A Brief History On December 10, 1968, a fake motorcycle cop stopped employees at the Nippon Trust Bank and stole 294 million yen, about $1 million in US dollars.  Known as the “300 Million Yen Robbery,” the dramatic heist is not only the largest robbery in Japanese history, it is still unsolved to this day! Digging Deeper To sell the fiction of being a police officer, the faux cop told the bank employees there was a bomb threat on their delivery car, and he even crawled under the car to “confirm” the presence of the bomb.  The robber also lit…

A Brief History This article presents a chronological list of notable events that happened on December 9th.  For each date below, please click on the date to be taken to an article covering that date’s event. Digging Deeper On December 9, 1872, P. B. S. Pinchback became the first ever African American governor of Louisiana, and in fact the first ever African American governor of any US State. On December 9, 1917, British forces under the command of Field Marshall Allenby captured the city of Jerusalem, then in the territory known as Palestine. On December 9, 1935, the Downtown Athletic…

A Brief History On December 9, 1935, muckraking journalist, Walter Liggett, was gunned down in front of his wife and children by a Minneapolis, Minnesota mobster with a Tommy Gun. Digging Deeper Liggett was a native Minnesotan that had a left leaning political bent, writing against political corruption at all levels and even siding with Charles Lindbergh, Sr. to oppose US involvement in World War I. Liggett became disillusioned with Governor Floyd Olson of the Farmer-Labor Party and began a protracted journalistic campaign against corruption in that party after he had returned to Minnesota from a period of writing in…

A Brief History This article presents a chronological list of notable events that happened on December 8th.  For each date below, please click on the date to be taken to an article covering that date’s event. Digging Deeper On December 8, 395, Later Yan was defeated by Earlier Yan. On December 8, 1854, Pope Pius IX issued his Apostolic constitution, Ineffabilis Deus, in which he established Catholic doctrine that the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, had been conceived without the ‘original sin’ that every other human is born with. While the Pearl Harbor raid captures most of our historical attention…

A Brief History On December 8, 1991, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus signed a treaty called the Belovezha Accords, an agreement that dissolved the USSR and put in its place the Commonwealth of Independent States.  A key part of this treaty was each newly independent state guaranteeing the integrity of the territory of the other signatory states. Digging Deeper As if this sacred agreement was not enough, in 1994, Russia, along with the US and other countries as part of the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons further guaranteed the respect of the territory of Ukraine and other involved nations…