Hüseyin Dogru Journalist / red. media founder

Today, 82 years ago, the Nazis executed Ernst Thälmann, chairman of Germany's Communist Party, on Hitler's personal order.

What's less known: from his cell, he secretly wrote to Stalin, hoping to be traded to Moscow. His wife smuggled the letters out through the Soviet embassy in Berlin. Stalin filed them as top secret.

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They smuggled the coup into Tehran in biscuit tins.

£1.5 million in bribes, handed to Iranian politicians by MI6. One officer later admitted he spent £700,000 of it himself.

73 years ago today the CIA and MI6 overthrew Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh. His crime was nationalizing Iran's oil, oil the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, today known as BP, had been taking for decades.

Britain blockaded the refinery. Froze Iran's money. Banned exports. When that failed they bought the parliament, and when that failed the CIA paid gangsters to riot in the streets.

Mosaddegh surrendered. The Shah's dictatorship followed.

The CIA has admitted it. Britain still refuses to.

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Happy birthday to Emiliano Zapata, born today in 1879 in Anenecuilco, Morelos.

A pivotal figure in the Mexican Revolution of 1910, he led an armed peasant revolt at the head of the "Liberation Army of the South," fighting to put land and power in the hands of the peasants:

"We fight for the land and not for illusions that give us nothing to eat […] With or without elections, the people are chewing the cud of bitterness."

Zapata was assassinated in 1919, lured into an ambush by government troops. His legacy lives on in the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), which rose up in Chiapas in 1994 and still fights for land reform and justice.

On this day 20 years ago, an Israeli airstrike killed 28 civilians in southern Lebanon. Sixteen of them were children.

The strike hit the same village, Qana, that Israel had bombed a decade earlier in 1996, killing 106 civilians sheltering in a UN compound. Israel claimed the building was a legitimate military target and refused to apologize.

Human Rights Watch found no military equipment in or near the house.

On 28 July 1915 the US invaded Haiti starting a brutal 19-year occupation of the country.

Conducted for selfish economic reasons and racist motives, the US waged two brutal wars against the native population, murdering thousands. American corporations were unable to accept Haitian independence while racist elements in US society including slave owners had never forgiven Haitians for launching the first successful Black rebellion against slavery.

France had already forced the freed slaves to pay reparations to their former slaveowners, a ransom Haiti was still repaying when the Marines arrived. Even when US troops left in 1934 Washington retained influence over Haiti's finances until 1947.