The Hemlock Society/Compassion & Choices

The Hemlock Society USA was a national right-to-die organization founded in Santa Monica, CA by Derek Humphry in 1980. Its primary missions included providing information to dying persons and supporting legislation permitting physician-assisted suicide. In 1992, following the publication of Derek Humphry's book 'Final Exit', he left the leadership of Hemlock Society USA. In 2003 the national organization renamed itself, and a year later merged itself out of existence, and into a newly formed national organization. Compassion & Choices is a contemporary successor to the Hemlock Society. A number of unaffiliated local organizations continue to operate under a variant of the 'Hemlock Society' name.

The Tuskegee Airmen

The Tuskegee Airmen  is the popular name of a group of African American pilots who fought in World War II. Formally, they were the 332nd Fighter Group of the U.S. Army Air Corps.

The Tuskegee Airmen were the first African American military aviators in the United States armed forces. During World War II, African Americans in many U.S. states still were subject to Jim Crow laws. The American military was racially segregated, as was much of the federal government. The Tuskegee Airmen were subject to racial discrimination, both within and outside the army. Despite these adversities, they flew with distinction. They were particularly successful in their missions as bomber escorts in Europe.

William Tell

William Tell  is a folk hero of Switzerland. His legend is recorded in a late 15th century Swiss chronicle.


It is set in the period of the original foundation of the Old Swiss Confederacy in the early 14th century. According to the legend, Tell was an expert marksman with the crossbow who assassinated Gessler, a tyrannical reeve of Habsburg Austria positioned in Altdorf, Uri.

Along with Arnold Winkelried, Tell is a central figure in Swiss patriotism as it was constructed during the Restoration of the Confederacy after the Napoleonic era

The Legend

William Tell, who originally came from Bürglen, was known as an expert shot with the crossbow. In his time, the Habsburg emperors of Austria were seeking to dominate Uri. Albrecht (or Hermann) Gessler, the newly appointed Austrian Vogt of Altdorf, raised a pole in the village's central square, hung his hat on top of it, demanding that all the townsfolk bow before the hat. When Tell passed by the hat without bowing to it, he was arrested. As punishment, he was forced to shoot an apple off the head of his son, Walter. Otherwise, both would be executed. Tell was promised freedom if he successfully made the shot.

On 18 November 1307, Tell split the apple with a bolt from his crossbow. When Gessler queried him about the purpose of a second bolt in his quiver, Tell answered that if he had killed his son, he would have turned the crossbow on Gessler himself. Gessler was angered, and had Tell bound. He was brought to Gessler's ship to be taken to his castle at Küssnacht. A storm broke on Lake Lucerne, and Tell managed to escape. He went by land to Küssnacht, and when Gessler arrived, Tell shot him.

Tell's defiance sparked a rebellion, in which he played a leading part. The struggle eventually led to the formation of the Swiss Confederation. He fought again against Austria in the 1315 Battle of Morgarten.

William Tell died in 1354 while trying to save a child from drowning in the Schächenbach river in Uri.[1] A fresco in a chapel in Bürglen, which dates to 1582, depicts this scene.

Moai

Moai, or mo‘ai (pronounced /ˈmoʊ.аɪ/), are monolithic human figures carved from rock on the Polynesian island of Easter Island, Chile between the years 1250 and 1500.[citation needed] Nearly half are still at Rano Raraku, the main moai quarry, but hundreds were transported from there and set on stone platforms called ahu around the island's perimeter. Almost all moai have overly large heads three-fifths the size of their bodies. The moai are chiefly the living faces (aringa ora) of deified ancestors (aringa ora ata tepuna). The statues still gazed inland across their clan lands when Europeans first visited the island, but most would be cast down during later conflicts between clans.


The statues' production and transportation is considered a remarkable intellectual, creative, and physical feat.The tallest moai erected, called Paro, was almost 10 metres (33 ft) high and weighed 75 tonnes; the heaviest erected was a shorter but squatter moai at Ahu Tongariki, weighing 86 tons; and one unfinished sculpture, if completed, would have been approximately 21 metres (69 ft) tall with a weight of about 270 tons

Gadsby: Champion of Youth

Gadsby: Champion of Youth is a 1939 novel by Ernest Vincent Wright. The plot revolves around the fictional city Branton Hills, primarily dealing with the transformation, through youth's vigor, of the moribund and slothful community. The story's protagonist is a fifty-year old man named John Gadsby; he calls upon the youth of Branton Hills to help him bring activity and vitality back to the town.


