As human beings, we love to feel superior and that we are one of the good guys. Throw in a dose of helplessness at the state of the world today, add social media into the mix – and you have a recipe for disaster.

SEE ALSO: 10 Decisions With Bizarrely Unexpected Consequences

Virtue signalling is a term that has evolved to describe empty gestures with no real commitment—think throwaway comments designed to generate “likes” and to appear virtuous.

Celebrities have been called out for hypocrisy when their moral posturing has turned out to be of little substance. Members of the public have also tripped up when trying to change the world. Perhaps the point to remember is – it’s OK to care, just do your research.

10 Rough Justice

In January 2019, the Spice Girls were back in the news when their eagerly awaited comeback tour was sold out in minutes. They announced they were to join forces with the charity Comic Relief to front a campaign called “Gender Justice”. The group designed an exclusive T-shirt bearing the words “IWannaBeASpiceGirl” with “Gender Justice” emblazoned across the back. The T-shirt went on sale for £19.40, (approx. US $25) with £11.40 (approx. US $14.65) being donated to the charity Comic Relief. In turn, the charity promised to use the funds to help “champion equality for women”.

The Guardian newspaper decided to trace the origins of the T-shirt and uncovered a story distinctly lacking in equality and justice.

They discovered that the garment had been produced in a factory in Bangladesh. There, the mostly female workforce toiled for up to 16 hours a day in stifling heat and inhuman conditions. They earned less than the local living wage. Workers told the reporters how they suffered daily abuse and threats if they failed to meet production quotas, even being called “daughters of prostitutes” by the managers. Many suffered neck and back injuries after spending hours bent over sewing machines.

A spokesperson for the Spice Girls said it was “heart-breaking to hear about the treatment that these women receive.” They had believed that the online retailer who sold the clothing was ethical. The group offered a full refund to anyone who had bought the tainted T-shirt.^[1]

9 Out of Order

In April 2018, two black men arrived at a Starbucks in Philadelphia to wait for a friend. Trouble brewed when one asked to use the restroom and a worker refused, saying that they were for paying customers only. After an argument, the manager called police and the men were handcuffed and arrested for “trespass”. They were later released without charge. A video of the incident was posted online, and crowds of people began to protest outside the store. Stuck in a PR nightmare, Starbucks announced that they were to close all 8000 stores for half a day to hold staff training classes on racial bias.

Chairman Howard Schultz then declared that its toilets would be open to all – no purchase necessary. The toilets became very popular and staff soon reported finding alcohol, drugs, dirty needles, blood and condoms in the cubicles. Some had to take anti-viral drugs after handling used needles.

Although the policy still stands, customers are finding many stores’ toilets are locked, barred or “Under Maintenance” as baristas take back control.^[2]

8They Suck

In an attempt to become eco-friendlier, McDonald’s announced that they were to phase out single use plastic straws in all its UK restaurants. By 2019, they had introduced new sustainably sourced paper straws and 1.8 million a day were issued. Customers soon began to complain that the straws dissolved in drinks. McDonald’s claimed that the new straws were designed to hold liquid for one hour. An online petition was launched to bring back the plastic straws and gained 50,000 signatures. Some enterprising customers tracked down the old plastic straws and began to sell them online. Others shared their trick of using a plastic cup lid as a scoop for their shakes.

It then emerged that the new paper straws were too thick to be recycled – and staff were being instructed to throw them out with the trash. The old plastic straws had been fully recyclable.^[3]

7 Turned Off

Stacey Dooley is a British TV presenter and a documentary maker. In 2019, she travelled to Africa to make a film for the charity “Comic Relief”. It was to be used as part of their TV fundraiser, an event where viewers pledge donations to the charity after seeing the work they do. Dooley was filmed at a village in Uganda meeting the locals and later shared a photo of herself hugging a young boy. British politician David Lammy shared his thoughts on Twitter stating:

“The world does not need any more white saviours.”

He wrote that the photo “perpetuates tired and unhelpful stereotypes.”

Stacey described his comments as “farcical”. The row opened up a media debate about race.

Comic Relief announced that they were to stop celebrity visits to third world countries when an aid charity described it as “poverty tourism”.

After the TV show aired, it raised £63m in donations. This was £8m less than the previous campaign in 2017, and the lowest amount of cash raised for more than a decade.^[4]

6 Painful Protest

A duck farm in Petaluma, CA caught the attention of an animal rights group called Direct Action Everywhere. They believed the animals were being kept in cruelty before being slaughtered. The group organized an early morning raid and demonstration to expose conditions on the Reichardt Duck Farm. Busloads of protestors pulled into the farm at 6am and set free hundreds of ducks. But this wasn’t far enough for some of the protestors.

Thomas Chiang and others broke into an area which housed the slaughter line – a metal conveyor belt where the ducks would dangle by the neck and be moved along to their death. Chiang decided to attach himself to the highly dangerous machine and even fixed a U-lock around his neck – just like one of the doomed ducks. A few minutes into his protest and unable to escape, the processing line unexpectedly began to move forward. An unknown person had pressed the start button. Chiang was dragged forwards by his neck and repeatedly smashed into a metal pole as the lock began to choke him. Chiang was minutes away from death and losing consciousness when the machine was suddenly turned off. He made a full recovery in hospital.

Reichardt Farm told the police that it was an accident, and the machine operator had no idea that there were people chained to the machine at the time.^[5]

5 Green Party

Every year, tech giant Google host a conference to discuss global issues. They invite experts, business leaders and A-listers to debate and share ideas in a private setting. In 2019, the 7th Annual Google Camp was held in Palermo, Sicily and the theme was climate change.

Google hired out the luxury Verdura Resort. Hotel staff were asked to sign non-disclosure agreements and all social media was banned. The tiny airport in Palermo was told to prepare for the arrival of 114 private jets carrying VIP guests from around the world.

Conference guests included Prince Harry, Leonardo di Caprio, Bradley Cooper and Katy Perry. Super yachts began to arrive, including producer David Geffen’s $400m vessel named Rising Sun.

Entertainment was courtesy of Coldplay, who performed with an extravagant light show at the Valley of Temples in Agrigento, an ancient Greek site which costs $100k to hire.

Guests were whisked around the island by Maserati and SUV. Prince Harry reportedly gave a heartfelt speech about global warming, pacing on stage barefoot.

Observers began to calculate the environmental cost of the climate change conference.

Each of the 114 first class flights from LA to Palermo generated 12.3 tonnes of CO2 per guest. If Prince Harry flew on a private jet from London, this would have used 1.3 tonnes of CO2. An environmental group called Trees For The Future estimate that 190 trees should be planted to off-set this journey alone.

The total cost of the 3-day jaunt is estimated at $20 million.^[6]

4 Hot Air

Extinction Rebellion is an international network which uses direct action to bring about ecological changes. The group get their message across by using civil disobedience, often causing major disruption to cities. One of their demands is that the UK government reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2025, so London is often the place where many of their mass demonstrations take place.

In April 2019, they set up camp near Oxford Street in central London and brought traffic to a standstill for more than 11 days. The non-violent group spent their time dancing and practising yoga in the occupied streets until a guest speaker arrived. Oscar winning actress Emma Thompson climbed aboard a pink boat with “Tell the Truth” painted on the side and spoke to the crowds through a loudspeaker. Thompson later said she “absolutely wanted to be arrested on my 60th birthday.”

However, Thompson’s good deed was ridiculed when a photograph emerged, taken the day before. She was pictured at Heathrow airport—after flying in from LA to attend the protest.

It is estimated that a single 5,456-mile flight from LA to Heathrow can create a three-tonne carbon footprint.

As a Greenpeace supporter, Thompson had once helped to buy land near Heathrow in order to stop a third runway being built.

A spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion said:

“…it seems counter-productive in the short term, but we are looking at the bigger picture.”^[7]

3 Car Crash

In October 2019, Extinction Rebellion were again protesting in London. This time, they were occupying Trafalgar Square along with a hearse containing a coffin which read “Our future”.

Actor Benedict Cumberbatch was photographed as he visited the activists and spent around two hours sitting and talking with them.

However, after his meeting it emerged that he is the brand ambassador for MG cars in India and the face of MG India’s Hector SUV range. He stars in an Indian commercial for MG cars, where he is seen whizzing around in an MG GS with a 1.5 turbocharged petrol engine. The commercial was filmed in Trafalgar Square, the place that he had met with the protestors who hope to reduce carbon emissions.

