This Date in History

Just keep puffin’ like we did in the 60’s too…. Yeah that’s exactly what we should keep singing about.

Thanks ICOT. This thread almost got derailed. Nice save.

Feel free to start a thread. Thanks. 26

ICOT, I did get the year incorrect. As you mentioned, North Korea was already in violation of its 1994 agreement by the time the Prize recipients were considered in 2002. So why would the Nobel Prize committee have considered North Korea in awarding the prize? That doesn’t make sense. Given that Menachem Begin & Anwar Sadat were awarded the Peace Prize in 1978 (President Carter was nominated after the deadline), it does make sense that the committee felt that Carter was due for a prize (even though the committee does not usually recognize mediators, President Clinton received the 1998 prize for his role in Northern Ireland). It’s also possible that his meeting with Fidel Castro earlier in 2002 influenced the committee’s decision. Announcing the award in 2002 was obviously politically motivated by world events at the time, especially the developing war in Iraq which was not generally popular. Based on the facts above, I think Mr. Will’s interpretation is incorrect.

The award speech does mention that not all of Carter’s efforts were successful–probably a reference to the North Korean agreement.

Sept. 18 historic events

Click here for today’s historic events list, kindly compiled ahead of time by R’ Jax.

Sept. 19 historic events

1777 American soldiers won the first Battle of Saratoga during the Revolutionary War.

1796 President George Washington’s farewell address was published. In it, America’s first chief executive advised, “Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all.”

1870 Franco-Prussian War: the Siege of Paris begins, which will result on January 28, 1871 in the surrender of Paris and a decisive Prussian victory.

1881 President James A. Garfield dies of wounds suffered in a July 2 shooting. (Botched medical care after the shooting led to his death. This included the failure of a metal-detector to find the bullet – no one thought to move Garfield off of the metal-springed bed he was lying on.)

1934 Bruno Hauptmann is arrested for the kidnap and murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr.

1940 Witold Pilecki is voluntarily captured and sent to Auschwitz in order to smuggle out information and start a resistance.

1942 Holocaust in Brody, western Ukraine: About 2,500 Brody Jews are deported by the German Gestapo to the extermination camp in Belzec.

1945 Lord Haw Haw (William Joyce) is sentenced to death in London. ( He was one of the famous Axis propogandists who used to broadcast regularly to Alied troops. Others included Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally.)

1957 First American underground nuclear bomb test.

1959 Nikita Khrushchev is barred from visiting Disneyland.

1976 Turkish Airlines Boeing 727 hits the Taurus Mountains, outskirt of Karatepe, Osmaniye, Turkey, killing all 155 passengers and crew.

1982 Emoticons were born when Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman proposed punctuating humorous or sarcastic computer messages with a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis as a horizontal “smiley face.” 🙂

1985 The Mexico City area was struck by the first of two devastating earthquakes that claimed some 6,000 lives and destroyed 400 buildings.

1985 Tipper Gore and other political wives form the Parents Music Resource Center as Frank Zappa and other musicians testify at U.S. Congressional hearings on obscenity in rock music.

1995 The Washington Post and The New York Times publish the Unabomber’s manifesto. (This led directly to the capture of the unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, when his brother recognized his writing style and turned him in. As part of his brother’s deal with the government, Kaczynski didn’t face the death-penalty for his crimes.)

2001 The Pentagon ordered combat aircraft to the Persian Gulf in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

2002 President George W. Bush asked Congress for authority to “use all means,” including military force if necessary, to disarm and overthrow Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein if he did not quickly meet United Nations demands to abandon all weapons of mass destruction.

2008 Struggling to stave off financial catastrophe, the Bush administration asked Congress for $700 billion to buy up troubled mortgage-related assets from U.S. financial institutions. (TARP – Troubled Assets Relief Program – was a classic bait-and-switch according to many of its critics.)

(anon for this-

Your comments are appreciated, because:

1) It means someone actually reads this 🙂

2) It keeps me on my toes re: factuality

3) I enjoy debate

Please keep it up)

Hey, good idea Jax! Too bad we didn’t remember to celebrate mdlevine’s 3rd anniversary two weeks ago!

squeak: ooops! well Mazel Tov to mdlevine on his third anniversary as well!

Remind me squeak. My institutional memory, as fed by yourself, indicates you signed up to be responsive to my comments.