The novel is most famous for a letter it omits; written as a lipogram, it purposefully does not use the letter "e" in any word. It inspired other authors to write lipogrammatic books, including Georges Perec's famous novel A Void.

Yogi Berra

Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra (born May 12, 1925) is a former Major League Baseball player and manager. He played almost his entire career for the New York Yankees and was elected to the baseball Hall of Fame in 1972. Berra was one of only four players to be named the Most Valuable Player of the American League three times and one of only six managers to lead both American and National League teams to the World Series.

Berra is widely regarded as one of the greatest catchers in baseball history. According to the win shares formula developed by sabermetrician Bill James, Berra is the greatest catcher of all time and the 52nd greatest non-pitching player in major-league history.

Berra, who quit school in the eighth grade, has a tendency toward malapropism and fracturing the English language. "It ain't over till it's over" is arguably the most famous example, often quoted.

He picked up his famous nickname from a friend, Bobby Hofman, who said he resembled a Hindu holy man (yogi) they had seen in a movie, whenever Berra sat around with arms and legs crossed waiting to bat, or while looking sad after a losing game.[1] Years later, the Hanna-Barbera cartoon character Yogi Bear was presumably named after Berra (the cartoon's creators denied it), something Berra did not appreciate after he started being periodically addressed as "Yogi Bear".

Antonín Dvořák

Antonín Leopold Dvořák (September 8, 1841 – May 1, 1904) was a Czech composer of Romantic music, who employed the idioms of the folk music of Moravia and his native Bohemia. His works include operas, symphonic, choral and chamber music. His best-known works include his New World Symphony, the Slavonic Dances, "American" String Quartet, and Cello Concerto in B minor.

Finnegans Wake

Finnegans Wake is a work of comic fiction by Irish author James Joyce, significant for an experimental style and its resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language.Written in Paris over a period of 17 years, and published in 1939, two years before the author's death, Finnegans Wake was Joyce's final work. The entire book is written in an idiosyncratic language, consisting of multilingual puns and portmanteau words, which attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams. Due to its expansive linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and its abandonment of conventions of plot and character construction, Finnegans Wake remains largely unread by the general public.


Despite these obstacles, readers and commentators have reached a broad consensus about the book's central cast of characters and, to a lesser degree, its plot. However, a significant number of details remain elusive.The book treats, in an unorthodox fashion, the Earwicker family, composed of the father HCE, the mother ALP, and their three children Shem the Penman, Shaun the Post, and Issy. Following an unspecified rumour about HCE, the book, in a nonlinear dream narrative, follows his wife's attempts to exonerate him with a letter, his sons' struggle to replace him, Shaun's rise to prominence, and a final monologue by ALP at the break of dawn. The opening line of the book is a sentence fragment, which continues from the book's unfinished closing line, making the work a never-ending cycle.

Joyce began working on Finnegans Wake shortly after the 1922 publication of Ulysses. By 1924 installments of Joyce's new avant-garde work began to appear, in serialized form, in Parisian literary journals Transatlantic Review and transition, under the title "fragments from Work in Progress". The actual title of the work remained a secret until the book was published in its entirety, on 4 May 1939. Initial reaction to Finnegans Wake, both in its serialized and final published form, was largely negative, ranging from bafflement at its radical reworking of the English language to open hostility towards its lack of respect for the conventions of the novel.

The work has since come to assume a preeminent place in English literature, despite its numerous detractors. Anthony Burgess has praised the book as "a great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page."Harold Bloom called the book "Joyce's masterpiece", and wrote that "[if] aesthetic merit were ever again to center the canon [Finnegans Wake] would be as close as our chaos could come to the heights of Shakespeare and Dante."In 1998, the Modern Library placed Finnegans Wake seventy-seventh amongst its list of "Top 100 English-language novels of the twentieth century

Physicist Murray Gell-Mann named a type of subatomic particle as a quark, after the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark" on page 383 of Finnegans Wake

Guillaume Le Gentil

Guillaume Joseph Hyacinthe Jean-Baptiste Le Gentil de la Galaisière (September 12, 1725 – October 22, 1792) was a French astronomer. was born in Coutances and first intended to enter the church before turning to astronomy. He discovered what are now known as the Messier objects M32, M36 and M38, as well as the nebulosity in M8, and he was the first to catalogue the dark nebula sometimes known as Le Gentil 3 (in the constellation Cygnus).