Over one million people in India died from air pollution in 2017.^[8]

2 In Plane Sight

Passengers on a flight from Heathrow to Istanbul watched as a man in handcuffs was escorted onto the plane by four security guards. Soon, a crowd gathered around the prisoner who was shouting for help. People power sprang into action, as the passengers began to film the episode and attempted to question the man and his security team. The prisoner managed to call out that he was being taken away from his family and the outraged passengers staged a protest, chanting:

“Take him off the plane!”

Under pressure, the security guards reluctantly led the prisoner off the flight as the triumphant crowd cheered and clapped. The prisoner called out to thank the group as he was taken away.

What they didn’t know, was that the prisoner was a convicted rapist and his captors were employed by the Government to escort him back to Somalia, his country of birth. Yaqub Ahmed, 29, was jailed in 2007 and upon release the Home Office ordered his immediate deportation.

After the plane revolt, he was taken to an Immigration Centre and later released on bail. He has since been taken back into custody and will be deported, this time by a direct charter flight.^[9]

1 Do Not Disturb

North Sentinel is a tiny island in the Indian region of the Bay of Bengal. The islanders have lived in total isolation for 30,000 years and they are one of the last uncontacted tribes left in the world today. All trespassers are met with violence.

American John Allen Chau, aged 27, was a Christian missionary and adventurer who dreamed of traveling to the island. This is a trip deemed so dangerous that all travel to North Sentinel is illegal under Indian law.

An indigenous rights group, Survival International also believe that by contacting the tribe, outsiders risk passing on harmful pathogens and causing a deadly epidemic of flu. This could potentially wipe out the entire population of 50 to 100 people.

Undeterred, Chau paid local fishermen to take him to the island. They only agreed to take him at night and to stay at a safe distance. In 2006, the islanders had killed fishermen who had sailed too close, leaving their bodies on bamboo stakes.

Chau waited for morning then paddled a kayak to the island. He called out:

“My name is John, I love you and Jesus loves you.”

Chau sang worship songs as an arrow hit the Bible he was holding. He hastily left the beach.

The following day he travelled back to the island. The watching fishermen said they saw the tribe drag John’s lifeless body along the beach, before burying him in the sand.

Indian authorities confirmed they were not planning to retrieve his body. A local anthropologist said:

“We have decided not to disturb the Sentinelese”.^[10]

About The Author: I am a true crime enthusiast and lover of words. Always looking at the darker side of the news to make new lists with.

On April 26, 1986, an explosion occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the northern part of Soviet Ukraine, an event which today is widely known as the Chernobyl disaster.

During the evening of April 25, engineers made several fatal mistakes, including disconnecting Reactor No. 4’s emergency safety systems and its power-regulating system. At 1:23 AM, the reactor’s power levels surged, and the events that followed led to an explosion which released more than 50 tons of radioactive material into the atmosphere.^[1]

In the days that followed, 32 people died at Chernobyl, and many more suffered radiation burns. Nearly 8.4 million residents of Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia were exposed to the radioactive cloud that was released. The calamity is considered the most disastrous nuclear power plant accident in history, and the area itself is still suffering in its aftermath.

10 Radiation After The Explosion Was Off The Scale

Hours after the explosion, helicopters were flown over Reactor No. 4 to evaluate radiation levels. Experts were unable to make an exact reading, as 200 meters (656 ft) above the reactor, radiation levels had reached 1,500 rems, but the counters were not capable of reading any higher than 500 rems.

In an attempt to contain the disaster, helicopters dumped lead slabs weighing 40 kilograms (88 lb) each on the reactor, followed by several tons of radiation absorbing-sand. However, the operation was flawed, as the scale of the disaster was like nothing ever seen before. Pilot Alexander Petrov, who responded to the scene, recalled, “It took us more than 24 hours to get things going. [ . . . ] At first, our commanders didn’t know what to do. We flew out to see what was happening, then returned and flew back in the morning.”^[2]

9 A Late Evacuation

The amount of radiation the Chernobyl disaster released into the atmosphere was 50 million curies—equivalent to around 500 Hiroshima bombs. Police roamed the streets wearing gas masks, but the residents were kept in the dark and only heard rumors. Armen Abagian, who was the director of one of the Moscow nuclear power research institutes at the time, advised the Soviet government to evacuate Pripyat immediately. Abagian recalled, “Children were running in the streets; people were hanging laundered linen out to dry. And the atmosphere was radioactive.”^[3]

Residents started to panic when there was a “metallic smell” in the air, and the atmosphere appeared different. It was close to midnight at the end of April 26 when an evacuation was ordered; 1,200 buses and 200 trucks relocated 47,000 residents of Pripyat. The locals thought they would later be returning to their homes, but this was never the case.

8 Contamination Spreads To Other Countries

The buses which escorted the residents out of Pripyat spread the radiation to wider areas. It took 3.5 hours to evacuate. One resident recalled, “Queues of jammed buses left the city. One after the other, like giant beetles, kilometre after kilometre. The traffic was insane. Only a Second World War survivor can imagine a similar scene.”^[4]

Just days after the initial disaster, the wind changed direction and began blowing high levels of radiation in the direction of the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. The city held its annual May Day parades as the government assured citizens everything was normal. Finally, 11 days after the disaster, officials warned the residents of Kiev that they should avoid eating leafy vegetables and to stay indoors.

Later in May, the Russian first deputy health minister also issued a warning that vodka and red wine were not a cure for radiation exposure—despite popular belief. More than 500,000 residents in Ukraine were ultimately forced to leave their homes.

7 Military Reserves Made Their Own Protective Clothing

More than 600,000 civil and military personnel have been given the honorary status of “Chernobyl liquidators” since the cleanup began in 1986. Originally, robots from West Germany, Japan, and Russia were used to help clean the debris, but they could not operate due to the high levels of radiation. Instead, the job was handed over to humans, who could not be exposed for any longer than 40 seconds.

Most of the liquidators were military reserves, and the army did not have enough uniforms suitable for working in radioactive conditions. Instead, reserves made their own protective clothing using lead sheets up to 4 millimeters thick as aprons to help protect the spine and bone marrow. Photographer Igor Kostin recalled, “The clever ones also added a vine leaf for extra comfort.”^[5]

Many of the liquidators have since suffered from severe health problems—some of which were fatal.

6 Doctors Facing Mortality

Dr. Robert Peter Gale, known as “the Chernobyl Doctor,” was one of the many physicians and scientists brought in from 15 nations to help with the aftermath of the disaster. Dr. Gale treated patients who had suffered such a high exposure to radiation that even a bone marrow transplant could not save them. Without functioning bone marrow in the body, a patient will usually die within four weeks. It was also difficult to assess how much radiation patients had been exposed to, as the gradual loss of hair and some darkening of the skin were the only visible signs.

In 1986, Dr. Gale and the director of the Soviet Union’s Central Institute for Advanced Medical Studies signed an agreement to monitor the 100,000 people who were residents in the “danger zone”—a 30-kilometer (18.7 mi) radius surrounding the site which ultimately became the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. He said, “A physician deals with life and death every day. Yet, with us, death is a biological event. We don’t think of our own death. The events of Chernobyl made me focus on my own mortality—on all our mortality. Unfortunately, it takes these tragic events to impress this on us.”^[6]

5 The Buried Villages

The village of Kopachi lies 7 kilometers (4.3 mi) from the site of the Chernobyl disaster. This is an eerie and deserted location, as the homes of Kopachi were completely bulldozed and buried by the Soviet Army. However, this plan only did more harm than good.

Chernobyl guide Yuri Tatarchuk explained, “Kopachi was very badly contaminated and so it was decided to bury it, house by house. It seemed a good idea at the time, but it wasn’t. The digging only pushed radioactive material deeper into the soil and closer to the water table, so that contamination spread even further.”

Today, only two buildings are left standing, one of which is the former kindergarten, where children were not evacuated until 36 hours of exposure. Tatarchuk said of the aftermath, “It was criminal. [ . . . ] At least 5,000 people were badly affected at the time, while women who were pregnant were simply told to have abortions. It was a cruel time.”^[7]

4 Puppies Of Chernobyl

There is a myth that no life can survive in Chernobyl, which is simply not true. It’s estimated that more than 900 stray dogs live in the Exclusion Zone. Many can be found playing inside the abandoned cooling tower at the former power plant. The puppies are believed to be descendants of the pet dogs that were left behind by their owners; residents were granted only a few hours’ notice before they were evacuated and advised to only take vital personal belongings and a certain amount of food.

