A Brief History On May 30, 1972, a British far left terrorist group went on trial for conducting 25 bombings over the previous two years. The soi-disant “Angry Brigade” saw eight of their members tried for the bombings, but only four of them were convicted. In any case, the trial was the end of the cleverly named group. Digging Deeper Targets of the Angry Brigade included banks, embassies, conservative politicians, and even a beauty contest. Luckily, no one was killed in the bombings, although one person was injured. At least two people were the subject of assassination attempts by the…
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A Brief History On May 24, 1993, Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, a Mexican Roman Catholic archbishop of the see of Guadalajara, was gunned down by 14 bullets while at the Guadalajara International Airport, allegedly because he was mistaken for drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán by rival drug cartel gunmen out to assassinate El Chapo. Digging Deeper Six other people were killed along with the Cardinal, allegedly by Mexican-American contract killers hired by the Tijuana Cartel to kill the head of the Sinaloa Cartel, Guzmán. In spite of the carnage wrought that day, nobody has ever been convicted and…
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,…
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 15, 2010, Australian 16 year old Jessica Watson completed a non-stop and solo unassisted sail voyage around the world, the youngest person to achieve this feat. Digging Deeper Watson piloted a 33.6 foot sailboat on her trip of seven months that covered nearly 20,000 nautical miles. She is just one of many people that achieved great feats before turning 18 years old, some of whom include: American Marjorie Gestring became the youngest Olympic Gold Medalist in 1936 when she won the 3-meter diving event at the age of 13. Eight Olympic champions have been age…
