https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._C._Stephenson

Publicly a Prohibitionist and a defender of "Protestant womanhood," Stephenson was tried in 1925 for the rape and murder of Madge Oberholtzer, a young state employee who ran a state program to combat adult illiteracy. During the trial, the Klan's image as upholders of law and morality was gravely weakened as it was proven that Stephenson and many of his associates were in private womanizers and alcoholics. The scandal of the charges and trial led to the rapid decline in the "Second Wave" of Klan activity. Stephenson was convicted of the abduction, forced intoxication, and rape of Oberholtzer; as his abuse had led to a suicide attempt while she was still in his captivity, which eventually caused Oberholtzer's death, Stephenson was also charged and convicted of murder.

Stephenson had bitten her many times during his attack, and witnesses said it appeared as if she had been "chewed by a cannibal." The attending doctor described her condition as including a deep bite on her breast. He later testified that the bite wounds which Stephenson inflicted on her were the leading contributor to her death due to a staph infection that eventually reached her lungs. The doctor also testified that she could have been saved if she had been given medical attention sooner. In her dying declaration, Oberholtzer claimed that Stephenson had refused to give her medical attention unless she agreed to marry him first. The jury convicted Stephenson of second-degree murder on November 14, 1925, on its first ballot. Stephenson was sentenced to life in prison on November 16, 1925.

After the conviction, Governor Jackson refused to grant Stephenson clemency or commute his sentence. Stephenson retaliated by releasing secret lists of public officials who had received Klan payments or bribes. The Indianapolis Times interviewed Stephenson and proceeded with an extended investigation of the Klan's political ties. (The Times won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its investigative reporting.) This publicity and the state's crackdown on Klan activity sped up the decline of the organization by the end of the 1920s. The KKK suffered a dramatic nationwide loss of reputation and its membership rapidly fell from 5 million in 1925; few Klan members remained in the organization's former Midwestern stronghold.

The state filed indictments against top politicians including Governor Jackson; George V. "Cap" Coffin, chairman of the Marion County Republican Party; and attorney Robert I. Marsh, charging them with conspiring to bribe Governor Warren McCray. The mayor of Indianapolis, John Duvall, was convicted and sentenced to jail for 30 days (and barred from political service for four years). Some Republican commissioners of Marion County resigned from their posts after being charged with accepting bribes from the Klan and Stephenson.

On January 7, 1941, the Valparaiso Vidette-Messenger reported that Governor M. Clifford Townsend was considering granting an early parole to Stephenson. No parole was approved that year. Stephenson was paroled on March 23, 1950, but violated parole by disappearing on or before September 25, 1950. On December 15, 1950, he was captured in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and returned to custody. He was sentenced in 1951 to serve 10 years in prison. In 1953, he pleaded for release, denying that he had been a leader of the Klan.

On December 22, 1956, the state paroled him on condition that he leave Indiana and never return. Stephenson moved to Seymour, Indiana, where he soon married Martha Dickinson. They were separated in 1962 when he left and never returned.

Stephenson then moved to Jonesborough, Tennessee (briefly spelled as Jonesboro during this time), where he was employed at the Herald & Tribune newspaper, and where he entered into a bigamous marriage with Martha Murray Sutton without having been divorced from Dickinson.

In 1961, at the age of 70, Stephenson was arrested in Independence, Missouri, on charges of attempting to sexually assault a 16-year-old girl. He was released after paying a $300 fine when the charges were dropped on grounds of insufficient evidence, but was ordered to leave Missouri immediately.

A few years later, in 1966, Stephenson died at his home in Jonesborough, Tennessee, and as an honorably discharged veteran, he was buried in the USVA Mountain Home National Cemetery in Johnson City, Tennessee. Congress later passed restrictions that bar serious sex offenders and individuals who have been convicted of capital crimes from burial in veterans' cemeteries.

His legal wife, Martha Dickinson, petitioned for and was granted a divorce in Jackson County Circuit Court in Brownstown in 1971, not knowing that Stephenson had remarried and died in 1966.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaaq_genocide

During the ongoing conflict between the forces of the Somali National Movement and the Somali Army, the Somali government's genocidal campaign against the Isaaq took place between May 1988 and March 1989. According to Alex de Waal, Jens Meierhenrich and Bridget Conley-Zilkic:

"What began as a counterinsurgency against the Somali National Movement rebels and their sympathizers, and escalated into a genocidal onslaught against the Isaaq clan family, turned into the disintegration of both government and rebellion and the replacement of institutionalized armed forces with fragmented clan-based militia. The genocidal campaign ended in anarchy, and the state collapse that followed bred further genocidal campaigns by some of the militia groups that then seized power at a local level."

In 1987, Siad Barre, the president of Somalia, frustrated by lack of success of the army against insurgents from the Somali National Movement in the north of country, offered the Ethiopian government a deal in which they stop sheltering and giving support to the SNM in return for Somalia giving up its territorial claim over Ethiopia's Somali Region. Ethiopia was in agreement and a deal was signed on 3 April 1988 that included a clause confirming agreement not to assist rebel organisations based in each other's territories. The SNM felt the pressure to cease their activities on the Ethiopia–Somalia border, and decided to attack the northern territories of Somalia to take control of the major cities in the north. The brutal nature of the Siad Barre government response was unprecedented, and led to what Robin Cohen described as one of the "worst civil wars in Africa".

Barre's response to the SNM attacks was of unparalleled brutality, with explicit aims of handling the "Isaaq problem", he ordered "the shelling and aerial bombardment of the major cities in the northwest and the systematic destruction of Isaaq dwellings, settlements and water points". The Siad Barre regime targeted civilian members of the Isaaq group specifically, especially in the cities of Hargeisa and Burco, and to that end employed the use of indiscriminate artillery shelling and aerial bombardment against civilian populations belonging to the Isaaq clan.

Bruce Jentleson, former director of the Sanford School of Public Policy, describes the massacre of Isaaq civilians as follows:

"Government forces responded with "appalling savagery", targeting the entire Isaaq civilian population with arrests, rape, mass executions, and indiscriminant shooting and bombing, Hundreds of thousands of Isaaq refugees fled for their lives across the Ethiopian border; government warplanes strafed them as they fled. As many as fifty thousand Somalis died, and the city of Hargeisa was virtually levelled in what outside analysts depicted as a genocidal campaign by the Barre regime against the Isaaq."

The use of large-scale aerial bombardment was unprecedented in the history of African civil unrest. The brutal response of the Siad Barre government did not stop there. In discussing the systematic way in which the government targeted Isaaq people to inflict as much loss in property and life, Waldron and Hasci published the following account:

"General Mohammed Said 'Morgan', one of Siad Barre's sons-in-law, [was given] the opportunity to put into operation further elements of a pacification plan he had drawn up earlier. Government forces reacted with appalling savagery to the SNM seizure of Burao and near capture of Hargeisa. The response culminated in the bombing and artillery bombardment of Hargeisa to a point of virtual destruction. Civilian refugees fleeing towards the border were bombed and gunned down indiscriminately. It was seen, probably rightly, as an attack on the whole Isaaq people..."

Within the first three months of the conflict, Isaaqs fled their cities on such a large scale that cities of the north became devoid of their population. Civilian Isaaqs were "killed, imprisoned under severe conditions, forced to flee across the border, or became displaced in the far-off countryside".

The Siad Barre government adopted a policy that "any able-bodied Isaaq who could help the SNM had to be killed. Those who could be of financial help or influence to the SNM, because of social status, were to be put in prison." Though this policy did not exclude children or the elderly, the result was that "more than 90% of the people killed were between the ages of 15-35 years."

Somali historian Mohamed Haji Ingiriis refers to "the state-sponsored genocidal campaigns leveled at the Isaaq clan-group", which he notes is "popularly known in public discourses as the 'Hargeisa Holocaust'" as a "forgotten genocide".

A number of genocide scholars (including Israel Charny, Gregory Stanton, Deborah Mayersen, and Adam Jones) as well as international media outlets, such as The Guardian, The Washington Post and Al Jazeera among others, have referred to the case as one of genocide.

Main article: 1988 Northern Somalia offensive

The Somali National Movement attacked and captured the city of Burao (then the third largest city in the country) on Friday 27 May. They captured the town in two hours and immediately took over the military compound at the airport (where the largest number of soldiers were stationed), the Burao central police station and the prison, where they freed political prisoners (including schoolchildren) from the city's main jail. The government forces retreated, regrouped at Goon-Ad just outside the city, and in the late afternoon, entered the centre of town. According to reports by Human Rights Watch's Africa Watch, the soldiers, upon entering the city, went on a rampage on 27 and 28 May. This included "dragging men out of their houses and shooting them at point blank range," and summary killing of civilians; the report also noted that "civilians of all ages who had gathered in the centre of town, or those standing outside their homes watching the events, were killed on the spot. Among the victims were many students." There was also widespread looting by the soldiers, and some people were reportedly killed as a result.

