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Northern Iraq was an area of general unrest during the early stage of the Iran–Iraq War, with the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) militias joining forces, with Iranian support, in 1982 and 1983, respectively.

The war crime was in all likelihood executed on the orders of Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein. It was a massacre against the Kurdish people, during the closing days of the Iran–Iraq War. The attack was part of the Al-Anfal Campaign in northern Iraq, as well as part of the Iraqi attempt to repel the Iranian Operation Zafar 7.

It took place 48 hours after the fall of the town to the Iranian Army. On March 16, 1988, Iraqi war planes and artillery pounded the Kurdish town of Halabja in northern Iraq with mustard gas and the deadly nerve agent sarin.

It was a five-hour attack that began in the evening. The region's Kurdish rebel commanders observed, Iraqi aircraft and helicopters conducted up to 14 bombings in different sorties. The eyewitnesses remembered clouds of white, black forming and then yellow smoke billowing upward and rising up to 150 feet (50 m) in the air.

Heavier than air – and with no windows and doors to stop the “gas” – it found its victims helpless and unprotected in underground cellars and air-raid shelters. These crimes against humanity were then followed up with a conventional bombardment to destroy the evidence.

It was defined as a genocidal massacre against the Kurdish people in Iraq. A conventional pre-bombardment - to break windows and doors and to get people underground - was followed by the deadly chemical weapons, sarin and mustard agent.

The gas attack resulted in an increased rate of cancer and birth defects in the area, in the years afterward. Some 5,000 people - mainly women and children - died on the day, and up to 12,000 have lost their lives since, due to an increased rate of cancer incidences and birth defects in the years after the attack.

Ali Hassan al-Majid, who served as the defence minister in the Saddam Hussein Government, who led the campaign, was found guilty of ordering the attack and subsequently executed in 2010.

The ”dictator for life” of the Roman Empire, Julius Caesar, was assissinated by the senators of his own kingdom. It was a result of a conspiracy by the noblemen, who disliked many of his policies like his peace making attempts with Pompey's supporters, his ways of leading the state and feared he might bring in totalitarianism.

After a series of victories in the East and South, Caear sent the message of "Veni, vidi, vici!" meaning “I came, I saw, I conquered!” to the Senate in Rome. He had defeated and pushed the Pompeys as far as Greece and followed him up to Egypt, where he defeated his rival.

Shortly after he returned back to Rome from the conquests. Caesar was declared the Dictator of the Roman Republic and the senators feared Caesar wanted to overthrow the senate which led them to conspire against their leader. The conspirators didn't use to meet openly, but assembled a few at a time in each others' homes. There were many discussions and proposals of how and where to execute their design.

Majority of them favored the plan of killing him when they gathered at the Senate, because non-senators would not be admitted to it and it would be easier to kill him and decided to kill him in one of their meetings. If one believes in omens, there were a number of reasons for Caesar not to attend the Senate meeting that day.

First, Caesar's horses that were grazing on the banks of the Rubicon were seen to weep. Next, a bird flew into the Theater of Pompey with a sprig of laurel but was quickly devoured by a larger bird. Caesar's wife, Calpurnia had a dream of him bleeding to death in her arms. And lastly, a soothsayer named Spurinna warned him to beware of danger no later than the Ides of March.

After he entered the hall, Caesar was surrounded by senators holding daggers. They stabbed Caesar 23 times to death in a location adjacent to the Theatre of Pompey on the Ides of March. Marcus Brutus, one of the perpetrators and Caesar's friend, wounded Caesar in the groin and Caesar is said to have remarked in Greek, “You, too, my friend?”

After the assassination, Brutus stepped forward as if to say something to his fellow senators not involved in the plot; they, however, fled the building. Brutus and his companions then marched through the city, announcing: "People of Rome, we are once again free!" They were met with silence,

as the citizens of Rome had locked themselves inside their houses as soon as the rumors of what had taken place began to spread. According to Suetonius, after the murder all the conspirators fled; Caesar's body lay untouched for some time afterwards, until finally three common slaves put him on a litter and carried him home, with one arm hanging down.

