This Day in History

[GordMay]

Groundhog Day [Feb 2] 2022:
Shubenacadie Sam: Six more weeks of winter
Lucy the Lobster: Six more weeks of winter
Fred la marmotte: Six more weeks of winter
Punxsutawney Phil: Six more weeks of winter
Wiarton Willie: Early spring

[GordMay]

February 3

1468: German craftsman, inventor, and printer, Johannes Gutenberg, whose printing press was considered a history-changing invention, died in Mainz.

1690: The first paper money, in America, is issued in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

1870: The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was ratified, guaranteeing the right to vote, regardless of race, and intending to ensure, with the Fourteenth Amendment, the civil rights of former slaves.

1894: The first American steel sailing ship, the “Dirigo”, was launched from Bath, Maine.

1913: The Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, granting Congress the authority to levy income taxes, was ratified.

1917: A German submarine sinks the U.S. liner “Housatonic”, off coast of Sicily. The United States severs diplomatic relations with Germany.

1928: Paleoanthropologist Davidson Black reports his findings on the ancient human fossils found at Zhoukoudian, China, in the journal Nature, and declares them to be a new species, he names 'Sinanthropus pekinensis' [now known as 'Homo erectus'].

1931: New Zealand's worst natural disaster, the Hawke's Bay earthquake, kills 256, and injures thousands, devastating Napier, and the Hawke's Bay region.

1950: Klaus Fuchs, a German-born British scientist who helped developed the atomic bomb, is arrested in Great Britain, for passing top-secret information about the bomb, to the Soviet Union.

1953: French oceanographer, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, publishes ‘The Silent World’, a memoir about his time exploring the oceans. It became a highly acclaimed documentary, in 1956.

1959: 'The day the music died...'

1962: US President John F. Kennedy bans all trade with Cuba, except for food & drugs.

1966: 1st operational weather satellite, US “ESSA-1" launched.
1966: 1st soft landing on Moon [Soviet “Luna 9"].

1986: ‘Pixar Animation Studios’, headed by Edwin Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, is spun off from ‘Lucasfilm, Ltd’, as an independent film production company, with backing of Steve Jobs.

1987: SD Yacht Club celebrates return of ‘America's Cup’.
➥ https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com...b02-story.html


1993: Federal trial of 4 police officers, charged with civil rights violations, in videotaped beating of Rodney King, begins in Los Angeles, California.

2011: All available blocks of ‘IPv4' internet addresses are officially distributed to regional authorities.

2019: Dam in Townsville, Australia, deliberately opened, flooding 20,000 homes, after city receives record 3.3ft of rain in a week.

2020: Cruise ship “Diamond Princess”, with 3700 passengers, quarantined in Yokohama port, Japan, after cases of COVID-19 found on board.

2021: Engineers at MIT announce they have engineered spinach, to send emails, when detecting explosive materials in groundwater, as part of plant nanobionic research.
➥ https://www.cruisersforum.com/forums...ml#post3567214

[GordMay]

February 4

1697: Three Dutch East India Company ships anchor, at Dirk-Hartogeiland, Australia.

1789: George Washington was elected to serve as the first U.S. president [and John Adams as Vice President], by a unanimous vote, in the first electoral college.

1795: France abolishes slavery in her territories, and converts slaves to citizens.

1859: One of the oldest known copies of the Bible [a handwritten copy of the Greek Bible], "The Codex Sinaiticus" [Sinai Bible], is seen in Egypt by Constantin von Tischendorf, who takes the manuscript home with him.

1861: 6 slave states met, in Montgomery, Alabama to form the Confederacy [Confederate States of America], which lasted only until 1865.

1894: Belgian musician [invented the saxophone] Adolphe Sax died.

1913: Civil rights icon, Rosa Parks [Rosa Louise McCauley] is born. Parks' name has become synonymous with her refusal to give up her seat, to a white man, on a segregated bus, in 1955.

1945: During the final stages of World War II, the Yalta [in the Crimea] Conference opened, with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin meeting, to plan the final defeat, and occupation of Nazi Germany.

1962: First U.S. helicopter is shot down, in Vietnam.

1971: The NASDAQ stock exchange, the second-largest in the world - behind the New York Stock Exchange - is founded in New York City.

1974: Patty Hearst, the 19-year-old granddaughter of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, is kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, California, by three armed members of the Symbionese Liberation Army.

