"Gembaku Domu" - The Atomic Bomb Dome
It will go down as one of the most inspiring survival stories ever to emerge from a horrific war. Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in his twenties when he found himself in Hiroshima on the morning of 6 August 1945, as a single B-29 US bomber droned overhead. The "Little Boy" bomb that it dropped from its payload would kill or injure 160,000 people by the day's end. Among them was the young engineer – who was in town on a business trip for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries – who stepped off a tram as the bomb exploded. Despite being 3km (just under two miles) from Ground Zero, the blast temporarily blinded him, destroyed his left eardrum and inflicted horrific burns over much of the top half of his body. The following morning, he braved another dose of radiation as he ventured into Hiroshima city centre, determined to catch a train home, away from the nightmare. But home for Mr Yamaguchi was Nagasaki, where two days later the "Fat Man" bomb was dropped, killing 70,000 people and creating a city where, in the words of its mayor, "not even the sound of insects could be heard". In a bitter twist of fate, Yamaguchi was again 3km from the centre of the second explosion. In fact, he was in the office explaining to his boss how he had almost been killed days before, when suddenly the same white light filled the room. "I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima," Mr Yamaguchi said....
Casey Anthony, who earlier this week was found not guilty of killing her daughter, was sentenced on Thursday to four years in jail, not including the nearly three years she has served for lying to investigators, though the precise time she will spend in jail has not yet been determined.
Judge Belvin Perry said that he would have to meet with lawyers for at least an hour or so to decide how much time Ms. Anthony should be credited with serving. A decision is to be reached sometime Thursday. She was also fined $1,000 for each of the four counts of lying she has been convicted of.
...
Just weeks after a New York based inmate allegedly confessed to robbing Tupac Shakur in 1994, a man named Clayton Hill has reportedly come forward to confess who allegedly murdered The Notorious B.I.G. and speaks on his own involvement.
On June 8, former Nation of Islam member, Hill, contacted HipHopDX and confessed to being handed a semi-automatic handgun that was allegedly used in the shooting of B.I.G. on March, 1997.
According to a reported email exchange between Hills, 41, and HipHopDX, via CorrLinks, in mid-May 1997 Western Regional Minister from the Nation of Islam, Tony Muhammad, with the approval of Supreme Captain of the Southern Region, Abdul Sharrieff Muhammad, via Account Executive Brother Melvin Muhammad, ordered Hill to pick up Dawoud Muhammad from the Greyhound Bus Station in downtown Atlanta. Dawoud's name was kept from Hill till Dawoud introduced himself as such when meeting....
Just one week after revealing her diagnosis with the autoimmune disorder, Graves' Disease, rapper Missy Elliott has opened up about her troubled childhood, including that she was the victim of sexual abuse. [Via AOL]
In her episode of VH1's Behind the Music, which debuted earlier this week -- and can be streamed in full below -- Missy said that she was abused by her 16-year-old cousin when she was only eight years old. "Each day he wanted me to come to the house after school," she explained. "It became sexual, which, for me at eight years old, I had no clue what that was, but I knew something was wrong."
"Being molested ... it don't disappear," she added. "You remember it as if it was yesterday." She explained that the abuse took place over the course of a year, but that she had never told anyone before.
Missy, who turns 40 on July 1, also talked about witnessing her mother being abused by her father, including an incident when she was 14, in which she saw her father pull out a loaded pistol. Missy's mother, Patricia Elliott, also appeared on the TV special. "Missy saw that the fight was just beyond measures," Patricia said. "My husband said, 'This is it, I'm gonna kill you. It's over!' I was so tired of being beaten over and over I just said, 'Fine, just do it.'"...
Like many other popular attractions in Orlando, the Casey Anthony trial requires tickets. Hundreds of people show up each day to watch the murder case unfold. But only those who arrive well before 8 a.m. and wait in June swelter can get a pass allowing them into the soaring, chilly top-floor courtroom where Anthony is trying to avoid the death penalty.
Anthony is accused of murdering her 2-year-old, Caylee, in 2008. In December of that year, investigators found parts of the girl's duct-taped corpse near Anthony's parents' home. Bugs and vegetation had colonized the remains, which had been dumped roughly six months earlier. The sheer horror at the act — and the idea that a mother committed it — catapulted the case from local live-at-5 sideshow to tabloid sensation ("Monster mom partying four days after tot died," one recent report said) to national preoccupation. The case is being followed by millions on live-stream video feeds and constant cable-news reports. In the past few days, the Washington Post and the Miami Herald have become the latest major outlets to begin offering live streams of the case. CNN and NBC air so much coverage of the trial that the networks each decided to erect a two-story, air-conditioned structure in a lot across from the courthouse. The broadcast village around the court often grows to hundreds of media vehicles. (See TIME's photo-essay "Moms Who Kill.")
And yet they are relative latecomers to what is the first major murder trial of the social-media age. The first public mention of the case appeared on MySpace on July 3, 2008, when Cindy Anthony, Casey's mother, posted a distraught message saying her daughter had stolen "lots of money" and wasn't allowing her to see her granddaughter. (A few days later, Cindy called 911 to report a "possible missing child.")...