WHAT REALLY HAPPENED WHEN AGATHA CHRISTIE WENT MISSING.
Have you ever heard about the time Agatha Christie went missing? What do you think happened?
If you were to stack up all the United States editions of Agatha Christie's Peril at End House they would reach the Moon! This prominent writer is one of the most translated authors in history, with her works being read in more than 100 languages. Not to mention she's been mentioned in the Guinness World Records for The Mousetrap, which has been running since 1952- the longest play ever! Wow! Born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller, in Torquay Devon, England, Agatha wouldn't have known how to read if it hadn't been for her insatiable curiosity and passion for reading. She was only four years old when she taught herself how to read! Her mother educated her at home, and beloved books captured her heart from a young age. In 1901, Agatha wrote her first poem called The Cow Slip.
The region of Torquay was a posh seaside resort that hosted wealthy Europeans and even royalty in its day. Thanks to its beautiful view of the ocean, Agatha often ventured into the water each summer for a swim. During this period, it was socially unacceptable for men and women to bathe together- so much so that men were not allowed to swim within 50 yards of a woman's bathing machine! These structures were often spotted along beaches during this time period and acted as a place where women could change into their swimming attire before being transported into deeper waters. It was often said thatAgatha had a special fondness for time spent near the sea while growing up; connections to this love could be seen in several stories throughout her writing career.
After graduating high school, Agatha set off to Paris where she focused more on music than writing. While there, however, she quickly realized that pursuing music wasn't necessarily right for her and harbored an ambition to become an opera singer for the rest of her life. Meanwhile back at home she was busy crafting stories from 1912 onward; her first detective novel called The Mysterious Affair at Styles introducing Hercule Poirot- with his large mustache and egg-shaped head - came out around this time too!
On 3rd December 1926 Agatha Christie went missing from her home sparking national sensatiom in newspapers across Britain- who knew what had happened?! To this day we still don't know for sure why she disappeared; however some events prior might provide some clues...Just months earlier Agatha had lost her beloved mother Claire who she held close - followed by an upsetting revelation by her husband Archie claiming he was leaving her due to being in love with another woman. After a fight between them later on that same day Agatha vanished without a trace and left behind only daughter daughter Rosalind with the maid.. What followed became an international search mission as policemen and volunteers scoured every nook and cranny looking for any sign of where she'd gone while politicians implored law enforcement officers to find clues leading towards discovery....The truth behind this case may still be hidden but it remains one of the most gripping tales ever penned! Wow, even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle got in on the Manhunt - but in a creative way. He hired a fortune teller to try and locate Agatha! When hope of finding her alive was fading, an alert waiter at the Harrogate hotel noticed a South African guest who looked suspiciously like the author. Her husband went to the hotel secretly and sure enough, there she was! People have wondered what caused it for years - some say it was due to her mother's death and her marriage breaking up, while others think she might have been creating an amazing publicity stunt. And still others suggest that she might have had amnesia! Agatha never spoke about it again, not even in her autobiography.
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SOME WONDER LAKES IN THE WORLD PART 1
There is an area in Russia's vast central regions, near the south Ural mountains, that the country wishes never existed. A lake that once existed in this area had a maximum size of 110 acres, or 83 football fields. However, it wasn't the lake's size or even depth that made it a living nightmare; rather, it was what was inside of it. So make yourself comfortable, settle in, and get ready for a tale so gloomy you'll wish it weren't true.The horrifying factual story of LAKE KARACHAY. The first nuclear bomb ever used as a weapon was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, by the Americans in 1945. It leveled 5 square miles of the city and killed up to 180,000 people, with tens of thousands dying instantly. And in the days and months that followed, an additional 100,000 people perished as a result of deadly radiation. The single most lethal weapon ever created was this one. It also drew the attention of foreign leaders. Stalin was one of them. The Soviet Union's then-president makes the decision to take on the US. He gave the go-ahead to build several highly classified nuclear plants in a place that was out of enemy sight. These will be dedicated to producing the materials necessary to create nuclear weapons. He settled in this area of central Russia, under the Southern Urals, far enough from the border and other population centers to hide the project from the rest of the world. From 1945 to 1948, the Mayak nuclear facility was built in secret on the shores of Lake Kyzyltash, and over 70,000 of his prisoners of war from 12 labor camps were forced to build the massive facility. It was also used to build a nearby town that will house 10,000 new factory workers and their families. This was about 60 miles from the nearest city, Chelyabinsk. As such, it was known simply by the last digit of the postal code, Chelyabinsk-40 or city-40. The government has promised its