He was part of the international collaborative project to measure the distance to the Sun, by observing the transit of Venus at different points on the earth. Edmond Halley had suggested the idea, but it required careful measurements from different places on earth, and the project was launched with more than a hundred observers dispatched to different parts of the globe, for observing the transit coming up in 1761. The French expedition turned out to be particularly unlucky, and perhaps the most unfortunate was Guillaume le Gentil, who set out for Pondicherry, a French colony in India.

He set out from Paris in March 1760, and reached Île de France (Mauritius) in July. But having learned that war had broken out between France and Britain, and deeming it dangerous to try and reach Pondicherry, he determined to go elsewhere; a frigate was bound for India's Coromandel Coast, and he sailed in March 1761. When they had nearly arrived they learned that the British had occupied Pondicherry, so the frigate was obliged to return to Île de France. June 6, the day of the transit, came, and the sky was clear, but he could not take astronomical observations with the vessel rolling about. After having come this far, he thought he might as well await the next transit of Venus, which would come in another eight years (they are relatively infrequent, occurring in pairs 8 years apart, but each such pair is separated from the previous and next pairs by more than a century.)

After spending some time mapping the eastern coast of Madagascar, he decided to record the 1769 transit from Manila in the Philippines. Encountering hostility from the Spanish authorities there, he headed back to Pondicherry, which had been restored to France by peace treaty in 1763, where he arrived in March 1768. He built a small observatory and waited patiently. At last, the day in question (June 4, 1769) arrived, but although the mornings in the preceding month had all been lovely, on this day the sky became overcast, and Le Gentil saw nothing. The misfortune drove him to the brink of insanity, but at last he recovered enough strength to return to France.

The return trip was first delayed by dysentery, and further when his ship was caught in a storm and dropped him off at Île Bourbon (Réunion), where he had to wait until a Spanish ship took him home. He finally arrived in Paris eleven years later in October 1771, only to find that he had been declared legally dead and been replaced in the Royal Academy of Sciences. His wife had remarried, and all his relatives had "enthusiastically plundered his estate". Lengthy litigation and the intervention of the king were ultimately required before things were normalized. He got back his seat in the academy, remarried, and lived apparently happily for another 21 years.

One of his interesting findings was that the duration of the lunar eclipse of 30 August 1765 was predicted by a Tamil astronomer, based on the computation of the size and extent of the earth-shadow (going back to Aryabhata, 5th c.), and was found short by 41 seconds, whereas the charts of Tobias Mayer were long by 68 seconds.

Le Gentil is the subject of a play by Canadian playwright Maureen Hunter. Transit of Venus was first produced at the Manitoba Theatre Centre in 1992. It was subsequently made into an opera of the same name with music by Victor Davies, presented by Manitoba Opera in 2007.

Piltdown Man

The "Piltdown Man" is a famous paleontological hoax concerning the finding of the remains of a previously unknown early human. The hoax find consisted of fragments of a skull and jawbone collected in 1912 from a gravel pit at Piltdown, a village near Uckfield, East Sussex, England. The fragments were thought by many experts of the day to be the fossilised remains of a hitherto unknown form of early man. The Latin name Eoanthropus dawsoni ("Dawson's dawn-man", after the collector Charles Dawson) was given to the specimen. The significance of the specimen remained the subject of controversy until it was exposed in 1953 as a forgery, consisting of the lower jawbone of an orangutan that had been deliberately combined with the skull of a fully developed modern human.

The Piltdown hoax is perhaps the most famous paleontological hoax in history. It has been prominent for two reasons: the attention paid to the issue of human evolution, and the length of time (more than 40 years) that elapsed from its discovery to its full exposure as a forgery.

Carmen Miranda

Carmen Miranda ( February 1909 – 5 August 1955) was a Portuguese-born Brazilian samba singer and Broadway actress popular in the 1940s and 1950s. She was, by some accounts the highest-earning woman in the United States and recognized for her signature fruit hat outfit that she wore in the 1943 movie The Gang's All Here. She is considered the precursor of Brazil's Tropicalismo.

