Holocaust victim

Patsy Sherman watched an assistant spill a bottle of her latex mixture over a pair of white tennis shoes in 1953. Nothing would shift the stain, and that was the useful part.

Patsy Sherman had joined 3M the year before with a degree in chemistry and maths. The job was offered to her as temporary, on the assumption that she would leave it when she married.

She and a colleague named Sam Smith had been handed a completely different problem. New jet fuels were eating through the rubber in aircraft fuel lines, and the company wanted a rubber that could survive them.

The assistant was carrying a bottle of synthetic latex that Sherman had mixed. It went over her white canvas shoes.

Water did not shift it and neither did any solvent they tried. Over the following days the splashed patch stayed clean while the rest of the shoe picked up dirt like any other shoe.

A ruined shoe is a ruined shoe. Sherman looked at it and saw a product.

She and Smith spent the next three years turning a failed rubber into a fabric treatment. Scotchgard went on sale in 1956.

During the testing she was kept out of the textile mill, because a rule at the time barred women from the floor. She waited outside while other people carried the results to her.

The two of them ended up holding 13 patents in fluorochemical polymers. Sherman stayed at 3M until 1992, and for forty years she gave the same piece of advice, which was to pay attention when something does not come out the way you expected.

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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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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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1941 Nazi murderer now identified

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