gnostek1 / 5Front page cover of the newspaper L'Aurore for Thursday 13 January 1898, with the letter J'Accuse...! , written by Émile Zola about the Dreyfus affair . The headline reads I Accuse...! Letter to the President of the Republic .
01Zola addressed the letter directly to President Félix Faure, naming eleven officials as co-conspirators.
02L'Aurore printed 300,000 copies on January 13, 1898 — multiples of its usual daily circulation.
03Zola was convicted of libel and fled to England, returning only after Dreyfus was exonerated.
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01The ten attackers coordinated via Pakistani handlers on mobile phones throughout the siege.
02166 people were killed across 12 sites, including the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel and Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus.
03Sole surviving attacker Ajmal Kasab was hanged in Pune's Yerwada Jail on November 21, 2012.
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01Voltaire predicted Christianity would collapse within 100 years; the Geneva Bible Society occupied his house by 1828.
02He annotated his own copy of the Bible with the word 'absurd' in the margins, repeatedly, throughout.
03Voltaire wrote over 20,000 letters in his lifetime, many mocking Scripture by quoting it back verbatim.
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01Solanas set the price at 10 cents for men and free for women — the differential was the argument.
02She shot Andy Warhol on June 3, 1968, citing his failure to return a manuscript she had given him.
03The Manifesto was reprinted by Olympia Press in 1968 while Solanas was in psychiatric custody; she had not authorized it.
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01The Chapel of St. Kinga sits 101 meters underground and fits 400 worshippers; every surface is carved salt.
02Miners began carving in the 13th century; the cathedral took nearly 700 years of cumulative chisel work to complete.
03Salt chandeliers were constructed by dissolving and recrystallizing brine into sculptural forms rather than cutting raw blocks.
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01His forces captured the True Cross from Jerusalem in 614 AD and carried it to the Persian capital.
02He assassinated Khosrow II, the emperor who had commanded him, and seized the Sasanian throne.
03His reign lasted precisely 40 days — ended by assassination — making him Persia's shortest-ruling usurper.
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01The Atocha sank in 1622 carrying 40 tons of silver, 115 gold bars, and 350 chests of unregistered contraband.
02Fisher's son Kane and daughter-in-law Angel died July 19, 1975 when the salvage vessel Northwind rolled over at night.
03Fisher's daily battle cry for sixteen years was 'Today's the day' — he said it the morning of the main find.
gnostek1 / 34Plate 34: Por una navaja ( For a clasp knife ). A garroted priest grasps a crucifix in his hands. Pinned to his chest is a description of the crime for which he was killed—possession of a knife.
01Goya kept the 82 copper plates hidden during his lifetime; publication came 35 years after his 1828 death.
02Plate 39 shows a castrated male torso hung from a tree, limbs severed and rearranged — titled 'Great Deeds! Against the Dead!'
03He witnessed the Peninsular War atrocities firsthand near Madrid between 1808 and 1814, drawing from direct observation.
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01The Enigma machine and its current rotor settings were seized from the armed trawler Krebs before she sank.
02315 Norwegian volunteers chose to sail back to Britain with the raiding force to join the Free Norwegian forces.
03The rotor settings recovered on March 4, 1941 allowed Bletchley Park to read Naval Enigma traffic for weeks.