The dogs have been driven out of the woods by the wild wolves that habitat the area. Now, volunteers, including veterinarians and radiation experts, have formed the nonprofit charity Dogs of Chernobyl. The dogs are tagged and their radiation exposure studied. They are also used for research on diseases including rabies. Some dogs have been fitted with radiation sensors and GPS receivers, which help to map the radiation levels across the exclusion zone.^[8]

3 Birth Defects Among The Children Of Chernobyl

Following the disaster, citizens in the city of Kiev were advised by authorities to take regular warm showers, keep their windows closed, and regularly wash their furniture. The precautions were not enough, as, since 1986, physicians have reported a rise in birth defects. Belarus shares a border with Ukraine, and the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant is quite close to said border; in 2010, UNICEF reported that 20 percent of adolescents in Belarus suffer from chronic illnesses or disabilities caused by birth defects.

There are many charities that support facilities which help babies who were born with severe birth defects, including neurological difficulties and heart conditions. Another common birth defect in this region is microcephaly, in which a baby’s head is smaller and not in proportion with the rest of their body.

In 2014, Michael Donnelly, chairman of Chernobyl Children’s Appeal, said, “These children are forced to suffer through no fault of their own. [ . . . ] It’s no better now than it was 28 years ago. The level of radiation in the Chernobyl zone is still the same today as it was in 1986.”^[9]

2 Contaminated Wildlife

Months after the Chernobyl disaster, the radioactivity had spread to Galsjo Forest in Sweden. Elk were contaminated, and the moment their bodies were thrown in a quarry after being stripped of their heads and fur was captured on camera.

A 10-square-kilometer (4 mi²) area of forest that surrounds the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant has become known as the “Red Forest” after the contamination caused the trees to die and their leaves to turn a deep red color. After the humans evacuated, wildlife grew rapidly with limited predators to hunt them down—wild boar multiplied eightfold in the two years following the disaster. Radioecologist Sergey Gaschak explained, “Animals don’t seem to sense radiation and will occupy an area regardless of the radiation condition.”^[10]

The Red Forest is now one of the most contaminated sites in the world, with more than 90 percent of the radioactivity found in the soil. Mice embryos used for research have dissolved in the conditions, and horses left that lived within 6 kilometers (3.7 mi) of the power plant died due to their thyroid glands disintegrating.

1 Chernobyl Directors Sentenced To Labor Camp

In July 1987, Chernobyl’s plant director Viktor P. Bryukhanov, chief engineer Nikolai M. Fomin, and deputy Anatoly S. Dyatlov were sentenced to two to ten years at a labor camp.^[11] They were found guilty of gross violation of safety regulations which led to an explosion. Judge Raimond Brize declared in the courtroom, “There was an atmosphere of lack of control and lack of responsibility at the plant.” The plant officials were also heavily criticized for not evacuating the town of Pripyat sooner.

Nowadays, an old sarcophagus covers the damaged fourth reactor at the nuclear power plant, and the New Safe Confinement (NSC) structure sits above that. Although it has been more than three decades since the Chernobyl disaster, there are many still suffering the consequences today.

Cheish Merryweather is a true crime fan and an oddities fanatic. Can either be found at house parties telling everyone Charles Manson was only 5’2″ or at home reading true crime magazines.
Twitter: @thecheish

There are lots of films that celebrate money. People finding money, making money, even stealing money. Films about losing money are less popular, for obvious reasons. Who wants to think about that, right?

10 Fascinating Economic Collapses Through History

There have been many documentaries about economics. From those serious documentaries with lots of graphs showing downward trajectories and long tracking shots of silent streets, to reality TV shows like The Queen of Versailles, following the building of a mansion by a spendaholic wife and a husband whose business is on the brink of disaster, which makes compulsive viewing. Like a car crash in slow motion.

Great movies about losing money are much rarer. But here are 10 movies that we think are worth a watch.

10 Rollover

Perhaps not one of the greatest movies in the world, after all Kris Kristofferson did win a Razzie for Worst Actor for his role as the president of a bank. Jane Fonda co-stars as the widow of a chemical company owner, whose husband died suddenly after discovering a secret slush fund with the ‘sinister’ account number 21214.

Kristofferson’s bank is doing badly. So badly, in fact, that if he cannot find a single customer with a lot of money to invest, they will go broke. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that they could achieve the same end from a lot of customers investing a small amount, but hey.

In walks Fonda. If only they can get their hands on the secret slush fund, they will both be saved. There’s a lot of guff about finders fees, and other pseudo-financial rubbish that makes us think that maybe the screenwriter wasn’t that clued up on the world of finance.

When the pair traveled to the Sahara Desert in order to negotiate with some Bedouin financial investors, our suspicions were confirmed. Even back in 1981, millionaire sheikhs had phones and held meetings in offices.

The film’s real interest is in gold. The secret slush fund is actually a massive big pile of gold, hoarded against the possibility of financial collapse. When its existence is made public, people around the world begin to riot when they discover their money is now worthless (OK this link is not very clear in the film and most countries’ currencies are not, in fact, tied to gold). But the scenes of the breakdown of civilization are interesting.

The final scenes make it worth the effort. We see Fonda’s chemical factory standing idle, its workers laid off, and Kristofferson’s bank is the same. And this is mirrored around the world as the catastrophe of financial collapse rolls over the world like a sandstorm in the Sahara.

9 Rogue Trader

13 years before the global financial meltdown, 1 single trader gave the financial world a foretaste of what was to come, and, as with all disasters, the story was made into a movie. Rogue Trader starred Ewan McGregor as Nick Leeson, a derivatives trader for one of the world’s oldest banks.

Leeson is the manager of their Singapore arm, where no one actually checked what he was doing.

Or how much he was losing. Which was a lot.

He viewed the stock market as ‘one giant casino’. After an initial winning streak, Leeson began to lose money, and hid the losses in a secret account.

And no one noticed. Until the bank was down £830 million and the bank went bust, almost bringing down the London Stock Exchange with it. The story was gold dust, but the movie was not so well received, and, like its subject, lost a lot of money.

8 Boiler Room

“Anyone who tells you money is the root of all evil doesn’t have any”. So says Ben Affleck, who runs his own brokerage firm, JT Marlin. Really?

Giovanni Ribisi is the inexperienced new trader sucked in by the promise of easy money.

The brokers are all young and ambitious. They can all quote lines from Wall St, and see Gordon Gekko as a role model. After some time selling shares, and enjoying the spoils, Ribisi begins to feel that something is not quite right at JT Marlin. Apart from the name.

The firm employs sharp practices to inflate demand for penny stocks. They even create fake companies and sell shares in them too at inflated prices.

Ribisi finally realizes that real people are being hurt by their scams when he persuades one of them to invest his meager savings in stocks which then tank. He begins to work with the FBI to bring Affleck and his company down, copying all their files, and in a small act of atonement, he persuades his boss to repay the investor who Ribisi had conned.

The film showed just how exciting the world of finance can be when everyone is making money.

And why, when there is so little control over what they do, some people don’t know where to draw the line.

This film is the original “Wolf of Wall Street” with both movies being loosely based on the life of Jordan Belfort.

7 Margin Call

Margin Call tries to put a human face to Wall St. It’s probably fair to say the final film doesn’t quite meet the brief. It follows a fictional firm over the course of a single day, and shows how their actions in dumping their stock precipitated the crash.

Stanley Tucci, a risk management guy, is made redundant and passes on his concerns about the impending financial crisis on his way out the door. Jeremy Irons plays the CEO of the bank, who decides to cut and run.

At the emergency board meeting, Irons says, “There are 3 ways to make a living in this business. Be first, be smarter or cheat.” Being bankers, not criminals, they decide to go with option 1. Irons orders his staff to sell off their shares, thus precipitating the stock market crash.

Kevin Spacey, as the COO, makes a big speech to his brokers that is just a little hard to swallow. He says he is ‘very proud’ of the work of his brokers, who have “dedicated a portion of their lives” to making themselves lots of money. Or, as Spacey put it ,“our talents have been used for the greater good”

In fairness, his trader’s did look devastated at the thought of the impending worldwide financial collapse, at least until he promised them a million-dollar bonus if they managed to off-load their worthless shares onto unsuspecting schmucks before the markets caught on.

Heroes, all of them.

Stanley Tucci heroically returns for the final day’s trading, in order to say, ‘I told you so’ and negotiate hard over his severance package. Kevin Spacey is disgusted with the behavior of his firm, and devastated by the effects of Corporate Greed, but, in a touching moment of genuine pathos, he is eventually persuaded to stay in his very well-paid job, because, ‘I need the money’.

That’s OK then

6 99 Homes

Most movies about the financial crash are centered on Wall St, and the money makers, which is understandable. 99 Homes looked at the situation from the other end – all those people whose homes were repossessed when the housing bubble burst.

