The extraordinary life of Victoria Alice Elizabeth of Battenberg, mother of Prince Philip and mother-in-law of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom.

Born in Windsor, England, on February 25, 1885, Alice of Battenberg, Princess of Greece, was one of Queen Victoria's many great-grandchildren. Her father was Prince Louis Alexander Battenberg and her mother was Princess Victoria of Hesse-Darmstadt.

Although Alice was congenitally deaf, she learned to read lips and speak English, German and, after her engagement, Greek.

On the occasion of the coronation of Edward VII, Alice meets and falls in love with Andrew of Greece, younger brother of King Constantine I and son of George I of Greece, and the two get married in 1903: they will have five children.

Alice's husband is commander of a Greek army corps in the ill-fated war against Turkey, which ends catastrophically in 1922. Held responsible

of the military defeat, Prince Andrew is arrested and tried. Foreign pressure saved his life, but he and his family were exiled when the Greek monarchy was overthrown in 1923.

It was in 1929 that the first signs of psychological imbalance began: Alice, in her delirium, was convinced that she was in direct contact with Jesus Christ and was receiving divine messages. In 1930 she was admitted to the clinic of Dr. Ernst Simmel, a close collaborator of Sigmund Freud, who diagnosed her as a paranoid schizophrenic.

When questioned, the father of psychoanalysis ruled that the princess' disorder arises from a sexual imbalance. Alice is therefore subjected, against her will, to sterilization which leads to an early menopause, without certainly providing her with any mental benefits.

While Alice is hospitalized in a mental hospital, her husband, in the south of France, turns to alcohol and gambling alongside a new lover.

But even from these dark years, Alice manages to recover. In 1942 she returned to Greece, where she hid Jews in the attic of her house, ending up in the sights of the Gestapo who included her among her suspects: by taking advantage of her deafness she managed to get away with it, saving the lives of her protégés.

She also works for the Red Cross, dedicating herself again to the least and needy. Her brother Louis of Mountbatten sends her money to live on, but she donates it all to charity.

Alice will not be able to attend her daughters' weddings with princes of various German families, but she would have seen her family again at a tragic moment. In 1937, in fact, her daughter Cecilia, married to her cousin Donato d' Assia, while traveling to London with her husband and two of her children, met her death in a plane crash that killed all the passengers.

Cecilia was eight months pregnant with her fourth child at the time of the disaster, and the remains of her baby were found in the wreckage, indicating that Cecilia had gone into labor. At her funeral Alice sees her husband again, but above all her Filippo, now a teenager and entrusted to the care of his uncle Louis Mountbatten, the famous last viceroy of India.

During the Second World War Alice experiences a controversial situation as her sons-in-law fight in the German army, while her son Philip is enlisted in the English army, in the navy commanded by Lord Mountbatten, the princess's brother.

Alice returned to Britain in 1947 for the wedding of her son Philip to the future Queen Elizabeth. To give the engagement ring as a gift, Philip, who has no means, receives some stones from his diadem from his mother.

In January 1949, Alice founded a Greek Orthodox order of nuns; she attended her daughter-in-law's coronation in 1953 dressed in the habit of the order.

When in 1967 the coup d'état in Greece made the situation hot again, Prince Philip had her mother taken to Buckingham Palace, where the Queen would assign her a room worthy of her rank.

Alice died on 5 December 1969 at the age of 84 in Buckingham Palace. Her remains, initially placed in the Royal Crypt of Windsor Castle, were transferred in 1988 to the convent of Saint Mary Magdalene in Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem (near her aunt Elizaveta Fedorovna, sister of Alexandra, last Tsarina of Russia), as requested by the princess before her death.

On 31 October 1994, at Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Memorial) in Jerusalem she was recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations" for having hidden and saved Jews.

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The Last Judicial Hanging in The United States

Billy Bailey was born in 1946, the ninth of 23 children, in South Carolina, where they lived in poverty. When he grew up, he developed an alcohol addiction and had a filthy temper. Bailey also got in trouble with the law on numerous occasions, committing six felonies ranging from grand larceny to burglary. In 1979, in Delaware, after being placed in a work release facility, Billy Bailey learned he faced a potential 45-year sentence for his most recent string of crimes. After attempting to kill himself with a knife only to be stopped by his brother-in-law, Bailey asked him to stop at a liquor store. There, he robbed the clerk before knocking her down and attempting to shoot her, but thankfully, the gun jammed. He fled the scene, being dropped off by his brother-in-law at Lambertson’s Corner. There, Billy Bailey entered a farmhouse and stole a shotgun. The elderly couple inside where then slaughtered by Bailey, the man being shot twice in the chest and once in the head with the pist...