No, different handle. But I can’t remember the password. I signed up shortly after you, but I didn’t post anything for a while.

Sept. 21 historic events

1780 American Revolutionary War: Benedict Arnold gives the British the plans to West Point.

1792 The National Convention declares France a republic and abolishes the monarchy.

1938 a hurricane struck parts of New York and New England, causing widespread damage and claiming more than 600 lives. (If such a hurricane would strike nowadays, lower Manhattan would be have devastating floods, including building basements and subway tunnels.)

1942 On Yom Kippur, Nazis sent over 1,000 Jews of Pidhaytsi (west Ukraine) to Belzec extermination camp.

1942 In Dunaivtsi, Ukraine, Nazis murder 2,588 Jews.

1942 The Boeing B-29 Superfortress makes its maiden flight. (The long-range B-29 devastated Tokyo and other Japanese cities later in the war, burning large sections of the mostly wood-building-constructed cities to the ground in fire-bomb raids. The fires were so massive and hot that they caused powerful winds. The only two nuclear bombs to be used in war were dropped by B-29s.)

1964 The North American XB-70 Valkyrie, the world’s first Mach 3 bomber, made its maiden flight from Palmdale, California. (This plane never went into full production . One of the two prototype planes crashed during a publicity-photo flight, killing a crew member as well as the pilot of the fighter it collided with.)

1977 President Jimmy Carter’s budget director, Bert Lance, resigned amid controversy over past business and banking practices.

1999 A powerful earthquake struck Taiwan, killing at least 2,400 people.

2001 Congress approved $15 billion to help an airline industry reeling from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

2002 Angelo Buono Jr., the Hillside Strangler whose murder spree terrorized Los Angeles in the 1970s, died in prison at age 67.

2003 NASA’s Galileo spacecraft plunged into Jupiter’s turbulent atmosphere, where it is crushed by the pressure at the lower altitudes, bringing a fiery conclusion to a 14-year exploration of the solar system’s largest planet and its moons.

2008 Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the two last remaining independent investment banks on Wall Street, become bank holding companies as a result of the subprime mortgage crisis.

Sept. 23 historic events

1641 The Merchant Royal, carrying a treasure worth over a billion USD, is lost at sea off Land’s End. (Treasure hunt, anyone?)

1779 American Revolution: a squadron commanded by John Paul Jones on board the USS Bonhomme Richard wins the Battle of Flamborough Head, off the coast of England, against two British warships. (It was at this battle that John Paul Jones uttered his famous quote “I have not yet begun to fight!” Although the Bonhomme Richard was so badly damaged it later sank, the Americans defeated and boarded the British warship Serapis. )

1806 Lewis and Clark return to St. Louis, after exploring the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

1846 Neptune is discovered by French astronomer Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier and British astronomer John Couch Adams; the discovery is verified by German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle.

1889 Nintendo Koppai (Later Nintendo Company, Limited) is founded by Fusajiro Yamauchi to produce and market the playing card game Hanafuda.

1932 The Kingdom of Hejaz and Nejd is renamed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

1941 World War II: The first gas murder experiments are conducted at Auschwitz. (The evil of the Nazis YM”S and its scope is incomprehensible, even today.)

1942 World War II: First day of the September Matanikau action on Guadalcanal as United States Marine Corps forces attack Imperial Japanese Army units along the Matanikau River.

1952 Republican vice-presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon went on television to deliver what came to be known as the “Checkers” speech as he denied allegations of improper campaign financing. (Nixon’s touching speech about “his little dog Checkers, that his daughters loved” worked, and he remained on the ticket.)

1957 Nine black students who had entered Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas were forced to withdraw because of a white mob outside.

1990 Iraq threatened to destroy Middle East oil fields and attack Israel if other nations tried to force it from Kuwait. (Iraq later followed thru on their threats. B”H there was only one direct casualty of Iraqui scuds in Israel, although others suffocated when they incorrectly put on their gas masks.)

1999 NASA announces that it has lost contact with the Mars Climate Orbiter. (Incredible as it sounds, the Orbiter was lost because of a simple standard-metric error, that sent the spacecraft into the Martian atmosphere, where it burned up.)

1999 Qantas Flight 1 overruns the runway in Bangkok during a storm. While some passengers only receive minor injuries, it is still the worst crash in Qantas’s history since 1960. (This is the only Jet crash in Qantas’s history. They have had crashes, including fatal ones, on propeller-driven planes.)