1976: 7.5 earthquake kills 22,778 in Guatemala & Honduras.

1985: 20 countries [but not US] sign UN treaty outlawing torture.

1987: US President Reagan's veto of Clean Water Act is overridden by Congress.

1997: O.J. Simpson found liable in the deaths of Ron Goldman and Nicole Simpson, in a civil court action.

2004: A Harvard sophomore, named Mark Zuckerberg, launches ‘The Facebook’, a social media website he had built, in order to connect Harvard students with one another. By the next day, over a thousand people had registered. By the end of the year, the site had 1 million users, angel investor Peter Thiel had invested $500,000, and Zuckerberg had left Harvard to run Facebook, from its new headquarters in California.

2012: British servicewoman Florence Green, the last surviving veteran of World War I, died at age 110.

2016: Morocco's Mohammed VI switches on world's largest solar plant, near Ouarzazate. Planned to power 1 million homes, when fully completed 2018.

2021: Denmark approves plans for world's first energy island, in the North Sea, to provide power to 3 million Europeans.

[GordMay]

February 5

0146 BCE: The Roman Republic finally triumphed over its nemesis, Carthage, after over a century of fighting. The victory, and subsequent destruction of the city of Carthage, marked the end of the [3] Punic Wars. Between 146 BCE and the sack of Rome, by the Vandals, in 476 CE, Rome would use its regional wealth and power to establish one of the largest and most powerful empires of all time, eventually stretching from the British Isles to the Near East. North Africa, being an important part of this empire, a new Roman city was established on the site of Carthage, roughly a hundred years after the original city's destruction.

1803: English explorer George Bass, and crew, set sail from Sydney to Tahiti and Chile - they're never seen again.

1901: John Pierpont [JP] Morgan forms US Steel Corp.

1924: The Royal Greenwich Observatory begin broadcasting the hourly time signals, known as the Greenwich Time Signal, or the ‘BBC pips’.

1983: Former Nazi Gestapo official Klaus Barbie ["Butcher of Lyon"] brought to trial.

1992: Jury selection begins in the trial of Los Angeles police charged with beating Rodney King.

2016: North Korean computer hackers [‘Lazarus Group’] try to steal $1 billion of Bangladesh’s money, from Federal Reserve Bank of New York, but only get $81 million, before a typo alerts authorities.
➥ https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-57520169

2020: After being impeached, by the House of Representatives, over his actions in the Ukraine scandal, Pres. Donald Trump was acquitted, in the Senate - 52-48 on charges of abuse of power, and 53-47 on obstruction of Congress.

2021: Ocean life is being drowned out by human noise, especially shipping, construction, sonar and seismic surveys, according to new research.
➥ https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba4658

[GordMay]

February 6

0046 BCE: Julius Caesar's forces delivered the final blow, against supporters of Pompey the Great, at the Battle of Thapsus.

1820: The first organized immigration of freed enslaved people to Africa, from the United States, departs New York harbor, on a journey to Freetown, Sierra Leone, in West Africa. In 1821, the American Colonization Society founded the colony of Liberia, south of Sierra Leone, as a homeland for formerly enslaved U.S. people, outside of British jurisdiction.

1836: HMS “Beagle”, and Charles Darwin, arrive in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania).

1840: Māori tribes [between 40 Māori Chiefs,later signed by 500] of New Zealand signed the Treaty of Waitangi, with Great Britain, a historic agreement, purported to protect Māori rights, that was the immediate basis of the British annexation of New Zealand.

1861: British Vice-Admiral Robert Fitzroy issues first storm warnings for ships.

1894: Bottle opener patented, by William Painter.

1911: Great fire destroys downtown Constantinople (Istanbul, Turkey).

1917: Just three days after U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s speech, in which he broke diplomatic relations with Germany, and warned that war would follow, if American interests at sea were again assaulted; a German submarine torpedoes, and sinks the Anchor Line passenger steamer “California” off the Irish coast, killing a total of 43 people [of 205 passengers and crew].

1918: Great Britain grants women (30 & over) the vote.

1928: A woman, dubbed Anna Anderson [possibly Franziska Schanzkowska], arrives in NYC, using the alias "Anastasia Tschaikovsky" - claims to be Grand Duchess Anastasia, daughter of Tsar Nicholas II.