Jewish women being stripped naked by Ukrainians in 1941.

They are trying to strip her of her humanity and dignity, but look into the eyes of this brave and lovable woman, and you will see she has not succumbed to them. The decision to kill all Jews in Kyiv was made by Major General Kurt Eberhardt, Chief of Military Government; Friedrich Jeckeln, Senior SS Commander of Army Group South; and Otto Rush, Commander of Einsatzgruppe C. Sonderkommando 4a, a subordinate organization of Einsatzgruppe C, carried out the order with the support of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police SD and Order Police Battalions, which were supported by the German Wehrmacht. The shooting was carried out by Sonderkommando 4a and the 45th Battalion of the German Security Police. At the time, members of the 303rd Battalion of the German Security Police were guarding the perimeter of the execution site.

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In December 2003, Joyce Vincent died of an apparent asthma attack in her North London flat. The television remained on.

The mail continued to be delivered. Her rent was set to be automatically deducted from her bank account. Days passed and no one noticed she had died. Those days turned into weeks and the weeks into months. There were large bins on the side of the building next to her flat, so the neighbours never gave much thought to the foul odor they could smell. The block was full of noisy children and teenagers and no one questioned the constant hum of the TV noise in the background. Eventually, Joyce's bank account ran dry. Her landlord sent her letters of demand. These, like the others, simply fell into the mix on her floor. They received no reply. Finally, with more than six months of back rent, the landlord obtained a court order to forcibly remove her from the premises. The bailiffs broke down the door and only then was her body discovered. At that point, it was January 2006, more than two years after her death. In all this time, no one ever came looking for Joyce Vincent. No family, no fr...

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In 1968, two men kidnapped Kim Bird. They put her in a homemade coffin, took this photo and buried her in the woods. They hung the photo on a local bulletin board and signed on the back, "I am buried in the woods, you have no more than 5 days to find me." For days, passersby looked at the photo and thought it was a joke. Until a former colleague of Kim's saw the photo. She immediately went to the police, but they didn't know what to do. After all, they only have the photo, but where it is buried is unknown. Then Kim's classmate started looking at the photo and realized that some letters are written strangely, highlighted in bold, and if you look closely, you can read the girl's secret message. On the leaf was written Kim + Brad (classmate's name). It was exactly the kind of inscription they had once left on a tree during a vacation in the woods as a token of their love for each other in high school. Brad immediately went with the police to the site and th...

In a small village in Iran, Suraiya's family lives: her husband, two daughters, and two sons.

Her husband suddenly falls in love with a fourteen-year-old girl, and the desire to marry her overwhelms him in exchange for marrying the girl, Suraiya's husband agrees to cover the medical expenses of her ailing father.But in the meantime, he finds it difficult to bring in a new wife while already having one, and he's also worried about the increased expenses. Then Suraiya's husband hatches a plan. He strikes a deal with the village headman and spreads a rumor about his wife. The rumor was that, "his wife is having an affair with someone else."To bolster this rumor, they even create false witnesses by threatening or luring certain individuals. As a result, Suraiya's guilt is quickly proven. According to the law, Suraiya is sentenced to death. The death penalty was horrific. A pit was dug in public on the road. Suraiya's hands and feet were tied. She was buried waist-deep in the pit. Earth was piled around her. Then, from a distance, stones were thrown at...

1941 Nazi murderer now identified

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Look no further than ‘Fighting Joe Wheeler’ - ex Confederate Cavalry General officer, wounded three times, with 16 horses shot from beneath him between 1861–1865, serving as a General of Volunteers in Cuba in 1898 at the tender age of 61. He commanded young Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders and even shouted to his command in the heat of the moment at the Battle of Las Guasimas (June 24, 1898): "Let's go, boys! We've got the damn Yankees on the run again!” He would later accept an appointment into the Regular Army as a Brigadier General, in 1900, 39 years after he had resigned his commission and served under Arthur MacArthur as a Brigade Commander in the Philippines. He also attended the hundredth-anniversary celebration of the U.S. Military Academy (West Point, New York) in 1902, and met some of his former fellow Confederate officers, including James Longstreet and Edward Porter Alexander while wearing his dress uniform of general in the U.S. Army. Longstreet reportedly ...

A final cigarette... then the hangman's noose: Three men put to death in Kuwaiti car park in country's first execution in six years

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Holocaust victim

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