citizens that they will have no shortage and a high standard of living. It sounds like a dream, but all plans for the town and its environs had to be kept secret.Anyone who declined this offer was exposed to classified security information and could go directly to a concentration camp. Sent. So they didn't have many options. City-40's gate was guarded day and night. It was surrounded by fences and walls covered with barbed wire. And unless citizens had special permission from the government, they were not marked on any map of the Soviet Union, and no one was allowed to enter or leave City-40. , which began production of weapons-grade plutonium soon after it was completed. By 1949, the Soviet Union had developed the first plutonium bomb called First Lightning. This success prompted them to produce even more nuclear weapons, and about 44 cities similar to City-40, colloquially called closed cities, were established in the Soviet Union. Some of the ancillary facilities hosted all sorts of nuclear research efforts, from plutonium production to uranium enrichment, but the Soviets were not the first closed city inventors. And the idea came from the US city of Richland, which was secretly built around the Handford nuclear power plant. The same facility that supplied plutonium for the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Soviet spy circles intercept plans for the city, so Stalin decides to use this information to follow in the footsteps of the United States. That wasn't the only secret they stole, but most of the Soviet nuclear research had been stolen by nuclear spies involved in the Manhattan Project. The mission that developed the first atomic bomb, but didn't get it all. This, combined with huge gaps in Soviet knowledge of nuclear physics and pressure to save money, forced plant managers to make many safety cuts in worker training, and radiation monitoring staff became poorly protected. , pollution was an afterthought. And to my horror, the workers were cleaning up the radioactive spill with their bare hands. They only stopped functioning when their noses bled as a side effect of their bodies being corroded by lethal levels of radiation. But that was the least of her problems. Mayak's seven main reactors used open-cycle water cooling systems to prevent the reactors from overheating. Here, water from Lake Kyzyltash and the nearby He Techa River was pumped into the reactor core itself, after which the water was pumped back to the same source without being treated or decontaminated. That means millions of gallons of contaminated water leaked into the water City-40 residents drank and bathed in. And it wasn't just the City 40 villages along the Techa that depended on the river as their main source of water. That means another 28,000 of his people were unknowingly dependent on deadly contaminated water sources. Little did they know they lived in a dangerous, radioactive area, but that was only the beginning of Mayak's troubles. In their quest to get plutonium production up and running as soon as possible. They did not consider the extensive requirements necessary to store all radioactive waste. During his first three years of operation, this was essentially non-existent, with workers simply diluting large amounts of waste and dumping it into the Techa River. Until 1951, and even after it was discovered that this was causing enormous environmental damage. They decided it would be safer to dispose of all the waste in a puddle of Lake Karachay. It wasn't until 1953, five years after Mayak opened, that he began storing high-level radioactive waste in stainless steel tanks. In total, these 20 tanks can hold up to 1,600,000 gallons of radioactive waste, more than two Olympic-sized swimming pools. They were buried underground, surrounded by concrete casings five inches thick, and cooled by an external water cooling system. All these elements are designed to prevent the active waste from overheating. Over time, the equipment used to monitor the tank failed, but could not be repaired due to excessive radiation levels in the area. Ultimately, the waste in the tank boiled at 662 degrees Fahrenheit. Then, at 16:20 on September 29, 1957, disaster struck. An explosion with a force of 100 tons of TNT shook Mayak his complex. His 5-inch concrete lid that covered the tank was blown over 80 inches. And 80 tons of radioactive waste began to erupt at an alarming rate. The radioactivity released by this first explosion is estimated to be less than half the radioactivity measured in the famous Chernobyl explosion less than 30 years later. Fortunately, 90% of the waste was liquid and only irradiated nearby facilities, while the remaining 10% was drawn into a radioactive plume over 800 m high and began drifting northeast. rice field. Within 11 hours, radioactive particles in clouds were detected in the city of Tyumen, more than 200 miles away from Mayak. In just a few days, about 9,000 square miles of land covering 217 towns and villages with a population of over 270,000 were contaminated with lethal doses of radiation. This was the disaster of Kishtim. He has had only two nuclear accidents in history more serious than Chernobyl and Fukushima. As water supplies become increasingly polluted by runoff. The government panicked. They calculated that the villages of Berdianish, Saltykovka and Galikaeva downstream of the disaster site would receive enormous cumulative doses within a month. At that time, the amount of absorbed radiation was measured in rads. While as little as 5 rads are enough to potentially and irreversibly damage human chromosomes, residents of these villages would receive cumulative radiation doses of up to 300 rads. This meant severe radiation damage, as well as bone marrow and bowel destruction. Ten days later, these villages of about 1,500 inhabitants were evacuated. The village itself was destroyed and cremated