A Brief History On May 18, 1944, Soviet leader Josef Stalin ordered the deportation of the Tatar population of the Crimea to far away Uzbekistan. Stalin accused the Tatars of collaborating with the German army that had invaded Ukraine and the USSR, and he was ruthless with his “relocation,” moving women and children but also communist party members and members of the Soviet armed forces. Digging Deeper Like other ethnic groups in Ukraine, the Tatars had come from somewhere else originally, in this case a Turkic people that had settled in the peninsula from the 13th to the 17th centuries,…
Browsing: Crime
Read More
A Brief History On May 17, 1983, the US government was obligated to release information due to a newspaper’s Freedom of Information Act request about the largest Mercury pollution source in history, the Oak Ridge, Tennessee, home of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Y-12 National Security Complex, nuclear facilities first constructed during World War II as part of the Manhattan Project. Digging Deeper The site of the second self-sustaining atomic pile reactor in the world, Plutonium was produced there from Uranium to make atom bombs. From 1950 to 1963, 11 million kilos of Mercury were used for isotope separation,…
A Brief History On May 14, 2008, one more sports related riot took place in Manchester, England, when fans of the Zenit Football Club of St. Petersburg, Russia, went hand and foot with fans of the Rangers Football Club of Glasgow, Scotland. Digging Deeper During the 2008 UEFA Cup final held near Piccadilly Gardens of Manchester, a failure of a big screen TV that had been set up to allow football fans not in the stadium to watch the match triggered the riot. A crowd of 200,000 Rangers fans had made the trip to Manchester to watch their beloved team,…
A Brief History On May 12, 1982, a bayonet wielding assassin was wrestled into custody by the bodyguards of Pope John Paul II at Fatima, Portugal only a year after John Paul II had been shot and seriously wounded in another assassination attempt! The would be assassin was a defrocked Catholic priest, a journalist and lawyer, a veritable living cliché! At least one other attempt was to be made on John Paul’s life, this time foiled when the assassins suffered a fire while building the bomb intended for the murder. Digging Deeper Many world leaders have survived assassination attempts, including…
A Brief History On May 7, 1992, the State of Michigan ratified the 27th Amendment after a two century struggle to pass this “common sense” law, namely that Congress cannot give itself a raise during a current term. Digging Deeper Laws are by nature political, and therefore differences of opinion about what is a “good” law generates fierce debate, but we offer some ideas for laws that we think are good and invite you to nominate your own ideas. Term limits for elected officials, especially in Congress, and also for the Supreme Court and Federal Courts. Mandatory ethical standards for…