Mengistu Haile Mariam

gnostek

1 / 8

gnostek

gnostek

1 / 7

gnostek

1 / 8

gnostek

1 / 48

A typical crossbow

gnostek

1 / 2

gnostek

1 / 11

gnostek

1 / 33

Spanish bullfight in Las Ventas in Madrid

gnostek

1 / 15

Flick ↓ for more

Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam ran Ethiopia's Red Terror from 1977 to 1978, killing between 30,000 and 750,000 citizens; families of the executed were billed for the bullets used in the executions.

J. Paul Getty — then the world's richest man — refused his grandson's ransom until a severed ear arrived by post. He negotiated the $17 million demand down to $2.2 million, the maximum he could deduct on taxes.

Leon Black founded Apollo after being effectively pushed out of Drexel Burnham Lambert in 1990. The SEC barred him from the securities industry — then watched the firm he built grow to manage $600 billion. Bars, it turns out, are negotiable.

id Software built Doom in a rented suite above a pizza shop in Mesquite, Texas, in 1993 — John Carmack's renderer was so fast it broke every benchmark tool the team tried to measure it with.

The Second Lateran Council banned the crossbow against Christians in 1139 — the first arms-control treaty in Western history. Knights ignored it, and within a century the bolt had made armor obsolete and chivalry theatrical.

Fred Lorz crossed the 1904 Olympic marathon finish line to cheers, waved at crowds, and posed for photos before admitting he'd hitched a car ride for 11 of the 26 miles.

In 1851, raiders killed five members of the Oatman family on an Arizona trail and took sisters Olive and Mary captive. Mary died in captivity; Olive was tattooed on the chin by the Mohave and lived the rest of her life marked.

Minoan frescoes show unarmed athletes vaulting over charging bulls in rituals that predate the Spanish corrida by 3,000 years. The matador's suit of lights is Bronze Age costume with a modern tailor.

At Isandlwana, January 1879, 1,300 British regulars were annihilated by a Zulu force of 20,000 — partly because a quartermaster refused to issue reserve ammunition without the proper paperwork.