On this day:

[BarnBuster]

​

"On April 5, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt establishes the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), an innovative federally funded organization that put thousands of Americans to work during the Great Depression on projects with environmental benefits.

In 1932, FDR took America’s political helm during the country’s worst economic crisis, declaring a “government worthy of its name must make a fitting response” to the suffering of the unemployed. He implemented the CCC a little over one month into his presidency as part of his administration’s “New Deal” plan for social and economic progress. The CCC reflected FDR’s deep commitment to environmental conservation. He waxed poetic when lobbying for the its passage, declaring “the forests are the lungs of our land [which] purify our air and give fresh strength to our people.”

The CCC, also known as “Roosevelt’s Tree Army,” was open to unemployed, unmarried U.S. male citizens between the ages of 18 and 26. All recruits had to be healthy and were expected to perform hard physical labor. Blacks were placed in de-facto segregated camps, although administrators denied the practice of discrimination. Enlistment in the program was for a minimum of 6 months; many re-enlisted after their first term. Participants were paid $30 a month and often given supplemental basic and vocational education while they served. Under the guidance of the Departments of the Interior and Agriculture, CCC employees fought forest fires, planted trees, cleared and maintained access roads, re-seeded grazing lands and implemented soil-erosion controls. They built wildlife refuges, fish-rearing facilities, water storage basins and animal shelters. To encourage citizens to get out and enjoy America’s natural resources, FDR authorized the CCC to build bridges and campground facilities. From 1933 to 1942, the CCC employed over 3 million men.

Of Roosevelt’s many New Deal policies, the CCC is considered by many to be one of the most enduring and successful. It provided the model for future state and federal conservation programs. In 1942, Congress discontinued appropriations for the CCC, diverting the desperately needed funds to the effort to win World War II".

 

[BarnBuster]

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"Two days after the U.S. Senate voted 82 to 6 to declare war against Germany, the U.S. House of Representatives endorses the declaration by a vote of 373 to 50. .On April 6, 1917, the United States formally declared war against Germany and entered the conflict in Europe

When World War I erupted in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson pledged neutrality for the United States, a position that the vast majority of Americans favored. Britain, however, was one of America’s closest trading partners, and tension soon arose between the United States and Germany over the latter’s attempted quarantine of the British Isles. Several U.S. ships traveling to Britain were damaged or sunk by German mines, and in February 1915 Germany announced unrestricted warfare against all ships, neutral or otherwise, that entered the war zone around Britain. One month later, Germany announced that a German cruiser had sunk the William P. Frye, a private American vessel. President Wilson was outraged, but the German government apologized and called the attack an unfortunate mistake.

On May 7, the British-owned Lusitania ocean liner was torpedoed without warning just off the coast of Ireland. Of the 1,959 passengers, 1,198 were killed, including 128 Americans. The German government maintained that the Lusitania was carrying munitions, but the U.S. demanded reparations and an end to German attacks on unarmed passenger and merchant ships. In August, Germany pledged to see to the safety of passengers before sinking unarmed vessels, but in November sunk an Italian liner without warning, killing 272 people, including 27 Americans. With these attacks, public opinion in the United States began to turn irrevocably against Germany.

In 1917, Germany, determined to win its war of attrition against the Allies, announced the resumption of unrestricted warfare in war-zone waters. Three days later, the United States broke diplomatic relations with Germany, and just hours after that the American liner Housatonic was sunk by a German U-boat. On February 22, Congress passed a $250 million arms appropriations bill intended to make the United States ready for war. In late March, Germany sunk four more U.S. merchant ships, and on April 2 President Wilson appeared before Congress and called for a declaration of war against Germany. Four days later, his request was granted.

On June 26, the first 14,000 U.S. infantry troops landed in France to begin training for combat. After four years of bloody stalemate along the western front, the entrance of America’s well-supplied forces into the conflict marked a major turning point in the war and helped the Allies to victory. When the war finally ended, on November 11, 1918, more than two million American soldiers had served on the battlefields of Western Europe, and some 50,000 of them had lost their lives."

 

[BarnBuster]

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The Bataan Death March was Japan's brutal forced march of American and Filipino prisoners of war during World War II. The 63-mile march began on April 9, 1942, with at least 72,000 POWs from the southern end of the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines. Some sources say 75,000 soldiers were taken prisoner after the surrender at Bataan, which broke down to 12,000 Americans and 63,000 Filipinos. The horrible conditions and harsh treatment of the prisoners during the Bataan Death March resulted in an estimated 7,000 to 10,000 deaths.

Surrender in Bataan
Only hours after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the Japanese struck airbases in the American-held Philippines. In a surprise air attack around noon on December 8, most of the military aircraft on the archipelago were destroyed.

Unlike in Hawaii, the Japanese followed their airstrike in the Philippines with a ground invasion. As Japanese ground troops headed toward the capital of Manila, U.S. and Filipino troops retreated on December 22 to the Bataan Peninsula on the western side of the large Philippine island of Luzon.

Cut off from food and other supplies by a Japanese blockade, the U.S. and Filipino soldiers slowly used up their supplies, going from half rations to third rations and then quarter rations. By April, they had been holding out in the Bataan jungles for three months. They were starving and suffering from diseases.

