Podbit · Empire: World History
Ada Duleep Singh was dismissed as a chambermaid or worse, but she nursed soldiers at Verdun, ran up £17,000 of debts at Monte Carlo, then marched into the India Office and demanded a small house and a hat shop in exchange for never bothering them again. They gave it to her.
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At 29:15 · chapter starts 28:00
In 1914, on the eve of the war, Pauline found love with a young army officer, Second Lieutenant John Shirley Archibald Torrie of the Rifle Brigade [1] — Anita Anand "Pauline widowed at 27, Battle of Loos: Pauline Duleep Singh married army officer John Torrie in 1914 but was widowed just a year later when…" 28:06 . He was exactly the kind of upper-middle-class Englishman whose family would have read Country Life. A year later, he was dead — killed at the Battle of Loos, one of the most catastrophic engagements of the entire war. Anita explains that the battle's horror stemmed largely from Germany releasing chlorine gas from cylinders, only for the wind to blow it back into British trenches, killing approximately 60,000 men in four days. Pauline, married at 25, was a widow at 27. She never remarried — the depth of her feeling for Torrie visible only in its absence, in the fact that she would not try again.
Pauline Duleep Singh married army officer John Torrie in 1914 but was widowed just a year later when he was killed at the catastrophic Battle of Loos, where the British lost approximately 60,000 men in four days.
The Battle of Loos was catastrophic for the British: approximately 60,000 men were killed in just four days, largely due to chlorine gas released by the Germans blowing back into British trenches.
Factories that replaced coal engines with electric ones in the early 1900s got only 6% efficiency gains. Those that redesigned their entire factory around electricity got a 3x productivity improvement. Swapping AI tools into your existing structure will give you 6%. Rebuilding around AI will give you 10x.
Lebanese terrorists backed by Iran were holding American hostages throughout the Reagan presidency. Reagan had loudly campaigned against negotiating with terrorists — putting him in an impossible position that his team quietly decided to ignore.
During the Iran-Iraq War, the US openly supplied Iraq with weapons, training, and intelligence. At the same time, Oliver North was secretly funneling missiles to Iran. The US was playing both sides of a shooting war.
Oliver North traveled to Iran under the alias 'William P. Goode' with a fake passport. CIA Director William Casey allegedly gave him cyanide pills so he could kill himself rather than be tortured if captured. He returned safely and the deal moved forward.
The Pentagon sold missiles to the CIA for $3,700 each. The CIA sold them to Richard Secord at cost. Secord sold them to Iranian middleman Ghorbanifar for $10,000 each. Ghorbanifar charged Iran even more. The profit — including $3 million in interest in one Swiss account — was diverted directly to fund the Nicaraguan Contras.
America secretly transferred 2,000 missiles and missile parts to Iran in 8 shipments over more than a year. Only 3 of 7 hostages were released. Three more were taken. The net result was zero freed hostages and a full-blown constitutional scandal.
On October 5, 1986, a CIA Contra supply plane flew a weapons drop at 2,500 feet in broad daylight. A Sandinista soldier shot it down. The only survivor, Eugene Hasenfuss, had borrowed a parachute from his skydiving brother. He was captured, paraded in front of cameras, and told the Sandinistas everything he knew.
The CIA supply operation used a front company called Southern Air Transport, widely known to be a CIA cover. Crew members of the downed plane carried their Southern Air Transport employee IDs in their wallets. One also had a business card directly linking him to Oliver North's office in Washington.
When the scandal broke, Oliver North and his secretary Fawn Hall conducted what became known as a 'shredding party,' destroying a day's worth of documents. The full truth of Iran-Contra may never be known because of what was fed through that shredder.
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