Day: October 17, 2026

The demonstrations come amid mounting economic and political pressure on President Emmanuel Macron’s government, following weeks of student-led protests.

The historical early color photograph shows a zindan (traditional Central Asian prison) in Bukhara, Uzbekistan (then part of the Russian Empire), taken around 1907 by the pioneering photographer Sergey Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky….

What you are looking at is a zindan—a traditional, medieval subterranean prison dungeon common in Central Asia. Five inmates look up from the darkness through a heavy wooden grate at ground level, while a uniformed guard stands over them with a rifle.

It is a grim, raw capture of the region’s judicial and penal system under imperial Russian oversight.

This is not a colorized photo!!!!

Long before modern color film, Prokudin-Gorsky traveled the empire with a specialized camera. He took three rapid black-and-white exposures through red, green, and blue filters. When projected together, they created the vibrant, true-to-life colors we see today. His genius allows us to witness history exactly as it looked over 110 years ago.

Tragically, we are lucky to even see this image. Following the Communist Revolution of 1917, Prokudin-Gorsky fled Russia. While he managed to smuggle out about half of his work, a massive portion of his unique photographic glass plates was confiscated and permanently lost to history.

The surviving glass plate negatives were eventually purchased from his heirs and are now preserved by the Library of Congress.

Seeing this rare, surviving moment in vivid color makes the past feel so much closer to our own time.

#archaeohistories

— @histories_arch Oct 17, 2026

Baron William de Ropp spied for British Intelligence and made his way into Adolph Hitler’s inner circle before the beginning of the Second World War.

De Ropp came from an aristocratic German family in present day Lithuania and was born as a Russian subject. After completing the naturalization process in 1914 he became a British citizen and served with the Royal Flying Corps as a Balloon Officer during World War I.

Shortly after the war he was recruited by MI6, and in 1924 played a key role in the infamous Zinoviev Letter scandal, which is credited with changing the results of the October 1924 elections in the UK. He went on to work as a journalist and spy in Germany throughout the 1930s and ingratiated himself with many members of the rising National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), all while reporting to Fred Winterbotham in MI6.

Although his closest relationship was with Alfred Rosenberg, who headed the NSDAP’s Office of Foreign Affairs, he met with Hitler himself on at least a dozen occasions. De Ropp also brought back intelligence on Germany’s rearmament during the interwar period, in particular on new developments in their aviation industry. This was some of the most vital military intelligence possible for the British government.

Once hostilities began, De Ropp spent most of the war in Switzerland where he played a much-diminished role and was practically sidelined by MI6. He left the service entirely after the war and lived out the last few years of his life in relative peace and quiet.

For episode 214 of the Spycraft 101 podcast, I spoke with Tim Willasey-Wilsey, author of The Spy and the Devil: The Untold Story of the MI6 Agent who Penetrated Hitler’s Inner Circle. We discussed De Ropp’s unlikely rise to become one of the UK’s most highly-placed agents in the lead up to war. The episode is available now.

#MI6  #ww2  #warhistory  #spy  #declassified

open.spotify.com/episode/5V6…

— @spycraft101 Oct 17, 2026

media.az/post/1068114531

#новости  #mediaaz  #Азербайджан  #Карабах  #Физули  #переселенец

If a man did anything like this, you would see headlines of an arrest on CNN.

Writer: Mhedi