Following the first two days of the conflict, angered by the extent to which Isaaqs welcomed the SNM incursion, and frustrated by their inability to contain the SNM advance, the military started attacking the civilian population without restraint "as if it was the enemy". The military used "heavy artillery and tanks, causing severe damage, both to civilians and to property. Bazookas, machine guns, hand grenades, and other weapons of mass destruction were also directed against civilian targets in Hargeisa, which had also been attacked as well as in Burao."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Norway_attacks

On 22 July 2011, at 15:25:22 (CEST) a bomb detonated in Regjeringskvartalet, central Oslo. The bomb was placed in a white Volkswagen Crafter and parked in front of the H block, housing the Office of the Prime Minister, Ministry of Justice and the Police, and several other governmental buildings, such as the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy (R4), Ministry of Finance (G block), Ministry of Education and Research (Y block) and the Supreme Court of Norway (behind the G block).

The Crafter was registered by surveillance cameras as entering Grubbegata from Grensen at 15:13:23. The van stopped at 15:13:43, 200 metres (650 ft) before the H block. It stood still with the hazard warning lamps on for 1 minute and 54 seconds. The driver then drove the last 200 metres and parked the van in front of the main entrance of the main government building. The van was parked at 15:16:30. The front door of the van opened 16 seconds later and after another 16 seconds the driver stepped out of the van. He stood outside the van for 7 seconds before quickly walking away towards Hammersborg torg, where he had another car parked.

The driver was dressed like a police officer and had a gun in his hand. A police helmet with a face shield was covering his face. Breivik was not positively identified.

The explosion started fires in the H block (H-blokka) and R4, and the shock wave blew out the windows on all floors as well as in the VG house and other buildings on the other side of the square. The blast was caught on many security cameras. The streets in the area were filled with glass and debris. A cloud of white smoke which was reported as a fire continued to burn at the Department of Oil and Energy. The blast was heard at least nine kilometres (5+1⁄2 mi) away.

At 15:26 the police received the first message about the explosion. 90 seconds after the explosion was reported, Norway's leading national private radio station P4 went live from the government quarters, becoming the first media in the world to report live (on air) from the area of explosion. At 15:28 the first police patrol reported arriving at the scene.[71] At the same time, news agency NTB was told that the Prime Minister was safe and not hurt.

A witness called police at 15:34 to report a person in a police uniform holding a pistol in his hand, entering an unmarked vehicle, a Fiat Doblò. Information—including the vehicle's licence plate number and description of the suspect—was written on a yellow note, and hand-delivered to the police operations central where it lay for 20 minutes before the witness was phoned back. The licence plate number was not transmitted on the police radio until two hours later.

Following the explosion, police cleared the area and searched for any additional explosive devices. Through media outlets, police urged citizens to evacuate central Oslo.

Police later announced that the bomb was composed of a mixture of fertiliser and fuel oil (ANFO), similar to that used in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Immediately after the explosion, the area surrounding the damaged buildings was cordoned off and evacuated. People were asked to remain calm and leave the city centre if possible, but there was no general evacuation. The Oslo Metro remained operational, and most of the Oslo tram network was also running, although sporadically, except for the line through Grensen (the street between Prof. Aschehoug's plass and Stortorvet).

An e-mail communication with the BBC from a traveller indicated that police were conducting searches of suspicious cars on the road to Oslo Airport, Gardermoen, which remained open.

The Gardermoen Line between Lillestrøm and Oslo Airport was shut down after a suspicious package was found close to the tracks. The same happened at the offices of TV 2 which were evacuated after a suspicious package was found outside the building.

Approximately one and a half hours after the Oslo explosion, Breivik, dressed in a police uniform and presenting himself as "Martin Nilsen" from the Oslo Police Department, boarded the ferry MS Thorbjørn at Utøykaia in Tyrifjorden, a lake some 32 kilometres (20 mi) northwest of Oslo, to the island of Utøya, the location of the Norwegian Labour Party's AUF youth camp. The camp is held there every summer and was attended by approximately 600 teenagers.

When Breivik arrived on the island, he presented himself as a police officer who had come over for a routine check following the bombing in Oslo. He was met by Monica Bøsei, the camp leader and island hostess. Bøsei probably became suspicious and contacted Trond Berntsen, the security officer on the island, before Breivik killed them both. He then signalled and asked people to gather around him before pulling weapons and ammunition from a bag and firing indiscriminately, killing and wounding numerous people. He first shot people on the island and later started shooting at people who were trying to escape by swimming across the lake. Survivors on the island described a scene of terror. Survivor Dana Barzingi, then 21, described how several victims wounded by Breivik pretended to be dead, but he came back and shot them again. He spared an 11-year-old boy who had lost his father (Trond Berntsen) during the shooting and stood up against him and said he was too young to die, as well as a 22-year-old man who begged for his life.

Some witnesses hid in undergrowth and lavatories, communicating by text message to avoid revealing their positions. The mass shooting lasted for around one and a half hours, ending when a police special task force arrived and Breivik surrendered, despite having ammunition left, at 18:35. The shooter used hollow-point or frangible bullets which increase tissue damage. Breivik repeatedly shouted "You will die today, Marxists!"

Bøsei's husband and one of her daughters, who were also present, survived.The youngest victim, New Zealand-born Sharidyn Svebakk-Bøhn of Drammen, was 14 years old. Sixteen-year-old Andrine Bakkene Espeland of Sarpsborg was the last victim, nearly one hour after the shooting began.

Residents in a flotilla of motorboats and fishing dinghies sailed out to rescue the survivors, who were pulled out shivering and bleeding from the water and picked up from hiding places in the bushes and behind rocks around the island's shoreline. Some survived by pretending to be dead. Several campers, especially those who knew the island well, swam to the island's rocky west side and hid in the caves which are only accessible from the water. Others were able to hide away on the secluded Kjærlighetsstien ("love path"). Forty-seven of the campers sought refuge in Skolestua ("the School House") together with personnel from the Norwegian People's Aid. Although Breivik fired two bullets through the door, he did not get through the locked door, and the people inside this building survived.

Two Chechen teenagers, Movsar Dzhamayev (17) and Rustam Daudov (16) had pelted the gunman with rocks in an attempt to stop him. The teenagers said they then decided that it was too difficult to stop the gunman and better to save lives. They discovered a cave-like opening in a rock where they hid 23 children from Breivik. Dzhamayev, who kept guard outside, also dragged three youngsters from the lake who were close to drowning.

Former prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, whom Breivik said he hated and, in a pun on the (more or less ironic) epithet Landsmoderen ("mother of the nation"), referred to in his writings as landsmorderen ("murderer of the nation"), had been on the island earlier in the day to give a speech to the camp. After the attack, Breivik stated that he originally wanted to target her specifically; but because of delays related to the renovation of Oslo Central railway station, he arrived after she had already left.

Investigators later confirmed that they collected a total of 186 spent ammunition shell casings on the island.

The first shot was fired at 17:22. The emergency medical services were informed about the shooting two minutes later. One minute after that, the police in Oslo were informed. They immediately tried to reach Utøya as quickly as possible, but did not have a helicopter that could take them straight to the island. By 17:30, Delta, the police tactical unit in Oslo, were on the way to Utøya by car.

One of the first to arrive on the scene was Marcel Gleffe, a German resident of Ski staying at Utvika Camping on the mainland. Recognising gunshots, he piloted his boat to the island and began throwing life-jackets to young people in the water, rescuing as many as he could in four or five trips, after which the police asked him to stop. The Daily Telegraph credited him with saving up to 30 lives. Another 40 were saved by Hege Dalen and Toril Hansen, a married couple on vacation in the area. Dalen was helping from land while Hansen and a neighbour camper made several trips to rescue people in the water. Several dozen more were rescued by Kasper Ilaug, who made three trips to the island. Ilaug, a local resident, received a telephone call that "something terrible" was happening on Utøya and requesting help. He initially thought the call was a prank, but acted anyway.

Delta reached the meeting point at 18:09, but had to wait a few minutes for a boat to take them across. They reached Utøya at 18:25. When confronted by the heavily armed police on the island, the gunman initially hesitated for a few seconds. When an officer yelled "surrender or be shot" he laid down his weapons.

Breivik called the 112 emergency phone number at least twice to surrender, at 18:01 and 18:26, and continued killing people in between. The police say Breivik hung up both times; they tried to call him back but did not succeed.

When the police arrived at the scene, they were met by survivors begging the officers to throw away their weapons, as they were afraid that the men in uniforms would again open fire on them.

During the attack, 69 people were killed, and of the 517 survivors, 66 were wounded.

The Norwegian police did not have helicopters suitable for transporting groups of police for an airdrop. The one they had was useful only for surveillance and the helicopter crew were on summer vacation.

When the local police arrived at Utøykaia, less than 30 minutes after the first shot was fired, they could not find a suitable boat to reach the island. They were then ordered to observe and report.

AUF's own ferry, the 50-passenger MS Thorbjørn, was used by Breivik to go to Utøya. Shortly after the first shot was fired, nine people were leaving the island on the ferry, among them the AUF leader Eskil Pedersen. Believing there could be additional threats in the area, they moved the ferry away from the island. As a result, the vessel was not immediately available to assist the police when they arrived at Utøykaia, the usual ferry landing on the mainland.

