PKK

 

On this day:

70
Siege of Jerusalem: Titus and his Roman legions breach the Second Wall of Jerusalem. The Jewish defenders retreat to the First Wall. The Romans build a circumvallation, cutting down all trees within fifteen kilometers.
1431
Hundred Years’ War: in Rouen, France, 19-year-old Joan of Arc is burned at the stake by an English-dominated tribunal. Because of this, the Catholic Church remembers this day as the celebration of Saint Joan of Arc.
1635
Thirty Years’ War: the Peace of Prague (1635) is signed.
1806
Andrew Jackson kills Charles Dickinson in a duel after Dickinson had accused Jackson’s wife of bigamy.

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Birds have been shown to have advanced cognitive abilities. Ravens plan for the future, crows count and use tools, cockatoos open and pillage booby-trapped garbage cans, and chickadees keep track of tens of thousands of seeds cached across a landscape. Notably, birds achieve such feats with brains that look completely different from ours: They’re smaller and lack the highly organized structures that scientists associate with mammalian intelligence.

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PKK

The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militant group, which has been locked in bloody conflict with Turkey for more than four decades, decided to disband and end its armed struggle, group members and Turkish leaders said on Monday.

Since the PKK launched its insurgency in 1984 - originally intending to create an independent Kurdish state - the conflict has killed more than 40,000 people, exerted a huge economic burden, and fuelled social tensions.

Was there an insight? A breakthrough? Some resolution answering all the animosities--geographic, ethnic, historic?
Were the oil issues resolved? The crimes adjudicated? The outrages forgiven? Compromises of both sides joined?

Or have generations of violence, the 40,000 dead, the countless others injured, the rage of ruined families, all this horror simply faded, evaporating molecule by molecule beneath the glare of history, leaving a distillate of graves and scars?

Just another vicious social experiment, masquerading as idealism--after sacrificing mounds of lives, hopes, and dreams--turned blind evolutionary alley?

Just another burned waystation on humanity's forced march?