13 June
The Catalina affair was a military confrontation and Cold War-era diplomatic crisis in June 1952, in which Soviet Air Force fighter jets shot down two Swedish aircraft in the Baltic Sea over international waters. Continue reading “1952 – Sweden: the Catalina affair”
11 January
The Kingsland Explosion was an incident that took place during World War I at a munitions factory in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, United States. On this day in 1917, a fire started in Building 30 of the Canadian Car and Foundry Company in Kingsland. In 4 hours, probably 500 000 pieces of 76 mm (3″) -high explosive shells were discharged. The entire plant was destroyed. An arbitration commission in 1931 determined that, “In the Kingsland Case the Commission finds upon the evidence that the fire was not caused by any German agent.” Continue reading “1917 – The Kingsland munitions factory explosion occurs as a result of sabotage”
22 December
The Dreyfus affair was a political scandal that from its beginning in 1894 divided France until it was finally resolved in 1906. The affair is often seen as a modern and universal symbol of injustice, and remains one of the most striking examples of a complex miscarriage of justice, where a major role was played by the press and public opinion. Continue reading “1894 – The Dreyfus affair begins in France, when Alfred Dreyfus is wrongly convicted of treason”
5 November
Sidney George Reilly (c. 1870 – c. 1880 – c. 1925), commonly known as the so-called “Ace of Spies”, was a secret agent of the British Secret Service Bureau, the precursor to the modern British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6/SIS). Continue reading “1925 – Secret agent Sidney Reilly is executed”
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