There was no option other than to surrender. On April 9, 1942, U.S. Gen. Edward P. King signed the surrender document, ending the Battle of Bataan. The remaining American and Filipino soldiers were taken by the Japanese as POWs. Almost immediately, the Bataan Death March began.

March Begins
The purpose of the march was to get 72,000 POWs from Mariveles in the southern end of the Bataan Peninsula to Camp O'Donnell in the north. The prisoners were to march 55 miles to San Fernando, then travel by train to Capas before marching the last eight miles to Camp O'Donnell.

The prisoners were separated into groups of approximately 100, assigned Japanese guards, and sent marching. It would take each group about five days to make the journey. The march would have been arduous for anyone, but the starving prisoners endured cruel treatment throughout their long journey, making the march deadly.

Japanese Sense of Bushido
Japanese soldiers believed strongly in bushido, a code or set of moral principles established by the samurai. According to the code, honor is brought to a person who fights to the death; anyone who surrenders is considered contemptible. To Japanese soldiers, the captured American and Filipino POWs were unworthy of respect. To show their disgust, the Japanese guards tortured their prisoners throughout the march.

The captured soldiers were given no water and little food. Although artesian wells with clean water were scattered along the way, Japanese guards shot prisoners who broke rank and tried to drink from them. A few prisoners scooped up stagnant water as they walked, which made many sick.

The prisoners were given a couple of rice balls during their long march. Filipino civilians tried to throw food to the marching prisoners, but Japanese soldiers killed those who tried to help.

Heat and Random Brutality
The intense heat during the march was miserable. The Japanese exacerbated the pain by making prisoners sit in the sun for several hours without shade, a form of torture called "the sun treatment."

Without food and water, the prisoners were extremely weak as they marched in the hot sun. Many were seriously ill from malnutrition; others had been wounded or were suffering from diseases they had picked up in the jungle. The Japanese didn't care: If anyone slowed or fell behind during the march, they were shot or bayoneted. A Japanese "buzzard squad" followed each group of marching prisoners to kill those who couldn't keep up.

Random brutality was common. Japanese soldiers frequently hit prisoners with the butt of their rifles. Bayoneting was common. Beheadings were prevalent.

Simple dignities also were denied the prisoners. The Japanese offered neither latrines nor bathroom breaks along the long march. Prisoners who had to defecate did so while walking.

Camp O'Donnell
When the prisoners reached San Fernando, they were herded into boxcars. The Japanese forced so many prisoners into each boxcar that there was standing room only. Heat and other conditions inside caused more deaths.

Upon arrival in Capas, the remaining prisoners marched another eight miles. When they reached Camp O'Donnell, it was discovered that only 54,000 prisoners made it there. An estimated 7,000 to 10,000 had died, while other missing soldiers presumably escaped into the jungle and joined guerrilla groups. Conditions at Camp O'Donnell also were brutal, leading to thousands more POW deaths in the first few weeks there.

The Man Responsible
After the war, a U.S. military tribunal charged Lt. Gen. Homma Masaharu for the atrocities during the Bataan Death March. Homma was in charge of the Philippines invasion and ordered the evacuation of the POWs from Bataan. Homma accepted responsibility for his troops' actions but claimed he never ordered such cruelty. The tribunal found him guilty. On April 3, 1946, Homma was executed by firing squad in the town of Los Banos in the Philippines.

 

[BarnBuster]

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The bloodiest four years in American history begin when Confederate shore batteries under General P.G.T. Beauregard open fire on Union-held Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Bay on April 12, 1861. During the next 34 hours, 50 Confederate guns and mortars launched more than 4,000 rounds at the poorly supplied fort. On April 13, U.S. Major Robert Anderson surrendered the fort. Two days later, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for 75,000 volunteer soldiers to quell the Southern “insurrection.”

As early as 1858, the ongoing conflict between North and South over the issue of slavery had led Southern leadership to discuss a unified separation from the United States. By 1860, the majority of the slave states were publicly threatening secession if the Republicans, the anti-slavery party, won the presidency. Following Republican Abraham Lincoln’s victory over the divided Democratic Party in November 1860, South Carolina immediately initiated secession proceedings. On December 20, the South Carolina legislature passed the “Ordinance of Secession,” which declared that “the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other states, under the name of the United States of America, is hereby dissolved.” After the declaration, South Carolina set about seizing forts, arsenals, and other strategic locations within the state. Within six weeks, five more Southern states–Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana–had followed South Carolina’s lead.

In February 1861, delegates from those states convened to establish a unified government. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi was subsequently elected the first president of the Confederate States of America. When Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861, a total of seven states (Texas had joined the pack) had seceded from the Union, and federal troops held only Fort Sumter in South Carolina, Fort Pickens off the Florida coast, and a handful of minor outposts in the South. Four years after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, the Confederacy was defeated at the total cost of 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers dead.

