Topic: United States (Page 18)
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π US Gold Reserve Act
The United States Gold Reserve Act of January 30, 1934 required that all gold and gold certificates held by the Federal Reserve be surrendered and vested in the sole title of the United States Department of the Treasury. It also prohibited the Treasury and financial institutions from redeeming dollar bills for gold, established the Exchange Stabilization Fund under control of the Treasury to control the dollarβs value without the assistance (or approval) of the Federal Reserve, and authorized the president to establish the gold value of the dollar by proclamation.
Immediately following passage of the Act, the President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, changed the statutory price of gold from $20.67 per troy ounce to $35. This price change incentivized gold miners globally to expand production and foreigners to export their gold to the United States, while simultaneously devaluing the U.S. dollar by increasing inflation. The increase in gold reserves due to the price change resulted in a large accumulation of gold in the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury, much of which was stored in the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox and other locations. The increase in gold reserves increased the money supply, lowering real interest rates which in turn increased investment in durable goods.
A year earlier, in 1933, Executive Order 6102 had made it a criminal offense for U.S. citizens to own or trade gold anywhere in the world, with exceptions for some jewelry and collector's coins. These prohibitions were relaxed starting in 1964 β gold certificates were again allowed for private investors on April 24, 1964, although the obligation to pay the certificate holder on demand in gold specie would not be honored. By 1975 Americans could again freely own and trade gold.
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- "US Gold Reserve Act" | 2021-10-05 | 15 Upvotes 39 Comments
π Punjabi Mexican Americans
The Punjabi Mexican American community, the majority of which is localized to Yuba City, California, is a distinctive ethnicity holding its roots in a migration pattern that occurred almost a century ago. The first meeting of these cultures occurred in the Imperial and Central Valleys in 1907, near the largest irrigation system in the Western Hemisphere.
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- "Punjabi Mexican Americans" | 2023-09-07 | 44 Upvotes 10 Comments
π Satellite Babies
Satellite babies (also called Satellite Children) refer to immigrantsβ children who are temporarily sent back to their home country by their parents to be reared by extended family. Typically, the satellite babies are born in the host country and sent back as infants, returning to their parents in time to start schooling or when their parents have established financial stability. Research and media articles on satellite babies have predominantly focused on the topic from a Chinese-American context. Satellite babies have become more prevalent in recent decades due to globalisation, prompting researchers and social workers to raise concerns about the psychological impacts of repeated attachment disruptions and acculturation associated with satellite babies.
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- "Satellite Babies" | 2020-05-11 | 33 Upvotes 20 Comments
π Jedi Blue
Jedi Blue is an agreement between Alphabet and Meta Platforms that allegedly gave Facebook an illegal advantage in Google's ad auctions in exchange for Facebook's word that it would end its own ad service plans.
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- "Jedi Blue" | 2025-11-28 | 51 Upvotes 1 Comments
π Graphite Bomb
A graphite bomb is intended to be a non-lethal weapon used to disable an electrical grid. The bomb works by spreading a dense cloud of extremely fine, chemically treated carbon filaments over air-insulated high voltage installations like transformers and power lines, causing short-circuits and subsequent disruption of the electricity supply in an area, a region or even an entire small country. The weapon is sometimes referred to as blackout bomb or as soft bomb because its direct effects are largely confined to the targeted electrical power facility, with minimal risk of immediate collateral damage. However, since water supply systems and sewage treatment systems depend on electricity, widespread outbreaks of cholera and other waterborne diseases, causing large numbers of civilian deaths, have in the past been the direct consequence of this bomb's use.
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- "Graphite Bomb" | 2026-01-05 | 10 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "Graphite Bomb" | 2023-12-05 | 27 Upvotes 3 Comments
π American cover-up of Japanese war crimes
The occupying United States government undertook the selective cover-up of some Japanese war crimes after the end of World War II in Asia, granting political immunity to military personnel who had engaged in human experimentation and other crimes against humanity, predominantly in mainland China. The pardon of Japanese war criminals, among whom were Unit 731's commanding officers General ShirΕ Ishii and General Masaji Kitano, was overseen by General of the Army Douglas MacArthur in September 1945. While a series of war tribunals and trials was organized, many of the high-ranking officials and doctors who devised and respectively performed the experiments were pardoned and never brought to justice due to the US government both classifying incriminating evidence, as well as blocking the prosecution access to key witnesses. As many as 12,000 people, most of them Chinese, died in Unit 731 alone and many more died in other facilities, such as Unit 100 and in field experiments throughout Manchuria.
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- "American cover-up of Japanese war crimes" | 2026-03-21 | 42 Upvotes 10 Comments
π Lockheed Bribery Scandals
The Lockheed bribery scandals encompassed a series of bribes and contributions made by officials of U.S. aerospace company Lockheed from the late 1950s to the 1970s in the process of negotiating the sale of aircraft.
The scandal caused considerable political controversy in West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Japan. In the U.S., the scandal nearly led to Lockheed's downfall, as it was already struggling due to the commercial failure of the L-1011 TriStar airliner.