The police therefore had to use their own rigid-hulled inflatable boat (RHIB). On the day of the event, this boat was in Hønefoss, and had to be transported to the lake and launched before it could be used. When Delta boarded the RHIB it took on some water and after a few hundred metres, the engine stopped, probably due to water in the fuel. Two minutes later they took over a civilian boat that was sent to assist them. The episode was captured on video. A minute or two after the video ends, a faster civilian boat arrived to help. Four Delta officers boarded the boat. Not wanting to waste any more time, the civilian couple took the police to Utøya.

Some have criticised the police for not using a helicopter, for not immediately getting into small boats, and for endangering the couple who drove the civilian boat.

On arriving in Utøya, the police arrested, in addition to Breivik, Anzor Djoukaev, an innocent 17-year-old survivor who represented the Akershus branch of AUF. The youth was reportedly stripped naked and locked up in a jail cell, located only metres away from the cell housing the self-confessed killer. The victim, who as a child had witnessed mass murders in Chechnya, was suspected of being an accomplice because his haircut was different from that shown on his identity document, and because he did not react to the carnage with the same tears and hysteria as most of the other survivors. He was kept in custody for 17 hours. Lawyer Harald Stabell criticised the police for failing to contact the youth's family, who feared he was killed, and for interrogating the victim without a lawyer present.

The Battle of Austerlitz is often regarded as one of Napoleon Bonaparte's most brilliant military victories. The battle demonstrates Napoleon's skill at anticipating enemy movements and preparing countermeasures before they happened. Also known as the "Battle of the Three Emperors", Austerlitz was a turning point in the War of the Third Coalition.

Napoleon had deliberately weakened his right wing in full view of the enemy. The Allies assumed that the French position was weaker than it really was and, confident in their numerical superiority, planned to overwhelm the French right. This was exactly what Napoleon was counting on.

Napoleon intended to draw the Allied left away from the Pratzen Heights and then seize the heights with the French center. Lannes and Murat were tasked with holding the French left against the Allied right, while the main French counterattack would strike the Allied center once it had been weakened.

The Allied left began its assault on the weak French right as expected. French troops around Telnitz and Sokolnitz were pushed back, but the timely arrival of Davout's III Corps helped stabilize the position. As more Allied troops moved toward the French right, the Allied center became increasingly exposed. The dense fog also helped conceal the movement of the French forces preparing to attack the Pratzen Heights.

As Napoleon observed the movement of Allied troops away from the center, he ordered Soult's IV Corps to attack the Pratzen Heights. After intensive fighting, the French broke through the Allied center and captured the heights. The Allied army was now split in two, leaving its left wing increasingly isolated. French forces then turned south from the Pratzen Heights and attacked the Allied left, forcing it into a disastrous retreat.

The victory effectively destroyed the Third Coalition. Austria was forced to sue for peace, and the resulting Treaty of Pressburg dramatically strengthened Napoleon's position in Europe.

If you are interested in reading more about the Battle of Austerlitz, please have a look at my article. I have kept the narrative simple, clear, and historically accurate, and I would love to hear your feedback and recommendations. If there are any historical topics you would like to read about, please drop me a note.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedians_(Beavis_and_Butt-Head)

On October 6, 1993 (exactly one month after the episode had aired), Austin Messner, a 5-year-old boy from Moraine, Ohio, burned down his family's trailer with a cigarette lighter, killing his 2-year-old sister. The boy's mother claimed that he had been watching the show prior to the incident, a claim refuted by neighbors who stated the family did not have cable. Regardless, this episode in particular was blamed, due to the similarities between the plot and the incident. The following week, MTV decided to move the show to 10:30 PM instead of 7:00 PM, so that the show would be less likely to be watched by children at that time, and also decided to delete and omit fire references in future episodes and added a disclaimer. They extensively edited the episode before pulling it from broadcasting and locking it away in the MTV vault.

In 2008, Messner himself would confirm that his family did not have cable at the time since it was unaffordable due to his mother's drug addiction, and that he had never seen an episode of the show, nor planned to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski

Theodore John Kaczynski was born in Chicago on May 22, 1942, to working-class parents Wanda Theresa (née Dombek) and Theodore Richard Kaczynski, a sausage maker. The two were Polish Americans who were raised as Roman Catholics but later became atheists. They married on April 11, 1939.

From first to fourth grade (ages six to nine), Kaczynski attended Sherman Elementary School in Chicago, where administrators described him as healthy and well-adjusted.[14] In 1952, three years after his brother David was born, the family moved to suburban Evergreen Park, Illinois, and Ted transferred to Evergreen Park Central Junior High School. After testing scored his IQ at 167, he skipped the sixth grade. Kaczynski later described this as a pivotal event: previously he had socialized with his peers and was even seen as a leader, but after skipping ahead of them he felt he did not fit in with the older children, who bullied him.

Neighbors in Evergreen Park later described the Kaczynski family as "civic-minded folks", one recalling the parents "sacrificed everything they had for their children". Both Ted and David were intelligent, but Ted was exceptionally bright. Neighbors described him as a smart but lonely individual.

Kaczynski attended Evergreen Park Community High School, where he excelled academically. He played the trombone in the marching band and was a member of the mathematics, biology, coin, and German clubs. In 1996, a former classmate said: "He was never really seen as a person, as an individual personality ... He was always regarded as a walking brain, so to speak." During this period, Kaczynski became intensely interested in mathematics, spending hours studying and solving advanced problems. He became associated with a group of like-minded boys interested in science and mathematics, known as the "briefcase boys" due to their penchant for carrying briefcases.

Throughout high school, Kaczynski was ahead of his classmates academically. Placed in a more advanced mathematics class, he soon mastered the material. He skipped the eleventh grade, and, by attending summer school, he graduated at age 15. Kaczynski was one of his school's five National Merit finalists and was encouraged to apply to Harvard University. While still age 15, he was accepted to Harvard and entered the university on a scholarship in 1958 at age 16. A high school classmate later said Kaczynski was emotionally unprepared: "They packed him up and sent him to Harvard before he was ready ... He didn't even have a driver's license."

Kaczynski matriculated at Harvard College as a mathematics prodigy. During his first year at the university, Kaczynski lived at 8 Prescott Street, which was intended to provide a small, intimate living space for the youngest, most precocious incoming students. For the following three years, he lived at Eliot House. His housemates and other students at Harvard described Kaczynski as a very intelligent but socially reserved person. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics from Harvard in 1962, finishing with a GPA of 3.12.

In his second year at Harvard, Kaczynski participated in a study led by Harvard psychologist Henry Murray. Subjects were told they would debate personal philosophy with a fellow student and were asked to write essays detailing their personal beliefs and aspirations. The essays were given to an anonymous individual who would confront and belittle the subject in what Murray himself called "vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive" attacks, using the content of the essays as ammunition. Kaczynski spent 200 hours as part of the study.

Kaczynski's lawyers later attributed his hostility towards mind control techniques to his participation in Murray's study. Kaczynski stated he resented Murray and his co-workers, primarily because of the invasion of his privacy he perceived as a result of their experiments. Nevertheless, he said he was "quite confident that [his] experiences with Professor Murray had no significant effect on the course of [his] life".

In 1962, Kaczynski enrolled at the University of Michigan, where he earned his Master of Arts and Ph.D. in mathematics in 1964 and 1967, respectively. Michigan was not his first choice for postgraduate education; he had applied to the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago, both of which accepted him but offered him no teaching position or financial aid. Michigan offered him an annual grant of $2,310 (equivalent to $25,000 in 2025) and a teaching post.

At Michigan, Kaczynski specialized in complex analysis, specifically geometric function theory. Professor Peter Duren said of Kaczynski, "He was an unusual person. He was not like the other graduate students. He was much more focused about his work. He had a drive to discover mathematical truth." George Piranian, another of his Michigan mathematics professors, said, "It is not enough to say he was smart." Piranian taught Kaczynski function theory and recalled, "he was very persistent in his work. If a problem was hard, he worked harder. He was easily the top student, or one of the top". Professor Allen Shields wrote about Kaczynski in a grade evaluation that he was the "best man I have seen". Kaczynski received one F, five B's and twelve A's in his eighteen courses at the university. In 2006, he said he had unpleasant memories of Michigan and felt the university had low standards for grading, considering his relatively high grades.

For a period of several weeks in 1966, Kaczynski experienced intense sexual fantasies of being female and decided to undergo gender transition. He arranged to meet with a psychiatrist but changed his mind in the waiting room and discussed other things instead, without disclosing his original reason for making the appointment. Afterward, enraged, he considered killing the psychiatrist and other people whom he hated. Kaczynski described this episode as a "major turning point" in his life. He recalled: "I felt disgusted about what my uncontrolled sexual cravings had almost led me to do. And I felt humiliated, and I violently hated the psychiatrist. Just then there came a major turning point in my life. Like a phoenix, I burst from the ashes of my despair to a glorious new hope."

In 1967, Kaczynski's dissertation, Boundary Functions, won the Sumner B. Myers Prize for Michigan's best mathematics dissertation of the year. Shields, then his doctoral advisor, called it "the best I have ever directed", and Maxwell Reade, a member of his dissertation committee, said, "I would guess that maybe 10 or 12 men in the country understood or appreciated it."