 

[GreatwhiteNorth]

RIP Sir Stirling Moss

 

[raratt]

RIP Mort

News - Heavy.com

Today’s top breaking news, delivered without bias or snark.

heavy.com

 

[cannabineer]

RIP Mort

News - Heavy.com

Today’s top breaking news, delivered without bias or snark.

heavy.com

 

[BarnBuster]

“Houston, we’ve had a problem here,”

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On April 13, 1970, disaster strikes 200,000 miles from Earth when oxygen tank No. 2 blows up on Apollo 13, the third manned lunar landing mission. Astronauts James A. Lovell, John L. Swigert, and Fred W. Haise had left Earth two days before for the Fra Mauro highlands of the moon but were forced to turn their attention to simply making it home alive.

Mission commander Lovell reported to mission control on Earth: “Houston, we’ve had a problem here,” and it was discovered that the normal supply of oxygen, electricity, light, and water had been disrupted. The landing mission was aborted, and the astronauts and controllers on Earth scrambled to come up with emergency procedures. The crippled spacecraft continued to the moon, circled it, and began a long, cold journey back to Earth.

The astronauts and mission control were faced with enormous logistical problems in stabilizing the spacecraft and its air supply, and providing enough energy to the damaged fuel cells to allow successful reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. Navigation was another problem, and Apollo 13‘s course was repeatedly corrected with dramatic and untested maneuvers. On April 17, with the world anxiously watching, tragedy turned to triumph as the Apollo 13 astronauts touched down safely in the Pacific Ocean.

 

[ANC]

 

[BarnBuster]

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1865, April 14, President Abraham Lincoln is shot in the head at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. The assassin, actor John Wilkes Booth, shouted, “Sic semper tyrannis! (Ever thus to tyrants!) The South is avenged,” as he jumped onto the stage and fled on horseback. Lincoln died the next morning.

Booth, who remained in the North during the war despite his Confederate sympathies, initially plotted to capture President Lincoln and take him to Richmond, the Confederate capital. However, on March 20, 1865, the day of the planned kidnapping, the president failed to appear at the spot where Booth and his six fellow conspirators lay in wait. Two weeks later, Richmond fell to Union forces. In April, with Confederate armies near collapse across the South, Booth hatched a desperate plan to save the Confederacy.

Learning that Lincoln was to attend Laura Keene’s acclaimed performance in Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater on April 14, Booth plotted the simultaneous assassination of Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William H. Seward. By murdering the president and two of his possible successors, Booth and his conspirators hoped to throw the U.S. government into a paralyzing disarray.

On the evening of April 14, conspirator Lewis T. Powell burst into Secretary of State Seward’s home, seriously wounding him and three others, while George A. Atzerodt, assigned to Vice President Johnson, lost his nerve and fled.

Meanwhile, just after 10 p.m., Booth entered Lincoln’s private theater box unnoticed, and shot the president with a single bullet in the back of his head. Although Booth had broken his left leg jumping from Lincoln’s box, he succeeded in escaping Washington.

The president, mortally wounded, was carried to a cheap lodging house opposite Ford’s Theater. About 7:22 a.m. the next morning, he died–the first U.S. president to be assassinated.

Booth was a well-regarded actor who was particularly loved in the South before the Civil War. During the war, he stayed in the North and became increasingly bitter when audiences weren’t as enamored of him as they were in Dixie. Along with friends Samuel Arnold, Michael O’Laughlin and John Surratt, Booth conspired to kidnap Lincoln and deliver him to the South.

On March 17, along with George Atzerodt, David Herold and Lewis Paine, the group met in a Washington bar to plot the abduction of the president three days later. However, when the president changed his plans, the scheme was scuttled. Shortly afterward, the South surrendered to the Union and the conspirators altered their plan. They decided to kill Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward on the same evening.

When April 14 came around, Atzerodt backed out of his part to kill Johnson. Upset, Booth went to drink at a saloon near Ford’s Theatre. At about 10 p.m. he walked into the theater and up to the president’s box. Lincoln’s guard, John Parker, was not there because he had gotten bored with the play and left his post to get a beer. Booth easily slipped in and shot the president in the back of the head. The president’s friend, Major Rathbone, attempted to grab Booth but was slashed by Booth’s knife. Booth injured his leg badly when he jumped to the stage to escape, but he managed to hobble outside to his horse.

Meanwhile, Lewis Paine forced his way into William Seward’s house and stabbed the secretary of state several times before fleeing. Booth rode to Virginia with David Herold and stopped at the home of Dr. Samuel Mudd, who placed splints on Booth’s legs. They hid in a barn on Richard Garrett’s farm as thousands of Union troops combed the area looking for them. The other conspirators were captured, except for John Surratt, who fled to Canada.

When the troops finally caught up with Booth and Herold on April 26, they gave them the option of surrendering before the barn was burned down. Herold decided to surrender, but Booth remained in the barn as it went up in flames. Booth was then shot and killed in the burning barn by Corporal Boston Corbett. On July 7, George Atzerodt, Lewis Paine, David Herold, and John Surratt’s mother, Mary, were hanged in Washington. The execution of Mary Surratt is believed by some to have been a miscarriage of justice. Although there was proof of Surratt’s involvement in the original abduction conspiracy, it is clear that her deeds were minor compared to those of the others who were executed.