2002 The first public version of the web browser Mozilla Firefox (“Phoenix 0.1”) is released. (Good job, guys. Thanks!)

2004 At least 1,070 in Haiti are reported killed by floods due to Hurricane Jeanne.

In 1948, Egypt launched a large-scale offensive against the Negev region of Israel. This was part of the War of Independence, an attack by five Arab armies designed to “drive the Jews into the sea.” Though the Jews were under-armed, untrained, and few in number, they staved off the attacks and secured the borders. Yet the price was high — Israel lost 6,373 of its people, a full one percent of the Jewish population of Israel at the time.

April 14 historic events

1775 The first abolition society in North America is established. The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage is organized in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania by Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush.

Slavery was a highly contentious issue when the U.S. was founded. Southern states insisted on retaining slavery and refused to join the U.S. if it was abolished. Because no agreement was reached, the issue was punted down the road. It was finally resolved by the Civil War.

1828 Noah Webster copyrights the first edition of his dictionary.

1831 Soldiers marching on a bridge in Manchester, England cause it to collapse.

The cause of this collapse, as well as the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse over 100 years later, are taught in high-school physics.

1860 The first Pony Express rider reaches Sacramento, California.

1865 U.S. President Abraham Lincoln is shot in Ford’s Theatre by John Wilkes Booth.

U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward and his family are attacked in his home by Lewis Powell.

Thereby replacing one of the greatest presidents with one of the worst (Andrew Johnson). Seward was wounded but recovered.

1894 Thomas Edison demonstrates the kinetoscope, a device using photographs that flip in sequence, a precursor to movies.

Hey, I remember those!

1910 William Howard Taft became the first U.S. president to throw the ceremonial first pitch at a baseball game at the Washington Senators’ home opener.

1912 The British passenger liner RMS Titanic hits an iceberg in the North Atlantic at 11:40pm. The ship sinks the following morning with the loss of 1,517 lives.

The last Titanic survivor just died this past year.

1915 The Turks invade Armenia.

1956 In Chicago, Illinois, Ampex Corp. demonstrated its first commercial videotape recorder.

1958 The Soviet satellite Sputnik 2 falls from orbit after a mission duration of 162 days.

This satellite carried the first living creature into space, namely the dog Laika.

1986 In retaliation for the April 5 bombing in West Berlin that killed two U.S. servicemen, U.S. president Ronald Reagan orders major bombing raids against Libya, killing 60 people.

1986 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) hailstones fall on the Gopalganj district of Bangladesh, killing 92. These are the heaviest hailstones ever recorded.

1988 In a United Nations ceremony in Geneva, Switzerland, the Soviet Union signs an agreement pledging to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan.

1994 In a U.S. friendly fire incident during Operation Provide Comfort in northern Iraq, two United States Air Force aircraft mistakenly shoot-down two United States Army helicopters, killing 26 people.

2002 Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez returns to office two days after being ousted and arrested by the country’s military.

2003 The Human Genome Project is completed with 99% of the human genome sequenced to an accuracy of 99.99%.

Amazing.

2003 U.S. troops in Baghdad capture Abu Abbas, leader of the Palestinian group that killed an American on the hijacked cruise liner the MS Achille Lauro in 1985.

April 16 historic events

73 Masada, a Jewish fortress, falls to the Romans after several months of siege, ending the Jewish Revolt.

Moshe Dayan initiated the practice of holding the swearing-in ceremony on top of Masada for soldiers who have completed their IDF basic training. The ceremony ends with the declaration: “Masada shall not fall again.” The soldiers climb the Snake Path at night and are sworn in with torches lighting the background (wikipedia).

1789 President-elect George Washington left Mount Vernon, Va., for his inauguration in New York.

1862 American Civil War: A bill ending slavery in the District of Columbia becomes law.

1917 Lenin returns to Petrograd from exile in Switzerland.

Germany was complicit in allowing and facilitating his return, thereby causing misery to countless hundreds of millions (probably billions) over the remainder of the twentieth century.

1941 Bob Feller of the Cleveland Indians throws the only Opening Day no-hitter in the history of Major League Baseball, beating the Chicago White Sox 1-0.