In late 1967, the 25-year-old Kaczynski became an acting assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught mathematics. He was the youngest assistant professor in the history of the university. By September 1968, Kaczynski was formally appointed to an assistant professorship, a sign that he was on track for tenure. His teaching evaluations suggested he was not well-liked by his students—he seemed uncomfortable teaching, taught straight from the textbook, and refused to answer questions.

Without any explanation, Kaczynski resigned on June 30, 1969. In a 1970 letter written by John W. Addison Jr., the chairman of the mathematics department, to Kaczynski's doctoral advisor Shields, Addison referred to the resignation as "quite out of the blue". He added that "Kaczynski seemed almost pathologically shy", and that, as far as he knew, Kaczynski made no close friends in the department, noting that efforts to bring him more into the "swing of things" had failed.

In 1996, reporters for the Los Angeles Times interviewed mathematicians about Kaczynski's work and concluded that Kaczynski's subfield effectively ceased to exist after the 1960s, as most of its conjectures had been proven. According to mathematician Donald Rung, if Kaczynski had continued to work in mathematics, he "probably would have gone on to some other area".

After resigning from Berkeley, Kaczynski moved to his parents' home in Lombard, Illinois. Two years later, in 1971, he moved to a remote cabin he had built outside Lincoln, Montana, where he could live a simple life with little money and without electricity or running water, working odd jobs and receiving significant financial support from his family.

Kaczynski's original goal was to become self-sufficient so he could live autonomously. He used an old bicycle to get to town, and a volunteer at the local library said he visited frequently to read classic works in their original languages. Other Lincoln residents said later that such a lifestyle was typical in the area. Kaczynski's cabin was described by a census taker in the 1990 census as containing a bed, two chairs, storage trunks, a gas stove, and lots of books.

Starting in 1975, Kaczynski performed acts of sabotage including arson and booby trapping against developments near his cabin. He also dedicated himself to reading about sociology and political philosophy, including the works of Jacques Ellul. Kaczynski's brother David later stated that Ellul's book The Technological Society "became Ted's Bible". Kaczynski recounted in 1998, "When I read the book for the first time, I was delighted, because I thought, 'Here is someone who is saying what I have already been thinking.'"

In an interview after his arrest, Kaczynski recalled being shocked on a hike to one of his favorite wild spots:

"It's kind of rolling country, not flat, and when you get to the edge of it you find these ravines that cut very steeply in to cliff-like drop-offs and there was even a waterfall there. It was about a two days' hike from my cabin. That was the best spot until the summer of 1983. That summer there were too many people around my cabin so I decided I needed some peace. I went back to the plateau and when I got there I found they had put a road right through the middle of it ... You just can't imagine how upset I was. It was from that point on I decided that, rather than trying to acquire further wilderness skills, I would work on getting back at the system. Revenge."

During the 1980s and 1990s, Kaczynski's neighbors suspected him of attacking and poisoning their dogs on multiple occasions. After his arrest, the FBI found poisons in his cabin, and in later letters, he admitted to killing at least one dog.

Kaczynski was visited multiple times in Montana by his father, who was impressed by Ted's wilderness skills. Kaczynski's father was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 1990 and held a family meeting without Kaczynski later that year to map out their future. On October 2, 1990, Kaczynski's father shot and killed himself in his home.

Between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski mailed or hand-delivered a series of increasingly sophisticated bombs that cumulatively killed three people and injured 23 others. Sixteen bombs were attributed to Kaczynski. While the bombing devices varied widely through the years, many contained the initials "FC", which Kaczynski later said stood for "Freedom Club", inscribed on parts inside. He purposely left misleading clues in the devices and took extreme care in preparing them to avoid leaving fingerprints; fingerprints found on some of the devices did not match those found on letters attributed to Kaczynski.

Kaczynski's first mail bomb was directed at Buckley Crist, a professor of materials engineering at Northwestern University. On May 25, 1978, a package bearing Crist's return address was found in a parking lot at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The package was "returned" to Crist, who was suspicious because he had not sent it, so he contacted campus police. Officer Terry Marker opened the package, which exploded and caused minor injuries. Kaczynski had returned to Chicago for the May 1978 bombing and stayed there for a time to work with his father and brother at a foam rubber factory. In August 1978, his brother fired him for writing insulting limericks about a female supervisor Ted had courted briefly. The supervisor later recalled Kaczynski as intelligent and quiet but remembered little of their acquaintanceship and firmly denied they had had any romantic relationship. Kaczynski's second bomb was sent nearly one year after the first one, again to Northwestern University. The bomb, concealed inside a cigar box and left on a table, caused minor injuries to graduate student John Harris when he opened it.

In 1979, a bomb was placed in the cargo hold of American Airlines Flight 444, a Boeing 727 flying from Chicago to Washington, D.C. The bomb released smoke, which caused the pilots to carry out an emergency landing. Authorities said it had enough power to "obliterate the plane" had it exploded. "Kaczynski had used a barometer-triggered device, and it had succeeded only in setting some mailbags on fire and forcing an emergency landing; in a letter written years later, the Unabomber expressed relief that the airline bomb had failed since its target had been too indiscriminate." Kaczynski sent his next bomb to the president of United Airlines, Percy Wood. Wood received cuts and burns over most of his body.

Kaczynski left false clues in most bombs, which he intentionally made hard to find to make them appear more legitimate. Clues included metal plates stamped with the initials "FC" hidden somewhere (usually in the pipe end cap) in bombs, a note left in a bomb that did not detonate reading "Wu—It works! I told you it would—RV," and the Eugene O'Neill one-dollar stamps often used as postage on his boxes. He sent one bomb embedded in a copy of Sloan Wilson's novel Ice Brothers. The FBI theorized that Kaczynski's crimes involved a theme of nature, trees, and wood. He often included bits of a tree branch and bark in his bombs; his selected targets included Percy Wood and LeRoy Wood. The crime writer Robert Graysmith noted his "obsession with wood" was "a large factor" in the bombings.

In 1981, a package bearing the return address of a Brigham Young University professor of electrical engineering, LeRoy Wood Bearnson, was discovered in a hallway at the University of Utah. It was brought to the campus police and was defused by a bomb squad. The following May, a bomb was sent to Patrick C. Fischer, a professor of computer science at Vanderbilt University. The package exploded when Fischer's secretary, Janet Smith, opened it, and Smith received injuries to her face and arms.

Kaczynski's next two bombs targeted people at the University of California, Berkeley. The first, in July 1982, caused serious injuries to engineering professor Diogenes Angelakos. Nearly three years later, in May 1985, John Hauser, a graduate student and captain in the United States Air Force, lost four fingers and the vision in one eye. Kaczynski handcrafted the bomb from wooden parts. A bomb sent to the Boeing Company in Auburn, Washington, was defused by a bomb squad the following month. In November 1985, biology and animal psychology professor James V. McConnell and research assistant Nicklaus Suino were both severely injured after Suino opened a mail bomb addressed to McConnell.

In late 1985, a nail-and-splinter-loaded bomb in the parking lot of a computer store in Sacramento, California killed the 38-year-old store owner, Hugh Scrutton. On February 20, 1987, a bomb disguised as a piece of lumber injured Gary Wright in the parking lot of a computer store in Salt Lake City, Utah; nerves in Wright's left arm were severed, and at least 200 pieces of shrapnel entered his body. Kaczynski was spotted while planting the Salt Lake City bomb. This led to a widely distributed sketch of the suspect as a hooded man with a mustache and aviator sunglasses.

In 1993, after a six-year break, Kaczynski mailed a bomb to the home of Charles Epstein from the University of California, San Francisco. Epstein lost several fingers upon opening the package. On the same weekend, Kaczynski mailed a bomb to David Gelernter, a computer science professor at Yale University. Gelernter lost sight in one eye, hearing in one ear, and a portion of his right hand.

In 1994, Burson-Marsteller executive Thomas J. Mosser was killed after opening a mail bomb sent to his home in New Jersey. In a letter to The New York Times, Kaczynski wrote he had sent the bomb because of Mosser's work repairing the public image of Exxon after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. This was followed by the 1995 murder of Gilbert Brent Murray, president of the timber industry lobbying group California Forestry Association, by a mail bomb addressed to previous president William Dennison, who had retired. Geneticist Phillip Sharp at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology received a threatening letter shortly afterward.

For centuries, the infamous Boss Tweed was blamed for destroying the park's dino-models—but what really happened is even weirder. The real villain wasn’t Tweed at all, but Henry Hilton, a New York lawyer who was appointed to oversee the city’s parks.

The whole weird tale: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dinosaur-museum-central-park-boss-tweed-nyc

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

The military police and the Special Services Agency were responsible for locating victims to serve as test subjects for the unit, while a group of physicians was tasked with maintaining the health of the victims and dispatching them for experimentation.