Her son John was eventually tracked down in Egypt and brought back to trial, but he managed, with the help of clever lawyers, to win an acquittal.

 

[BarnBuster]

​

"On April 15, 2013, two bombs go off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three spectators and wounding more than 260 other people in attendance. Four days later, after an intense manhunt that shut down the Boston area, police captured one of the bombing suspects, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; his older brother and fellow suspect, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, died following a shootout with law enforcement earlier that same day.

The 117th Boston Marathon began in the morning from Hopkinton, Massachusetts, with some 23,000 participants. At around 2:49 that afternoon, with more than 5,700 runners still in the race, two pressure cooker bombs hidden in backpacks exploded within seconds of each other near the finish line along Boylston Street. Three people died: a 23-year-old woman, a 29-year-old woman and an 8-year-old boy. Among the scores of others who were injured, more than a dozen people required amputations.

On the evening of April 18, the FBI released photos of two male suspects sought in connection with the bombings. That night at around 10:30, Sean Collier, a 26-year-old police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was shot dead in his patrol car on the school’s Cambridge campus. Authorities would eventually link the murder to the Tsarnaev brothers, who spent parts of their childhoods in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan but had lived in the United States for about a decade prior to the bombings. Soon after Officer Collier was killed, Tamerlan Tsarnaev carjacked an SUV, taking the driver hostage and telling him he was one of the Boston Marathon bombers.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev followed behind in a smaller car before joining his older brother and the hostage in the SUV. The brothers drove around the Boston area with their hostage, forcing him to withdraw money from an ATM and discussing driving to New York City. When they stopped at a Cambridge gas station, the hostage escaped and called police, informing them the SUV could be tracked by his cellphone, which was still in the vehicle. Shortly after midnight, a gun battle broke out between the Tsarnaevs and police on a street in the Boston suburb of Watertown. One officer was seriously injured by gunfire but survived. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, also seriously wounded, was taken to a hospital, where doctors tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate him. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev managed to drive away from the shootout in the stolen SUV before abandoning it nearby and fleeing on foot.

That day, April 19, the Boston area was on lockdown, with schools closed, public transportation service suspended and people advised to stay inside their homes, as police conducted door-to-door searches in Watertown and military-style vehicles patrolled the streets. That evening, after police called off their search of the area, a Watertown man went outside to check on a boat he was storing in his backyard. When he looked inside the 24-foot vessel, he was startled to see blood and a person, who turned out to be Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, hiding there. Police soon arrived and took the suspect, who was wounded from the earlier gun battle, into custody.

At the time of the bombings, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a sophomore at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, while Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a community college dropout and former amateur boxer with a wife and child. Investigators believe the Tsarnaevs were motivated by extremist Islamic beliefs but planned and carried out the bombings on their own and were not connected to any terrorist organizations. The brothers allegedly used the Internet to learn how to build explosives.

In July 2013, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev pleaded not guilty to the 30 federal charges against him, including the use of a weapon of mass destruction. He went on trial in January 2015, and was found guilty on all 30 counts. He was sentenced to death but appealed the decision. Tsarnaev is currently being held at a supermax prison in Colorado."

 

[BarnBuster]

​

On April 16, 2007, 32 people died after being gunned down on the campus of Virginia Tech by Seung-Hui Cho, a student at the college who later died by suicide.

The Virginia Tech shooting began around 7:15 a.m., when Cho, a 23-year-old senior and English major at Blacksburg-based Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, shot a female freshman and a male resident assistant in a campus dormitory before fleeing the building.

Police were soon on the scene; unaware of the gunman’s identity, they initially pursued the female victim’s boyfriend as a suspect in what they believed to be an isolated domestic-violence incident.

However, at around 9:40 a.m., Cho, armed with a 9-millimeter handgun, a 22-caliber handgun and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, entered a classroom building, chained and locked several main doors and went from room to room shooting people. Approximately 10 minutes after the rampage began, he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The attack left 32 people dead and more than a dozen wounded. In all, 27 students and five faculty members died in the massacre.

Two days later, on April 18, NBC News received a package of materials from Cho with a timestamp indicating he had mailed it from a Virginia post office between the first and second shooting attacks. Contained in the package were photos of a gun-wielding Cho, along with a rambling video diatribe in which he ranted about wealthy “brats,” among other topics.

In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shooting, authorities found no evidence that Cho, who was born in South Korea and moved to America with his family in 1992, had specifically targeted any of his victims. The public soon learned that Cho, described by students as a loner who rarely spoke to anyone, had a history of mental-health problems.

It was also revealed that angry, violent writings Cho made for certain class assignments had raised concern among some of his professors and fellow students well before the events of April 16. In 2011, Virginia Tech was fined by the U.S. Department of Education for failing to issue a prompt campus-wide warning after Cho shot his first two victims

 

[BarnBuster]

​

When the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian Communist forces, seized the nation’s capital of Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, it was no surprise. In the years since the nation had been drawn into fighting in the region, the insurgents had continued to gain power. With the end of the U.S.’s involvement on the horizon—that would come before the month was up—it seemed clear that Phnom Penh would fall sooner or later.

