A Brief History On April 18, 1996, the village of Qana in Southern Lebanon was shelled by artillery fire from the Israeli Defense Force, the official Israeli military organization. Unfortunately, Qana was the location of a United Nations compound manned by members of the Fijian United Nations Interim Force and had been providing haven to about 800 Lebanese civilian refugees. The attack left 4 of the Fijian soldiers wounded and killed 106 of the Lebanese civilians, injuring another 116 civilians. The bombardment was part of an Israeli offensive operation from April 11-April 27, 1996, known as Operation Grapes of Wrath,…
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A Brief History On April 17, 2014, the Kepler space telescope operated by NASA confirmed the existence of Kepler-186f, the first discovery of a planet of equivalent size to Earth within the “habitable zone” of another solar system. The newly discovered planet is in the solar system of a red dwarf star called Kepler-186, only about 582 light years away! (A light year is roughly 6 trillion miles.) Digging Deeper We know that at some point the Earth will become uninhabitable for human civilization. This eventuality may take hundreds of millions of years, or even billions of years, when our…
A Brief History On April 16, 1910, Boston Arena opened for the first time, an indoor ice hockey arena that is still in operation, the oldest such building still operating. We use this occasion in sports history to list 8 of the really old and great sports stadiums, arenas, venues, or whatever you want to call them, but only those that still exist. All but the last are still in use. As always, feel free to tell us of places we “should have” listed or if any we listed do not deserve mention. Digging Deeper Boston Arena, 1910. Although the…
A Brief History On April 15, 2016, we ran an article acknowledging April 15th as the day your income tax return must be filed by each year in the United States, and used that fact to list five days people really look forward to and five other days many people may dread. Today, we do it all again, with an updated list for both columns that takes into account the changing nature of our society, or as you may have guessed already, coronavirus. As always, we welcome your input on days we could have added to the list or should…
A Brief History On April 14, 1986, the Gopalganj district of Bangladesh experienced the largest hailstones ever recorded, with an incredible weight of 1 kilogram for a single hailstone! As you can imagine, the damage caused was extensive, but even worse, 92 people were killed by the giant ice balls from above. Today we take a look at this particular weather phenomenon. Digging Deeper Hail is basically frozen rain. Little balls of ice, or irregular shaped lumps, hail differs from ice pellets in that ice pellets usually fall in the winter or cold weather and are smaller. Hail varies in…