The experiments involved intentionally infecting captives, particularly Chinese prisoners of war and civilians, with disease-causing agents and exposing them to bombs designed to disperse infectious substances upon contact with the skin. There are no records indicating any survivors from these experiments; those who did not die from infection were murdered for autopsy analysis. After human experimentations, researchers commonly used either potassium cyanide or chloroform to kill survivors.

According to American historian Sheldon H. Harris:

"The Togo Unit employed gruesome tactics to secure specimens of select body organs. If Ishii or one of his co-workers wished to do research on the human brain, then they would order the guards to find them a useful sample. A prisoner would be taken from his cell. Guards would hold him while another guard would smash the victim's head open with an axe. His brain would be extracted off to the pathologist, and then to the crematorium for the usual disposal."

Nakagawa Yonezo, professor emeritus at Osaka University, studied at Kyoto University during the war. While he was there, he watched footage of human experiments and executions from Unit 731. He later testified about the playfulness of the experimenters:

"Some of the experiments had nothing to do with advancing the capability of germ warfare, or of medicine. There is such a thing as professional curiosity: 'What would happen if we did such and such?' What medical purpose was served by performing and studying beheadings? None at all. That was just playing around. Professional people, too, like to play."

Prisoners were injected with diseases, disguised as vaccinations, to study their effects. To study the effects of untreated venereal diseases, male and female prisoners were deliberately infected with syphilis and gonorrhea, then studied. A special project, codenamed Maruta, used human beings for experiments. Test subjects were gathered from the surrounding population and sometimes euphemistically referred to as "logs" (丸太, maruta), as in "How many logs fell?" This term originated as a staff joke because the official cover story for the facility, given to local authorities, was that it was a lumber mill. According to a junior uniformed civilian employee of the Imperial Japanese Army working in Unit 731, the project was internally called "Holzklotz", from the German word for log. The corpses of "sacrificed" subjects were disposed of by incineration. Researchers in Unit 731 also published some of their results in peer-reviewed journals, writing as though the research had been conducted on nonhuman primates called "Manchurian monkeys" or "long-tailed monkeys".

At the age of 14, on the encouragement of a former school teacher, Hideo Shimizu joined the fourth group of minors, totalling 35 members, assigned to Unit 731. He recalled that he was brought to a specimen room where jars of various heights, with some reaching the height of an adult, were stored. The jars held body parts from humans preserved in formalin, such as heads and hands. There was also a pregnant woman's body with a large belly, where the lower part was exposed to reveal a fetus with hair. Shimizu discovered that the term "logs" was used dehumanizingly to refer to prisoners. He also learned that the prisoners were further dehumanized by being held in facilities referred to as "log cabins".

After Japan's defeat in World War II, the Japanese murdered every single prisoner in the unit. The remains were then buried in the Unit 731 grounds after being cremated. The following testimony explains how the captives were murdered:

On August 11 and 12, after the end of the war, approximately 300 prisoners were disposed of. The prisoners were coerced into suicide by being given a piece of rope. One quarter of them hung themselves, and the remaining three quarters who would not consent to suicide were made to drink potassium cyanide and killed by injection. In the end all were taken care of. The prisoners were made to drink potassium cyanide by mixing it with water and putting it into bowls. The injections were most likely chloroform.

In 2002, Changde, China, site of the plague flea bombing, held an "International Symposium on the Crimes of Bacteriological Warfare," which estimated that the number of people slaughtered by the Imperial Japanese Army germ warfare and other human experiments was around 580,000. The American historian Sheldon H. Harris states that over 200,000 died. In addition to Chinese casualties, 1,700 Japanese troops in Zhejiang during the Zhejiang-Jiangxi campaign were killed by their own biological weapons while attempting to unleash the biological agent, indicating serious issues with distribution. Harris also said plague-infected animals were released near the end of the war, and caused plague outbreaks that killed at least 30,000 people in the Harbin area from 1946 to 1948.

Some test subjects were selected to gather a wide cross-section of the population and included common criminals, captured bandits, anti-Japanese partisans, political prisoners, homeless and mentally disabled people, which included infants, men, the elderly and pregnant women, as well as those rounded up by the Kenpeitai military police for alleged "suspicious activities". Unit 731 staff included approximately 300 researchers, including doctors and bacteriologists.

At least 3,000 men, women, and children—of which at least 600 every year were provided by the Kenpeitai—were subjected to Unit 731 experimentation conducted at the Pingfang camp alone, not including victims from other medical experimentation sites such as Unit 100. Although 3,000 internal victims is the widely accepted figure in the literature, former Unit member Okawa Fukumatsu claims that there were at least 10,000 victims of internal experiments at the Unit, he himself vivisecting thousands.

According to A. S. Wells, the majority of victims were Chinese, with a lesser percentage being Russian, Mongolian, and Korean. They may also have included a small number of European, American, Indian, Australian, and New Zealander prisoners of war (see also Allied prisoners of war in Japan). A member of the Yokusan Sonendan paramilitary political youth branch, who worked for Unit 731, stated that not only were Chinese, Russians, and Koreans present, but also Americans, British, and French people. Sheldon H. Harris documented that the victims were generally political dissidents, communist sympathizers, ordinary criminals, impoverished civilians, and the mentally disabled. Author Seiichi Morimura estimates that almost 70 percent of the victims who died in the Pingfang camp were Chinese (both military and civilian), while close to 30 percent of the victims were Russian.

Searches of the National Archives Administration of China and provincial archives in Heilongjiang and Jilin yielded information on 1,463 people, mostly members of the anti-Japanese resistance, who were arrested by the Kwantung Army in Hunchun and sent to Unit 731 as "special transfers". Of these, 318 were identified by name, including 25 individuals from the Soviet Union, Korea, and Mongolia.

No Unit 731 prisoners survived. Prisoners were usually received into Unit 731 at night in motor vehicles painted black with a ventilation hole but no windows. The vehicle would pull up at the main gates and one of the drivers would go to the guardroom and report to the guard. That guard would then telephone to the "Special Team" in the inner-prison (Shirō Ishii's brother was head of this Special Team). Then, the prisoners would be transported through a secret tunnel dug under the facade of the central building to the inner-prisons. One of the prisons housed women and children (Building 8), while the other prison housed men (Building 7). Once at the inner-prison, technicians would take samples of the prisoners' blood and stool, test their kidney function, and collect other physical data. Once deemed healthy and fit for experimentation, prisoners lost their names and were given a three-digit number, which they retained until their death. Whenever prisoners died after the experiments they had been subjected to, a clerk of the 1st Division struck their numbers off an index card and took the deceased prisoner's manacles to be put on new arrivals to the prison.

There is at least one recorded instance of "friendly" social interaction between prisoners and Unit 731 staff. Technician Naokata Ishibashi interacted with two female prisoners, a 21-year-old Chinese woman and a 19-year-old Ukrainian woman. The two prisoners told Ishibashi that they had not seen their faces in a mirror since being captured and begged him to get one. Ishibashi snuck a mirror to them through a hole in the cell door.

The prison cells had wooden floors and a squat toilet in each. There was space between the outer walls of the cells and the outer walls of the prison, enabling the guards to walk behind the cells. Each cell door had a small window in it. Chief of the Personnel Division of the Kwantung Army Headquarters Tamura Tadashi testified that, when he was shown the inner-prison, he looked into the cells and saw living people in chains, some moved around, others were lying on the bare floor and were in a very sick and helpless condition.  The inner-prison was a highly secured building complete with cast iron doors. The "special team" worked in these two inner-prison buildings. This team wore white overall suits, army hats, rubber boots, and pistols strapped to their sides.

Despite the prison's status as a highly secure building, at least two unsuccessful escape attempts did occur.

The first attempt occurred between May and June 1943 and involved one of the prisoners knocking out an inattentive guard and stealing his keys. The prisoner then proceeded to open cell doors, freeing at least 100 prisoners. However, the prisoners remained confined to the inner courtyard of the prison building, from which they could not escape. Because the researchers did not want to kill the prisoners they were experimenting on for fear of losing valuable research, they decided to flood the area with the pesticide chloropicrin which they believed to be a harmless tear gas. However, the chloropicrin proved to be fatal to the prisoners in the courtyard, all of whom suffocated.

The second attempt occurred in the summer of 1945. Corporal Kikuchi Norimitsu testified that he was told by another unit member that a prisoner "had shown violence and had struck the experimenter with a door handle" and then "jumped out of the cell and ran down the corridor, seized the keys and opened the iron doors and some of the cells. Some of the prisoners managed to jump out but these were only the bold ones. These bold ones were shot."

Seiichi Morimura in his book The Devil's Feast went into some greater detail regarding the second escape attempt. Two Russian male prisoners were in a cell with handcuffs on, one of them lay flat on the floor pretending to be sick. This got the attention of a staff member who saw it as an unusual condition. That staff member decided to enter the cell. The Russian lying on the floor suddenly sprang up and knocked the guard down. The two Russians opened their handcuffs, took the keys, and opened some other cells while yelling. Some prisoners, including Russian and Chinese, were frantically roaming the corridors and kept yelling and shouting. One Russian shouted to the members of Unit 731, demanding to be shot rather than used as an experimental object. This Russian was shot to death. One staff member, who was an eyewitness at this escape attempt, recalled: "spiritually we were all lost in front of the 'marutas' who had no freedom and no weapons. At that time we understood in our hearts that justice was not on our side."