While the Wall St films were all frenetic energy, champagne and billion-dollar deals, 99 Homes looks at what desperate people will do to put food on the table and keep a roof over the heads of their kids. Andrew Garfield stars as a first-time buyer who loses his home after he is made redundant.

The real-estate developer who evicted him, played with chilling coldness by Michael Shannon, offers Garfield a job evicting 99 other people from their homes.

And Garfield sold his soul to the devil, and evicted his neighbors, until one of the neighbors fought back.

99 Homes is not a feel-good movie, but does put a human face to the sub-prime mortgage scandal.

10 Famous Props And The Actors Who Stole Them

5 Too Big to Fail

What would government do when banks fail? This was the premise of Too Big to Fail, the story of the US Treasury’s response to the financial collapse of 2008.

Starring William Hurt as the Treasury Secretary and Paul Giamatti as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve trying to save the world in a Gucci suit.

(Spoiler: They failed)

If Hurt and Giamatti are the superheroes, who are the villains? Well, there’s James Woods, who plays the CEO of Lehman Brothers, Richard Fuld, who refused to acknowledge the end of the world was nigh, and kept right on hustling until the collapse. In one excruciating scene, the Lehman brothers staff maneuver to keep Fuld away from the negotiating table as they work with a Korean consortium to fund a buyout, only for Fuld to crash the meeting and try to drive up the price.

The Korean’s walked, and Lehman’s folded.

The film had a good go at making the difficult subject of finance interesting. It’s not easy to inject drama into what is, essentially, an endless round of meetings, and there are an awful lot of shots of men in suits striding purposefully down corridors, but the film does manage to convey the seriousness of the financial situation, even if it doesn’t quite manage to explain how we got there.

The film’s end carries a note of warning, when William Hurt points out that the billions of dollars in bail out funds is simply being handed to the same people who caused the crash, without any restrictions on how they will use it. Which is disturbing.

Even more disturbing, the film said, is that as a result of mergers following the crash, the top 10 financial institutions in America now hold 77% of US banking assets, making them, once again, too big to fail.

And don’t even get me started on the massive bailout bill that just got passed by Congress and the Senate under the cover of saving us from the Coronavirus.

4 Wall St (1 and 2)

Gordon Gekko made finance sexy in Wall St. The Oliver Stone film captured the 1980’s zeitgeist of ‘Greed is Good’. Starring Michael Douglas as seasoned financier, Gekko, and Charlie Sheen as Bud Fox, a newly qualified stockbroker not yet wise in the ways of the stock exchange, the film examines the way Wall St often blurred lines and traded off inside information in order to line their own pockets.

In a ridiculously naïve move, Bud persuades Gekko to buy an airline, and hopes that the famed destroyer of companies will expand this company, and make Bud its new CEO.

Gekko breaks it up and sells it for parts. Which is kind of awkward for Bud, given that his dad works there.

Although both Gekko and Bud are arrested for insider trading at the end of the film, the enduring message of the film was, indeed, that Greed is Good, and many stockbrokers subsequently credited the film as the reason they went into finance.

Oliver Stone took another look at Wall St almost 25 years later, and focused on the stock market crash. Gekko, now released from prison, is making a living by warning of an impending economic disaster. He is a changed man.

And Shia LeBeouf is the newbie stockbroker. You can see where this is going, can’t you?

The sequel didn’t capture the spirit of Wall St in the crash quite so well as it had done during the champagne and cocaine years, perhaps because a repentant
Gordon Gekko just didn’t play well, but no list of films about Wall St would be complete without Wall St, so we’ve included the sequel, just so we can include the original.

3 The Damned

La Caduta Degli Dei (The Fall of the Gods), also released under the title The Damned, was a pretty strange 1969 Italian-German made movie, in English, about a rich industrialist family who start doing business with the Nazis, despite their opposition to the Nazi ideology. After a murder and an arrest, the family business is passed to relatives with even fewer scruples.

The film demonstrates the incestuous relationship between business and politics, as well as quite a few other types of incestuous relationships, and how control over one can affect the other.

It also shows how narrow is the void between success and disaster. In only a few months the family go from lavish, not to say excessive, living, to losing their home, business and even their lives.

Better than no other, this film depicts the transition from life under a failed bankrupt Weimar Republic to the powerful Nazi state. Director Luchino Visconti illustrates this masterfully through the central character, Martin, who starts out dressed in drag performing burlesque, and ends in a full Nazi uniform giving the Heil Hitler salute.

If you ask yourself where our current society sits on the scale of Weimar to Nazidom, the answer may frighten you.

2 The Big Short

Hands down the best film about the financial collapse, The Big Short concentrated not so much on what was done to try to prevent the collapse, but how we got there. It manages to explain complicated, and rather dull, financial concepts in ingenious ways. Such as Margot Robbie sipping champagne in a bubble bath, while explaining what a sub-prime mortgage is. “Basically, whenever you hear ‘sub-prime’, think ‘shit’.”

There are a lot of bad guys in this movie, but very few good guys. Steve Carrell plays Mark Baum, a fictional character based on Steve Eisman, the man who shorted Collateralized Debt Obligations (see Selina Gomez at the blackjack table for explanation) or Michael Burry, played by Christian Bale, who recognized early on that the market was unsustainable, and bought Credit Default Swaps as a result.

But they both profited from the collapse, so hard to picture them as actual superheroes.

The movie is pretty entertaining, for a finance movie, and has cameo appearances by the dozen, including Brad Pitt as a bearded trader-guru passing on his ancient financial wisdom to the young bloods. It won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay, and was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Supporting Actor, for Christian Bale.

Which is not bad for a film about mortgages.

1 The Grapes of Wrath

Long before the 2008 banking collapse, there was the Great Depression. John Steinbeck wrote the defining novel of the era, The Grapes of Wrath, which was made into a film by John Ford in 1940. The film was rather less bleak than the novel, and tried to end on a note of hope, when Ma Joad says, “We’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out, they can’t lick us. We’ll go on forever, Pa, cos we’re the people.” Which has a flavor of Gone With the Wind about it.

I swear, I’ll never be hungry again.

Despite its rather upbeat ending, the film, which starred Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, is still considered not only one of the best films about economic depression, but one of the best films ever.

In a brilliantly concise explanation, one ‘labor agitator’ explains why bosses encouraged mass migration to join the California labor force. ‘Maybe he needs 1000 men, so he gets 5000 there, and he’ll pay 15 cents an hour and you guys will have to take it because you’re hungry.’

The film won Best Director Oscar for John Ford, and was nominated for 6 more.

10 Movies You Had No Idea Were Filmed In The Wrong Locations

In Victorian times, people would stop a house’s clocks at the time of an occupant’s death. Although this tradition continues somewhat today, there are some death clocks that weren’t stopped on purpose. Instead, they were broken by terrible circumstance, frozen forever to mark the last moments of disaster. These clocks are chilling mementos of past tragedies.

10 The Pirate’s Pocket Watch

On June 7, 1692, the town of Port Royal, Jamaica, was destroyed by a major earthquake. Shortly before noon, residents heard a thunderous cracking noise before feeling the earth shake violently and watching half their city slip into the sea. Three centuries later, historians began to explore the underwater ruins.

The most famous artifact recovered from the ruins was a pocket watch manufactured in the Netherlands around 1686. The hands on the watch were stopped at 11:43 AM, the exact time of the earthquake and the watch’s entrance into the sea. Although other records noting the time of the quake do exist, the discovery of the pocket watch was the first time that a stopped clock was used by archaeologists to date a disaster down to the minute.

9 Casey Jones’s Pocket Watch

Railroad enthusiasts know the story of John Luther “Casey” Jones, a train engineer who heroically died saving his passengers during a collision near Vaughn, Mississippi. While approaching the station at Vaughn, Jones and his signalman noticed something on the track ahead. They realized too late that it was the tail end of another train that was too long to fit its siding. The signalman leaped from the cab (on Jones’s orders), leaving Casey to his fate. A few seconds later, Jones’s train collided head-on with the other cars.

When Jones’s badly mangled body was pulled from the wreckage later that day, it was found that his pocket watch had stopped at 3:52 AM, the exact time of the impact. Although Jones died as a result of the crash, his actions ensured that he was the only fatality. No one else involved with either train suffered more than minor injuries.

8 The Titanic’s Mantel Clock

The story of the Titanic—the so-called “unsinkable” luxury ocean liner—is well-known. On the night of April 14, 1912, the ship struck an iceberg and ultimately sank into the North Atlantic during the early morning hours of April 15, taking approximately 1,500 people with it. Although there were many pocket watches and clocks retrieved from both victims and the ship itself, the most interesting one remains with the wreck.