1933: Highest recorded sea wave (not tsunami), 34 m (112 Ft), in North Pacific hurricane, by USS “Ramapo”.
➥ https://www.rosslaird.com/articles/blog/rogue-waves/

1935: "Monopoly" board game goes on sale, for 1st time.

1952: After a long illness, King George VI, of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, dies in his sleep, at the royal estate at Sandringham. Princess Elizabeth, the oldest of the king’s two daughters, and next in line to succeed him, was in Kenya at the time of her father’s death; she was crowned Queen Elizabeth II on June 2, 1953, at age 27.

1958: A British European Airways flight crashes, just after takeoff from the Munich Airport. Twenty-two of the 43 people on board died in the crash, including eight players, and 3 staff , from the Manchester United soccer team, which had just qualified for the semifinals of the European Cup.

1959: 1st successful test-fire of “Titan” ICBM.

1964: France & Great-Britain sign accord, over building channel tunnel (“Chunnel”).

1968: Former President Dwight Eisenhower shot a hole-in-one.

1971: American astronaut Alan Shepard is 1st to hit a golf ball, on the moon.

1980: John Wayne Gacy goes on trial, for the murder of 33 young men, in Cook County, Illinois.

2018: SpaceX's “Falcon” Heavy rocket had its first test flight; on board was a Tesla automobile, owned by SpaceX's founder, Elon Musk.

2019: Honeybees are able to add and subtract, and understand concept of zero, according to research, from RMIT University in Australia.
➥ https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aav0961
2019: 2018 named the 4th warmest year on record, according to NOAA and NASA, after 2016, 2015, and 2017.
➥ https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2841/2...-to-nasa-noaa/

2020: Date of the 1st COVID-19 related death, in the US (confirmed by the CDC April 21).

[skipmac]

Originally Posted by GordMay

February 6

1928: A woman, dubbed Anna Anderson [possibly Franziska Schanzkowska], arrives in NYC, using the alias "Anastasia Tschaikovsky" - claims to be Grand Duchess Anastasia, daughter of Tsar Nicholas II.

Wonder if this is why I saw the rerun of the movie (the original with Yul Brynner and Grace Kelly) on TV last night.

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by skipmac

Wonder if this is why I saw the rerun of the movie (the original with Yul Brynner and Grace Kelly) on TV last night.

Possibly.
BUT:
Twentieth Century Fox made the film twice, once in 1956, and again in 1997.
The 1956 version stared Ingrid Bergman [Anna “Anastasia” Koreff], Yul Brynner [Sergei], and Helen Hayes, amongst other great character actors, such as Akim Tamiroff. and Martita Hunt.

[skipmac]

Originally Posted by GordMay

Possibly.
BUT:
Twentieth Century Fox made the film twice, once in 1956, and again in 1997.
The 1956 version stared Ingrid Bergman [Anna “Anastasia” Koreff], Yul Brynner [Sergei], and Helen Hayes, amongst other great character actors, such as Akim Tamiroff. and Martita Hunt.

Duh. Brain fart. Of course Ingrid Bergman.

Had just watched a travel show about Monaco and had Grace Kelly on the brain. Guess there could be worse things.

[GordMay]

February 7

1783: The Great Siege of Gibraltar, launched by France and Spain, against the British colony, during American War of Independence, is lifted, after 3 years and 7 months.

1863: HMS “Orpheus” sinks off the coast of Auckland, New Zealand, killing 189.

1962: President John F. Kennedy issues an executive order, broadening the United States' restrictions on trade with Cuba. The ensuing embargo, which effectively restricts all trade between Cuba and the United States, has had profoundly negative effects on the island nation's economy, and shaped the recent history of the Western Hemisphere.

1964: Pan Am Yankee Clipper flight 101, from London Heathrow, lands at New York’s Kennedy Airport, and ‘Beatlemania’ arrives. It was the first visit, to the United States, by the Beatles, who had just scored its first No. 1 U.S. hit, six days before with “I Want to Hold Your Hand”. Two nights later, their performance, on The Ed Sullivan Show, was watched by 73 million viewers.