While the conspiracy had all the makings of a great plan, little attempt was made to prepare for afterwards. In the aftermath of the assassination, Antony and Octavian, Caesar's adopted son, attempted to carry out Caesar’s legacy. Two years later, their armies defeated of those of Brutus and the other conspirators' at the Battle of Philippa in Greece, which led them to commit suicide.

Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany. Einstein grew up in a secular Jewish family. His father, Hermann Einstein, was a salesman and engineer who, with his brother, founded Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie, a Munich-based company that mass-produced electrical equipment.

When in his latter years at school, Einstein decided to study math and physics so he could become a teacher. In 1896 he renounced his German citizenship. He was not a citizen of any country until 1901 when he became a citizen of Switzerland. He graduated and then completed his doctorate in 1906.

He developed the special and general theories of relativity. He kept working on statistical mechanics and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory, the motion of molecules and explained the photoelectric effect. He is best known to the general public for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2, which has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation".

In 1933, while Einstein was visiting the United States, Adolf Hitler came to power. Because of his Jewish background, Einstein did not return to Germany. He settled in the United States, becoming an American citizen in 1940.

On the eve of World War II, he endorsed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt alerting him to the potential development of "extremely powerful bombs of a new type" and recommending that the US begin similar research. This eventually led to the Manhattan Project. Einstein supported the Allies, but he generally denounced the idea of using nuclear fission as a weapon.

Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity drastically altered man’s view of the universe, and his work in particle and energy theory helped make possible quantum mechanics and, ultimately, the atomic bomb.

He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", that helped in the development of quantum theory.

Albert Einstein was arguably the most creative minds in human history. He died in Princeton Hospital, New Jersey, on 18 April 1955 at the age of 76, having continued to work until near the end.

The Siege of Khartoum was the conquest of Egyptian-held Khartoum by the Mahdist forces led by Muhammad Ahmad. Egypt had held the city for some time, but the siege the Mahdists engineered and carried out from 13 March 1884 to 26 January 1885 was enough to wrest control away from the Egyptian administration. The Sudan was a dependency of Egypt, which in 1882 was invaded and occupied by the British to safeguard their strategic interests.

Years of Egyptian misrule there had fueled a popular revolt led by al-Mahdī. Mahdist forces defeated the Egyptians at El Obeid (Al-Ubayyiḍ) in 1882 and overran Kordofan and Darfur in 1883, which prompted discussion of the matter in Britain’s Parliament.

Khartoum was being defended by an Egyptian garrison under the British general Charles George Gordon. The then British Prime Minister, William Gladstone, decided to not intercede to avoid the cost involved. Gordon had decided to take on the Mahadists by himself and asked for reinforcements. After sending a series of telegrams to London, the Parliament held a vote of confidence on Gladstone and his government. Gladstone survived and persisted in refusing aid to Khartoum.

The Siege of Khartoum commenced on March 13, 1884. Mahdist forces quickly surrounded the city, and Gordon was in need of supplies and troops. The siege lasted till 26 January 1885 and was enough to wrest control away from the Egyptian administration.

On the night of 25–26 January an estimated 50,000 Mahdists attacked the city wall just before midnight. The details of the final assault are vague, but it is said that by 3:30 am, the Mahdists managed to concurrently outflank the city wall at the low end of the Nile.  and were slaughtered to the last man within a few hours, as were 4,000 of the town's inhabitants, while many others were carried into slavery.

Physically weakened by starvation, Gordon and his men offered only patchy resistance and were eventually captured and slaughtered, which caused a storm of public protest against the alleged inaction of the British government under Prime Minister William Gladstone.

At the end of the war almost 7000 soldiers of the Egyptian-British forces had died along with 4000 civilians.  All the defenders were slaughtered, which caused a storm of public protest against the alleged inaction of the British government under Gladstone.

Soon afterward the Mahdists abandoned Khartoum and made Omdurman their capital. Gladstone suffered major political damage, as Gordon’s death was blamed on Gladstone’s refusal to send reinforcements earlier. His government officially fell in 1885.

