A Chernobyl 'SUICIDE SQUAD' of Volunteers Helped Save Europe — Here's Their Amazing True Story3/17/2019  It's been 32 years since the Chernobyl disaster, a nuclear reactor meltdown caused by a mix of design flaws and human error. The event immediately killed dozens and scarred the lives of tens of thousands of people over the ensuing decades. Chernobyl is still considered the worst nuclear accident in history — but it could have been much, much worse, if not for a so-called "suicide squad" of three brave volunteers. Alexei Ananenko, an engineer, was the only person on the shift who knew the location of the release valves which were located under the plant.
Valeri Bezpalov, was an engineer and Boris Baranov, was the shift supervisor.
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   Patrick Radden Keefe Are the Troubles in Northern Ireland finally over? Almost 21 years have passed since the Good Friday Agreement formally ended the conflict. Self-rule has replaced supervision from afar, and a return to the terrifying days of car bombs and masked gunmen is unthinkable. Yet the border separating the Republic of Ireland from the North has become a key sticking point in the continuing Brexit fiasco, and segregation persists between Catholics and Protestants. The factions continue to wave their flags and tend their murals with a dangerous pride. Like other societies recovering from internecine violence, Northern Ireland brims with shattered lives, and forgiveness seems generations away. An exceptional new book, “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland,” by Patrick Radden Keefe, explores this brittle landscape to devastating effect. Mr. Keefe is a talented writer for the New Yorker and an unaffiliated Irish-American. He grew up in Boston in the 1980s and never quite knew what to make of the contribution jars “for the lads” that he saw in pubs. “Say Nothing” renders his ambivalence into fierce reporting. Whereas previous histories of the Troubles by Ed Moloney and Brendan O’Brien could take on numbingly encyclopedic qualities, Mr. Keefe presents the conflict through narrative. He tracks the fatefully intersecting lives of three former leaders of the Irish Republican Army—Gerry Adams, Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes—and one of the paramilitary group’s victims, a widowed mother of 10 named Jean McConville, who disappeared in 1972. 
Stephen R. Bown
The Last Viking unravels the life of the man who stands head and shoulders above all those who raced to map the last corners of the world. In 1900, the four great geographical mysteries—the Northwest Passage, the Northeast Passage, the South Pole, and the North Pole—remained blank spots on the globe. Within twenty years Roald Amundsen would claim all four prizes. Renowned for his determination and technical skills, both feared and beloved by his men, Amundsen is a legend of the heroic age of exploration, which shortly thereafter would be tamed by technology, commerce, and publicity. Féted in his lifetime as an international celebrity, pursued by women and creditors, he died in the Arctic on a rescue mission for an inept rival explorer.
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A note from the Author
The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education. Archives
January 2021
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