A Brief History On August 30, 1974, the third World Population Conference was held in Bucharest, Romania. The first such conference was held in Geneva, Switzerland in 1927, the idea of birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, under the aegis of the League of Nations. Experts in health, food supply, fertility and other relevant subjects met to examine how many humans the Earth could sustainably host. Subsequent conferences have been arranged by the United Nations starting in 1954. Digging Deeper The conference spawned the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, a subject fraught with religious, moral, and ethnic considerations. …
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A Brief History On August 28, 1973, Stockholm, Sweden police arrested two bank robbers after a five day standoff in which the robbers held four people as hostages. Incredibly, the hostages seemed to take sides with the robbers, a psychological effect later named “Stockholm Syndrome.” Digging Deeper The perpetrator of the crime, Jan-Erik Olsson, was a convicted criminal that had absconded while on furlough from prison. A veteran of prior armed robberies, Olsson was armed with a sub-machinegun during the robbery. When police arrived at the scene, Olsson took hostages, and the standoff began. Police brought Olsson’s friend from prison…
A Brief History On August 24, 1998, science fiction and conspiracy theory met science fact when the first successful human implant of a radio tracker was tested in the UK. Digging Deeper Called “Radio-frequency identification, “or “RFID,” the device consists of a miniaturized radio transponder that when interrogated by a RFID “reader” sends identifying information to that reader, usually a coded number that is interpreted as whatever identity of person is assigned to the implant. Far from the conspiracy theory systems that allow satellites to observe and report on the location and movement of people with implants, for the device…
A Brief History On August 10, 1961, the US began Operation Ranch Hand, a ten year program of using chemical herbicides against the flora of Vietnam and surrounding countries to both deprive the Viet Cong of food crops and of foliage for cover. Digging Deeper Chemical weapons are banned by international treaty, including the 1925 Geneva Protocol and The Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993. Not only are deadly chemicals prohibited, but irritants such as “tear gas” are also banned for use in war. Herbicides escaped mention in previous prohibitions against deadly chemicals used in war, but in 1978 the Environmental…
A Brief History On August 7, 1978, President Jimmy Carter recognized the toxic waste that had been disposed of negligently into a residential area canal as a federal emergency. Digging Deeper The Love Canal neighborhood of Niagara Falls, New York had been planned in 1890, but only reached a portion of its planned size. The eponymous canal in the neighborhood was used for industrial dumping of various chemical by-products by the Hooker Chemical Company as well as municipal waste products. By the 1950s, people took notice of the health problems experienced by people in the neighborhood, finally drawing the attention…