Édouard Stern was a French banker who was infamously murdered in Geneva, Switzerland, by a woman he had a four-year relationship with.[1] At the time of his death, he was the 38th richest French citizen. On 28 February 2005, Stern was found dead in his apartment in Geneva, his body riddled with four bullets. He was found in the bedroom, in a flesh-coloured head-to-toe latex bodysuit and a dildo inserted in him.
Abram Petrovich Gannibal was a Russian military engineer, general-in-chief, and nobleman of African origin. Kidnapped and enslaved as a child by Ottomans, Gannibal was smuggled to Russia and presented as a gift to Peter the Great, where he was freed, adopted and raised in the Emperor's court household as his godson.
Ming was a tiger that was found living in an apartment in Harlem, New York City, in October 2003, when he was approximately three years old. Ming lived semi-openly with his owner, Antoine Yates, in a room of Yates' five-bedroom apartment on the fifth floor of a large public housing complex in Harlem. Several other normal and exotic pets were found in the apartment, including an alligator named Al in another bedroom.
Joybubbles was an early phone phreak. Born blind, he became interested in telephones at age four. He had absolute pitch, and was able to whistle 2600 hertz into a telephone, an operator tone also used by blue box phreaking devices. Joybubbles said that he had an IQ of "172 or something". As a five-year-old, Joybubbles discovered he could dial phone numbers by clicking the hang-up switch rapidly ("tapping"), and at the age of 7 he accidentally discovered that whistling at certain frequencies could activate phone switches. A student at the University of South Florida in the late 1960s, he was given the nickname "Whistler" due to his ability to place free long-distance phone calls by whistling the proper tones with his mouth. After a Canadian operator reported him for selling such calls for $1 at the university, he was suspended and fined $25 but soon reinstated. He later graduated with a degree in philosophy and moved to Tennessee.
Christine Chubbuck was an American television news reporter who worked for stations WTOG and WXLT-TV in Sarasota, Florida. On the morning of July 15, 1974, Christine Chubbuck made headlines around the world when she committed suicide during a live broadcast of her news program. In a shocking and unprecedented act, Chubbuck drew a revolver and shot herself in the head, shocking viewers and leaving her colleagues and loved ones reeling with grief and disbelief.
Phineas P. Gage was an American railroad construction foreman remembered for his improbable survival of an accident in which a large iron rod was driven completely through his head, destroying much of his brain's left frontal lobe, and for that injury's reported effects on his personality and behavior over the remaining 12 years of his life—effects sufficiently profound that friends saw him (for a time at least) as "no longer Gage".
Mike the Headless Chicken was a male Wyandotte chicken that lived for 18 months after his head had been cut off, surviving because most of his brain stem remained intact and it did not bleed to death due to a blood clot. After the loss of his head, Mike achieved national fame until his death in March 1947. In Fruita, Colorado, United States, an annual "Mike the Headless Chicken Day" is held in May.
A Mongolian spot is a benign, flat, congenital birthmark with wavy borders and an irregular shape. In 1883, it was described and named after Mongolians by Erwin Bälz, a German anthropologist based in Japan, who erroneously believed it to be most prevalent among his Mongolian patients. It normally disappears three to five years after birth and almost always by puberty. The most common color is blue, although they can be blue-gray, blue-black or deep brown.
Julia Lorraine Hill is an American environmental activist and tax redirection advocate. She is best known for having lived in a 200-foot (61 m)-tall, approximately 1000-year-old California redwood tree for 738 days between December 10, 1997, and December 18, 1999. Hill lived in the tree, affectionately known as Luna, to prevent Pacific Lumber Company loggers from cutting it down. She ultimately reached an agreement with the lumber company to save that tree.
Starting in airshows and barnstorming during the 1920s, wing walking is the act of moving on the wings of an airplane during flight. The earliest known instance of a wing-walking on a powered aircraft was an experimental flight in England involving a biplane built by Colonel Samuel Franklin Cody in 1911. Cody wished to demonstrate how his Flying Cathedral biplanes had the greatest lateral stability even with a passenger three meters away from the aircraft's center of gravity. The first wing walker to perform daring stunts was 26-year-old Ormer Locklear. Legend has it that he first climbed out onto the lower wings during his pilot training in the Army Air Service during World War I. Undaunted, Ormer just climbed out of the cockpit onto the wings in flight whenever there was a mechanical issue and fixed the problem.