This clock was located on the fireplace of the Straus suite, used by Macy’s founder Isidor Straus and his wife. Upon the dilapidated mantel, surrounded by sand and debris, sits a golden clock looking almost as new as it did the day it was made. Old pictures of the suite in its heyday show that the sinking did not affect the clock’s position at all. Its face, however, has seen some damage and is hard to read. The documentary Tony Robinson’s Titanic Adventure hypothesizes that the hands stopped either at 2:04 AM, when the last lifeboat was released, or 2:20 AM, the very minute the ship plunged beneath the waves.

7 John Taylor’s Pocket Watch

Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, was killed on June 27, 1844, by a group of angry Illinois townspeople. After a long legal debacle that began with the destruction of an anti-Mormon newspaper’s printing press, Smith and a few other men waited in the Carthage, Illinois, jail for a trail. There, they saw a mob of around 200 men marching toward the building.

Although Smith was killed in the attack, his friend, John Taylor, miraculously survived. In the melee, Taylor tried to escape by jumping from the jail window but was pushed backward by the force of a gunshot from below. The shooter had been aiming for Taylor’s heart but instead hit his watch, which he kept in his left vest pocket. The hands of the watch were stopped at 5:16 PM, approximately the time that Joseph Smith breathed his last. Taylor later took his miracle watch to Salt Lake City, where he eventually became president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The watch remains in the church’s archives to this day.

6 The Chernobyl Clock

In early morning hours of April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant experienced a meltdown after a safety test went catastrophically wrong. In the ensuing hours, the power plant and nearby areas were blasted with radioactive energy, heat, and fire. In 2005, intrepid photographer Gerd Ludwig ventured into the radioactive ruins of the power plant for a 15-minute photography trip. Although all the photographs of ghostly control rooms and empty hallways are stunning, there was only one scene that Ludwig truly risked his life to capture.

Deep in the heart of the reactor, where the radiation is strongest, Ludwig ventured into a room hidden behind a steel door. In the few seconds allowed to him, he saw an old clock hanging on a wall, its hands stopped at 1:23:58 AM, the exact time at which the reactor exploded. The image of the clock spoke so much to Ludwig that he begged to be allowed a few brief seconds to photograph, in his words, “the time when on 26 April, 1986, in the building that housed Energy Block #4, time stood forever still.”

5 The Train Workers’ Clock

The entire world knows the story of September 11, 2001, in which the United States suffered the worst terrorist attack in its history. Although the US has largely rebounded from the tragedy, 9/11 hasn’t been forgotten. Each plane crash site was made into a memorial, with the largest and most elaborate filling the footprint of the Twin Towers in New York City.

In 2005, the Ground Zero Museum Workshop opened in New York to honor the dead and remind the living of that terrible day. One of the featured items in the museum is a clock found in the wreckage, its hands pointing to 10:02:14 AM, when the south tower collapsed. The clock was discovered in a break room used by local train workers alongside the remnants of their weight lifting bench.

4 The Photographer’s Pocket Watch

On August 6, 1945, the future of warfare was changed forever. Whether truly merited or not, US military leaders decided to destroy the city of Hiroshima, Japan, with the ace they’d secretly been building: the atomic bomb. Roughly 100,000 people were killed in the attack, and everything within a 1.6-kilometer (1 mi) radius was completely turned to rubble.

In the aftermath of the bombing, 19-year-old Shinji Mikamo returned to Hiroshima to dig through the ruins of his family home. There, he found his grandfather’s golden pocket watch, which had originally been given as payment for serving as an imperial photographer. Even though the watch’s hands had been blown off, the heat of the blast had seared the time of the bombing onto the metal below, leaving the clock to always read 8:15 AM. Shinji donated the watch to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in 1955 and then to a museum in the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Unfortunately, the watch disappeared in 1989 and has not been seen since.

3 The Murrah Building Clock

Masterminded by two criminals who were disgruntled with the government, the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, was the deadliest terrorist attack in the US before 9/11. On the morning of April 19, 1995, a moving truck loaded with explosives detonated outside the building, killing 168 people (19 of whom were children under the age of six) and injuring more than 650 others. Three months later, the remains of the Murrah building were demolished so that a memorial and museum could be built on the grounds.

The idea of stopped time is heavily integrated into both the memorial and the museum. Two large structures known as the Gates of Time flank the entrances of the outdoor memorial, each inscribed with a time stamp of significance. The eastern gate reads “9:01,” which represents “the last moments of peace” before the blast. Its parallel, the western gate, reads “9:03,” called “the first moments of recovery.” Enshrined in the museum, however, is a memento that marks the exact time of the blast: a clock poised at 9:02 AM.

2 Oppau Church Clocks

Oppau (now incorporated into the city of Ludwigshafen) was a small town located in Southwestern Germany. Oppau’s BASF chemical plant was responsible for the production of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, which it stored in a large silo alongside another chemical. Unfortunately, these two chemicals had a habit of getting stuck together, a situation that was remedied with the use of dynamite charges. While this operation was dangerous, it was also commonplace.

However, Oppau’s luck ran out on September 21, 1921, when the fertilizer exploded. The huge blast left both the factory and town destroyed. What did survive were several clocks belonging to nearby churches. Every single one was found to have stopped at 7:33 AM, the exact time of the explosion.

1 The Tsunami Clock

While the Hawaiian islands are seen as a paradise by many, they still face the wrath of nature on occasion. The city of Hilo, located on the Big Island, has itself faced two major tsunamis in the last century, the second of which was on May 23, 1960. One of the area’s famous landmarks, a green clock located in the low-lying suburb of Waiakea Town, survived the first tsunami but was heavily damaged by the second. Its hands are stopped at 1:04 AM, the time at which the first massive waves hit the island.

The clock has been kept in this condition as a memorial to those who lost their lives and homes and still stands today. Waiakea Town no longer exists, its former lands having been replaced with public parks and green spaces.

The author is a Ph.D. student in agriculture who lives to read and learn.

Dwayne Johnson) this list takes a look at 10 popular disaster movies and delves into what experts have to say:

Dr Victoria Petryshen, environmental scientist and Assistant Professor (Teaching) of Environmental Studies at USC.
Morgan Page, Earthquake expert and Research Geophysicist at the Earthquake Science Center.
Michael Angove, tsunami expert and meteorologist and Tsunami Program Manager at NOAA.
Peter Gleick, climate and water expert and Hydrologist and Climatologist at the Pacific Institute.

Top 10 Controversial Movie Trailers

10 The Swarm (1978)

After watching the trailer for the first time, Dr Petryshen jokes that “The Swarm is now a movie I must watch immediately.”

Yes, animal migrations happen regularly, and more and more insects are appearing in places they have never been seen before. In Los Angeles, for instance, mosquitoes are now commonplace where they were hardly ever encountered just a few years ago. It seems that these insects are moving north, looking for more favorable climates.

And, of course, swarms of locusts, bees and other insects are not uncommon. But, as Petryshen points out, as much as Hollywood would like you to believe otherwise, they are definitely not “targeting” the human race. The migrations are about their survival, not our downfall.

Still, overall, Petryshen gives this film a “why not?”

9 Twister (1996)

A lot of what you see in this movie is quite realistic. According to Angove, the moviemakers consulted with the National Weather Service and it shows. The technical advice, ideas and suggestions the agency provided clearly did not go to waste. A lot of what is shown in this movie accurately portrays scientists’ attempts at understanding more about these weather systems.

“The one quibble I have with this scene,” Page points out during the cow scene above, “is that when we see the cow the first time it’s turning one way, but when we see it again later, it’s turning the other.” She does, concede, however, that this might be possible had they driven right through the tornado. It looks like the tornado is off to one side, though, in which case the scene doesn’t make much sense as the twister wouldn’t just change direction.

“The cow doesn’t look all that perturbed, tough,” says Angove.

8 Volcano (1997)

“Just to be clear, there is no volcano under Los Angeles,” Page feels compelled to point out after watching this poignant scene. There are many places you will find volcanoes, but Los Angeles is not one of them.

However, as far as she knows, she says, the human interaction with the slow-moving lava is portrayed quite accurately. Yes, your sneakers would start melting and yes concrete barriers and water have been used to stop or divert lava flow in places like Hawaii and Italy. And, yes, unfortunately, you most probably would die if you jumped into lava.

7 The Perfect Storm (2000)

This movie is great for many reasons. First: Clooney. Need we say more. The film also gives the viewer a real sense of just how difficult a sea rescue operation during a storm can be. It very accurately portrays the challenges the sea guard would typically encounter under such conditions. Additionally, the science makes sense. To the scientists, at least.

