A Brief History On March 14, 1982, an 11 kilogram bomb went off at the office of the African National Congress in London, England.  The explosion that occurred at 9 am local time, did not kill anyone, but the considerable blast smashed windows as far as 400 meters away.  Obviously, the human damage could have been much worse.  ANC voluntary worker, Vernet Mbatha, a caretaker, was the only person injured.  He had been sleeping in an apartment above the offices. Digging Deeper The ANC is currently the governing political party of the Republic of South Africa, a country that was…

A Brief History On March 13, 2012, the parents of 46 children riding on a Swiss coach (long distance bus, similar to our Greyhound and Trailways or Charter types in the US) found out the hard way that kids are not always safe when riding on a bus.  Near the town of Sierre, Switzerland, a coach carrying 46 school children and 4 of their teachers (and 2 crew members) swerved while driving in the Sierre Tunnel, hitting a curb and then veering head on into a concrete wall.  Among those killed were 22 of the students and all 4 teachers. …

A Brief History On March 12, 2020, people all over the globe are wondering about the true origins and the true implications of the “coronavirus” that (as we are told) originated in Wuhan, China.  Drastic measures being taken, including shutting down schools and colleges, draconian quarantines of cruise ships, cancellation public presidential campaign events, ending spectators at school athletic contests and the use of the National Guard to enforce a quarantine of New Rochelle, New York are all the types of measures we would expect in some sort of apocalyptic scenario, such as the Black Plague or the fictional “Captain…

A Brief History On March 10, 1952, Fulgencio Batista, a former military sergeant in the Cuban Army and former President of Cuba from 1940 to 1944, led a successful coup against the democratically elected government of the island nation of Cuba, installing himself as “President,” or more accurately as dictator.  Batista remained in charge of Cuba with the support of the United States until the Fidel Castro led revolution aided by revolutionary hero Che Guevera ousted the would be king in 1959.  Castro later declared himself and his regime to be communist after 2 years of contentious relations with the…

A Brief History On March 9, 2020, we take a look at some of today’s technology that is not celebrated the way some previous inventions have been.  Virtually everyone knows that Edison invented the light bulb and Bell invented the telephone, but we ask, who knows the inventor of the touch screen?  Who invented the computer chip?  Who came up with GPS?  Today we take a few selected modern devices and tell you a little about how they came about.  What would you add to this list?  (Note: Not being scientists ourselves, some of the technology in this article is…