Archive for the 'History and Politics' Category

2514- Jasper Kettner

Boy meets girl.

2442

China”s one-child policy, and a traditional preference for male heirs, has led many couples to try to ensure that their single offspring is a boy. Some pay for illegal ultrasound tests to discover the sex of a foetus, and abort it if it is female.

2441

Archeologists believe they may have found the remains of two children of Russia”s last tsar, executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918. Ceramic vessels found nearby appear to have contained sulphuric acid, consistent with an account by one of the Bolshevik firing squad, who said that after shooting the family they doused the bodies in acid to destroy the flesh and prevent them becoming objects of veneration.

2436

47 million files hold meticulously recorded information on forced labourers, concentration camp victims and political prisoners. In grey, bureaucratic language the Nazis kept records on the smallest details – from the number of lice on a prisoner”s head to the exact moment of their execution.

2426

Bulgarian society is still divided on whether anyone should bear moral responsibility for the communist past and, if so, who. Few believe the new commission charged with opening the archives will act impartially.

2423

“Follow the money”. This famous phrase has inspired generations of investigative reporters.

2422

She was known for dressing like a man and wearing a false beard, and was more powerful than either of her more famous female successors, Nefertiti and Cleopatra.

2418

Armed gangs are seizing children for ransom payments in the lawless north of the Central African Republic.

2415

A chance meeting in a White House waiting room sparked a young, almost adolescent journalist”s friendship with an FBI agent, and this friendship would change their country forever.

2414

The US Central Intelligence Agency is to declassify hundreds of documents detailing some of the agency”s worst illegal abuses. Among them: the confinement of a Soviet defector in the mid-1960s; assassination plots of foreign leaders, including Cuba”s Fidel Castro; wiretapping and surveillance of journalists; behaviour modification experiments on “unwitting” US citizens.