Josip Broz Tito

Josip tito Broz ( May 1892 – 4 May 1980) was a Yugoslav revolutionary and statesman. He was Secretary-General (later President) of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (1939–80), and went on to lead the World War II Yugoslav resistance movement, the Yugoslav Partisans (1941–45). After the war, he was the authoritarianPrime Minister (1943–63) and later President (1953–80) of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). From 1943 to his death in 1980, he held the rank of Marshal of Yugoslavia, serving as the supreme commander of the Yugoslav military, the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA).

Tito was the chief architect of the "second Yugoslavia", a socialist federation that lasted from World War II until 1991. Despite being one of the founders of Cominform, he was also the first (and the only successful) Cominform member to defy Soviet hegemony. A backer of independent roads to socialism (sometimes referred to as "national communism" or "Titoism"), he In 1961, Tito co-founded the non-alignment movement with Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, India's Jawaharlal Nehru, Indonesia's Sukarno and Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, in an action called The Initiative of Five (Tito, Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno, Nkrumah), thus establishing strong ties with third world countries

Maria Callas

Maria Callas (December 2, 1923 – September 16, 1977) was an American-born Greek soprano and one of the most renowned opera singers of the twentieth century. She combined an impressive bel canto technique with great dramatic gifts. An extremely versatile singer, her repertoire ranged from classical opera seria to the bel canto operas of Donizetti, Bellini, and Rossini; further, to the works of Verdi (Aida) and Puccini; and, in her early career, the music dramas of Wagner. Her remarkable musical and dramatic talents led to her being hailed as La Divina.



Born in New York City and raised by an overbearing mother, she received her musical education in Greece and established her career in Italy. Forced to deal with the exigencies of wartime poverty and with myopia that left her nearly blind on stage, she endured struggles and scandal over the course of her career. She turned herself from a heavy woman into a svelte and glamorous one after a mid-career weight loss, which might have contributed to her vocal decline and the premature end of her career. The press exulted in publicizing Callas's allegedly temperamental behavior, her supposed rivalry with Renata Tebaldi, and her love affair with Aristotle Onassis. Her dramatic life and personal tragedy have often overshadowed Callas the artist in the popular press. Her artistic achievements, however, were such that Leonard Bernstein called her "The Bible of opera", and her influence so enduring that, in 2006, Opera News wrote of her, "Nearly thirty years after her death, she's still the definition of the diva as artist—and still one of classical music's best-selling vocalists

Puccini

Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini (22 December 1858 – 29 November 1924) was an Italian composer whose operas, including La bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly and Turandot, are among the most frequently performed in the standard repertoire. Some of his arias, such as "O mio babbino caro" from Gianni Schicchi, "Che gelida manina" from La bohème, and "Nessun dorma" from Turandot, have become part of popular culture.

The Wampanoag

The Wampanoag are a Native American nation which currently consists of five tribes
1600 the Wampanoag lived in southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, as well as within a territory that encompassed current day Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket and the Elizabeth Islands. Their population numbered about 12,000.


Historical Wampanoag leaders included:
Massasoit, who met the English;

Massasoit's oldest son Wamsutta (known by the English as King Alexander) who died under mysterious circumstances after visiting with English colonial administrators in Plymouth;

His second son Metacom or Metacomet (King Philip), who initiated the war against the English known as King Philip's War in retaliation for the death of his brother at the hands of the English;

Sachem Weetamoo of the Pocasset, a woman who supported Metacom and drowned crossing the Taunton River while fleeing the English;

Sachem Awashonks of the Sakonnet, a woman who at first fought the English but then changed sides; and

Annawan, a war leader.
 
Image:Philip, King of Mount Hope, 1772, by Paul Revere. Revere designed this pygmy-like image to make King Philip look repulsive

Cortes and Pizarro

The Aztec civilization of Mexico came out of the heritage of Mayan, Zapotec, and Toltec cultures. It built enormous constructions from stone tools and human labor, developed a writing system and a priesthood. It also engaged in (let us not overlook this) the ritual killing of thousands of people as sacrifices to the gods. The cruelty of the Aztecs, however, did not erase a certain innocence, and when a Spanish armada appeared at Vera Cruz, and a bearded white man came ashore, with strange beasts (horses), clad in iron, it was thought that he was the legendary Aztec man-god who had died three hundred years before, with the promise to return-the mysterious Quetzalcoatl. And so they welcomed him, with munificent hospitality.

