Browsing: Crime

A Brief History On February 10, 1355, Oxford, England, the site of the ultra-prestigious University of Oxford, was the scene of a considerable riot that cost the lives of 63 student/scholars and at least 30 townsfolk. This so-called St. Scholastica Day Riot started in a tavern and ended when the scholars were finally routed by the townies. (History and Headlines currently has 7 articles about riots and will certainly be adding more.) Digging Deeper The University of Oxford was founded around 1096, with no specific founding date. It is the oldest university or college in the English-speaking world and is…

A Brief History On February 4, 1999, New York City police officers shot an unarmed African immigrant 19 times (out of 41 shots fired), a horrible mistake we wrote about previously on our site. (Cops Shoot Amadou Bailo Dialo 19 Times!) Police took a big public relations hit over that incident, but how about the incident in Cleveland in January of 2018? Digging Deeper On January 14, 2018, Clevelander Ronald Newberry, age 22, was pulling out of his own driveway when he was subjected to a hail of gunfire. Hit by 16 of the bullets fired at him, he somehow…

A Brief History On February 3, 1953, one of the worst atrocities of the second half of the 20th Century in a tiny nation occurred when the Portuguese colonial administration and the planters on the island of São Tomé in the tiny island nation of São Tomé and Principe massacred 2,000 “creole” peasants (known as forros) when the peasants hesitated to agree to work the sugar cane, coffee, and cacao fields. Digging Deeper Portugal had colonized the small islands off the Equatorial Atlantic coast of Africa in 1493, and as was the fashion of the time, enslaved the native African…

A Brief History On February 2, 1935, Leonarde “Nard” Keeler testified about polygraph evidence in a Wisconsin courtroom at a trial of 2 men for assault, the first use of the polygraph, often simply called “the lie detector,” in court. Then, as now, debate about the efficacy of the polygraph was fiercely defended on both sides. Digging Deeper Keeler was the co-inventor of the polygraph, a machine that measures bodily functions in response to questions being asked the subject of the test, the reaction of those functions supposedly indicating whether the subject is telling the truth or a lie. Bodily…

A Brief History On January 31, 2018, we celebrate National Appreciate Your Social Security Check Day, one of those many days you find all over the internet that seem to have no specific origin. Well, this cowboy does not celebrate this particular “holiday,” because of the JERK (or jerks) that came up with the WEP (Windfall Elimination Provision) that cheats people like me out of half their social security! Today we list 7 Jerks of the Month. Digging Deeper 1. WEP (Congress). How can our country celebrate social security when so many people are getting so thoroughly shampooed by the…