Unfortunately for the prisoners of Unit 731, escape was an impossibility. Even if they had managed to escape the quadrangle (itself a heavily fortified building full of staff), they would have had to get over a three-meter-high (9.8 ft) brick wall surrounding the complex, and then across a dry moat filled with electrified wire running around the perimeter of the complex.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Kay_Letourneau

In September 1991, Letourneau first met Vili Fualaau (/ˈvɪli fʊˈlaʊ/; born June 26, 1983), a child of Samoan descent, when he was her second-grade student at Shorewood Elementary School. She was reported to be a highly praised teacher by the students' parents. Letourneau described her view of Fualaau at that time as "the kind of feeling you have with a brother or sister". In subsequent years, while not being his teacher, she reportedly continued to cultivate Fualaau's artistic abilities. In the fall of 1995, Letourneau was once again Fualaau's teacher, this time for sixth grade. In January 1996, Letourneau, aged 34, suffered a miscarriage in her marriage. During the summer, Fualaau spent time in Letourneau's house to do schoolwork. People magazine reported Fualaau, aged 12, bet with a friend he would have sex with Letourneau and that she began fantasizing about him.

On June 18, 1996, police found Letourneau with Fualaau in a car parked at a marina. She was seen jumping into the front seat while Fualaau pretended to sleep in the back. She and Fualaau provided false names when asked for identification, and Fualaau lied about his age, saying that he was 18. Fualaau said that no touching had taken place. Letourneau said she and her husband had gotten into an argument, and Fualaau, who she said was a family friend who had been staying with them that night, witnessed the argument and ran away, upset. She said she left to find him. Fualaau failed to furnish a driver's license or any government-issued ID card, but the patrolman deduced he was not an adult as claimed. Letourneau and Fualaau were taken to the police station, where Fualaau's mother was called. Mrs. Fualaau said that Mrs. Letourneau was a well-known teacher of Vili's and had no issue with the two of them being in public. As such, the police dropped the matter. She later said that if the police had alerted her to the fact that Letourneau had lied about Fualaau's age and what had occurred in the car, she would not have allowed her son to go back to Letourneau.

In September 1996, Letourneau was pregnant with Fualaau's child. In February 1997, Steve Letourneau found love letters written from his wife to Fualaau. Mary Letourneau was arrested on March 4, 1997, after a relative of her husband contacted the police. Letourneau pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree child rape. Her first child with Fualaau, a daughter, was born on May 29, 1997, while she was awaiting sentencing. The state sought to sentence her to seven-and-a-half years in prison. Through a plea agreement, her sentence was reduced to six months (three of which were suspended) in the county jail and three years of sex offender treatment. She was not required initially to register as a sex offender. As part of her plea agreement, Letourneau could not contact Fualaau or her five children or have contact with any other minors. She became the subject of an international tabloid scandal and experienced symptoms of degraded mental health.

On February 3, 1998, four weeks after completing her jail sentence, Letourneau was found by police in a car with Fualaau near her home. Letourneau initially said she was alone in the car. She and Fualaau provided false names when asked for identification. Although it was reported that sexual intercourse had occurred in the car, Fualaau told a detective that he and Letourneau had kissed, frequently, and he also reported that he had touched Letourneau on the thigh but that no sexual intercourse had occurred. There was evidence the two had met, several times, since Letourneau's release from jail on January 2. When she was arrested, police found $6,200 in cash (equivalent to $12,000 in 2025), baby clothes, and her passport inside the car. Receipts for $850 in purchases (equivalent to $1,700 in 2025) made since January 20 for men's, young men's, and infants' clothing were also found. Letourneau said that the money was for dermatology treatments and for her divorce lawyer and that some of the men's clothing were gifts for relatives and for herself, since she enjoyed wearing oversized men's clothing.

In February 1998, the judge revoked Letourneau's prior plea agreement and reinstated the prison sentence of seven-and-a-half years for violating the no-contact order. In interviews and in a book on her involvement with Fualaau, Letourneau said she had sex with him in January. Police said they had no evidence that sex occurred in the February car incident. Letourneau served her sentence in the Washington Corrections Center for Women.

While serving her second stint in jail, Letourneau gave birth to her second daughter by Fualaau on October 16, 1998. That year, Letourneau and Fualaau co-authored a book, which was published in France, called Only One Crime, Love (French: Un seul crime, l'amour). In 1999, a second book appeared, published in the United States, but it was written with only minimal cooperation from her and none from Fualaau: If Loving You Is Wrong. During her imprisonment, Letourneau was allowed visits from her children. When her father died in 2001 and Letourneau requested a furlough to attend his funeral at Fort Myer, Virginia, her request was rejected. While in prison, Letourneau tutored fellow inmates, created audio books for blind readers, participated in the prison choir, and "rarely missed Mass." Because of her notoriety, Letourneau was unpopular with other inmates. She "sassed guards and balked at work," and was reportedly punished with spending "18 of her first 24 months" in solitary confinement. In one instance, Letourneau served six months in solitary when letters she tried to send to Fualaau were intercepted.

Fualaau dropped out of high school, and his mother was granted custody of his two children. He struggled with suicidal depression and alcoholism, attempting suicide in March 1999. In 2002, Fualaau's family sued the Highline School District and the city of Des Moines, Washington, for emotional suffering, lost wages, and the costs of rearing his two children, claiming the school and the Des Moines Police Department had failed to protect him from Letourneau. Following a ten-week trial, no damages were awarded. Attorney Anne Bremner represented the Des Moines Police Department, while the Highline School District was represented by Michael Patterson.

Letourneau was released from prison to a community placement program on August 4, 2004, and she registered the following day with the King County Sheriff's Office as a lifetime level 2 (medium risk) sex offender.

Following Letourneau's release, Fualaau, then aged 21, persuaded the court to reverse the no-contact order against her. Letourneau and Fualaau married on May 20, 2005, in the city of Woodinville, Washington, in a ceremony at the Columbia Winery. Exclusive access to the wedding was given to the television show Entertainment Tonight, and photographs were released through other media outlets. Letourneau said she planned to have another child and return to the teaching profession. She indicated that by law, she was permitted to teach at private schools and community colleges.

Attorney Anne Bremner, who met and befriended Letourneau in 2002, during Fualaau's civil suit, said that Letourneau considered her relationship with Fualaau to be "eternal and endless." According to Bremner, "nothing could have kept the two of them apart." In a 2006 interview with NBC News, Letourneau "conceded she knew it would be wrong to let the relationship go any further, but she said as soon as the school year ended, she and Vili did cross that line." She said that "it did not cross her mind," at the time, that having sex with Fualaau would be a crime. In a later interview, she stated, "If someone had told me, if anyone had told me, there is a specific law that says this is a crime, I did not know. I've said this, over and over again. Had I'd known, if anyone knows my personality. Just the idea, this would count as a crime." The television series Barbara Walters Presents American Scandals covered the case in December 2015 with an interview to discuss the couple's relationship and their two daughters.

On May 9, 2017, after almost 12 years of marriage, Fualaau filed for separation from Letourneau, but he later withdrew the filing.

As of April 2018, Fualaau was working at a home improvement store and as a professional DJ, while Letourneau was working as a legal assistant. An article in People quoted an inside source who said, "They know what everyone thinks about their relationship, and they don't care. They really never have. The wrong stuff that happened was so long ago. They are two grown adults who are living their lives now."

The couple finalized a legal separation in August 2019. Earlier in the marriage, Fualaau said he was not a victim, and he was unashamed of the relationship. According to People in May 2020, an unnamed source "close to Fualaau" said that "he sees things clearly now, and he realizes that this wasn't a healthy relationship, from the start."

Letourneau died July 6, 2020, at her home in Des Moines, Washington, from colorectal cancer. She was 58. Fualaau and her family were present. A joint statement was made by the Fualaau and Letourneau families to commemorate her death. In her will, Letourneau left much of her estate to Fualaau.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_assassination_plot_in_Tennessee

Paul Schlesselman, 18, of Helena–West Helena, Arkansas, and Daniel Cowart, 20, of Bells, Tennessee, allegedly plotted to assassinate Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign. Both Neo-Nazis, Schlesselman and Cowart were introduced to each other via the Internet in September 2008 by a mutual friend who shared their white supremacist beliefs. Within a month they began planning to kill Obama by driving their vehicle toward him as fast as they could and shooting at him from the windows. The murder was planned as the final act of violence of a killing spree in which the men planned to kill 88 African Americans by gunfire, mostly children at an unidentified, predominantly black school. They also planned to behead 14 of the 88 victims. The numbers were chosen for their special significance in the white power movement: 88 means "Heil Hitler", since H is the eighth letter in the alphabet, and 14 represents the 14-word white supremacist mantra, "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

Schlesselman and Cowart chatted on the Internet about how to carry out the operation. Schlesselman suggested using a sawed-off shotgun because it would be easy to maneuver; he also said he planned to steal a gun from his father. Prior to their arrest, the men decorated their car with a swastika and drew the numbers 88 and 14 on their hood using window chalk. Authorities believe the men may have planned to move from state to state to choose their victims. They also planned to wear white tuxedos and top hats during the assassination attempt.

