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On this date in 1942, 200-plus Australian and Dutch prisoners captured after the Battle of Ambon earlier that same year were summarily executed near Laha Airfield on present-day Maluku, Indonesia. It was the last and the largest of a series of POW executions in the days following the February 3 conclusion of the battle; collectively, they’re known as the Laha Massacre.* The individual incidents, timelines, and body counts of the several incidents are reported with a good deal of variance and conflation in the sites describing these horrible days, but the evening of February 20 as the consummating atrocity appears...

Avdeevka…. From where the Ukrainian Army has shelled the rebel civilians of Donetsk City for TEN YEARS, has fallen to the Russians after ten years, with many reports of the Ukrainian forces in an absolute rout. There are going to be lots of tactical, strategic, and political implications from this that we will see over the next days and weeks. There are reportedly few Ukrainian defenses behind Avdeevka, the Ukrainians put all their eggs into one basket, counting on the deep Soviet-era nuclear bunker system, and defenses built since the end of the civil war to make it impregnable.

It was 2 Oct 1629, Dutchman Jeronimus Cornelisz was noosed along with 15 other men by the Dutch East Indies Company for a reign of terror that included mutiny and murder off the coast of Australia.* Six others would eventually hang in the infamous affair, two marooned on the Australian mainland, and many more punished for the gruesome atrocities committed on the Southern Ocean. Cornelisz was not such an assuming character when he boarded the vessel Batavia in 1628. Rather, he was a marginally failed merchant, someone who could buy his way on board as an under-merchant** and sail to...

On this date in 1719, Mary (Marie) Hamilton, lady-in-waiting upon the tsaritsa Catherine I, was beheaded in St. Petersburg for infanticide. Lady Hamilton — her Scottish family had emigrated generations earlier — did not like to wait on her libido. She could tell you if Peter the Great deserved his nickname, and dish on any number of other courtiers, nobles, and hangers-on. This pleasing sport, of course, assumes with it the risks imposed by an equally impatient biology. Hamilton’s gallantries two or three times quickened her womb. Her decision to dispose of these unwanted descendants in the expedient way —...