Now you know the answer to a baseball trivia question: How did a team have a no-hitter thrown against them, but nobody’s batting average went down?

1945 The United States Army liberates Nazi Sonderlager (high security) Prisoner of War camp Oflag IV-C (better known as Colditz).

1945 More than 7,000 die when the German refugee ship Goya is sunk by a Soviet submarine torpedo.

The shipwreck which cost more loss of life than any other in history – the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, in which nearly 10,000 died – was also the result of being torpedoed by a Soviet sub.

1947 America’s worst harbor explosion occurred in Texas City, Texas, when the French ship Grandcamp, carrying ammonium nitrate fertilizer, caught fire and blew up, devastating the town. Another ship, the Highflyer, exploded the following day. The explosions and resulting fires killed more than 500 people and left 200 others missing.

1947 Financier and presidential confidant Bernard Baruch coins the term “Cold War” to describe the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. Baruch said in a speech at the South Carolina statehouse, “Let us not be deceived. We are today in the midst of a cold war.”

1963 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. pens his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail while incarcerated in Birmingham, Alabama for protesting against segregation.

1972 Apollo program: The launch of Apollo 16 from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The second-to-last of the six successful manned lunar landings.

1990 The “Doctor of Death”, Jack Kevorkian, goes through with his first assisted suicide.

1992 The House ethics committee listed 303 current and former lawmakers who had overdrawn their House bank accounts.

Insert punch line here.

2007 Virginia Tech massacre: The deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. Seung-Hui Cho, kills 32 and injures 23 before committing suicide.

2008 Democratic senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama participate in the final Democratic primary debate of 2008 in Philadelphia.

2009 President Barack Obama issued a statement saying CIA officials who’d used harsh interrogation tactics during the Bush administration would not be prosecuted.

It would probably be inappropriate to suggest that the new 2013 administration return the favor and not prosecute the architects of the ruinous foreign policies currently being enacted and followed.

Correction: “Robert Ismay” in yesterday’s post should have been “J. Bruce Ismay”.

Thanks to the many readers who noticed the error, but were too kind to embarrass yours truly by pointing it out.

Gut Shabbos.

1941 Bob Feller of the Cleveland Indians throws the only Opening Day no-hitter in the history of Major League Baseball, beating the Chicago White Sox 1-0.

Now you know the answer to a baseball trivia question: How did a team have a no-hitter thrown against them, but nobody’s batting average went down?

Two minor quibbles:

One, the year was 1940, not 1941.

Two, while it is technically true that no one average went down, that’s a bit misleading. Someone once posed a similar question to me — when did it happen that every player on a team had the same batting average after a game as they did before. The answer I was given was the White Sox on 4/16/1940, after Feller’s no hitter. Before the game, their average was .000 and so it was afterwards.

I argued with the questioner, telling him that his answer was incorrect. Before the game the White Sox batters didn’t have a .000 average — they have no average at all, having never batted yet that season.

By the same token, you can’t say that no one’s average on the White Sox went down (or up) since they didn’t have an average to begin with. You can make the same case for every batter the first time he comes to bat in the season.

The Wolf

By the same token, you can’t say that no one’s average on the White Sox went down (or up) since they didn’t have an average to begin with.

You can’t say that their average went up (or down).

But you can say that no one’s average went up (or down).

The legacy of a misspent youth. 🙂

Plus the fact that I saw an article on it interviewing Bob Feller on the 70th anniversary of the no-hitter (today).

The Wolf

April 19 historic events

A year later, in a much more famous battle, he helped defeat the Spanish Armada.

1775 American Revolutionary War: The war begins with the battles of Lexington and Concord.

1782 John Adams secures the Dutch Republic’s recognition of the United States as an independent government. The house which he had purchased in The Hague, Netherlands becomes the first American embassy.

1861 American Civil War: Baltimore riot of 1861, a pro-Secession mob in Baltimore, Maryland, attacks United States Army troops marching through the city.

Although Maryland was on the Union side during the Civil War, there were a great many Confederate sympathizers in Baltimore and the rest of Maryland.

1892 Charles Duryea claims to have driven the first automobile in the United States, in Springfield, Massachusetts.

The Duryea brothers (Charles and Frank) were the first commercial manufacturers of gasoline-engined cars in the U.S.