The attack was planned by Abu Jihad and carried out by the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) faction Fatah, a group of eleven Palestinian terrorists. They aimed at scuppering the Israeli-Egyptian peace talks between Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat in the United States and damaging tourism in Israel.

The plan was to seize a luxury hotel in Tel Aviv and take tourists and foreign ambassadors hostage in order to exchange them for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. However, due to a navigation error, the attackers ended up 40 miles (64 km) north of their target, and were forced to find alternative transportation to their destination.

The Palestinian fedayeen were equipped with Kalashnikov rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, light mortars and high explosives. They had departed from Lebanon by boat on March 9th and landed on a beach head north of Tel Aviv. On landing, they walked less than a mile up to the four-lane highway, opened fire at passing cars, and hijacked a white Mercedes taxi, killing its occupants.

Following that, they hijacked a chartered bus carrying Egged bus drivers and their families on a day outing, along the Coastal Highway. During the ride, the militants shot and threw grenades at passing cars and shot at the passengers. Police vehicles followed the bus and were fired at by the militants but they couldn't return fire due to the civilians inside.

The pursuit finally ended when the bus was stopped by a large police roadblock, which included nails planted on the road to puncture the bus' tires. A firefight erupted, and police broke the bus' windows and yelled at passengers to jump. Escaping passengers were shot at by one of the militants. The fight ended when the bus exploded and burst into flames.

A total of 38 civilians were killed in the attack, including 13 children. 71 others were wounded. Of the 11 perpetrators, 9 were killed. Two days later, Prime Minister Begin, who delayed his trip to the US, told the Knesset, “Gone forever are the days when Jewish blood could be shed with impunity….We shall do what has to be done.”

Time magazine characterized it as "the worst terrorist attack in Israel's history." Fatah called the hijacking "Operation of the Martyr Kamal Adwan", after the PLO chief of operations killed in the Israeli commando raid on Beirut in April 1973. In response, the Israeli military forces launched Operation Litani against PLO bases in Lebanon three days later.

The Bombing of Tokyo was a series of firebombing air raids by the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) during the Pacific campaigns of World War II. The firebombing of Tokyo marked the beginning of the end for Imperial Japan. This attack was code-named Operation Meetinghouse by the USAAF and is known as the Great Tokyo Air Raid in Japan.

Operation Meetinghouse, is regarded as the single most destructive bombing raid in human history. Bombs dropped by the Americans had created tornadoes of fire so intense that they were sucking mattresses from homes and hurling them down the street along with furniture -- and people.

An aerial armada of 334 B-29 bombers took off from newly established US bases in the Mariana Islands, bound for Tokyo. In the space of a few hours, they dropped 1,667 tons of napalm-filled incendiary bombs on the Japanese capital. Over 50% of Tokyo's industry was spread out among residential and commercial neighborhoods; firebombing had cut the whole city's output in half.

16 square miles (41 km2) of central Tokyo were destroyed. As many as 100,000 Japanese people were killed and another million injured, most of them civilians.

The stage for this human catastrophe was set years earlier, beginning with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. But the factors that converged to enable the severity of Operation Meetinghouse took years to build. The attack on Tokyo was an intensification of the air raids on Japan which had begun in 

June 1944. Prior to this operation, the USAAF had focused on a precision bombing campaign against Japanese industrial facilities. These attacks were generally unsuccessful, which contributed to the decision to shift to firebombing.

Concerns were raised in the United States during the war about the morality of the 10 March attack on Tokyo or the firebombing of other Japanese cities.

The raid is often cited as a key example in criticism of the Allies' strategic bombing campaigns, with many historians and commentators arguing that it was not acceptable for the USAAF to deliberately target civilians, and other historians stating that the USAAF had no choice but to change to area bombing tactics given that the precision bombing campaign had failed.