1984: ‘David’ (born without immune system) touches his mother, for 1st time, at age 12.
➥ https://primaryimmune.org/story-david-vetter

1987: Dennis Conner, & “Stars & Stripes 87” [US55], beats “Kookaburra III” [4-0], to bring the ‘America's Cup’ back to US.
➥ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stars_%26_Stripes_87

1992: ‘Maastricht Treaty’ signed by 12 countries, from the European Community (EC), to create the European Union (EU).

2005: Britain's Ellen MacArthur becomes the fastest person to sail solo around the world, taking 71 days, 14 hours, 18 minutes, 33 seconds.
➥ https://ellenmacarthurfoundation.org...s/ellens-story

2013: Mississippi became the last U.S. state to officially abolish slavery; it had ratified the Thirteenth Amendment in 1995, but failed to submit the necessary paperwork.

2018: All citrus fruit can be traced to the southeast foothills of the Himalayas [about 8 million years ago], according to DNA study, published in "Nature".
➥ https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25447

2019: Measles cases in Europe highest in a decade, tripling in a year to 82,596.
2019: Measles outbreak declared in the Philippines with 1,813 cases and 26 deaths.

[GordMay]

February 8

1587: After 19 years of imprisonment, Mary, Queen of Scots is beheaded, at Fotheringhay Castle, in England, for her alleged complicity in the Babington Plot, to murder Queen Elizabeth I.

1672: Isaac Newton reads 1st optics paper, before Royal Society, in London.

1725: Peter the Great, emperor of Russia, dies, and is succeeded by his wife, Catherine I.

1757: Concluded by Robert Clive, the Treaty of Alinagar restored Calcutta (now Kolkata), which Clive had recovered in January from Siraj al-Dawlah, to British control, and served as a prelude to the seizure of Bengal.

1807: Battle of Eylau ends inconclusively, between Napoleon's forces, and Russian Empire - 1st battle Napoleon isn't victorious.

1879: Sandford Fleming first proposes adoption of Universal Standard Time, at a meeting of the Royal Canadian Institute.

1905: Cyclone hits Tahiti & adjacent islands, killing some 10,000 people.

1915: D.W. Griffith’s ‘The Birth of a Nation’, a landmark film, in the history of cinema, premieres at Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles. The film was America’s first feature-length motion picture, and a box-office smash, and during its unprecedented three hours, Griffith popularized countless filmmaking techniques, that remain central to the art today. ‘Birth of a Nation’ is also regarded as one of the most offensive films ever made. Actually titled ‘The Clansman’, for its first month of release, the film provides a highly subjective history of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. African Americans are portrayed as brutish, lazy, morally degenerate, and dangerous. In the film’s climax, the Ku Klux Klan rises up to save the South, from the Reconstruction Era-prominence of African Americans, in Southern public life.

1916: French cruiser "Admiral Charner" torpedoed off Syrian coast, kills 374.

1924: Gee Jon becomes the first man executed by lethal gas, in American history, in Carson City, Nevada.

1940: ‘Lodtz’, 1st large ghetto, established, by Nazis, in Poland.

1943: Japanese troops evacuate Guadalcanal, leaving the island in Allied possession, after a prolonged campaign. The American victory paved the way for other Allied wins, in the Solomon Islands.

1965: President Johnson deploys 1st US combat troops to South Vietnam, with 3500 marines, sent to protect key US airbase, near Da Nang.

1971; ‘Nasdaq’ Composite stock market index debuts, with 50 companies, and a starting value of 100.

1986: Spud Webb, who, at 5’7”, was one of the shortest players in the history of professional basketball, wins the NBA slam dunk contest, beating his Atlanta Hawks teammate, and 1985 dunk champ, the 6’8” Dominique Wilkins. Webb retired from basketball in 1998, after 12 seasons in the NBA. He was said to have paved the way for other height-challenged NBA players, including 5’5” Earl Boykins, and 5’3” Muggsy Bogues.

1996: The massive Internet collaboration, ‘24 Hours in Cyberspace’, takes place. A team of 150+ photojournalists fanned out across the world, to document how the Internet, and online communication, are changing people's lives.
➥ https://www.historyofdomains.com/cyberspace/

2018: ‘Twitter’ reports its first quarterly profit, as a public company.

[GordMay]

February 9

1799: The USS “Constellation” captures the French frigate, “Insurgente”, off Nevis, the West Indies.

1870: US Army establishes US National Weather Service.