In fact, as TIME reported in the days after April 17, the very leaders who had pledged never to stop fighting seemed to know that there was no point in a last stand. The surrender of the Khmer Republic to the Khmer Rouge was, the magazine noted, the first time a capital city had fallen to Communist forces since Seoul in the early 1950s.

But, even though the regime change was no surprise, the world watched with apprehension to see what the nation’s new rulers would do. In that initial report, TIME noted that at first “there was none of the carnage that some government officials had predicted”—one of the main fears was that widespread retribution would be exacted—even though “there were, to be sure, some ominous notes.”

A few weeks later, it became clear that those fears were not misplaced. “The curtain of silence that has concealed Cambodia from Western eyes ever since the Khmer Rouge capture of Phnom-Penh on April 17 opened briefly last week, revealing a shocking portrait of a nation in torturous upheaval,” TIME reported. “Eyewitness reports by the few Western journalists who stayed on in the Cambodian capital after the closing down of the American embassy indicated that the country’s new Communist masters have proved to be far more ruthless, if not more cruel and sadistic in their exercise of power than most Western experts had expected.”

Those eyewitness reports, as relayed by TIME, told a tale of Phnom Penh (stylized with a hyphen at the time) being emptied of its inhabitants, as urban Cambodians were forcibly relocated to grow rice in the countryside, despite the fact that there would be no rice harvest for months and there was no other plan to feed them. Foreigners who took refuge in the French embassy were stuck inside the compound, with no running water, for nearly two weeks. Cambodians among them—many married to the foreign citizens—were removed from the group before the outsiders were driven by truck to the Thai border and allowed to walk across.

In 1978, David Aikman, who had been a TIME correspondent who left Cambodia mere days before Phnom Penh fell, wrote in an essay that what had happened in Cambodia since that day was “perhaps the most dreadful infliction of suffering on a nation by its government in the past three decades”:

On the morning of April 17, 1975, advance units of Cambodia’s Communist insurgents, who had been actively fighting the defeated Western-backed government of Marshal Lon Nol for nearly five years, began entering the capital of Phnom Penh. The Khmer Rouge looted things, such as watches and cameras, but they did not go on a rampage. They seemed disciplined. And at first, there was general jubilation among the city’s terrified, exhausted and bewildered inhabitants. After all, the civil war seemed finally over, the Americans had gone, and order, everyone seemed to assume, would soon be graciously restored.​

​

Then came the shock. After a few hours, the black-uniformed troops began firing into the air. It was a signal for Phnom Penh’s entire population, swollen by refugees to some 3 million, to abandon the city. Young and old, the well and the sick, businessmen and beggars, were all ordered at gunpoint onto the streets and highways leading into the countryside.​

​

The survivors were settled in villages and agricultural communes all around Cambodia and were put to work for frantic 16-or 17-hour days, planting rice and building an enormous new irrigation system. Many died from dysentery or malaria, others from malnutrition, having been forced to survive on a condensed-milk can of rice every two days. Still others were taken away at night by Khmer Rouge guards to be shot or bludgeoned to death. The lowest estimate of the bloodbath to date–by execution, starvation and disease–is in the hundreds of thousands. The highest exceeds 1 million, and that in a country that once numbered no more than 7 million. Moreover, the killing continues, according to the latest refugees.​

Aikman’s essay confirmed that news of what was happening in Cambodia had reached the rest of the world, without a doubt—but, he wrote, the response confirmed that somehow knowing the truth didn’t mean believing it and responding appropriately. “In the West today, there is a pervasive consent to the notion of moral relativism, a reluctance to admit that absolute evil can and does exist,” he wrote. “This makes it especially difficult for some to accept the fact that the Cambodian experience is something far worse than a revolutionary aberration. Rather, it is the deadly logical consequence of an atheistic, man-centered system of values, enforced by fallible human beings with total power, who believe, with Marx, that morality is whatever the powerful define it to be and, with Mao, that power grows from gun barrels.”

 

[GreatwhiteNorth]

View attachment 4536451​

Looks like a nitrogen rich environment.









Too soon?

 

[BarnBuster]

​

"On April 20, 1999, two teenage gunmen kill 13 people in a shooting spree at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, south of Denver. At approximately 11:19 a.m., Dylan Klebold, 18, and Eric Harris, 17, dressed in trench coats, began shooting students outside the school before moving inside to continue their rampage. By 11:35 a.m., Klebold and Harris had killed 12 fellow students and a teacher and wounded another 23 people. Shortly after noon, the two teens turned their guns on themselves and committed suicide.

The crime prompted a national debate on gun control and school safety, as well as a major investigation to determine what motivated the teen gunmen. In the days immediately following the shootings, it was speculated that Klebold and Harris purposely chose jocks, minorities and Christians as their victims.

It was initially reported that one student, Cassie Bernall, was allegedly asked by one of the gunmen if she believed in God. When Bernall said, “Yes,” she was shot to death. Her parents later wrote a book titled She Said Yes, honoring their martyred daughter. Apparently, however, the question was not actually posed to Bernall but to another student who had already been wounded by a gunshot. When that victim replied, “Yes,” the shooter walked away.

