01Alp Arslan placed his boot on Emperor Romanos IV's neck in a formal humiliation ritual.
02Romanos was released for 1.5 million gold pieces — then murdered by his own court before paying.
03Within ten years, Anatolia — the empire's heartland — was permanently lost to Seljuk settlement.
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01Port Authority police boarded the departing Air France flight and removed Strauss-Kahn from seat number 1A, first class.
02Nafissatou Diallo, a 32-year-old Guinea-born housekeeper, described the assault in a civil suit that settled for an undisclosed sum.
03French polls showed Strauss-Kahn leading Nicolas Sarkozy by 10 points in presidential projections the week of his arrest.
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01The Treasury Department ruled that U.S. lawyers required a special license to legally represent al-Awlaki in court.
02A federal judge dismissed his father's lawsuit to remove him from the kill list, citing lack of standing.
03The Justice Department's legal memo authorizing the killing was classified for three years after his death.
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01South Korean authorities killed an estimated 60,000–100,000 of their own civilians in weeks during summer 1950.
02Victims included Bodo League members — a government-run 're-education' program whose enrollees were then deemed threats.
03The South Korean government denied the massacres for over 50 years; a truth commission confirmed them in 2008.
gnostek1 / 4Red Bird – watercolour on paper
01Giuliani threatened to cut $7 million in city funding to the Brooklyn Museum over the painting.
02Ofili, a Catholic, said the dung was a reverent material — he used it in nearly every painting.
03A man entered the museum and smeared white paint over the canvas; he was arrested on-site.
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01De Kock's unit at Vlakplaas once blew up three activists and scattered the remains across two provinces.
02He gave evidence against his political masters in exchange for two life sentences, implicating cabinet ministers.
03Paroled in 2015; he personally apologised to widows of men he had ordered killed.
gnostek1 / 11A tulip, known as "the Viceroy" ( viseroij ), displayed in the 1637 Dutch catalogue Verzameling van een Meenigte Tulipaanen ("Collection of a Crowd of Tulips"). Its bulb was offered for sale for between 3,000 and 4,200 guilders (florins)…
01The Semper Augustus, the most prized tulip, fetched 10,000 guilders in early 1637 — roughly 10 years of a skilled craftsman's wages.
02Futures contracts for tulip bulbs still underground were being traded in taverns; buyers never saw the actual bulb.
03By May 1637, Haarlem courts ruled tulip contracts unenforceable, effectively wiping out every outstanding futures position.
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01Greek fire was first deployed in 672 AD, repelling the Arab siege of Constantinople by sea.
02The weapon burned on water — witnesses described ships continuing to burn as they sank.
03The recipe was a state secret; even modern analysis cannot pin down all its components.
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01Holt's body was never found despite one of Australia's largest naval search operations covering 10 square miles of coastline.
02A 1983 biography floated the theory that a Chinese submarine extracted Holt, who was allegedly a spy — taken seriously enough to be officially denied.
03Australia named a swimming center the Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Centre in his honor.