December 20 1973 - The ETA blows up Spain’s fascist prime minister and successor to Franco, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco in what was called Operación Ogro.
Operación Ogro (Operation Ogre) was the name given by the Basque liberation group ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna) to its assassination of Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, the Prime Minister of Spain, on 20 December 1973.
Over five months an ETA commando unit using the code name Txikia dug a tunnel under the street from their rented basement flat in Madrid – telling the landlord that they were student sculptors to hide their true purpose. The tunnel was packed with 80 kg of explosives that had been stolen from a Government depot.
On 20 December, a three-man ETA commando unit disguised as electricians detonated the explosives by wire as Blanco’s car passed. The blast sent Blanco and his car 20 metres into the air and over a five-storey building. The car crashed to the ground on the opposite side of a Jesuit college, landing on the second-floor balcony.
The gif is from a Spanish movie about the operation. [video]
u forgot to mention ppl called the dead president “spain’s first astronaut”
happy anniversary to the basque’s first launch of a manned spacecraft
The little-noticed provision, which dated back
at least to October according to the cached version of an IRS webpage on Archive.org, appeared to mark the first time
the agency has ruled on video game currencies, including Fortnite’s V-bucks,purchased
with real dollars. By applying the same policy to in-game money that it
enforces on bitcoin, ether and other cryptocurrencies, the IRS guide seemed
poised to affect millions of gamers — or their parents.
But on Wednesday, the IRS scrubbed all mentions of the in-game currency from the
webpage after questions from CNN and other outletsabout the
policy. Despite the sudden deletion, experts believe that transactions
involving video game currencies will still need to be reported under a new
question the IRS is including this year on tax forms. Just because the IRS
deleted the language, they said, does not resolve questions about how the IRS
plans to treat video game currencies.
The day after the agency deleted the
guideline, IRSChief Counsel Michael Desmond told reporters at a
Washington conference that including the video game currencies had been a
mistake, the agency confirmed to CNN on Thursday. Desmond’s remarks were first
reported by Bloomberg.
“It was corrected and that was done
quickly — as soon as it was brought to our attention,” Desmond said,
according to Bloomberg’s report. However, the IRS did not respond when CNN
asked for a statement clarifying the tax treatment of video game currencies.
The IRS’s changes only add to confusion about
how it is handling tax filings for virtual currencies – and which digital
products are lumped into the category.“[The] definition of
virtual currency in IRS guidance would still encompass these,” Jerry
Brito, executive director at the Coin Center, a virtual currency think
tank, wrote on Twitter after the changes on Wednesday. “I
don’t think they realized the consequences of their 1040 question.”
The agency has long reminded Americans that virtual currency is treated
like property for tax purposes. When Americans buy bitcoin, for example, they
need to keep track of how much they paid for it. When they sell, they need to
report any appreciation in value and pay taxes on those capital gains (and can
claim a loss if there were realized losses). Using bitcoin to buy goods and
services, even a coffee, is still considered a sale of property and potentially
a taxable event. The IRS published a landmark policy
guidance in 2014 laying out the details, and another update last
year.
Relationships can be complicated — especially if you’re a pair of stars. Sometimes you start a downward spiral you just can’t get out of, eventually crash together and set off an explosion that can be seen 130 million light-years away.
For Valentine’s Day, we’re exploring the bonds between some of the universe’s peculiar pairs … as well as a few of their cataclysmic endings.
Stellar Couples
When you look at a star in the night sky, you may really be viewing two or more stars dancing around each other. Scientists estimate three or four out of every five Sun-like stars in the Milky Way have at least one partner. Take our old north star Thuban, for example. It’s a binary, or two-star, system in the constellation Draco.
Alpha Centauri, our nearest stellar neighbor, is actually a stellar triangle. Two Sun-like stars, Rigil Kentaurus and Toliman, form a pair (called Alpha Centauri AB) that orbit each other about every 80 years. Proxima Centauri is a remote red dwarf star caught in their gravitational pull even though it sits way far away from them (like over 300 times the distance between the Sun and Neptune).
Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2/Davide De Martin/Mahdi Zamani
Sometimes, though, a stellar couple ends its relationship in a way that’s really disastrous for one of them. A black widow binary, for example, contains a low-mass star, called a brown dwarf, and a rapidly spinning, superdense stellar corpse called a pulsar. The pulsar generates intense radiation and particle winds that blow away the material of the other star over millions to billions of years.
Black Hole Beaus
In romance novels, an air of mystery is essential for any love interest, and black holes are some of the most mysterious phenomena in the universe. They also have very dramatic relationships with other objects around them!
Scientists have observed two types of black holes. Supermassive black holes are hundreds of thousands to billions of times our Sun’s mass. One of these monsters, called Sagittarius A* (the “*” is pronounced “star”), sits at the center of our own Milky Way. In a sense, our galaxy and its black hole are childhood sweethearts — they’ve been together for over 13 billion years! All the Milky-Way-size galaxies we’ve seen so far, including our neighbor Andromeda (pictured below), have supermassive black holes at their center!
These black-hole-galaxy power couples sometimes collide with other, similar pairs — kind of like a disastrous double date! We’ve never seen one of these events happen before, but scientists are starting to model them to get an idea of what the resulting fireworks might look like.
One of the most dramatic and fleeting relationships a supermassive black hole can have is with a star that strays too close. The black hole’s gravitational pull on the unfortunate star causes it to bulge on one side and break apart into a stream of gas, which is called a tidal disruption event.
The other type of black hole you often hear about is stellar-mass black holes, which are five to tens of times the Sun’s mass. Scientists think these are formed when a massive star goes supernova. If there are two massive stars in a binary, they can leave behind a pair of black holes that are tied together by their gravity. These new black holes spiral closer and closer until they crash together and create a larger black hole. The National Science Foundation’s LIGO project has detected many of these collisions through ripples in space-time called gravitational waves.
Credit: LIGO/T. Pyle
Here’s hoping your Valentine’s Day is more like a peacefully spiraling stellar binary and less like a tidal disruption! Learn how to have a safe relationship of your own with black holes here.
Learn how to design a lush forest garden right in your backyard with seven layers of vegetation including tall trees, low trees, shrubs, herbs, ground cover, vines, and root crops.
A visit to the now-defunct Fort Brown Memorial Golf Course in Brownsville, Texas, is a cautionary tale of how Trump’s border wall can create dead zones. The clubhouse is shuttered, par signs are fading, and the once-manicured greens are fields of weeds.
In 2008, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, working with the University of Texas at Brownsville, built a security fence on the southern edge of the campus that effectively walled off the popular golf course from the rest of the city.Golfers stopped coming, and the course, which was operated by the university, eventually went bankrupt.
“What used to be a very active place, very friendly place, for students and for our golf team and for winter Texans has become a deserted, sad, desolate no man’s land,” says Juliet Garcia, the former university president, who fiercely fought the border wall. She stands in the empty parking lot, littered with trash and palm fronds.
“None of us come over here,” Garcia says, looking around sadly. “You don’t feel protected in any part of the land that is south of the wall.”