Subsequent investigations also determined that Harris and Klebold chose their victims randomly. Their original plan was for two propane bombs to explode in the school’s cafeteria, potentially killing hundreds of people and forcing the survivors outside and into the gunmen’s line of fire. When the bombs didn’t work, Harris and Klebold went into the school to carry out their murderous rampage.

There was speculation that Harris and Klebold committed the killings because they were members of a group of social outcasts called the “Trenchcoat Mafia” that was fascinated by Goth culture. Violent video games and music were also blamed for influencing the killers. However, none of these theories was ever proven.

Columbine High School reopened in the fall of 1999, but the massacre left a scar on the Littleton community. Mark Manes, the young man who sold a gun to Harris and bought him 100 rounds of ammunition the day before the murders, was sentenced to six years in prison. Carla Hochhalter, the mother of a student who was paralyzed in the attack, killed herself at a gun shop. Several other parents filed suit against the school and the police. Even Dylan Klebold’s parents filed notice of their intent to sue, claiming that police should have stopped Harris earlier. And when a carpenter from Chicago erected 15 crosses in a local park on behalf of everyone who died on April 20, parents of the victims tore down the two in memory of Klebold and Harris.

The shootings at Columbine were among the worst school shootings in U.S. history until April 16, 2007, when 32 people were shot and many others wounded by a student gunman on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Virginia. Subsequent school shootings, including in Newtown, Connecticut in December 2012 and in Parkland, Florida in February 2018, continued to pain the nation. A March 2018 analysis by the Washington Post found that since the Columbine shootings in 1999, there have been 10 school shootings each year on average in the United States."

 

[BarnBuster]

​

Just after 9 a.m April 19, 1995, a massive truck bomb explodes outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The blast collapsed the north face of the nine-story building, instantly killing more than 100 people and trapping dozens more in the rubble. Emergency crews raced to Oklahoma City from across the country, and when the rescue effort finally ended two weeks later the death toll stood at 168 people killed, including 19 young children who were in the building’s day-care center at the time of the blast.

On April 21, the massive manhunt for suspects in the worst terrorist attack ever committed on U.S. soil by an American resulted in the capture of Timothy McVeigh, a 27-year-old former U.S. Army soldier who matched an eyewitness description of a man seen at the scene of the crime. On the same day, Terry Nichols, an associate of McVeigh’s, surrendered at Herington, Kansas, after learning that the police were looking for him. Both men were found to be members of a radical right-wing survivalist group based in Michigan, and on August 8 John Fortier, who knew of McVeigh’s plan to bomb the federal building, agreed to testify against McVeigh and Nichols in exchange for a reduced sentence. Two days later, a grand jury indicted McVeigh and Nichols on murder and conspiracy charges.

While still in his teens, Timothy McVeigh acquired a penchant for guns and began honing survivalist skills he believed would be necessary in the event of a Cold War showdown with the Soviet Union. Lacking direction after high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and proved a disciplined and meticulous soldier. It was during this time that he befriended Terry Nichols, a fellow 13 years his senior, who shared his survivalist interests.

In early 1991, McVeigh served in the Persian Gulf War and was decorated with several medals for a brief combat mission. Despite these honors, he was discharged from the U.S. Army at the end of the year, one of many casualties of the U.S. military downsizing that came after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Another result of the Cold War’s end was that McVeigh shifted his ideology from a hatred of foreign communist governments to a suspicion of the U.S. federal government, especially as its new elected leader, Democrat Bill Clinton, had successfully campaigned for the presidency on a platform of gun control.

The August 1992 shoot-out between federal agents and survivalist Randy Weaver at his cabin in Idaho, in which Weaver’s wife and son were killed, followed by the April 19, 1993, inferno near Waco, Texas, that killed some 80 Branch Davidians, deeply radicalized McVeigh, Nichols, and their associates. In early 1995, Nichols and McVeigh planned an attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City, which housed, among other federal agencies, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF)–the agency that had launched the initial raid on the Branch Davidian compound in 1993.

On April 19, 1995, the two-year anniversary of the disastrous end to the Waco standoff, McVeigh parked a Ryder rental truck loaded with a diesel-fuel-fertilizer bomb outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and fled. Minutes later, the massive bomb exploded, killing 168 people.

On June 2, 1997, McVeigh was convicted on 15 counts of murder and conspiracy, and on August 14, under the unanimous recommendation of the jury, was sentenced to die by lethal injection. Michael Fortier was sentenced to 12 years in prison and fined $200,000 for failing to warn authorities about McVeigh’s bombing plans. Terry Nichols was found guilty on one count of conspiracy and eight counts of involuntary manslaughter, and was sentenced to life in prison.

In December 2000, McVeigh asked a federal judge to stop all appeals of his convictions and to set a date for his execution. Federal Judge Richard Matsch granted the request. On June 11, 2001, McVeigh, 33, died of lethal injection at the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. He was the first federal prisoner to be put to death since 1963.