“What started off kind of like any other hurricane turned into an unusual and very dangerous storm because of the high latitude. Instead of dissipating as it normally would when approaching land, it managed to reinforce the “core” when it encountered these very specific barotropic conditions,” Angove explains. Or tries to. Suffice it to say that the meteorologist and tsunami expert is impressed with the scientific accuracy of the conditions that created “the perfect storm”.

6 The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

The movie is loosely based on the theory of “abrupt climate change.” Basically, as a result of global warming, ocean currents that circulate water around the world shut down, heating up the tropics and cooling the North Atlantic. In the clip above we see a giant tsunami about to hit Manhattan. Which is rather unlikely, according to Dr Petryshen.

A tsunami is usually the result of an earthquake that causes the sea floor to suddenly and dramatically go up and down. “The east coast of the United States is what is known as a passive margin. There is nothing on the sea floor that is going to cause such a massive tsunami. Short of a giant asteroid,” Petryshen quips.

More likely is the steady rise of the sea level, a direct result of melting ice caps due to global warming. This is something New York is in fact very worried about and has led to the proposal of a billion-dollar sea wall to keep out the rising water.

Top 10 Space Movies Judged By Actual Astronauts

5 Wall-E (2008)

Not your typical disaster movie, Wall-E looks at the post-apocalyptic world left behind after humanity trashed this planet to the extent that they had to take off on a spaceship and send in the robots to clean up after them so life on earth is once again possible.

Although Dr Petryshen chooses to remain hopefully optimistic that we would never actually let things get to this point, she simultaneously points out that when she looks at the current Coronavirus crisis and climate change, her heart sinks just a little.

At the moment we don’t, of course, have the ability or technology to take off on a spaceship and leave the mess to a team of robots. However, some elements depicted in the movie are rather accurate. The space junk, for instance, is very similar to the junk mentioned in a previous list on astronauts reviewing space movies. Even the wind turbines clearly visible in the wasteland where Wall-E works, strike close to home.

There have been several environmental studies, in fact, looking at the long-term effects of the giant non-recyclable fiberglass blades used to create the “environmentally friendly” sources of energy. “We simply don’t have an answer to what to do with these once they are no longer in use,” says Petryshen.

4 2012 (2012)

According to Page, an earthquake occurs when one side of a tectonic plate fault slips and moves, relative to the other side of the plate. This generates seismic waves that cause the shaking and rolling motion we see in the movie. The scale is hugely exaggerated though. “We’re talking centimeters not meters,” Page says.

She also rolls her eyes when she sees John Cusack trying to outrun the seismic waves in his car. Typically, these waves move at a speed of about 5 000 meters per second. No way you can outrun that in a battered old jalopy!

3 Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

With constant reminders of global warming in the form of droughts, fires and unprecedented heat waves, it’s not that hard to imagine that we may one day, as depicted in the movie, be in a position where fresh water is the scarcest commodity on earth.

Dr Petryshen, however, points out that it is highly unlikely that climate change would cause the collapse of all of civilization and turn the entire earth into a desert wasteland. In fact, in many parts of the world, climate change is leading to an increase in severe storms and flooding.

To understand the effects of climate change, think about the worst parts of the weather you experience where you live; these are the things that are going to get worse. So, while in many parts of the world this means drought and fire, in other parts storms and flooding are more likely, making the global all-encompassing water scarcity depicted in Mad Max highly improbable. There will still be water in other places on earth.

2 San Andreas (2015)

In this action-packed movie, the San Andreas fault ruptures and causes a bunch of massive earthquakes along the fault line. The only person who can save the day is, of course, The Rock.

How realistic is it though? Would all the buildings in downtown Los Angeles simply crumble should the big one (defined here as a magnitude 8 earthquake along the San Andreas fault) hit?

“Probably not the way you see in the movie,” comments Dr Petryshen. Buildings in L.A. are built on rollers and multiple safety measures to withstand a certain amount of shaking, compensating for the P-wave (up and down) as well as the S-wave (swaying side to side). Naturally, should the shaking be sustained over a long enough period of time, even those measure will ultimately fail. But it’s hard to imagine all the buildings succumbing at the exact same moment.

1 Geostorm (2017)

Much like many other disaster movies, Geostorm builds on the idea of plausible geo-events and takes it to the extreme. In the opening scenes of the film we see clips from real-life events such as tornadoes, flooding and the drying out of reservoirs.

“The worry of course is that we are now modifying the climate to an extent that will make these extreme events even more damaging to civilization,” Gleick explains. The movie then transitions into massive CGI storms and the global response. “The world comes together and produces what we in the business call geoengineering,” Gleick continues.

Geoengineering in the real world refers to the deliberate large-scale manipulation of an environmental process that affects the earth’s climate, in an attempt to counteract the effects of global warming. The building of sea walls and even tree planting campaigns happening now are, one could argue, geo-engineering. We are lightyears away, however, from the massive inter-planetary scale of the geoengineering efforts we see in this movie. Hopefully, we won’t ever need this kind of intervention.

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They say a picture is worth a thousand words. This rings true for the rare photographs in this list that tells you tales of suffering, courage and hope experienced firsthand by the photographers and captured through their lenses.

Note that some of the pictures are disturbing therefore powerful and quiet alive. Scroll down at your own risk.

Here is a list of 10 disturbing photographs that shocked the world.

10. Kosovo Refugees

Photographer: Carol Guzy

In 2000 Carol Guzy received a Pulitzer Prize for the touching photographs she had taken of the Kosovo refugees. In this particular photo, a 2-years-old refugee child (Agim Shala) was being passed through the barb wired fence to his family on the other side. Guzy currently works for the Washington Post and has won the Pulitzer four times.

Photographer: Carolyn Cole

Very aptly named, the photograph certainly says a thousand unsaid words. It mirrors the devastating effects of the Civil War in Liberia. The picture was taken on the streets of Monrovia, capital of Liberia. Cole won the Pulitzer in 2004, for her coverage of the siege of Monrovia. For the records, Carolyn Cole is a staff photographer for the Los Angeles Times.

8. World Trade Center 9/11

Photographer: Steve Ludlum

This photograph is an eyewitness to history. It captures the power of universal destruction. Ludlum said, “It’s an iconic image. When people think of the World Trade Center disaster they will think about this photograph.” In 2002, Ludlum won the Pulitzer for Breaking News Photography.

7. Thailand Massacre

Photographer: Neal Ulevich

Neal Ulevich is an American photographer who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1977 for capturing “disorder and brutality in the streets of Bangkok.” In 1976 the worsening political situation in Thailand culminated into violent confrontation at The Thammasat University. Several students who were demonstrating against dictatorial Field Marshall Thanom Kittikachorn’s plan of returning into the country, were shot, beaten, hanged, mutilated and even burnt to death.

6. After the Storm

Photographer: Patrick Farrell

In 2008 Farrell captured the horrors experienced by the victims of the tropical storm Hanna that had hit Haiti. He documented the after math in black-and-white stills, more of which you can find here. He was awarded Pulitzer in 2009. In the above picture, we have a young boy rescuing a stroller from the wreck of his home.

5. The Power of One

Photographer: Oded Balilty

Oded Balilty is an Israeli documentary photographer. In 2006, when the Israeli government decided to uproot illegal settlers, a ferocious clash was inevitable. What we have here is a brave 16-year-old Jewish settler, Ynet Nili resisting the authorities. Later, Nili had said, “You see me in the photograph, one against many, but that is only an illusion, behind the many stands one man, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, but behind me stand the Lord and the people of Israel.”

4. After the Tsunami

Photographer: Arko Datta

This is considered as one of the most striking representation of the devastation that followed the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami. Arko Datta is an award-winning photojournalists from India who is also recognised for his photographs of the Gujarat riots, depicting the plight of victims of the riots. ‘After the Tsunami’ is a “graphic, historical and starkly emotional picture” that depicts a woman mourning the death of a relative.

3. Operation Lion Heart

Photographer: Deanne Fitzmaurice

Fitzmaurice is an American photographer and photojournalist won had won the highly respected Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for her sensitive photo essay ‘Operation Lion Heart’. ‘Lion Heart’ is the nickname given to Saleh Khalaf, a nine year old boy maimed by an explosion in Iraq. The boy was brought to a hospital in Oakland, CA where he underwent several life-threatening surgeries. His unwillingness to die and his courage gave him the nickname – Saleh Khalaf meaning ‘Lion Heart’.

2. Bhopal Gas Tragedy 1984

Photographer: Pablo Bartholomew

In December 1984, gas leaking from the Union Carbide India Limited storage tank killed as many as 15,000 and injured 558,125 people in Bhopal. This massive environmental and human disaster was a result of ignorance in standard safety and maintenance procedures. Bartholomew while documenting the catastrophe came across a man who was burying a child.