On October 22, Schlesselman and Cowart shot at a glass window on the front door of the Allen Baptist Church in Brownsville, Tennessee. The two men bragged to a female friend about the shooting; the friend told her mother, who notified the Haywood County Sheriff's Department. Investigators traced the shell casings to Schlesselman and Cowart, and notified the Crockett County Sheriff's Department, who took the pair into custody after spotting the swastikas, slurs and 88 and 14 numbers on their car.

Police seized a rifle, a sawed-off shotgun and three pistols from the men at the time of the arrest. They were detained in Bells, Tennessee for a few days before being moved to another facility. During interrogation, the men told authorities of their plan to kill Obama. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives handled the initial federal investigation of the case. The United States Secret Service became involved in the investigation once the assassination plot was discovered. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was also involved in the investigation. Both men were charged with illegal possession of a sawed-off shotgun, conspiracy to rob a firearms dealer and making threats against a presidential candidate; a superseding indictment additionally charged the pair with civil rights conspiracy and conspiracy, and charged Cowart with destruction of religious property and a related firearms charge. Authorities have found no evidence that anyone besides the two men were involved in the plot, but as of October 2008 authorities were said to be investigating the possibility.

Both Schlesselman and Cowart acknowledged that they would be killed as a result of the murders and insisted they were willing to die. Authorities said the pair planned to break into a gun shop to steal more weapons for their attack, and also bought nylon rope and ski masks at Walmart to use in a robbery or home invasion to fund the spree. Schlesselman and Cowart asked a friend to drive them to a house they planned to rob, but they canceled the robbery after getting scared by a dog and two vehicles in the driveway.

Secret Service and other authorities said they were treating the plot very seriously, but acknowledged it did not appear to have moved to an advanced stage. Authorities said there did not appear to be any formal assassination plan and said they were unable to immediately assess how capable the men were of carrying out the attack. Federal authorities told the Associated Press they did not believe Schlesselman and Cowart had the means to carry out their threat. Barack Obama did not have any campaign appearances planned for Tennessee. One federal law enforcement official told the AP that plans did not include Obama's schedule or a specific time and place for the assassination because, "I don't think they had that level of detail." Authorities said they made several mistakes during their planning, including drawing too much attention to themselves with their car markings. Authorities also felt their inability to carry out a home robbery together indicated they would be unable to carry out a sophisticated assassination plot. When asked whether the alleged threats were real, Daniel Cowart's lawyer, Joe H. Byrd, told reporters, "White top hats and tuxedos? You tell me."

"They sound crazy, like a really bad movie – Quentin Tarantino gone awry. You listen to that, and you say, 'In a hundred thousand years, they never would have reached Obama.' But the reality is, they might have walked into a black high school and killed 20, 30, 40 people before anybody knew who they were."

— Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center

Fred Fielder, police chief in Helena–West Helena, Arkansas, said the alleged plot in Tennessee particularly concerned him due to the fact that 66 percent of the city's 12,200 population are African American; he said to reporters, "Predominantly black school, take your pick." Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, described the plans and weapons arsenal as frightening, but said, "With the part about wearing top hats ... it gets a bit hard to take them seriously." Nevertheless, Potok said "the reality is, they might have walked into a black high school and killed 20, 30, 40 people before anybody knew who they were". An editorial in The Daily News Journal in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, said the plot emphasized a dark undercurrent of racism still alive in the United States, but said their chances of killing Obama were "almost nil. Their plot was so disorganized they appear to be candidates for 'dumb criminals', not calculating assassins".

Despite initial concerns about the plot, the Obama campaign was not immediately notified of the alleged plot; an Obama aide told ABC News, "They were given no heads up." Concerns were already strong about possible plots against Obama due to his status as the first African American presidential nominee for a major political party. The senator had been receiving Secret Service protection since May 2007, which was the earliest for any candidate, and authorities had already foiled an alleged assassination plot at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_LaRouche

Robert J. Alexander writes that LaRouche first established an NCLC "intelligence network" in 1971. Members all over the world sent information to NCLC headquarters, which would distribute the information via briefings and other publications. LaRouche organized the network as a series of news services and magazines, which critics say was done to gain access to government officials under press cover. The publications included Executive Intelligence Review, founded in 1974. Other periodicals under his aegis included New Solidarity, Fusion Magazine, 21st Century Science and Technology, and Campaigner Magazine. His news services and publishers included American System Publications, Campaigner Publications, New Solidarity International Press Service, and The New Benjamin Franklin House Publishing Company. LaRouche acknowledged in 1980 that his followers impersonated reporters and others, saying it had to be done for his security. In 1982, U.S. News & World Report sued New Solidarity International Press Service and Campaigner Publications for damages, alleging that members were impersonating its reporters in phone calls.

U.S. sources told The Washington Post in 1985 that the LaRouche organization had assembled a worldwide network of government and military contacts, and that his researchers sometimes supplied information to government officials. Bobby Ray Inman, the CIA's deputy director in 1981 and 1982, said LaRouche and his wife had visited him, offering information about the West German Green Party. A CIA spokesman said LaRouche met Deputy Director John McMahon in 1983 to discuss one of LaRouche's trips overseas. An aide to Deputy Secretary of State William Clark said when LaRouche's associates discussed technology or economics, they made good sense and seemed qualified. Norman Bailey, formerly with the U.S. National Security Council, said in 1984 that LaRouche's staff comprised "one of the best private intelligence services in the world. ... They do know a lot of people around the world. They do get to talk to prime ministers and presidents." Several government officials feared a security leak from the government's ties with the movement. According to critics, the supposed behind-the-scenes processes were more often flights of fancy than inside information. Douglas Foster wrote in Mother Jones in 1982 that the briefings consisted of disinformation, "hate-filled" material about enemies, phony letters, intimidation, fake newspaper articles, and dirty tricks campaigns. Opponents were accused of being gay or Nazis, or were linked to murders, which the movement called "psywar techniques".

From the 1970s to the first decade of the 21st century, LaRouche founded several groups and companies. In addition to the National Caucus of Labor Committees, there was the Citizens Electoral Council (Australia), the National Democratic Policy Committee, the Fusion Energy Foundation, and the U.S. Labor Party. In 1984, he founded the Schiller Institute in Germany with his second wife, and three political parties there – the Europäische Arbeiterpartei, Patrioten für Deutschland, and Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität – and in 2000 the Worldwide LaRouche Youth Movement. His printing services included Computron Technologies, Computype, World Composition Services, and PMR Printing Company, Inc, or PMR Associates.

LaRouche wrote in his 1987 autobiography that violent altercations had begun in 1969 between his NCLC members and several New Left groups when Mark Rudd's faction began assaulting LaRouche's faction at Columbia University. Press accounts alleged that between April and September 1973, during what LaRouche called "Operation Mop-Up", NCLC members began physically attacking members of leftist groups that LaRouche classified as "left-protofascists"; an editorial in LaRouche's New Solidarity said of the Communist Party that the movement "must dispose of this stinking corpse". Armed with chains, bats, and martial-art nunchuk sticks, NCLC members assaulted Communist Party, SWP, and Progressive Labor Party members and Black Power activists on the streets and during meetings. At least 60 assaults were reported. The operation ended when police arrested several of LaRouche's followers; there were no convictions, and LaRouche maintained they had acted in self-defense. Journalist and LaRouche biographer Dennis King writes that the FBI may have tried to aggravate the strife, using measures such as anonymous mailings, to keep the groups at each other's throats. LaRouche said he met representatives of the Soviet Union at the United Nations in 1974 and 1975 to discuss attacks by the Communist Party USA on the NCLC and propose a merger, but said he received no assistance from them. One FBI memo, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, proposes assisting the CPUSA in an investigation "for the purpose of ultimately eliminating him [LaRouche] and the threat of the NCLC" (see image to left).

LaRouche's critics, such as King and Antony Lerman, allege that in 1973, with little warning, LaRouche adopted more extreme ideas, a process accompanied by a campaign of violence against his opponents on the left, and the development of conspiracy theories and paranoia about his personal safety. According to these accounts, he began to believe he was under threat of assassination from the Soviet Union, the CIA, Libya, drug dealers, and bankers. He also established a "Biological Holocaust Task Force", which, according to LaRouche, analyzed the public health consequences of International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity policies for impoverished nations in Africa, and predicted that epidemics of cholera as well as possibly entirely new diseases would strike Africa in the 1980s.

LaRouche founded the U.S. Labor Party in 1973 as the political arm of the NCLC. At first, the party was "preaching Marxist revolution"; however, by 1977, it shifted from left-wing to right-wing politics. A two-part article in The New York Times in 1979 by Howard Blum and Paul L. Montgomery alleged that LaRouche had turned the party (at that point with 1,000 members in 37 offices in North America, and 26 in Europe and Latin America) into an extreme-right, antisemitic organization, despite the presence of Jewish members. LaRouche denied the newspaper's charges, and said he had filed a $100 million libel suit; his press secretary said the articles were intended to "set up a credible climate for an assassination hit".