 

[BarnBuster]

​

"A U.S. effort to rescue American hostages in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran ended in failure on April 24, 1980. The Army Special Forces unit tasked with the mission was to rescue 53 hostages being detained by Iran.

The secret mission was complicated, involving the movement of the ground force element – known as Delta Force – landing in three MC-130 fixed-wing aircraft at a location called Desert One. The rendezvous location was located southeast of Tehran. At this first location the ground force would link up with eight RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters flown by Marine pilots that took off from a Navy carrier (Nimitz) in the Arabian Sea. Once the choppers refueled the ground force (Delta) would board the helicopters and fly to new locations closer to Tehran.

During the second night the rescue party would then enter Iran’s capital city, storm the embassy compound, free the hostages, and then move them to a nearby soccer stadium. From there the hostages would be transported to a seized airstrip outside Tehran where fixed-wing aircraft would evacuate them out of the country.

Two small teams had previously entered Iran to conduct a recon of the rendezvous site in the desert, the hide sites used for the second night, the embassy, and other locations. These teams also set up a network for the transport of men, equipment, and hostages in and around the city.

The primary assault force was Delta. A unit of the 75th Ranger Regiment would provide security at Desert One. An Army Special Forces team from Det A (Berlin) – specially trained in mountain operations – would assault the foreign ministry where three diplomats were being held. There was also a small Air Force combat control team to coordinate movements on the desert landing strip.

The planning and practice for the rescue mission had taken place in the previous months prior to the execution of the raid. The rescue was to take place over two days.

Operation Eagle Claw was cut short because one of the abort criteria had been reached. There was an insufficient number of helicopters with which to conduct the raid. The mission started with eight. Two never made it to the rendezvous location. One developed a maintenance problem on the ground. That left only five to conduct the mission – and the operation required six. The commander, Charlie Beckworth, aborted the mission and gave the order for withdrawal of the rescue party from Iran.

At that point disaster struck when one of the helicopters – while repositioning at Desert One – collided with a parked C-130 loaded with fuel bladders causing an explosion. The mission would cost the lives of eight men, seven helicopters, and a C-130.

The failure of Operation Eagle Claw was an embarrassment for the United States. The Carter administration certainly lost credibility – as it had failed to recover the hostages either through diplomatic or military means.

The failed rescue attempt prompted a review by the U.S. military and Congress. One result was the establishment of the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) and other specialized units that would bring ‘jointness’ to the U.S. special operations community.

Iran Hostage - Rescue Mission Report

STATEMENT OF ADMIRAL J. L. HOLLOWAY, III, USN (Ret.) CHAIRMAN, SPECIAL OPERATIONS REVIEW GROUP At the outset, let me clarify that the document which you have received is not the verbatim report of the Special Operations Review Group. You have an unclassified version of a highly classified report...

www.history.navy.mil

Aftermath, Lessons Learned:
The Pentagon and the government immediately after the botched attempt began to formulate plans, and procedures to ensure that this doesn’t happen again. The debacle at Desert One helped usher in a far stronger, better trained, and infinitely better coordinated Special Operations Force that we see today.​

​

During hearings with the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Sam Nunn who was the chairman asked Colonel Beckwith first what he learned from the mission failure and what his recommendations were to prevent this from happening again.​

​

Beckwith shot straight from the hip, “If coach Bear Bryant at the University of Alabama put his quarterback in Virginia, his backfield in North Carolina, his offensive line in Georgia and his defense in Texas and then got Delta Airlines to pick them up and fly them to Birmingham on game day, he wouldn’t have his winning teams.”​

​

To prevent future mishaps, he stated, “My recommendation is to put together an organization that would include Delta, the Rangers, the Navy SEALs, Air Force pilots, its own staff, its own support people, its own aircraft and helicopters. Make this organization a permanent military unit. Allocate sufficient funds. And give it sufficient time to recruit, assess, and train its people,”​

​

The issue of Joint Warfighting Doctrine and cooperation was fixed with Goldwater Nichols Act and also the Cohen – Dunn amendment that ushered in the Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) in 1987. The first unified command for Special Operations. And the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, ensuring that Special Operations units have the bureaucracy behind them. And SOF units finally got Title 10 authority which gave them the ability to procure weapons and equipment independent of the services budgets.​

​

The Army took the lead in the new doctrine and created the United States Army Special Operations Command which placed an umbrella of troops including Delta, Special Forces, Rangers, Psyops and Civil Affairs units under one organization.​

​

Perhaps the most significant change was the creation of their own aviation element Special Operations Aviation, including the 160th Aviation Regiment (Nightstalkers).​

​

Some of the tactics that were used in 1980 that were new such as flying blacked-out, landings using night-vision goggles, remotely illuminated landing strips and methods for seizing airfields, as well as satellite communications are all second nature now to special operators.​

​

The Air Force created their own Air Force Special Operations Command, (AFSOC) and created search and rescue units CSAR, combat controllers, Special Operations Air Wings which included AC-130 gunships.​

​

The Navy’s US Naval Special Warfare Command (NAVSPECWARCOM) consists of Special Boat Units and SEAL Teams including SEAL Team 6 (DEVGRU) who conducted the mission to kill Osama bin Laden.​

​

The Marine Corps finally joined SOCOM in October 2005 and created the Marine Special Operations Command (MARSOC). The Marine special ops troops have renamed themselves the Raiders after their units of WWII.​

​

While the Iran hostage rescue mission may have ended in failure, it opened the door a much better era for Special Operations Forces today. If the same mission was tasked to them today, there is no doubt, that the chances of success would be much higher."​

 

[BarnBuster]

​

"On April 26, 1986, the world’s worst nuclear power plant accident occurs at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the Soviet Union. Thirty-two people died and dozens more suffered radiation burns in the opening days of the crisis, but only after Swedish authorities reported the fallout did Soviet authorities reluctantly admit that an accident had occurred.

