A Brief History On February 14, 2005, former Lebanese Prime Minister and then a multi-billionaire Rafic Hariri was blown up while driving in his motorcade in Beirut by a suicide car bomb. Born in Sidon, Lebanon in 1944, Hariri worked as a teacher and in the construction business in Saudi Arabia where he made his fortune, He returned to his war torn homeland where he was a force for peace, only to be assassinated by Hezbollah terrorists a year after he left office. Digging Deeper As a young adult, Hariri went to Saudi Arabia to seek work in 1965, soon…
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A Brief History On February 12, 1993, a pair of deranged 10 year old English boys kidnapped and murdered 2 year old James Bulger from a shopping center in Bootle, Merseyside, England. Before 1993 was over, the two murderous kidnappers had already been convicted of kidnapping, torturing and murdering the poor toddler, making the deadly duo the youngest persons convicted of murder in modern British history. Digging Deeper Video surveillance from New Strand Shopping Centre later showed police the 2 perpetrators looking over potential targets until they spotted the young boy that would be their prey, little James Bulger. James…
A Brief History On February 5, 1933, the crew of the Royal Netherlands Navy ship HNLMS De Zeven Provinciën mutinied while stationed off the coast of Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies. Fed up with harsh working conditions and an announced cut in pay, the crew consisting of both ethnically Dutch and Indonesian sailors seized control of the cruiser sized ship, not relinquishing control until the ship was bombed by Dutch warplanes 6 days later! Digging Deeper The 1930’s was a time of the Great Depression, and Europe was still recovering from the terrible effects of World War I. Austerity…
A Brief History On January 30, 1835, for the first time in American History an assassination attempt was made on the President of the United States. Richard Lawrence, a 35 year old housepainter that had immigrated to the United States from England pulled the triggers on 2 pistols aimed at the back of President Andrew Jackson, but incredibly both pistols misfired and the assassination attempt failed. In the decades that followed, several other attempted assassinations of American Presidents have taken place, with Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy fatally wounded by their assassins. Digging Deeper Lawrence had come to the…
A Brief History On January 11, 532, the seeds of a riot broke out in the capital of the Byzantine Empire (spawn of the Eastern Roman Empire), Constantinople (modern day Istanbul) over competing support of chariot racing teams. Not your typical few hours of drunken revelry, the Nika Riots went on for a week and resulted in half the city being burned down! While we consider a modern sports related riot that results in a fatality to be a tragedy, the Nika Riots resulted in an estimated 30,000 rioters killed, making it the worst sports related riot in history. Today…