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Before he became a Civil War general, Congressman Dan E. Sickles’ scandalous murder trial changed our legal system forever. Harper’s Weekly/Library of CongressAn illustration of Daniel Sickles shooting Barton Key appeared in Harper’s Weekly. In 1859, Congressman Dan Sickles pulled out a pistol and shot his wife’s lover. Standing in full view of the White House, Sickles screamed, “You scoundrel, you have dishonored my house — you must die!” The shocking crime made headlines around the world, and Sickles became the first person in American history to plead temporary insanity to get away with murder....

Aftershocks of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake were felt as far away as Finland — and people were so traumatized that they questioned their faith and turned toward science. Wikimedia CommonsLisbon before the fateful 1755 earthquake was a glittering capital of significant wealth and culture. In the mid-18th century, Lisbon was the throbbing heart of a global empire, famed for its grandeur and intrepid explorers. But by 1755, the empire was in a precarious place....

Over 1 million tons of radioactive water has been collected in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Now it has to go somewhere. IAEA Imagebank/FlickrTwo workers from the International Atomic Energy Agency review the Fukushima Daiichi plant in 2013. When three of six reactor cores melted down in Fukushima after a magnitude-9 earthquake off Japan’s northeast coast caused a tsunami in March 2011, it created the second-worst nuclear disaster after Chernobyl....

“The worst thing I did was fall in love with a married man,” Judith Campbell Exner confessed years after the affair: “I kept my secret out of fear.” Judith Campbell Exner was the first woman to publically admit her affair with President John F. Kennedy, but not at her own discretion. An FBI investigation into JFK’s assassination and certain mob dealings uncovered Exner’s name and brought them to expose her to the nation....

The zonkey is in perfect health and protected by anti-poaching laws. Nonetheless, this type of cross-breeding has consequences. Sheldrick Wildlife TrustThe young foal is perfectly healthy, but won’t be able to breed once it reaches maturity. When Chyulu Hills National Park officials in Kenya spotted a zebra with a strange-looking foal by her side, they couldn’t believe their eyes. While the young animal had stripes, they barely covered her brown body....

The Ugandan mother of 38 surviving kids had an immensely difficult childhood of her own. All she wants is for her children to go to school, have enough food, and help around the house. Henry Wasswa/Picture Alliance/Getty ImagesThe 40-year-old mother and 12 of her children take a rest in front of one of their four houses. Her youngest daughter, Sudaisha, sits on her lap. April 28, 2017. Kasawo, Uganda. There’s nothing more important than family, which this Ugandan mother of 44 has certainly taken to heart....

Meet the dwarf planet, Ceres. Its categorization has less to do with Snow White’s tiny friends and more with its gravitational impact on surrounding celestial bodies. This means that Ceres has the mass of a planet, but it hasn’t become gravitationally dominant. Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt, which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The dwarf planet was first discovered over 200 years ago by Giuseppe Piazzi in Palermo, Sicily, who first thought it was a comet....

The “Migrant Mother” photo is iconic — but if the subject had her way, she wouldn’t be the face of the Great Depression. Dorothea Lange/Library of Congress In 1936, a very tired 32-year-old mother of seven named Florence Owens sat down with a few of her children in a temporary shelter near the migrants’ camp in Nipomo, California, next to her broken-down car. The woman’s boyfriend, Jim, was away for several hours with the older two children to get the car’s radiator fixed....

The pastor said he was sorry to the victim, but that he was more sorry to God. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyKdluNR95I#t=16m15s It is often said that with God, anything is possible. In one Tennessee church, that would seem to include getting a standing ovation for admitting to sexual assault. Pastor Andy Savage, 42, of Highpoint Church in Memphis did just that on Sunday, when he told his congregation he had been involved in “a sexual incident” 20 years ago that he regretted....

On March 18, 1964, Marise Chiverella was murdered by a stranger on her way to school. Now, using DNA technology and genealogy, police have identified her killer. Pennsylvania State PoliceMarise Ann Chiverella’s case was cold for almost six decades. Fifty-eight years ago, a man noticed what looked like a large doll in a coal-mining waste pit in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. The “doll” was actually a nine-year-old girl, Marise Ann Chiverella. Now, her murder has finally been solved thanks to DNA technology....

