Feb 16, 2015
Housing over 2,500 squatters on 28 of its 45 floors, the Tower of David is a half-finished structure in Caracas, Venezuela, populated with displaced people. Like the now-vanished Kowloon Walled Cit...
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Vietnam
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from China
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from Singapore
seen from Australia
seen from Chile
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Albania
seen from Spain
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Singapore
Housing over 2,500 squatters on 28 of its 45 floors, the Tower of David is a half-finished structure in Caracas, Venezuela, populated with displaced people. Like the now-vanished Kowloon Walled Cit...
Fifty years ago 180,000 whales disappeared from the oceans without a trace, and researchers are still trying to make sense of why.
Why do these things correlate? These 20 correlations will blow your mind. (Is this headline sensationalist enough for you to click on it yet?)
In August 1914, at the start of the First World War, Admiral Charles Fitzgerald founded the Order of the White Feather with support from the prominent author Mrs Humphrey Ward. The organization aimed to shame men into enlisting in the British Army by persuading women to present them with a white feather if they were not wearing a uniform.
The campaign was very effective, and spread throughout several other nations in the Empire, so much so that it started to cause problems for the government when public servants came under pressure to enlist. This prompted the Home Secretary, Reginald McKenna, to issue employees in state industries with lapel badges reading "King and Country" to indicate that they too were serving the war effort. Likewise, the Silver War Badge, given to service personnel who had been honourably discharged due to wounds or sickness, was first issued in September 1916 to prevent veterans from being challenged for not wearing uniform.
One such veteran was Private Ernest Atkins who was on leave from the Western Front. He was riding a tram when he was presented with a white feather by a girl sitting behind him. He smacked her across the face with his pay book saying: "Certainly I'll take your feather back to the boys at Passchendaele. I'm in civvies because people think my uniform might be lousy, but if I had it on I wouldn't be half as lousy as you."
The supporters of the campaign were not easily put off. A woman who confronted a young man in a London park demanded to know why he was not in the army. "Because I am a German", he replied. He received a white feather anyway.
Perhaps the most ironic use of a white feather was when one was presented to Seaman George Samson who was on his way in civilian clothes to a public reception in his honour. Samson had been awarded the Victoria Cross for gallantry in the Gallipolli campaign.
"Japanese tankers in Burma improvised additional protection for a few of their command Type 95 tanks by bolting sheets of armor from captured American M3 tanks to the front of the tanks. According to Rottman and Takizawa (2008), the Japanese Army forbade the tankers to weld the extra armor directly to the tank, on the grounds that this was illegal alteration of government property. Instead, the extra armor was bolted to the tanks with a considerable air gap, which ironically provided the tanks with spaced armor protection that was better than if the armor had been directly applied."
Follow the link to read about the death of a corrupt speed-trap town in Ohio.
An article on a 1956 study into whether it'd be possible to build massive underground atomic shelters beneath major cities (such as, say, New York).