1936 First day of the Great Uprising in Palestine.

1942 World War II: In Poland, the Majdan-Tatarski ghetto is established, situated between the Lublin Ghetto and a Majdanek subcamp.

1943 World War II: In Poland, German troops enter the Warsaw ghetto to round up the remaining Jews, beginning the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

In one of the bravest and saddest episodes in history, the doomed Jewish resistance, armed mostly with pistols and Molotov cocktails, held off the nazis (YM”S) despite their tanks and armored vehicles, for nearly a month. It is worth your time to read up on this.

1951 General Douglas MacArthur retires from the military.

The “retirement” was preceded by his firing, ordered by President Truman. During his farewell speech he said his famous line, that “old soldiers never die; they just fade away.”

1961 The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba ends in success for the defenders.

Translation – the poorly planned and executed invasion was totally crushed.

1971 Vietnam War: Vietnam Veterans Against the War begin a five-day demonstration in Washington, DC.

Among the attendees was future Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry.

1989 A gun turret explodes on the USS Iowa, killing 47 sailors.

An initial investigation concluded that the explosion was caused by suicidal sabotage, carried out by one of the dead sailors. A follow-up investigation concluded that it was an accident. The truth? Who knows?

1993 A 51-day siege at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, ended when fire destroyed the structure as federal agents smashed their way in. Eighty-one people, including sect leader David Koresh, were killed.

Whether the fatal fires were started accidentally by the Feds or deliberately by the Branch Davidians hasn’t been proven. Videotape appears to show a Branch Davidian on a rooftop setting a fire.

1995 Oklahoma City bombing: The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA, is bombed, killing 168. That same day convicted murderer Richard Wayne Snell, who had ties to bombing suspect Timothy McVeigh, is executed in Arkansas. McVeigh was later convicted of federal murder charges and executed.

One of the bombers’ motives was “avenging” the Branch Davidian compound’s destruction. This was the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil until 9/11.

1997 The Red River Flood of 1997 overwhelms the city of Grand Forks, ND. Fire breaks out and spreads in downtown Grand Forks, but high water levels hamper efforts to reach the fire, leading to the destruction of 11 buildings.

Photos of Grand Forks’s devastated downtown showed shells of brick buildings standing in the floodwaters.

April 21 historic events

1898 Spanish-American War: The U.S. Congress, on April 25, recognizes that a state of war exists between the United States and Spain as of this date.

1918 World War I: German fighter ace Manfred von Richthofen, known as “The Red Baron”, is shot down and killed over Vaux sur Somme in France.

1934 Moe Berg, Senators catcher, plays AL record 117th cons errorless game.

1952 Secretary’s Day (now Administrative Professionals’ Day) is first celebrated.

Political correctness strikes again! Anyway, have a happy one.

1963 Beatles meet Rolling Stones for 1st time.

Rolling Stones meet Beatles. Crunch, crunch, crunch.

1964 A Transit-5bn satellite fails to reach orbit after launch; as it re-enters the atmosphere, 2.1 pounds of radioactive plutonium in its SNAP RTG power source is widely dispersed.

Fortunately, no harm was done. The discovery of a three-eyed rabbit colony nearby was purely coincidental.

1965 The 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair opens for its second and final season.

1975 Vietnam War: President of South Vietnam Nguyen Van Thieu flees Saigon, as Xuan Loc, the last South Vietnamese outpost blocking a direct North Vietnamese assault on Saigon, falls.

1980 Rosie Ruiz, the first woman to cross the finish line at the Boston Marathon, was disqualified when officials discovered she had jumped into the race about a mile from the finish.

1983 1 pound coin introduced in United Kingdom

1987 Brewers lose, ending AL season-opening winning streak at 13 games.

Incredibly, after setting the record with 13 straight wins to open the season, they then proceeded to lose twelve straight.

1989 Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989: In Beijing, around 100,000 students gather in Tiananmen Square to commemorate Chinese reform leader Hu Yaobang.

1994 The first discoveries of extrasolar planets are announced by astronomer Alexander Wolszczan.

Mighty fine telescope you’ve got there, Alex.

1918 World War I: German fighter ace Manfred von Richthofen, known as “The Red Baron”, is shot down and killed over Vaux sur Somme in France.

And despite being dead since 1918, The Red Baron continued to plague Snoopy as he flew in his Sopwith Camel for decades to come.