1. Tragedy of Omayra Sanchez

Photographer: Frank Fourier

1985 Columbia, the Nevado del Ruiz volcano eruption lead to a mudslide that killed more than 25,000 people. Frank Fournier captured the tragic image of Omayra Sanchez, a 13-years-old girl trapped for 60 hours under the debris of her home which won the 1985 World Press Photo award.

As to the little girl’s fate, she tragically died due to hypothermia and gangrene following three days of struggle which was followed by millions of people around the world on television. This erupted major criticism on the Columbian government for commencing a weak rescue mission.

Here are some other great lists; rare historical photographs, World’s most expensive photographs, Perfectly Timed Photographs, Fantastic Nature Photographs etc. You may also like these lists.

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Disaster movies are hugely popular with audiences around the world. There is just something about watching the Statue of Liberty toppling over into the sea or a giant tsunami “folding” over an entire city that keeps people on the edge of their seats. There is a lot of work that goes into making a disaster movie, as producers will attest to. And there are a lot of things that can go wrong or not according to plan. On this list are some lesser-known facts about some of the most popular disaster movies.

Related: Top 10 Films About Economic Disaster You Really Need To Watch

10 Independence Day

Way back in the day when Will Smith wasn’t a Hollywood pariah, he was the star of the biggest film of 1996, Independence Day, the script of which was written in a mere four weeks. The movie made top dollar regardless of reviewers calling it the ultimate B-movie or an over-the-top cheese-fest.

What some may not know is that the film had the support of the U.S. military, which agreed to provide greater access to military facilities and make their officers, soldiers, and pilots available for consultation. However, as soon as they became aware of the multiple references to Area 51 being the center of obscure alien projects, the military immediately withdrew their support.

Also, when residents of California spied the “Welcome Wagon” used in the film, more than 150 of them called the police to report a UFO sighting.^[1]

9 The Impossible

The Impossible is a terrifying film, not only because of the tsunami sequences but also because hundreds of thousands of people lived through and died during that specific real-life tragedy.

María Belón, Enrique Álvarez, and their three sons—Lucas, Simón, and Tomás—were in Khao Lak, Thailand, when the 2004 tsunami struck. The Impossible tells their story of survival, closely following the harrowing details, which are enough to make you watch through your fingers.

At the beginning of the film, the sound of a jet can be heard in the distance. This was done on purpose as that is how María described the sound of the approaching tsunami. The massive destruction that followed during the next 10 minutes took a year to complete. The producers also included many tsunami survivors as extras for the film.^[2]

8 Greenland

In Greenland, the grim reality of the selfishness of humankind in the face of overwhelming disaster is thoroughly explored. It’s all fun and games and social media debates over a visible comet in the sky during the daytime when the realization hits that the U.S. government can only evacuate so many people. Chaos ensues. Fortunately, there are also great moments, such as the military personnel putting their lives on the line to help save others. Throw in the ambiguous ending, and you have yourself a decent disaster flick.

Director, Ric Roman Waugh, did some intensive research into the science of comets to bring realism to his vision. He spoke to several scientists and did some of his own studying to fully understand what would truly happen if a huge comet broke through Earth’s atmosphere the way it does in Greenland.

Waugh also mentioned that his focus on family came from the hope that the personal side of such a disaster would help his film stand out from previous disaster films.^[3]

7 Don’t Look Up

The black comedy film Don’t Look Up focuses satirically on the typical scientists no one ever wants to listen to when it comes to pending doomsdays. Reviews were mixed, especially about the satire, but the movie continues to be a fan favorite after being released in December 2021.

If you’ve seen the movie, you would have noticed the hotline launched by the government, which people could call if they had any questions. In real life, that number leads to a sex chat line. And apparently, that was an accident as the number was just thought up randomly.^[4]

6 The Wave

The director of The Wave, Roar Uthaug, submitted his movie as Norway’s entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 88th Academy Awards but sadly failed to be nominated. The movie is based on actual events—in this case, the 1934 landslide that caused a tsunami in the Norwegian community of Tafjord, as well as the prediction that this disaster will repeat itself in the not-too-distant future.

The Wave had one of the best opening weekends in Norwegian history, beating the number of tickets sold for Jurassic World by 30%.

The movie also includes the single most expensive scene ever filmed in the country. Amazingly, 40,000 liters (10,566 gallons) of water came crashing down on a purpose-built set and could only be filmed once. Planning the scene took six months and the execution several days.^[5]

5 Knowing

Knowing may not be your traditional disaster movie, but it does center around trying to prevent the apocalypse. Despite the ending being panned by critics and movie-goers alike, the film has gained a cult following (thanks in no small part to the presence of Nicolas Cage).

Filming was completed in just three months and was also the movie debut of Liam Hemsworth. There is a cool tribute in the form of an elementary school named William Dawes. He was one of several people instrumental in warning American soldiers about the imminent arrival of the British in April 1775.

Also, in a creepy twist of events, the ending of the film is something scientists have been predicting for many years, but luckily for us, they believe that it would only happen in four billion years.^[6]

4 Pompeii

This film eerily reconstructs the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 that led to the decimation of nearby Pompeii, leaving its residents buried in huge mounds of volcanic ash. To accurately depict the city, the director and his team LiDAR-scanned the streets and buildings. They then re-created a digital version of it by overlaying a computer-generated model over shots taken from a helicopter of the destroyed Pompeii. Scientists were impressed by this true-to-life recreation, especially the villas and the stones used for paving.

Director Paul Anderson wanted to bring across a clear message with this film that what happened then repeated itself in 1631 and killed 3,000 people and will likely happen again in the future. This is especially concerning considering that more than one million people still live in the vicinity of the volcano today.^[7]

3 Into the Storm

A firenado makes a terrifying appearance in Into the Storm, a found-footage film based on real-life events. In 1986, eight tornadoes hit Dallas County in Iowa over the span of an hour. This disaster forms the center of the film, which also features a 747 being lifted by a tornado.

There has been some debate around this scene, as some doubt that a tornado could do this in real life. However, since there isn’t a significant weight difference between an empty 747 and an average-sized locomotive and tornadoes have been known to pick up locomotives, it is plausible that it could lift a plane as well.

The film makes use of several actual news reports, including some from the F5 tornado that hit Moore, Oklahoma, in 2013 and the Joplin tornado from 2011. There is also a clever tribute to Twister in a scene that shows a statue of a cow being blown clean off a building and flying across the screen.

Filming was rough on the actors and actresses, and the extras on set would often break out in song to try and lift their spirits. One of their favorite tunes to belt out was “Come Sail Away” by Styx.^[8]

2 Twister

Back in the ’90s, Twisterbecame everyone’s favorite disaster flick. Sure, watching it now makes for some hilarity, but it is still a fun ride.

Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton, the leads of the film, found themselves sitting in the cab of the infamous red truck for hours on end with bright electric lamps shining down on them. To keep the illusion of a dark and stormy sky behind the truck, these lamps were made even brighter until they eventually temporarily blinded both of the actors. For days afterward, they had to wear special glasses and use eyedrops. Hunt and Paxton even had to get hepatitis shots after spending some time filming inside a dirty ditch.

Wakita, Oklahoma, found a prominent place in the film after a couple of movie scouts noticed the debris still left over in the town from a hailstorm in 1993. Residents were recruited as extras and were paid $100 each day they were on set.

A few months before the movie’s release in 1996, Wakita opened the Twister Museum which boasts a Dorothy I prop, and a Twister pinball machine donated by Bill Paxton.^[9]

Twister was also the first film commercially available on DVD in the U.S.

1 Moonfall

Moonfall was one of the most anticipated films of 2022. Whether it lived up to the hype is for individual viewers to decide.

What the movie has done, however, is cause speculation around whether the moon could, in fact, hit Earth should it be knocked out of orbit. Director, Roland Emmerich, confirmed that the Hollow Moon theory was a major inspiration for the film and that he’d read up on the theory in several books. He and his team also used planetary sciences simulators to depict what the moon careening toward Earth would look like. And they got it spot on, as the moon wouldn’t just cut a straight path for us but instead would get into an elliptical orbit that continuously gets smaller before an eventual impact.

