It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him, wielding a baseball bat.

Before hospital staff realized how sick he was—the alcohol-induced hallucination was just a symptom—the man died. So did another holiday partygoer. And another. As dusk fell on Christmas, the hospital staff tallied up more than 60 people made desperately ill by alcohol and eight dead from it. Within the next two days, yet another 23 people died in the city from celebrating the season.

Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

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The Imperial Japanese Army’s notorious medical research team carried out secret human experiments regarded as some of the worst war crimes in history.

Its scientists subjected more than 10,000 people per year to grotesque Josef Mengele-style torture in the name of science, including captured Russian soldiers and downed American aircrews.

The experiments included hanging people upside down until they choked, burying them alive, injecting air into their veins and placing them in high-pressure chambers.

Now new detail about their victims’ suffering could be revealed after the authorities in Tokyo announced plans to open an investigation into human bones thought to have come from the unit.

A new search is also due to be carried out for mass graves that may contain more victims of human experiments.

The bones are thought to be from up to 100 people and were discovered in a mass grave in 1989 during construction work.

They bore the marks of saws and some of the skulls had drill holes and portions of the bone cut out. But the issue is so controversial in Japan that they have since been stored in a repository.

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Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev believes that US President Barack Obama still has the support of the electorate despite opinion polls showing his support slipping. Gorbachev had positive comments and words recently when discussing nuclear disarmament treaty negotiations.

“The election of Obama was not an accident,” Gorbachev said. “It is true however that there has been some slippage in support for him.” While he said that he liked Obama “a great deal,” Gorbachev acknowledged that Obama faces considerable difficulties as he attempts to change his country’s policies.

“US policy is changing, but it’s a difficult process,” he said. Gorbachev feels that the United States had missed “many opportunities” in the past, but chances are better with Obama. “I am very pleased that now Obama has changed course and has gone back to dialogue and the process of nuclear arms control,” said Gorbachev, speaking through an interpreter.

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Idi Amin Dada (c.1925 – 16 August 2003) was the military dictator and President of Uganda from 1971 to 1979. Amin joined the British colonial regiment, the King’s African Rifles, in 1946, and eventually held the rank of Major General and Commander of the Ugandan Army. He took power in a military coup of January 1971, deposing Milton Obote.

Amin’s rule was characterised by human rights abuses, political repression, ethnic persecution, extrajudicial killings, nepotism, corruption and gross economic mismanagement. The number of people killed as a result of his regime is estimated by international observers and human rights groups to range from 100,000 to 500,000.

Notable backers of Amin included Muammar al-Gaddafi’s Libya, the Soviet Union and East Germany, with early support for his regime coming from Great Britain, Israel, and Apartheid South Africa.

In 1975–1976, Amin became the Chairman of the Organisation of African Unity, a pan-Africanist group designed to promote solidarity of the African states.[6] During the 1977–1979 period, Uganda was appointed to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. From 1977 to 1979, Amin titled himself as “His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular”.

Dissent within Uganda and Amin’s attempt to annex the Kagera province of Tanzania in 1978 led to the Uganda-Tanzania War and the demise of his regime. Amin fled first to Libya, then to Saudi Arabia, where he died in 2003.

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The Hama massacre (Arabic: مجزرة حماة‎) occurred on February 2, 1982, when the Syrian army bombarded the town of Hama in order to quell a revolt by the Muslim Brotherhood. An estimated 7,000 to 40,000 people were killed, including about 1,000 soldiers,[1] and large parts of the old city were destroyed.

Syria had been deeply involved in Lebanon’s Civil War since 1976. A Jihadist splinter group from the Muslim Brotherhood took advantage of this situation to start an armed rebellion against the government of Hafez al-Assad. The Muslim Brotherhood opposed Assad on political as well as theological grounds; Assad was an Alawite, regarded as heretical by the hardline Sunni Islamists.

The Brotherhood undertook guerrilla activities in multiple cities within the country targeting military officers, government officials, Christians, and infrastructure. The resulting government repression included abusive tactics, torture, mass arrests, and a number of massacres, and was largely directed at the main body of the Muslim Brotherhood. Anti-regime violence included the killing of eighty-three mainly Alawite military cadets at an artillery school in Aleppo in June 1979, and three car bomb attacks in Damascus between August and November 1980 that killed several hundred people. In July 1980, membership in the Muslim Brotherhood was made a capital offense, with the ratification of Law No. 49. Throughout the first years of the 1980s the Muslim Brotherhood and various other Islamist factions staged hit-and-run and bomb attacks against the government and its officials, including a nearly successful attempt to assassinate president Hafez al-Assad on June 26, 1980, during an official state reception for the president of Mali. When a machine-gun salvo missed him, al-Assad allegedly ran to kick a hand grenade aside, and his bodyguard (who survived and was later promoted to a much higher position) smothered the explosion of another one. Surviving with only light injuries, al-Assad’s revenge was swift and merciless: only hours later a large number of imprisoned Islamists (most reports ranged from several hundred to approximately 1000) were murdered in their cells in Tadmor Prison (near Palmyra), by units loyal to the president’s brother Rifaat al-Assad.

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