The Chernobyl station was situated at the settlement of Pripyat, about 65 miles north of Kiev in the Ukraine. Built in the late 1970s on the banks of the Pripyat River, Chernobyl had four reactors, each capable of producing 1,000 megawatts of electric power. On the evening of April 25, 1986, a group of engineers began an electrical-engineering experiment on the Number 4 reactor. The engineers, who had little knowledge of reactor physics, wanted to see if the reactor’s turbine could run emergency water pumps on inertial power.

As part of their poorly designed experiment, the engineers disconnected the reactor’s emergency safety systems and its power-regulating system. Next, they compounded this recklessness with a series of mistakes: They ran the reactor at a power level so low that the reaction became unstable, and then removed too many of the reactor’s control rods in an attempt to power it up again. The reactor’s output rose to more than 200 megawatts but was proving increasingly difficult to control. Nevertheless, at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, the engineers continued with their experiment and shut down the turbine engine to see if its inertial spinning would power the reactor’s water pumps. In fact, it did not adequately power the water pumps, and without cooling water the power level in the reactor surged.

To prevent meltdown, the operators reinserted all the 200-some control rods into the reactor at once. The control rods were meant to reduce the reaction but had a design flaw: graphite tips. So, before the control rod’s five meters of absorbent material could penetrate the core, 200 graphite tips simultaneously entered, thus facilitating the reaction and causing an explosion that blew off the heavy steel and concrete lid of the reactor. It was not a nuclear explosion, as nuclear power plants are incapable of producing such a reaction, but was chemical, driven by the ignition of gases and steam that were generated by the runaway reaction. In the explosion and ensuing fire, more than 50 tons of radioactive material were released into the atmosphere, where it was carried by air currents.

On April 27, Soviet authorities began an evacuation of the 30,000 inhabitants of Pripyat. A cover-up was attempted, but on April 28 Swedish radiation monitoring stations, more than 800 miles to the northwest of Chernobyl, reported radiation levels 40 percent higher than normal. Later that day, the Soviet news agency acknowledged that a major nuclear accident had occurred at Chernobyl.

In the opening days of the crisis, 32 people died at Chernobyl and dozens more suffered radiation burns. The radiation that escaped into the atmosphere, which was several times that produced by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was spread by the wind over Northern and Eastern Europe, contaminating millions of acres of forest and farmland. An estimated 5,000 Soviet citizens eventually died from cancer and other radiation-induced illnesses caused by their exposure to the Chernobyl radiation, and millions more had their health adversely affected. In 2000, the last working reactors at Chernobyl were shut down and the plant was officially closed."

 

[lokie]

Nicolaus Copernicus was born and died in Royal Prussia, a region that had been part of the Kingdom of Poland since 1466. A polyglot and polymath, he obtained a doctorate in canon law and was also a mathematician, astronomer, physician, classics scholar, translator, governor, diplomat, and economist. In 1517 he derived a quantity theory of money—a key concept in economics—and in 1519 he formulated an economic principle that later came to be called Gresham's law.

4/26/1514: Copernicus makes his first observations of Saturn
Copernicus made his first observations of Saturn. He later proposed that the sun is stationary and that the earth and the planets move in circular orbits around it.


The first observation of Saturn through a telescope was made by Galileo Galilei in 1610. His first telescope was so crude that he wasn't able to distinguish the planet's rings; instead he thought the planet might have ears or two large moons on either side of it


1: Drawings of the first observations of Saturn with a telescope. I: Galileo (1610), II: Scheiner (1614), III: Riccioli (1641). From Systema Saturnium, Huygens (1659).


Saturn's Rings Shine in Hubble Portrait

Source: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (GSFC), M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley) and the OPAL Team
Published: September 12, 2019
Historical Date: June 20, 2019

The latest view of Saturn from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captures exquisite details of the ring system — which looks like a phonograph record with grooves that represent detailed structure within the rings — and atmospheric details that once could only be captured by spacecraft visiting the distant world. Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 observed Saturn on June 20, 2019, as the planet made its closest approach to Earth, at about 845 million miles away. This image is the second in a yearly series of snapshots taken as part of the Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) project. OPAL is helping scientists understand the atmospheric dynamics and evolution of our solar system's gas giant planets. In Saturn's case, astronomers will be able to track shifting weather patterns and other changes to identify trends.

 

[mysunnyboy]

On this day, I’ve come to the understanding that I can no longer smoke or vape