He may have been a decent fielder, but he was a lousy hitter. Casey Stengel (the legendary manager) used to say of him that he could speak eight languages but he couldn’t hit in any of them. “The Catcher Was A Spy” is a pretty good biography of Berg.

1994 The first discoveries of extrasolar planets are announced by astronomer Alexander Wolszczan.

Mighty fine telescope you’ve got there, Alex.

Actually, the first exoplanets weren’t discovered through direct observation but through the effect their gravity had on their stars. That’s why the first exoplanets to be discovered were large planets (think multi-Jovian masses) orbiting very close to their stars.

The Wolf

April 22 historic events

1864 The U.S. Congress passes the Coinage Act of 1864 which mandates that the inscription “In God We Trust” be placed on all coins minted as United States currency.

The 1864 two-cent piece was the first coin to carry this motto. After it was omitted from the $10 and $20 gold coins of 1907, congress passed a law requiring that it appear on all coins minted thereafter (except for the penny and nickel, upon which it’s stamped, anyway).

1884 U.S. recognizes King Leopold II’s Congo Free State.

Belgium’s colonization of the Congo was particularly vicious and brutal. “Though he (Leopold) extracted a personal fortune from the Congo, his harsh regime was directly or indirectly responsible for the death of millions of people.” – wikipedia

1897 New York City Jewish newspaper “Forward” begins publishing (still active).

1912 Pravda, the “voice” of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, begins publication in Saint Petersburg.

1915 The use of poison gas in World War I escalates when chlorine gas is released as a chemical weapon in the Second Battle of Ypres.

1954 Red Scare: The Army-McCarthy Hearings begin.

“Tailgunner Joe” McCarthy led the witch-hunt in a shameful period in U.S. history. He had zero ethics, zero honesty, and was eager to burnish his own credentials by smearing an ruining innocent people. Even WWII hero and Presidential candidate Eisenhower was intimidated by McCarthy to the extent that he backed off from his planned defense of General George Marshall.

1962 New York Mets tie a NL record by losing 9 straight to start season.

Amazin’

1964 The 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair opens for its first season.

The Unisphere in Queens, NY is among the remnants of that event.

1972 Vietnam War: Increased American bombing in Vietnam prompts anti-war protests in Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco.

1979 The Albert Einstein Memorial is unveiled at The National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC.

1993 The Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. is dedicated.

2004 Pro football player Pat Tillman, who’d traded in a multimillion-dollar contract to serve as an Army Ranger in Afghanistan, was killed by friendly fire.

2008 The United States Air Force retires the remaining F-117 Nighthawk aircraft in service.

F-117, aka the Stealth fighter. Unlike the fictional Soviet “Firefox”, this radar-evading plane was only capable of subsonic flight.

Irony: Vladimir Lenin (1870) and Alexander Kerensky (1881) share this birthday.

April 25 historic events

1719 Daniel Defoes publishes “Robinson Crusoe”.

1846 Thornton Affair: Open conflict begins over the disputed border of Texas, triggering the Mexican-American War.

1859 British and French engineers break ground for the Suez Canal.

1862 American Civil War: Forces under Union Admiral David Farragut capture the Confederate city of New Orleans, Louisiana.

1881 250,000 Germans petition to bar foreign Jews from entering Germany.

1898 Spanish-American War: The United States declares war on Spain.

1901 New York becomes the first U.S. state to require automobile license plates. The fee is $1.

1904 New York Yankee Jack Chesbro’s 1st of 41 wins this year.

A huge loss of life for both sides, with little accomplished.

1939 DC Comics publishes its second major superhero in Detective Comics #27; he is Batman, one of the most popular comic book superheroes of all time.

If you were fortunate enough to buy that comic book, and still have it, you can probably trade it in for a very nice house.

1945 Elbe Day: United States and Soviet troops meet in Torgau along the River Elbe, cutting the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany in two, a milestone in the approaching end of World War II in Europe.

1952 American Bowling Congress approves use of an automatic pinsetter.

1953 Francis Crick and James D. Watson publish Molecular structure of nucleic acids: a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid describing the double helix structure of DNA.

1959 The St. Lawrence Seaway, linking the North American Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean, officially opens to shipping.

1961 Robert Noyce is granted a patent for an integrated circuit.

1975 As North Vietnamese forces close in on the South Vietnamese capital Saigon, the Australian Embassy is closed and evacuated, almost ten years to the day since the first Australian troop commitment to South Vietnam.