Scientology centers in Tennessee have been closed after police rescued two patients being held and medicated against their will. UPDATE: A previous version of this article stated the facilities were owned and operated by the Church of Scientology. This information was reportedly gleaned from an erroneous statement from the county’s sheriff’s department. The confusion stems from the fact that Marc Vallieres, who has been charged with two felonies of facilitation to kidnapping in connection to the case, is a well-known Scientologist....

Christian Brückner has a lengthy record of sexual crimes against children. He also made a phone call that ended an hour before McCann vanished — and re-registered his car under a different name the day after. Public DomainChristian Brückner is the prime suspect and has a roster of child sexual offenses to his name. Christian Brückner, a German man with a history of child sexual offenses, has become the prime suspect in the 2007 disappearance of Madeleine McCann....

Rebecca Schaeffer was destined to be a star. But before she had the chance to make it in Hollywood, she was murdered by an obsessed fan. Twenty-one-year-old model and actress Rebecca Schaeffer was well on her way to becoming a star. By 1989, she had already appeared in several movies and TV shows. However, the day she was set to audition for a part in The Godfather III, her life was horrifically cut short by an obsessed fan....

You’ve heard the expression “raining cats and dogs,” but what about raining octopuses and starfish? The SunOctopuses and starfish were seen falling onto cars. “It’s raining cats and dogs” might just be an expression to mean it’s raining hard, but this week in a coastal city in northeast China, it really was raining so hard that creatures started falling from the sky. In this case, the creatures were from the ocean....

The original chainsaw was used in a symphysiotomy, the preferred method for quickly removing a child from a woman’s womb for almost three centuries. Wikimedia CommonsAn early osteotome, which doctors used to perform a symphysiotomy. Before it became the horror movie murder weapon of choice, the chainsaw was actually intended to be used in medicine. Specifically, to aid in childbirth. Starting in the 19th century, doctors sometimes used early chainsaws for a procedure called symphysiotomy to deliver babies....

How a Caribbean island became infamous for primates with a taste for booze – the fascinating island of drunk monkeys! On the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, alcoholic monkeys roam the beaches waiting for vacationers to leave their drinks. Yes, you read that right, there is an entire island of drunk monkeys: The drunk monkeys phenomenon has become so commonplace that there is now research being done on the monkeys to test the effects of alcohol on primates with interesting findings related to human alcoholism:...

The World Health Organization had hoped to reduce inactivity 10 percent by 2025, but these numbers don’t bode well for that goal. Flickr1.4 billion people around the world do not get enough exercise. The World Health Organization (WHO) — the agency of the United Nations concerned with international public health — published a report in The Lancet Global Health on Sept. 5 that outlines which nations get the most (and the least) amount of exercise....

If you sip on Russian vodka at parties, you can thank Vladimir the Great. Legend has it that the primary reason that Vlad rejected Islam as the state religion was because Islam prohibited the consumption of all alcohol. To a point, that was a good decision on behalf of future Vlads: by 1860 vodka comprised nearly half of Russia’s state revenue. The “party” could only last for so long and as Russia entered World War I and the Bolsheviks came to power, soviet anti-alcoholism propaganda ran rampantly in efforts to curb and prohibit subsequent alcohol consumption:...

The 23-year-old musical genius and frontman for The Bobby Fuller Four was on the brink of superstardom when he was found inexplicably burned and bruised in the front seat of his mom’s car. In the early afternoon of July 18, 1966, Lorraine Fuller returned to the parking lot of her apartment building in Los Angeles. Ever since that morning, both her car and her son Bobby Fuller had been missing. She kept checking the lot as she became more anxious by the minute....

The photographer himself, amid some of the people he was attempting to rescue from poverty. Source: US Holocaust Memorial Museum Exploring photographer Roman Vishniac’s archives of Jewish life before the Holocaust is to contemplate just how quickly politics and propaganda can transform—or eviscerate—an entire culture. In 1935, Vishniac began to photo-document impoverished Jewish communities in order to secure aid for them through the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. There are about 9,000 photo negatives in Vishniac’s archive, but only 350 of them were printed in the span of his lifetime....