T Ruth Handler watched her daughter Barbara play with paper dolls, and noticed that she often enjoyed giving them adult roles. At the time, most children's toy dolls were representations of infants. Realizing that there could be a gap in the market, Handler suggested the idea of an adult-bodied doll to her husband Elliot, a co-founder of the Mattel toy company. He was unenthusiastic about the idea, as were Mattel's directors.

On a trip to Europe with her kids, Ruth came across a German doll called Bild Lilli. It became an inspiration for her to create her own. She bought one for her daughter and got two more to study them.

Fourteen years after Mattel was founded in 1945, Ruth introduced Barbie Millicent Roberts, better known as "Barbie". Eleven inches tall, with a waterfall of blond hair, Barbie was the first mass-produced toy doll in the United States with adult features.

Upon her return to the United States, Handler redesigned the doll and the doll was given a new name, Barbie, after Handler's daughter Barbara. The doll made its debut at the American International Toy Fair in New York on March 9, 1959. This date is also used as Barbie's official birthday.

Mattel had already become the first toy company to broadcast commercials to children. And it used the same to great effect to create a huge demand in consumers. The first Barbie doll wore a black-and-white zebra striped swimsuit and signature topknot ponytail, and was available as either a blonde or brunette.

The doll was marketed as a "Teen-age Fashion Model," with her clothes created by Mattel fashion designer Charlotte Johnson. The first Barbie dolls were manufactured in Japan, with their clothes hand-stitched by Japanese homeworkers. Around 350,000 Barbie dolls were sold during the first year of production.

The great success of Barbie led to Mattel extending Barbie's family. Her boyfriend was released in 1961, whom Handler named Ken, after her son. Barbie’s best friend, Midge, came out in 1963; her little sister, Skipper, debuted the following year.

Over the years, she has had a series of different jobs, from airline stewardess, doctor, pilot and astronaut to Olympic athlete and even U.S. presidential candidate. Mattel claims that more than one billion Barbie dolls have been sold so far, with about 3 dolls being sold every second.

Today, Barbie products include not only the range of dolls with their clothes and accessories, but also a large range of Barbie branded goods such as books, apparel, cosmetics, and video games. Barbie has had a media franchise starting with Barbie in the Nutcracker in 2001, when she began appearing in a series of animated films.

MH370 was scheduled to fly from Kuala Lumpur International Airport to its destination, Beijing Capital International Airport. Flight 370 took off at 12:41 AM local time and reached a cruising altitude of 10,700 metres (35,000 feet) at 1:01 AM. The Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), which transmitted data about the aircraft’s performance, sent its last transmission at 1:07 AM and was subsequently switched off.

The last voice communication from the crew occurred at 1:19 AM, and at 1:21 AM the plane’s transponder, which communicated with air-traffic control, was switched off, just as the plane was about to enter Vietnamese airspace over the South China Sea. At 1:30 AM Malaysian military and civilian radar began tracking the plane as it turned around and then flew southwest over the Malay Peninsula and then northwest over the Strait of Malacca. At 2:22 AM Malaysian military radar lost contact with the plane over the Andaman Sea. An Inmarsat satellite in geostationary orbit over the Indian Ocean received hourly signals from flight 370 and last detected the plane at 8:11 AM.

With all 227 passengers and 12 crew aboard presumed dead, the disappearance of Flight 370 was the deadliest incident involving a Boeing 777 and the deadliest in Malaysia Airlines' history until it was surpassed in both regards by Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down while flying over eastern Ukraine four months later. The combined loss caused significant financial problems for Malaysia Airlines, which was re-nationalised by the Malaysian government in December 2014.

The search for the missing airplane, which became the most costly in aviation history, focused initially on the South China and Andaman seas, before analysis of the aircraft's automated communications with an Inmarsat satellite identified a possible crash site somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean.

Several pieces of marine debris confirmed to be from the aircraft washed ashore in the western Indian Ocean during 2015 and 2016. After a three-year search across 120,000 square kilometres (46,000 sq mi) of ocean failed to locate the aircraft, the Joint Agency Coordination Centre heading the operation suspended their activities in January 2017. A second search launched in January 2018 by the private contractor Ocean Infinity also ended without success after six months.