That was Hernando Cortes, come from Spain with an expedition financed by merchants and landowners and blessed by the deputies of God, with one obsessive goal: to find gold. In the mind of Montezuma, the king of the Aztecs, there must have been a certain doubt about whether Cortes was indeed Quetzalcoatl, because he sent a hundred runners to Cortes, bearing enormous treasures, gold and silver wrought into objects of fantastic beauty, but at the same time begging him to go back. (The painter Durer a few years later described what he saw just arrived in Spain from that expedition-a sun of gold, a moon of silver, worth a fortune.)

Cortes then began his march of death from town to town, using deception, turning Aztec against Aztec, killing with the kind of deliberateness that accompanies a strategy-to paralyze the will of the population by a sudden frightful deed. And so, in Cholulu, he invited the headmen of the Cholula nation to the square. And when they came, with thousands of unarmed retainers, Cortes's small army of Spaniards, posted around the square with cannon, armed with crossbows, mounted on horses, massacred them, down to the last man. Then they looted the city and moved on. When their cavalcade of murder was over they were in Mexico City, Montezuma was dead, and the Aztec civilization, shattered, was in the hands of the Spaniards.

All this is told in the Spaniards' own accounts.

In Peru, that other Spanish conquistador Pizarro, used the same tactics, and for the same reasons- the frenzy in the early capitalist states of Europe for gold, for slaves, for products of the soil, to pay the bondholders and stockholders of the expeditions, to finance the monarchical bureaucracies rising in Western Europe, to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism, to participate in what Karl Marx would later call "the primitive accumulation of capital." These were the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business, politics, and culture that would dominate the world for the next five centuries.

Source: Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress, Howard Zinn

Selma to Montgomery marches

The Selma to Montgomery marches were three marches in 1965 that marked the political and emotional peak of the American Civil Rights Movement. They were the culmination of the voting rights movement in Selma, Alabama, launched by Amelia Boynton and her husband. Boynton brought many prominent leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement to Selma, including James Bevel, who initiated and organized the march; Martin Luther King, Jr.; and Hosea Williams.

The first march took place on March 7, 1965 — "Bloody Sunday" — when 600 civil rights marchers were attacked by state and local police with billy clubs and tear gas. The second march took place on March 9. Only the third march, which began on March 21 and lasted five days, made it to Montgomery, 54 miles (87 km) away. This day will forever be known as Bloody Sunday, as policed forced the peaceful marchers to turn around and head back to Selma, they used tear gas and clubs to harm these peace marchers. African Americans were in a struggle to get voting rights listed in the United States Constitution, in Alabama half of the population was African Americans and only one percent of them were registered voters.

The route is memorialized as the Selma To Montgomery Voting Rights Trail, a U.S. National Historic Trail.

Paul Revere

Paul Revere (bap. January 1, 1735 [O.S. December 22, 1734] – May 10, 1818)[1] was an American silversmith and a patriot in the American Revolution.

He was glorified after his death for his role as a messenger in the battles of Lexington and Concord, and Revere's name and his "midnight ride" are well-known in the United States as a patriotic symbol. In his lifetime, Revere was a prosperous and prominent Boston craftsman, who helped organize an intelligence and alarm system to keep watch on the British military.

Revere later served as an officer in the Penobscot Expedition, one of the most disastrous campaigns of the American Revolutionary War, a role for which he was later exonerated. After the war, he was early to recognize the potential for large-scale manufacturing of metal.

Revere's role was not particularly noted during his life. In 1861, over 40 years after his death, the ride became the subject of "Paul Revere's Ride", a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The poem has become one of the best known in American history and was memorized by generations of schoolchildren. Its famous opening lines are:

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year

Painting: Portrait of Paul Revere by John Singleton Copley,

The battles of Lexington and Concord

The battles of Lexington and Concord were the first military engagements of the American Revolutionary War. They were fought on April 19, 1775, in Middlesex County, Province of Massachusetts Bay, within the towns of Lexington, Concord, Lincoln, Menotomy (present-day Arlington), and Cambridge, near Boston. The battles marked the outbreak of open armed conflict between the Kingdom of Great Britain and its thirteen colonies in the mainland of British North America.

About 700 British Army regulars, under Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith, were given secret orders to capture and destroy military supplies that were reportedly stored by the Massachusetts militia at Concord. Through effective intelligence gathering, Patriot colonials had received word weeks before the expedition that their supplies might be at risk, and had moved most of them to other locations. They also received details about British plans on the night before the battle, and were able to rapidly notify the area militias of the military movement.