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- "Lockheed Bribery Scandals" | 2020-02-01 | 43 Upvotes 7 Comments
π United States involvement in regime change
United States involvement in regime change describes United States government participation or interference, both overt and covert, in the replacement of foreign governments. In the latter half of the 19th century, the U.S. government initiated actions for regime change mainly in Latin America and the southwest Pacific, including the SpanishβAmerican and PhilippineβAmerican wars. At the onset of the 20th century, the United States shaped or installed governments in many countries around the world, including neighbors Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.
During World War II, the United States helped overthrow many Nazi Germany or imperial Japanese puppet regimes. Examples include regimes in the Philippines, Korea, the Eastern portion of China, and much of Europe. United States forces were also instrumental in ending the rule of Adolf Hitler over Germany and of Benito Mussolini over Italy. After World War II, the United States in 1945 ratified the UN Charter, the preeminent international law document, which legally bound the U.S. government to the Charter's provisions, including Article 2(4), which prohibits the threat or use of force in international relations, except in very limited circumstances. Therefore, any legal claim advanced to justify regime change by a foreign power carries a particularly heavy burden.
In the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. government struggled with the Soviet Union for global leadership, influence and security within the context of the Cold War. Under the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. government feared that national security would be compromised by governments propped by the Soviet Union's own involvement in regime change and promoted the domino theory, with later presidents following Eisenhower's precedent. Subsequently, the United States expanded the geographic scope of its actions beyond traditional area of operations, Central America and the Caribbean. Significant operations included the United States and United Kingdom-orchestrated 1953 Iranian coup d'Γ©tat, the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion targeting Cuba, and support for the overthrow of Sukarno by General Suharto in Indonesia. In addition, the U.S. has interfered in the national elections of countries, including the Philippines in 1953, and Japan in the 1950s and 1960s as well as Lebanon in 1957. According to one study, the U.S. performed at least 81 overt and covert known interventions in foreign elections during the period 1946β2000. Another study found that the U.S. engaged in 64 covert and six overt attempts at regime change during the Cold War.
Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States has led or supported wars to determine the governance of a number of countries. Stated U.S. aims in these conflicts have included fighting the War on Terror, as in the ongoing Afghan war, or removing dictatorial and hostile regimes, as in the Iraq War.
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- "United States involvement in regime change" | 2021-06-17 | 35 Upvotes 15 Comments
π George Stinney: youngest American to be sentenced to death and executed
George Junius Stinney, Jr. (October 21, 1929 β June 16, 1944), was an African American child who was convicted, in a proceeding later vacated as an unfair trial, of murdering two white girls, ages 7 and 11, in his hometown of Alcolu, South Carolina. He was executed by electric chair in June 1944. Stinney is the youngest American to be sentenced to death and executed.
A re-examination of the Stinney case began in 2004, and several individuals and Northeastern University School of Law sought a judicial review. His conviction was overturned in 2014, 70 years after he was executed when a court ruled that he had not received a fair trial.
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- "George Stinney: youngest American to be sentenced to death and executed" | 2020-07-05 | 46 Upvotes 2 Comments
π Halt and Catch Fire
Halt and Catch Fire is an American period drama television series created by Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers. It aired on the cable network AMC in the United States from June 1, 2014, to October 14, 2017, spanning four seasons and 40 episodes. Taking place over a period of more than ten years, the series depicts a fictionalized insider's view of the personal computer revolution of the 1980s and the growth of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s. The show's title refers to computer machine code instruction Halt and Catch Fire (HCF), the execution of which would cause the computer's central processing unit to stop working (catch fire being a humorous exaggeration).
In season one, the company Cardiff Electric makes its first foray into personal computing, with entrepreneur Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace) running a project to build an IBM PC clone with the help of computer engineer Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy) and prodigy programmer Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis). Seasons two and three shift focus to a startup company, the online community Mutiny, that is headed by Cameron and Gordon's wife Donna (Kerry BishΓ©), while Joe ventures out on his own. The fourth and final season focuses on competing web search engines involving all the principal characters.
Halt and Catch Fire marked Cantwell's and Rogers's first jobs in television. They wrote the pilot hoping to use it to secure jobs as writers in the industry but instead landed a series of their own from AMC. The story was inspired by Cantwell's childhood in the Silicon Prairie of DallasβFort Worth, where his father worked as a software salesman, and the creators' subsequent research into Texas's role in personal computing innovations of the 1980s. Filmed in the Atlanta, Georgia, area and produced by the network, the series is set in the Silicon Prairie for its first two seasons and Silicon Valley for its latter two.
Halt and Catch Fire debuted to generally favorable reviews, though many reviewers initially found it derivative of other series such as Mad Men. In each subsequent season, the series grew in acclaim, and by the time it concluded, critics considered it among the best shows of the 2010s. Despite its critical reception, the series experienced low viewership ratings throughout its run, with only the first episode surpassing oneΒ million viewers for its initial broadcast.
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- "Halt and Catch Fire" | 2020-07-06 | 30 Upvotes 17 Comments