Big Shots – Amusettes, Jingals and Other Super-Sized Firearms

“Pioneered as far back as the late Middle Ages, amusettes, wall guns and rampart guns eventually found their way into the arsenals of most 18th Century European armies.” LARGER THAN A musket, but not large enough to…

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Companies Behaving Badly – The Wartime Histories Some Corporations Wish We’d Just Forget

“Holocaust survivors and their families charged that Hugo Boss used forced labour during the war. Eventually, the company paid more than 700,000 Euros to a victims memorial fund.” THEY SAY THAT there is no such thing…

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Solar Power – The Strange History of ‘Weaponized Sunlight’

  A 37-FLOOR London office tower made headlines last Wednesday after its curved, all-glass mirror design reflected (and then intensified) the afternoon sunlight enough to melt a number of vehicles parked on a street below….

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The Art of Rehan Siraj

Two weeks ago, we posted a story about the Saiful Azam, the fighter ace that served in four different air forces in his career. While researching the story, we discovered the aviation artist Rehan Siraj…

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Shot Down — KAL Flight 007 and Seven Other Deadly Airliner Attacks

“While the incident captured the world’s attention, it wasn’t the only instance in which civilian passenger planes had fallen victim to military aircraft.” IN SEPTEMBER of 1983, the word was rocked by news that Soviet…

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Meet The ‘White Tights’ – The Mythical Spandex-Wearing Bombshells of the Chechen War

“According to army folklore, rebel commanders recruited the female crack-shots from various Nordic biathlon teams.” FOR MONTHS, foreign fighters from the Muslim world have been flooding into Syria to take part in the two-year-old civil…

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