For filming purposes, 135 different sets had to be constructed which were built on six different sound stages.^[10]

Selling you stuff—it’s what mega-corporations are best at. Every year, they find new ways to get consumers interested in their products: eye-catching marketing schemes, big-budget promotional events, and, most common of all, sales promotions. Sales promotions are like advertisements, except that they also target the buyer with a promise of reward; coupons, contests, and vouchers are all examples of sales promotions. Some, like the long-running McDonald’s Monopoly campaign, drive up company profits enormously and become staples of consumer culture. On the other side of the spectrum, however, a poorly-received promotion can all but destroy a brand, as shown by these ten laughably ill-conceived examples.

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10 Sunny Co Clothing: “Pamela” Bathing Suits

Back in summer of 2017, California-based startup Sunny Co Clothing offered Instagram users a free swimsuit, styled after the iconic one-piece worn by Pamela Anderson on the TV show “Baywatch” and valued at $64.99. All you had to do to receive it was repost the accompanying image, tag Sunny Co, and pay shipping fees—they’d handle the rest.

Unfortunately, the company massively underestimated just how many swimsuits they would have to give away. More than 330,000 people liked the original post, and despite a scourge of technical issues, the company did end up taking the L and delivering on their promise. You can’t say the error destroyed SunnyCo, as the stunt thrust them into the limelight and no doubt grew their consumer base (surely the intent of the promotion), but dishing out thousands of freebies still might not have been worth it in the long run.^[1]

9 Chevy: Do-It-Yourself Ads

Rule number one of using the Internet: be prepared for anything you post to be received by a network of trolls, critics, and “memelords”—this applies double if you’re a big company like Chevy. In 2006, they partnered with the hit TV show “The Apprentice” to offer fans the chance to create their own ad for the Chevy Tahoe, through a website where anyone with a fast connection and a little bit of time on their hands could splice together clips of the SUV with custom text and their pick of pre-provided soundtrack to create—presumably—a creative piece of user-generated advertising.

Predictably, critics of the brand (especially environmentalists) saw the contest as an opportunity to create disparaging “ads” pointing out perceived flaws with the Tahoe or just Chevy in particular. Many of these submissions stayed on the contest website for indefinite periods of time, as GM (Chevy’s parent company) specifically stated they wouldn’t be removing “negative” ads, only “offensive” ones. In the end, it seems that, like many tech-illiterate corporations both before and after them, GM definitely overestimated the Internet’s innocence.^[2]

8 American Airlines: The AAirpass

American Airlines has had a bumpy history, to say the least, but their lowest point may have come in the early 1980s—a time when they were losing money fast and needed to make a quick buck to stay afloat. Their solution to the dilemma? An exclusive membership program called the AAirpass.

The idea was simple: for just $250,000, you could purchase a pass that entitled you to free first-class flights for life. Seems pretty simple, right? The trouble started when, in 2007, AA (again in the midst of financial trouble) realized some people were using their passes too much, and it was costing the company millions. While they tried to simply remove the offending passholders from the system (citing “fraudulent activity”), the matter was only settled after years of litigation. Nowadays, the program is mostly remembered as a high-profile example of a colossal business mistake.^[3]

7 Red Lobster: Endless Crab

Plenty of companies have misjudged consumer demand when giving out freebies (for instance, Sunny Co Clothing), but none did it as catastrophically as Red Lobster. An “Endless Crab” promotion in 2003 cost them millions during its short-lived run and led to the resignation of company president Edna Morris, all because too many customers went back for more. Apparently, the team behind the stunt didn’t realize that, despite being quite the costly appetizer, crab just isn’t that filling.^[4]

6 Build-A-Bear: Pay Your Age

Obviously, the Red Lobster mistake isn’t replicated that often. That’s because most companies are able to weigh the risks of heavily discounting items against the advantages of gaining new customers and make a balanced decision based on the data they have. However, even when the monetary side of things is accounted for, poor planning can completely ruin a potentially profitable promotion.

For instance, in 2018, Build-A-Bear announced “Pay Your Age Day”, an event during which parents could buy the company’s trademark stuffed animals for the low, low price of their child’s age. It seemed like a smart marketing tactic, until Build-A-Bear employees realized the stores were unable to handle the influx of crowds the promotion had created. Those who had to wait in line for hours—with kids in tow, no less—were less than happy, and the fiasco led to a surge in negative PR for the company.^[5]

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5 Coca-Cola: MagiCans

Coca-Cola’s “MagiCans” contest idea seemed decent, at least in theory—among the millions of regularly-labeled Coke cans distributed across the United States, there would also be a select number of disguised “MagiCans”, special “golden ticket” cans that hid prizes inside which would pop up once the can was opened. To keep the MagiCans from being discovered too easily, they were designed with a compartment inside that contained a replacement for the usual soda; a (non-toxic) mix of chlorinated water and an unknown, foul-tasting liquid clearly meant to keep the contents from being drunk.

The promotion was nixed after just a few weeks, however, after numerous reports came in of problems with the cans: the liquid ruined the prize, or the prize didn’t pop up at all, or—in one extreme case—a child drank the Coke-replacement liquid. At first, Coke did try their best to dispel concerns, but the campaign led to so much negative publicity that they finally decided to pull the plug.^[6]

4 McDonald’s: When The U.S. Wins, You Win

To keep the patriotic spirit going during the 1984 Summer Games, McDonald’s created a promotional contest called “When The U.S. Wins, You Win.” The premise: buy an item, you get a game piece with the name of an Olympic event on it. If the U.S. gets a medal in that event, you get free food (a Big Mac for gold, fries for silver, and a Coke for bronze).

However, what seemed like a smart way to capitalize on the biggest sporting event of the year became a marketing nightmare for McDonald’s after the Soviet Union boycotted the games, leading to the United States performing far above expectations. So many prizes had to be given out as a result of this that some McDonald’s locations even reported a shortage of Big Macs, the chain’s signature burger.^[7]

3 Malaysia Airlines: My Ultimate Bucket List

After 2014 saw Malaysia Airlines take a huge hit from two unconnected incidents that resulted in the combined loss of more than 500 passengers and crew members, the company was no doubt looking for a way to restore its image. However, a “bucket list” themed contest (which asked entrants to describe, in 500 words or less, “what and where [they’d] like to tick off on [their] bucket list”) might not have been the best option. At least the gruesome association was caught quickly, giving the airline time to rebrand the contest as a “to-do” list—albeit not before international news media had picked up the story.^[8]

2 Hoover: Two Free Flights

One of the most well-known examples of a truly terrible marketing campaign was Hoover’s ill-fated “two free flights” promotion. In 1992, desperate to overcome the ongoing financial crisis, Hoover’s British division partnered with little-known airline JSI Travel to offer two free round-trip flights to anyone who bought a Hoover product worth £100 or more (about $123 USD).

Despite the fact that Hoover purposefully made it as hard as possible to redeem the flights (a controversial fact in and of itself), they just couldn’t keep up with the high levels of demand, and the ensuing scandal caused the company irreparable damage. In 1995, Hoover Europe was sold to Candy, an Italian unit that was formerly one of their primary competitors. In 2004, a BBC documentary was made about the incident, the release of which led to Hoover’s failures being brought back into the public eye; the company subsequently lost their Royal Warrant as a result.^[9]

1 Pepsi: Number Fever

It’s quite possibly the only marketing snafu to date in which a simple error quite literally meant the difference between life and death: that’s right, I’m talking about Pepsi Philippines’ infamous number blunder. In 1992 (quite a year for disastrous promotions), the company introduced a contest called “Pepsi Number Fever”. Pepsi bottle caps would be marked on the inside with one three-digit number, and certain “winning numbers” would be eligible for prizes of up to one million pesos (or about $40,000 USD).

The promotion enjoyed moderate success for a couple of weeks until the night of May 25th, 1992, when the next winning number—349—was announced. Almost everybody was a winner that night—but only because Pepsi had goofed and printed winning number 349 on more than 800,000 different bottle caps, only 2 of which were “supposed” to be winners. With thousands of people trying to redeem the contest’s million-peso grand prize, Pepsi announced their mistake and offered a 500-peso consolation prize to the now-angry “prizewinners”, a move that cost them more than four times the contest’s original budget in and of itself.

The trouble didn’t end there, however, as the country continued to rally against Pepsi. Not only were thousands of lawsuits filed, but dozens of Pepsi trucks were vandalized, several Pepsi executives were issued death threats, and five people (including three Pepsi employees) were killed by grenades thrown by anti-Pepsi rioters. While things eventually went back to normal, the “349 Incident” went down in history as a projection of the worldwide economic unrest prevalent during the early 1990s, as well as a tragic example of how a tiny mistake can have big consequences for a brand.^[10]

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About The Author: Izak Bulten is a pop culture enthusiast and connoisseur of all things bizarre. He’s written for ScreenRant, CBR, and The Art of Puzzles.