Relying mostly on analysis of data from the Inmarsat satellite with which the aircraft last communicated, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) proposed initially that a hypoxia event was the most likely cause. At various stages of the investigation, possible hijacking scenarios were considered, including crew involvement, and suspicion of the airplane's cargo manifest.

More conspiracy-like theories include the theory that the plane went down in a second Bermuda Triangle, that aliens took it, and that the aircraft actually went to the Moon.

The Scottish-born Bell worked in London with his father, Melville Bell. The Bells had always been interested in sound and speech. His grandfather studied elocution and speech impediments and his father developed the first phonetic alphabet. Young Alexander experimented with sound even as a boy, obtaining a human inner ear from a medical school to observe how sound waves vibrated the bones.

He had two brothers, but both passed away from tuberculosis by the time Bell was 20 years old. His parents did not want to lose their remaining son, so they decided to sell all of the family's belongings in the United Kingdom and in the 1870s, the Bells moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where the younger Bell found work as a teacher at the Pemberton Avenue School for the Deaf. He later married one of his students, Mabel Hubbard.

Samuel F.B. Morse’s invention of the telegraph in 1843 had made nearly instantaneous communication possible. The only drawback was that it required delivery of messages between telegraph stations and recipients. Bell wanted to improve this by allowing individuals to speak to each other from a distance.

He once said, "If I can get a mechanism which will make a current of electricity vary in its intensity, as the air varies in density when a sound is passing through it, I can telegraph any sound, even the sound of speech."

Bell started working on his dream with electrician Thomas Watson. They created an early model of a telephone in June 1875 and developed a prototype of the telephone in which sound waves caused an electric current to vary in intensity, causing the diaphragm to vibrate. The vibrations were transferred magnetically to another wire connected to a distant instrument whose diaphragm replicated the same sound in the ear of the receiving instrument.

Three days after filing the patent, the telephone carried its first intelligible message—the famous “Mr. Watson, come here, I need you”—from Bell to his assistant.

Alexander Graham Bell is often credited as the inventor of the telephone since he was awarded the first successful patent. However, there were many other inventors such as Elisha Gray and Antonio Meucci who also developed a talking telegraph.

In fact, Bell's patent filing beat a similar claim by Elisha Gray by only two hours. Not wanting to be shut out of the communications market, Western Union Telegraph Company employed Gray and fellow inventor Thomas A. Edison to develop their own telephone technology. Bell sued, and the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld Bell's patent rights. In the years to come, the Bell Company withstood repeated legal challenges to emerge as the massive American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) and form the foundation of the modern telecommunications industry.

Where would we be without the telephone?

Rodney Glen King was an American author and activist who was born in 1965, in Sacramento, California. He and his four siblings grew up in Altadena, California. King attended John Muir High School.

Earlier, King had a history of robbery of a store in Monterey Park, California on November 3, 1989. He reportedly had threatened the Korean store owner with an iron bar and in retaliation was hit with a rod the owner found on the floor. King hit the store owner again with a pole before running away. He stole two hundred dollars in cash and was caught convicted, and sentenced to two years in prison.

He was released on December 27, 1990, after serving one year in prison.

In the early morning of March 3, King was driving a 1987 Hyundai Excel with his friends Bryant Allen and Freddie Helms. He was going west on the Foothill Freeway, Interstate 210, in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. The three had spent the night watching basketball and drinking at a friend's house in Los Angeles.

Officers Tim and Melanie Singer, husband and wife, of the California Highway Patrol were the first ones to notice King's car speeding on the freeway. They decided to pursue and confront King’s car but they refused to pull over. This pursuit reached about 117 mph (188 km/h).

King left the freeway and the pursuit continued through residential streets. The car’s speed ranged from 55 to 80 miles per hour (90 to 130 km/h). By this point, several police cars and a police helicopter joined in to stop them. After about 8 miles, the car was cornered and put to a stop. The first Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers to arrive were Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, Theodore Briseno, and Rolando Solano.