The first shots were fired just as the sun was rising at Lexington. The militia were outnumbered and fell back, and the regulars proceeded on to Concord, where they searched for the supplies. At the North Bridge in Concord, several hundred militiamen fought and defeated three companies of the King's troops. The outnumbered regulars fell back from the Minutemen after a pitched battle in open territory.

More militiamen arrived soon thereafter and inflicted heavy damage on the regulars as they marched back towards Boston. Upon returning to Lexington, Smith's expedition was rescued by reinforcements under Lieutenant-General Hugh Percy. The combined force, now of about 1,700 men, marched back to Boston under heavy fire in a tactical withdrawal and eventually reached the safety of Charlestown. The accumulated militias blockaded the narrow land accesses to Charlestown and Boston, starting the Siege of Boston.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his "Concord Hymn", described the first shot fired by the Patriots at the North Bridge as the "shot heard 'round the world," even though it was not the first shot of the war.

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (5 May 1813 – 11 November 1855) was a Danish philosopher, theologian, and psychologist. Kierkegaard strongly criticised both the Hegelianism of his time and what he saw as the empty formalities of the Danish National Church. Much of his philosophical work deals with the issues of how one lives, focusing on the priority of concrete human reality over abstract thinking and highlighting the importance of personal choice and commitment.[4] His theological work focuses on Christian ethics and the institution of the Church.[5] His psychological works explore the emotions and feelings of individuals when faced with life choices.

As part of his philosophical method, inspired by Socrates and the Socratic dialogues, Kierkegaard's early work was written under various pseudonymous characters who present their own distinctive viewpoints and interact with each other in complex dialogue.[7] He assigns pseudonyms to explore particular viewpoints in-depth, which may take up several books in some instances, and Kierkegaard, or another pseudonym, critiques that position. Thus, the task of discovering the meaning of his works is left to the reader, because "the task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted". Subsequently, scholars have interpreted Kierkegaard variously as, among others, an existentialist, neo-orthodoxist, postmodernist, humanist, and individualist. Crossing the boundaries of philosophy, theology, psychology, and literature, he is an influential figure in contemporary thought.

Riksdag and Mona Sahlin

The Riksdag (officially Swedish: Sveriges riksdag, literally: The National Diet of Sweden) is the national legislative assembly of Sweden. The riksdag is a unicameral assembly with 349 members (Swedish: riksdagsledamöter), who are elected on a proportional basis to serve fixed terms of four years. The Riksdag building stands on the island of Helgeandsholmen in Stockholm.

In 1995 it was revealed that the Swedish politician Mona Sahlin had bought, among other things, two bars of Toblerone using her Riksdag credit card. This became known as the Toblerone affair. Sahlin was forced to step down as a candidate for the post as Prime Minister. She returned to politics in 1998 (In October 1995 the newspaper Expressen revealed that Sahlin, who was then serving as Deputy Prime Minister and was widely seen as the main candidate to succeed Ingvar Carlsson as Prime Minister, had charged more than 50,000 Swedish kronor for private expenses on her working charge card, which was only for working expenses.[3] She had used the card to buy clothes, and to rent a private car (the money was always repaid, and Sahlin described how she saw use of the card as "advance pay"). Sahlin also claimed that the work charge card and her private charge card looked exactly the same and that some of the work charges were unintentionally debited as personal expenses. Sahlin decided to take the case to court to prove her innocence and be cleared of all accusations of misconduct. During this controversy it was also revealed that Sahlin had many unpaid parking fines at the Swedish Enforcement Administration, and that she often had missed or been late in paying her children's kindergarten fees.[4]

On 16 October 1995 Sahlin declared that she would take a time out from politics, and on 10 November she announced her resignation from the Swedish government as well as the Social Democratic Party leadership candidacy.[4] She left her seat in the parliament in April 1996 but continued to sit as a member of the executive council of the Social Democrats. The criminal charges against her were eventually dropped. The controversy was dubbed as the "Toblerone affair" after a statement Sahlin made during a press conference when she said: "I bought two Toblerone, diapers and cigarettes".

In 1996 Sahlin's autobiography Med mina ord ("With My Words") was published. The book dealt mostly with the Toblerone affair)