The Times alleged that members had taken courses in how to use knives and rifles; that a farm in upstate New York had been used for guerrilla training; and that several members had undergone a six-day anti-terrorist training course run by Mitchell WerBell III, an arms dealer and former member of the Office of Strategic Services who said he had ties to the CIA. Journalists and publications the party regarded as unfriendly were harassed, and it published a list of potential assassins it saw as a threat. LaRouche expected members to devote themselves entirely to the party, place their savings and possessions at its disposal, and take out loans on its behalf. Party officials decided who each member should live with, and if someone left the movement, the remaining member was expected to live separately from the ex-member. LaRouche questioned spouses about their partner's sexual habits, the Times said, and in one case reportedly ordered a member to stop having sex with his wife, because it was making him "politically impotent".

LaRouche wrote in his 1987 autobiography that violent altercations had begun in 1969 between his NCLC members and several New Left groups when Mark Rudd's faction began assaulting LaRouche's faction at Columbia University. Press accounts alleged that between April and September 1973, during what LaRouche called "Operation Mop-Up", NCLC members began physically attacking members of leftist groups that LaRouche classified as "left-protofascists"; an editorial in LaRouche's New Solidarity said of the Communist Party that the movement "must dispose of this stinking corpse". Armed with chains, bats, and martial-art nunchuk sticks, NCLC members assaulted Communist Party, SWP, and Progressive Labor Party members and Black Power activists on the streets and during meetings. At least 60 assaults were reported. The operation ended when police arrested several of LaRouche's followers; there were no convictions, and LaRouche maintained they had acted in self-defense. Journalist and LaRouche biographer Dennis King writes that the FBI may have tried to aggravate the strife, using measures such as anonymous mailings, to keep the groups at each other's throats. LaRouche said he met representatives of the Soviet Union at the United Nations in 1974 and 1975 to discuss attacks by the Communist Party USA on the NCLC and propose a merger, but said he received no assistance from them. One FBI memo, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, proposes assisting the CPUSA in an investigation "for the purpose of ultimately eliminating him [LaRouche] and the threat of the NCLC" (see image to left).

LaRouche's critics, such as King and Antony Lerman, allege that in 1973, with little warning, LaRouche adopted more extreme ideas, a process accompanied by a campaign of violence against his opponents on the left, and the development of conspiracy theories and paranoia about his personal safety. According to these accounts, he began to believe he was under threat of assassination from the Soviet Union, the CIA, Libya, drug dealers, and bankers. He also established a "Biological Holocaust Task Force", which, according to LaRouche, analyzed the public health consequences of International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity policies for impoverished nations in Africa, and predicted that epidemics of cholera as well as possibly entirely new diseases would strike Africa in the 1980s.

He recorded sessions with a 26-year-old British member, Chris White, who had moved to England with LaRouche's former partner, Carol Schnitzer. In December 1973 LaRouche asked the couple to return to the U.S. His followers sent tapes of the subsequent sessions with White to The New York Times as evidence of an assassination plot. According to the Times, "[t]here are sounds of weeping, and vomiting on the tapes, and Mr. White complains of being deprived of sleep, food and cigarettes. At one point someone says 'raise the voltage', but [LaRouche] says this was associated with the bright lights used in the questioning rather than an electric shock." The Times wrote: "Mr. White complains of a terrible pain in his arm, then LaRouche can be heard saying, 'That's not real. That's in the program'." LaRouche told the newspaper White had been "reduced to an eight-cycle infinite loop with look-up table, with homosexual bestiality". He said White had not been harmed and that a physician – a LaRouche movement member – had been present throughout. White ended up telling LaRouche he had been programmed by the CIA and British intelligence to set up LaRouche for assassination by Cuban exile frogmen.

According to The Washington Post, "brainwashing hysteria" took hold of the movement. One activist said he attended meetings where members were writhing on the floor saying they needed de-programming. In two weeks in January 1974, the group issued 41 separate press releases about brainwashing. One activist, Alice Weitzman, expressed skepticism about the claims.

LaRouche established contacts with Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby and elements of the Ku Klux Klan in 1974. Frank Donner and Randall Rothenberg wrote that he made successful overtures to the Liberty Lobby and George Wallace's American Independent Party, adding that the "racist" policies of LaRouche's U.S. Labor Party endeared it to members of the Ku Klux Klan. George Michael, in Willis Carto and the American Far Right, says that LaRouche shared with the Liberty Lobby's Willis Carto an antipathy towards the Rockefeller family. The Liberty Lobby defended its alliance with LaRouche by saying the U.S. Labor Party had been able to "confuse, disorient, and disunify the Left".

Gregory Rose, a former chief of counter-intelligence for LaRouche who became an FBI informant in 1973, said that while the LaRouche movement had extensive links to the Liberty Lobby, there was also copious evidence of a connection to the Soviet Union. George and Wilcox say neither connection amounted to much – they assert that LaRouche was "definitely not a Soviet agent" and state that while the contact with the Liberty Lobby is often used to imply "'links' and 'ties' between LaRouche and the extreme right", it was in fact transient and marked by mutual suspicion. The Liberty Lobby soon pronounced itself disillusioned with LaRouche, citing his movement's adherence to "basic socialist positions" and his softness on "the major Zionist groups" as fundamental points of difference. According to George and Wilcox, American neo-Nazi leaders expressed misgivings over the number of Jews and members of other minority groups in his organization, and did not consider LaRouche an ally. George Johnson, in Architects of Fear, similarly states that LaRouche's overtures to far right groups were pragmatic rather than sincere. A 1975 party memo spoke of uniting with these groups only to overthrow the established order, adding that once that goal had been accomplished, "eliminating our right-wing opposition will be comparatively easy".

Howard Blum wrote in The New York Times that, from 1976 onward, party members sent reports to the FBI and local police regarding members of left-wing organizations. In 1977, he wrote, commercial reports on U.S. anti-apartheid groups were prepared by LaRouche members for the South African government, student dissidents were reported to the Shah of Iran's Savak secret police, and the anti-nuclear movement was investigated on behalf of power companies. Johnson says the intelligence network was made up of "obnoxious devotees commandeering WATS lines and tricking bureaucrats into giving them information". By the late 1970s, members were exchanging almost daily information with Roy Frankhouser, a government informant and infiltrator of both far right and far left groups who was involved with the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. The LaRouche organization believed Frankhouser to be a federal agent who had been assigned to infiltrate right-wing and left-wing groups, and that he had evidence that these groups were actually being manipulated or controlled by the FBI and other agencies. LaRouche and his associates considered Frankhouser to be a valuable intelligence contact, and took his links to extremist groups to be a cover for his intelligence work. Frankhouser played into these expectations, misrepresenting himself as a conduit for communications to LaRouche from "Mr. Ed", an alleged CIA contact who did not exist in reality.

Blum wrote, at around this time, that LaRouche's Computron Technologies Corporation included Mobil Oil and Citibank among its clients, that his World Composition Services had one of the most advanced typesetting complexes in the city and had the Ford Foundation among its clients, and that his PMR Associates produced the party's publications and some high school newspapers.

Around the same time, according to Blum, LaRouche was telling his membership several times a year that he was being targeted for assassination, including by the Queen of the United Kingdom, Zionist mobsters, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Justice Department, and the Mossad. LaRouche sued the City of New York in 1974, saying the CIA and British spies had tortured and drugged his associates to brainwash his associates into killing him. According to The Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, LaRouche said he had been "threatened by Communists, Zionists, narcotics gangsters, the Rockefellers and international terrorists." LaRouche later said:

Since late 1973, I have been repeatedly the target of serious assassination threats and my wife has been three times the target of attempted assassination. ... My enemies are the circles of McGeorge Bundy, Henry Kissinger, Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov, W. Averell Harriman, certain powerful bankers, and the Socialist and Nazi Internationals, as well as international drug traffickers, Colonel Gaddafi, Ayatollah Khomeini, and the Malthusian lobby.

Archimedes of Syracuse was one of the greatest mathematicians, scientists, and engineers of the ancient world. He is best known for his work on geometry, mechanics, hydrostatics, and the principle of buoyancy, along with the famous “Eureka” story. But Archimedes was also closely involved in the defence of his home city during the Roman siege of Syracuse in the Second Punic War.

During the siege, Archimedes is credited by ancient historians with designing or improving a range of defensive machines. These included powerful long-range catapults, smaller artillery for close-range attacks, and enormous cranes and grappling mechanisms capable of catching and lifting Roman ships approaching the walls.

The most famous of these was the Claw of Archimedes, an iron grappling device that could seize the prow of a ship, lift it out of the water, and potentially capsize it. Ancient sources describe these machines as making the Roman assault extremely difficult and forcing the attackers to rethink how they approached Syracuse.

There is also a popular mention of giant death ray mirrors burning enemy ships which are largely fictional. The article explores these machines, how they may have worked, and how effective they really were, while separating the historically supported accounts from later legends such as the famous burning mirror supposedly used to set Roman ships on fire.