【推荐2】A total of 17 paintings worth between 10 and 15 million euros were stolen at a museum in northern Italy,local officials said.

Three armed men with masked faces broke into the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona at night, a local newspaper reported.Located inside a castle which was built in 1354, the Castelvecchio Museum is one of the most important museums in the northern city.

The stolen paintings included masterworks from Andrea Mantegna, Jacopo Tintoretto, Peter Paul Rubens, Jacopo Bellini, Hans de Jode and other world-famous artists.

The group controlled the only private security guard who was there and the cashier, and then forced the guard to accompany them to the rooms where they stole the paintings.

Verona Mayor Flavio Tosi, who stayed at the scene until late in the night, said that surely someone sent them, because they acted professionally, and knew what they were looking for."The paintings stolen,"he added,"basically are the most valuable works on display."An investigation was opened over the theft.

The museum displays a very important collection of Italian and European art in 29 rooms on various levels exhibiting early Christian finds, Lombard gold work, sculptures from the 10th to the 14th century, medieval arms and armor, and paintings from the 14th to the 18th century.

The museum's director, Paola Marini, called herself shocked by the theft. The experienced art historian, who is about to leave her post after over 20 years, was receiving an award in a nearby restaurant when she was informed of what had happened.

The theft came just a day after two stolen paintings recently recovered by Italian heritage police were displayed in Rome during a ceremony attended by President Sergio Mattarella and Culture Minister Dario Franceschini.

【推荐3】Throughout July 1945, the Japanese mainland, from Tokyo on Honshu northward to the coast of Hokkaido, were bombed as if an invasion were about to take place. In fact, something far more threatening was at hand, as the Americans were telling Stalin at Potsdam (伯茨坦).

In 1939 physicists in the United States had learned of experiments in Germany showing the possibility of atomic power and understood the coming damage of an atomic bomb. On August 2, 1939, Albert Einstein warned President Roosevelt of the danger of Nazi Germany’s advances in development of the atomic bomb. Eventually, the U.S. Office of Scientific Research Development was created in June 1941 and given combined responsibility with the War Department in the Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear bomb. After four years of research and development efforts, an atomic device was set off on July 16, 1945, in a desert area at Alamogordo, New Mexico, producing an explosive power equal to that of more than 15,000 tons of TNT. Thus, the atomic bomb was born. Truman, the new U.S. president, believed that this terrible object might be used to defeat Japan in a way less costly of U.S. lives than an ordinary invasion of the Japanese homeland. Japan’s unsatisfactory reply to the Allies’ Potsdam Declaration decided the matter.

On August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb, carried from Tinian Island in the Mariana in a specially equipped B-29 was dropped on Hiroshima, at the southern end of Honshu. The combined heat and explosion destroyed everything in the explosion’s immediate neighbourhood , produced fires that burned out almost 4.4 square miles completely, and killed between 70,000 and 80,000 people, in addition to injuring more than 70,000 others. A second bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, killed between 35,000 and 40,000 people, injured a like number and ruined 1.8 square miles.