After the police ordered them to exit the vehicle, Allen was manhandled, kicked, stomped, taunted, and threatened. King’s other friend Helms was hit in the head while lying on the ground, a deep cut on the top of his head which he was treated later.

When King got out of the car, he was reportedly giggling, patted the ground, and waved to the police helicopter. As King went to grab his buttocks, Officer Melanie Singer thought King was reaching for a weapon and drew her pistol, pointing at King, ordering him to lie on the ground. At this point, Stacey Koon, the ranking officer at the scene, told Singer that the LAPD was taking command and ordered officers to holster their weapons.

According to a report, Koon ordered the four other LAPD officers at the scene to subdue and handcuff King using a technique called a "swarm". The officers allegedly claimed that King resisted arrest, while King and Witnesses present denied any appearance of resisting. The officers later testified that, King was under the influence of phencyclidine (PCP), although King's toxicology report tested negative for the drug.

King was found to be unarmed during the process and he later reasoned that he tried to outrun the police because a charge of driving under the influence would violate his parole for his previous robbery conviction.

Plumbing salesman George Holliday, an uninvolved witness present on the scene, filmed the incident from his balcony. His video recording showed King on the ground after being tasered by Koon. Officer Powell strikes King with his baton, and he is knocked to the ground, as alleged in court that King was rushing towards Powell.

Powell strikes King several more times as Briseno intervenes attempting to stop him from striking again. Koon reportedly said, "Stop! Stop! That’s enough! That’s enough!" as King rises again,

to his knees, Powell and Wind are seen hitting King with their batons.

Koon acknowledged continuing the use of batons and directed Powell and Wind to strike King with "power strokes". In the videotape, King continues to try to stand again as Koon orders the officers to "hit his joints, hit the wrists, hit his elbows, hit his knees, hit his ankles". Officers Wind, Briseno, and Powell attempted numerous baton strikes on King, with 33 blows hitting King along with seven kicks.

Two days later, Holliday tried to contact LAPD headquarters at Parker Center to inform them of his videotape of the incident. He was ignored and decided to send the footage to local news station KTLA. The footage, as a whole, became a media sensation and portions of it were aired numerous times.

King was taken to the Pacifica Hospital where he was found to have suffered a fractured facial bone, a broken right ankle, and multiple bruises. King alleged, in a negligence claim filed with the city, he suffered; 11 skull fractures, permanent brain damage, broken bones and teeth, kidney failure and emotional and physical trauma. Blood and urine samples taken from King five hours later showed traces of marijuana.

Later nurses in the hospital reported that the officers who accompanied King were openly joking about his situation and bragged about the number of times they hit King.

Subsequently, several organizations were started throughout the United States to safeguard against police abuse.

On April 29, 1992, the jury acquitted all four officers of assault and acquitted three of the four of using excessive force. The jury failed to reach a verdict for the fourth on using excessive force. The jury was composed of ten whites, one bi-racial male, one Latino, and one Asian American. The prosecutor, Terry White, was black.

Within hours of the acquittals, the 1992 Los Angeles riots were started and was sparked by outrage among racial minorities over the trial's verdict and other related longstanding social issues. This lasted six days and killed 63 people, with 2,383 more injured. It ended only after the California Army National Guard, the United States Army, and the United States Marine Corps provided reinforcements to re-establish control.

The federal government prosecuted a separate civil rights case, obtaining grand jury indictments of the four officers for violations of King's civil rights. Their trial in a federal district court ended on April 16, 1993, with two of the officers being found guilty and sentenced to serve prison terms. The other two were acquitted of the charges. In a separate civil lawsuit in 1994, a jury found the city of Los Angeles liable and awarded King $3.8 million in damages.

King was found dead in 2012 in his swimming pool two months after he published his memoir “The Riot Within: My Journey from Rebellion to Redemption”. The coroner found evidence of alcohol, cocaine and PCP in his system and ruled that based on his history of heart problems, he experienced a cardiac arrhythmia which resulted in his accidental drowning. King had died 28 years later after his father, Ronald King, was found dead in his bathtub in 1984.