if possible, but nothing was said to the survivors. Fortunately, follow-up studies showed no long-term radiation damage among survivors, but they weren't the only ones left homeless. Eight months later, he had another 6,500 people evacuated from her 23 other villages. During that time, they ate contaminated plants, drank contaminated water, and lived on contaminated land, but suspiciously, no registry was ever established to track their medical history. A year after the accident, all pine trees within a 12.5 mile radius of the affected area were dead. Instead of declaring a radioactive disaster, the Soviet government simply covered up the incident. No one knew the full extent of Kishtim's tragedy for more than thirty years, but the horror did not stop there. The huge amount of untreated radioactive waste dumped into Lake Karachay means that 120 million curies of radioactivity have accumulated over time. For comparison, the Chernobyl disaster released a total of about 185 million curies of radioactivity. But the radioactive isotope Cesium-137, responsible for long-term contamination of soil, was 40 times higher in him in Lake Karachay than in Chernobyl. This means that lakes and surrounding areas will remain polluted for much longer. It also meant that anyone who decided to visit the most polluted part of the lake in less than an hour, or simply dip their feet in the water, would receive a lethal dose of over 500 rads. You would think this would destroy his leg. Depending on how the radiation works, it may shrink, melt, or even grow a few toes. But in practice this leads to acute radiation sickness. Upon exposure, all cells in the body begin to be destroyed rapidly. how fast? After 30 days he has a 95% chance of dying. Now, around 1960, Lake Karachay appeared to be drying up. In 1967, after a hot summer and a dry winter, the remaining water evaporated. This was originally seen as a blessing, but in reality it was more like a curse. This meant that all the still radioactive sediments were contained in the dry dust layer at the bottom of the lake. It only took a gust of wind to kick it up and cause another radioactive accident.But there were no gusts in the area. A storm is coming. Deposits spread throughout the area, bombarding civilians and the environment with another lethal dose of radiation. Only in 1973 did the Soviet government begin the painstaking process of backfilling the lake with tens of thousands of concrete blocks to keep the remaining sediment from moving. After decades of work, the lake was finally filled in in 2015. One might think that during this time the Soviet Union did everything in its power to warn and protect its citizens of danger, but it was surprising. 1989, three years after the Chernobyl meltdown Until now, there was no information about the event in the Southern Urals, where it was finally declassified. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, City 40 was officially recognized by the new government and renamed Ozersk. Descendants of the original population still live there. And today, residents are getting everything the government promised in his 1940s. But now citizens are aware that their children are likely to be born with serious health problems. that their water is polluted; Many of the beautiful areas around them are off limits. And their life expectancy is much shorter than in other countries. Meanwhile, the story of Lake Karachay and the Kishtim disaster haunts the Russian history books. It is not the only lake in the country known to be irreversibly and irreversibly polluted. There is another lake in the city of Karabash, about 26 miles from Karachay. Like much of the surrounding land and forest, the water is a polluted reddish-orange color. Karabash became the site of a copper smelting plant in 1910. Over 180 tons of sulfur dioxide and heavy metals were released into the environment from this site each year. Although it closed in 1989, it still contains 500 times the concentration of heavy metals such as iron and copper oxide. Swimming in this mud for hours may not help immediately. May cause heavy metal poisoning if swallowed. Although they get pretty ill in the short term, long-term residents of the region have higher rates of skin diseases, cancer, stroke, and birth defects than other regions.
By Jennifer Chigbundu 3 years ago in Earth
The $23,000-a-Day Question: Ephrata spends $8.5 million a year for police. What are we actually buying?
The Invoice Arrives Every year, Ephrata property owners receive a tax bill. A massive chunk of that bill goes to one place: The Police Department. We are told this is the price of safety. We are told that we have a "Gold Standard" department that warrants premium funding.
By Sunshine Firecracker4 days ago in Criminal
Man Escaped Death Row, But He Could Not Escape Death: The Story of Troy Leon Gregg
The story of Troy Leon Gregg is one of the most haunting and ironic episodes in the history of the American criminal justice system. It is a narrative that seems almost fictional in its cruel symmetry: a man sentenced to die by the state escapes death row mere hours before his scheduled execution only to lose his life later that same night in a violent confrontation. Gregg’s story continues to resonate not only because of its dramatic events, but also because of the deeper questions it raises about fate, justice, violence, and the limits of human escape.Troy Leon Gregg was a death row inmate in the state of Georgia, convicted of serious crimes that ultimately led to a capital sentence. After years of legal proceedings and appeals, his execution date was set. For the prison system it was meant to be the final chapter in a long process. For Gregg, however the night before his execution would take an unexpected and shocking turn.
By Kure Garbaabout 19 hours ago in Criminal
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