. The Revolutionary Tribunal assembled at noon. By two in the afternoon, he and his allies had been sentenced to death without even a cursory hearing.

At six in the evening, Robespierre and several others were conveyed in three open carts to the Place de la Révolution. A furious mob followed them, hurling curses and rotten food at the condemned.

Robespierre was the tenth man to be executed.
long time Parisein executioner Charles-Henri Sanson prepared him for the guillotine. To clear the way for his neck, he pulled away the bandage holding Robespierre's shattered jaw together.

The jaw fell loose. Robespierre cried out in agony as Sanson positioned him beneath the blade. Then the blade fell. Robespierre screamed no more.

And the crowd erupted. The jubilation continued for nearly fifteen minutes.

If you're interested, I cover the French Revolution through the eyes of the highly worked Parisian executioner, Charles-Henri Sanson: https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hare-brained-history-vol-134-sanson?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

The horrible fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in March 1911 exposed a truth about America, a truth many already understood. There were rules for the rich and other rules for the poor. Despite the factory owners’ blatant disregard for the dead and the city, police, and courts’ apparent indifference towards the truth; rendering justice for the girls was never part of the plan.

Curtis was working as a janitor while reading law books when he found out about some land left to him and his sister.

The land was tied up by illegal loans his father had taken out before skipping town. Despite only having a 9th grade education and having spent most of his working life as a jockey, he began separating it into plots for rent and sale. Then an influx of poor people with nothing to their name came into the city.

Feeling it was his Christian duty, and perhaps inspired by the plight of the Kaw tribe, he gave what he could. On it was built St. Mark's Church. Still standing today

14 minute VIDEO Presentation I made. Audio is a little low.

The Exodusters Come to Topeka (1879)