A Brief History On September 6, 2013, ivory poachers in Africa poisoned and killed 41 elephants at the Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe. The WWF reports about 20,000 elephants are killed illegally each year in Africa by poachers, out of a world wide total of only 415,000 African elephants. Incredibly, in 1930 there were about 10 million wild elephants in Africa! Digging Deeper Despite strict anti-poaching laws, poaching takes a terrible toll on many types of animals. There may be about 30,000 Rhinos left in Africa, of which only 6000 are Black Rhinos, which numbered over 100,000 as recently as…
Browsing: Business and Economics
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A Brief History On September 4, 1882, the Pearl Street Station opened for business in New York City, the first commercial provider of electric power to customers. Built and operated by the Edison Illuminating Company, a new era began of providing the public with mass quantities of electric power. Digging Deeper In the century plus since 1882, the US has seen an electrical grid fed by over 11,000 utility type electric plants. Coal originally fired most electric plants, but today natural gas provides over 38% of our electricity. Coal accounts for 22%, while nuclear energy provides almost 19% of our…
A Brief History On September 2, 1963, CBS Evening News made TV history by becoming the first major nightly news show to be 30 minutes long instead of only 15 minutes. Prior to this event, the evening news was 15 minutes of local and 15 minutes of national news. Digging Deeper Other big changes to TV news include NBC switching its national news shows to color in 1966, quickly matched by rivals ABC and CBS. Still, a majority of Americans watched the news in black and white until 1972 when color TVs finally became the majority. Cleveland’s Dorothy Fuldheim became…
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. …
A Brief History On August 21, 1791, a voodoo, or alternately “vodou,” ceremony at Bois Caïman, Haiti was the scene of the first major assembly of African slaves in Haiti, an event that led to the slave rebellion known as the Haitian Revolution. Digging Deeper White European colonial slave owners viewed the voodoo ceremonies as harmless exercise of the slave religion, making such rituals the only opportunity for large numbers of slaves to meet. Dutty Boukman, a voodoo priest and slave looked up to by other slaves, was named by a mysterious woman who appeared during the ceremony as the…