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: Politics
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 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…
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 10, 1922, the US annexed an atoll in the North Pacific, an unoccupied, mostly underwater formation called Kingman Reef. Between Hawaii and Samoa, the 7.4 acre reef is known as the Kingman Reef National Wildlife Refuge administered by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Digging Deeper Other than the 50 states and Puerto Rico, the US owns many territories, mostly islands in both the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. Some of these include the US Virgin Islands in the Caribbean, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, Palau, the Marshall Islands, and the Federated States…
