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On this date in 1673, Indians named Kaelkompte and Keketamape were sentenced to hanging and gibbeting for the murder of an English soldier near Albany, New York. (The date this sentence was executed, if it was not immediate, has been lost to history.) This place had been known as Beverwijck up until a few years prior, when the English gave it its new and still-current christening* after taking it away New Netherland during the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The transition of its legal organs was a more gradual process — with a long survival of Dutch practices upon which the English...

It has been reported that a couple in North Carolina has been arrested for making horrific child abuse material as part of a sting operation. Carmen Delia Foley, 31, and Darryl Edwin Foley, 34, are facing multiple charges related to child sex crimes. These heinous crimes involve underage victims as young as 12 months to 12 years old. WRAL News reports, Darryl was arrested in January and is charged with 10 counts of second-degree exploitation of a minor. The arrest warrant said victims included children ranging from the ages of one to 12 years old. Darryl has already been indicted...

On this date in 1951, the first of two batches comprising the “Martinsville Seven” — black, all — went to the Virginia electric chair for gang-raping a white woman. (The remainder were executed on Feb. 5) Somewhat forgotten today, the Martinsville Seven were in their day the locus of radical activism against Jim Crow in the South — very much like Willie McGee, who was put to death in Louisiana later that same year. In fact, this case generated a bit of a legal milestone: a month before the executions began, the U.S. Supreme Court declined an appeal seeking relief...

As an electrical engineer, the most glaring problem with EVs is that we simply do not have the grid capacity to power a national EV fleet. A few months ago some colleagues and I did the analysis for California – Australia is similar. In order to create the same “power to wheels” as currently provided by gasoline and diesel, California would need to double its generation capacity.

On this date in 1946, fascist William Joyce, famous by the nickname “Lord Haw-Haw” for his English-language Nazi propaganda broadcasts, was hanged at Wandsworth Prison for treason. As a pugilistic young anti-Semite with the unusual credential of being a Unionist Irish Catholic, Joyce had been a moving spirit in the interwar British fascist party. (Since audio broadcasts would define Joyce’s life, it seems appropriate to refer the reader for a fuller biography to this recent Oxford biography podcast.) But because time loves a good laugh, it had the guy haranguing his countrymen for insufficient patriotism marked out for the last...