        DID YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENED ON THIS DAY ? 🤔

The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), is an international treaty whose objective is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology, to promote cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, and to further the goal of achieving nuclear disarmament.

The Treaty is regarded as the cornerstone of the global nuclear non-proliferation regime and an essential foundation for the pursuit of nuclear disarmament. It was designed to to further the goals of nuclear disarmament and general and complete disarmament, and to promote cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.

Between 1965 and 1968, the treaty was negotiated by the Eighteen Nation Committee on Disarmament, a United Nations-sponsored organization based in Geneva, Switzerland. A total of 190 countries have joined the Treaty, including the five nuclear-weapon countries, China, France, Russia, UK and USA.

The five countries who haven't joined are India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan (countries believed to possess nuclear weapons) and South Sudan (a country formed in 2011). The member countries are classified in two categories: nuclear-weapon states (NWS)—consisting of the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom—and non-nuclear-weapon states (NNWS).

The NPT consists of a preamble and eleven articles. Although the concept of "pillars" is not expressed anywhere in the NPT, the treaty is nevertheless sometimes interpreted as a three-pillar system, with an implicit balance among them -

1. non-proliferation,

2. disarmament, and

3. the right to peacefully use nuclear technology

These pillars are interrelated and mutually reinforcing. An effective nonproliferation regime whose members comply with their obligations provides an essential foundation for progress on disarmament and makes possible greater cooperation on the peaceful use of nuclear energy. With the right to access the benefits of peaceful nuclear technology comes the responsibility of nonproliferation. Progress on disarmament reinforces efforts to strengthen the nonproliferation regime and to enforce compliance with obligations, thereby also facilitating peaceful nuclear cooperation.

The treaty is reviewed every five years in meetings called Review Conferences of the Parties to the Treaty of Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Even though the treaty was originally conceived with a limited duration of 25 years, the signing parties decided, by consensus, to unconditionally extend the treaty indefinitely during the Review Conference in New York City in 1995.

Critics argue that the NPT cannot stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons or the motivation to acquire them. They express disappointment with the limited progress on nuclear disarmament, where the five authorized nuclear weapons states still have 13,400 warheads in their combined stockpile. Several high-ranking officials within the United Nations have said that they can do little to stop states using nuclear reactors to produce nuclear weapons.

It was the first of the two pandemics involving H1N1 influenza virus, with the second being the swine flu in 2009. It was the time of the second world war, and an army hospital camp in Étaples in France was identified by researchers as being at the center of the Spanish flu. Many believe infected soldiers spread the disease to other military camps across the country, then brought it overseas.

It also was home to a piggery, and poultry was regularly brought in for food supplies from surrounding villages. Scientists believed that a significant precursor virus, harbored in birds, mutated and then migrated to pigs kept near the front. When an infected person coughs, sneezes or talks, respiratory droplets are generated and transmitted into the air, and can then can be inhaled by anyone nearby. Additionally, a person who touches something with the virus on it and then touches his or her mouth, eyes or nose can become infected.

Newspapers were free to report the epidemic's effects in neutral Spain (such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII). These stories created a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit, giving rise to the pandemic's nickname, "Spanish flu".

Most influenza outbreaks disproportionately kill the very young and the very old, with a higher survival rate for those in between, but the Spanish flu pandemic resulted in a higher than expected mortality rate for young adults. Mortality was high in people younger than 5 years old, 20-40 years old, and 65 years and older.

The sick, who experienced such typical flu symptoms as chills, fever and fatigue, usually recovered after several days, and the number of reported deaths was low. Citizens were ordered to wear masks, schools, theaters and businesses were shuttered and bodies piled up in makeshift morgues before the virus ended its deadly global march. A hundred years later, we're struck with the Coronavirus and are going through similar times.

It infected 500 million people around the world, or about 27% of the then world population of between 1.8 and 1.9 billion, including people on isolated Pacific islands and in the Arctic. The death toll is estimated to have been anywhere from 17 million to 50 million.