1982 Israel completes its withdrawal from the Sinai peninsula per the Camp David Accords.

As a result of the unprecedented give-back, the Arab world offers congratulations to Israel for their concession, and extends diplomatic recognition to the Jewish state. Yeah, right.

1983 American schoolgirl Samantha Smith is invited to visit the Soviet Union by its leader Yuri Andropov after he read her letter in which she expressed fears about nuclear war.

Old KGBer Andropov wins worldwide PR points for the invitation. Samantha Smith became famous as a result of her letter and visit, and a TV show was created for her to star in. Sadly, she and her father died in a plane crash a couple of years later.

1983 Pioneer 10 travels beyond Pluto’s orbit.

The Pioneer 10 is the first man-made object to leave the solar system.

1988 In Israel, John Demjanuk is sentenced to death for war crimes committed in World War II.

1990 The Hubble Telescope is deployed into orbit from the Space Shuttle Discovery.

2003 The Human Genome Project comes to an end 2.5 years before first anticipated.

YW Moderator-80-

The author was Daniel Defoe

I read the book*, so I should know

But haste in this case did make waste

It happens when you** cut and paste

(*the Classics Illustrated version, anyway)

(**me)

April 27 historic events

1521 Battle of Mactan: Explorer Ferdinand Magellan is killed by natives in the Philippines led by chief Lapu-Lapu.

1773 The Parliament of Great Britain passes the Tea Act, designed to save the British East India Company by granting it a monopoly on the North American tea trade.

1805 First Barbary War: United States Marines and Berbers attack the Tripolitan city of Derna (The “shores of Tripoli” part of the Marines’ hymn).

1813 War of 1812: United States troops capture the capital of Upper Canada, York (present day Toronto, Canada).

Britain returned the favor by capturing and burning Washington, DC.

1861 President of the United States Abraham Lincoln suspends the writ of habeas corpus.

Even the Great Emancipator recognized that in a time of war some freedoms may need to be suspended.

1865 The steamboat Sultana, carrying 2,400 passengers, explodes and sinks in the Mississippi River, killing 1,700, most of whom are Union survivors of the Andersonville and Cahaba Prisons.

This was the worst shipwreck in U.S. history. More people died in this sinking than in the sinking of the Titanic.

1945 World War II: Benito Mussolini is arrested by Italian partisans in Dongo, while attempting escape disguised as a German soldier.

1947 “Babe Ruth Day” at Yankee Stadium was held to honor the ailing baseball star.

He was dying of throat cancer at the time. He was barely able to speak, and told fans that he knew he didn’t look too good, and he didn’t feel too good either.

1950 Apartheid: In South Africa, the Group Areas Act is passed formally segregating races.

1967 Expo 67 officially opens in Montreal, Canada with a large opening ceremony broadcast around the world. It opens to the public the next day.

The Montreal Expos (now the Washington Nationals) were named in commemoration of this event.

1972 Apollo 16 returned to Earth after a manned voyage to the moon.

1974 10,000 march in Washington, D.C., calling for the impeachment of US President Richard Nixon.

1981 Xerox PARC introduces the computer mouse.

We haven’t seen “Squeak” around in a while. If you’re reading this, why not drop in and say hello?

1987 The U.S. Department of Justice bars the Austrian President Kurt Waldheim from entering the United States, saying he had aided in the deportation and execution of thousands of Jews and others as a German Army officer during World War II.

Ed Koch declared that Kurt had “Waldheimers disease” – forgetting one’s nazi past.

1993 All members of the Zambia national football team lose their lives in a plane crash off Libreville, Gabon in route to Dakar, Senegal to play a 1994 FIFA World Cup qualifying match against Senegal.

1994 South African general election, 1994: The first democratic general election in South Africa, in which black citizens could vote.

2002 The last successful telemetry from the NASA space probe Pioneer 10.

2005 The superjumbo jet aircraft Airbus A380 makes its first flight from Toulouse, France.

2006 Construction begins on the planned 1,776 foot Freedom Tower for the new World Trade Center in New York City.

2009 General Motors announced plans to cut 21,000 hourly jobs and scrap the Pontiac brand.

…leaving only Chevrolet, Buick, Cadillac and GMC as GM’s surviving brands.