1893: Canal builder De Lesseps, & others, sentenced to prison, for fraud.

1926: Teaching theory of evolution forbidden in Atlanta, Georgia schools.

1942: The largest and most luxurious ocean liner on the seas, at that time, France’s “Normandie”, catches fire, while in the process of being converted for military use, by the United States [renamed the USS “Lafayette”].

1950: During a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, Senator Joseph McCarthy (Republican-Wisconsin) claims that he has a list, with the names of 205 members of the Department of State, that are ‘known communists’, sparking a nationwide hysteria, about subversives in the American government. In the next few weeks, the number fluctuated wildly, with McCarthy stating, at various times, that there were 57, or 81, or 10 communists in the Department of State. In fact, McCarthy never produced any solid evidence that there was even one communist in the State Department.

1951: St Louis Browns sign pitcher Satchel Paige, aged 45.

1961: The Beatles first gig at Liverpool's Cavern Club; they would play there nearly 300 times, over the next two years.

1971: Pitcher Leroy “Satchel” Paige becomes the first Negro League veteran, to be nominated for the Baseball Hall of Fame. He was inducted, in August of that year.

1994: Nelson Mandela becomes the first black president of South Africa.

1997: Fox cartoon series ‘The Simpsons’ airs 167th episode; longest-running animated series, in cartoon history.

2001: American submarine USS “Greeneville” accidentally strikes, and sinks, the “Ehime-Maru”, a Japanese training vessel, operated by the Uwajima Fishery High School; nine of the Ehime-Maru's crew members were killed, including four high school students.

2014: Australian National University scientists discover the oldest known star, at 13.6 billion years old.

2021: US Senate Impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump begins, in Washington D.C.

[GordMay]

February 10

0060: St Paul thought to have been shipwrecked at Malta.

1763: The Treaty of Paris was signed, ending territorial conflicts between France and Britain, in the Seven Years' War, the North American phase of which, was called the French and Indian War. France gives up all her territories in the New World, except New Orleans, and a few scattered islands.

1842: Moreton Bay Penal Colony abolished, and opened for free settlement (modern city of Brisbane, Australia).

1846: Their leader [Joseph Smith] assassinated, and their homes under attack, the 1,600 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (aka: Mormons) of Nauvoo, Illinois, begin a long westward migration, under Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, that eventually brings them to the valley of the Great Salt Lake, in Utah.

1906: British battleship HMS “Dreadnought” launches, after only 100 days, renders all other capital ships obsolete, with its revolutionary design.

1916: Biggest oil well gusher ever - Edward L. Doheny's Cerro Azul No. 4 first gushes 600 feet in the air, near Tampico, Mexico.

1931: New Delhi becomes the capital of India.

1933: Adolf Hitler proclaims ‘end of Marxism’.

1942: American chemist James Franklin Hyde is granted a patent, for fused silica.

1964: Australian destroyer HMAS “Voyager” sinks, after colliding with aircraft carrier HMAS “Melbourne”, killing 82.

1966: Ralph Nader, a young lawyer, and the author of the groundbreaking book “Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile,” testifies before Congress for the first time, about unsafe practices in the auto industry.

1996: After three hours, world chess champion Garry Kasparov loses the first game of a six-game match, against ‘Deep Blue’, an IBM computer, capable of evaluating 200 million moves per second. Man was ultimately victorious over machine, however, as Kasparov bested Deep Blue in the match, with three wins, and two ties, and took home the $400,000 prize.

2013: 5 people are killed, by a falling lifeboat, from the cruise ship “Thomson Majesty”, in the Canary islands.

2021: 17,000 year old conch shell discovered to be oldest known wind instrument, after being reassessed by archaeologists, originally found in Marsoulas cave, Pyrenees.
➥ https://www.sciencetimes.com/article...instrument.htm
2021: Astronomers confirm the planetoid named ‘Farfarout’ as the most distant orbiting the Sun, almost four times more distant than Pluto
➥ https://www.inverse.com/science/most...tem-discovered

[GordMay]

February 11

0660 BCE: Traditional founding of Japan, by Emperor Jimmu Tenno.

0055: Tiberius Claudius Caesar Britannicus, heir to the Roman Emperorship, dies under mysterious circumstances, in Rome. This clears the way for Nero to become Emperor.

0385: Siricius, bishop of Tarragona, elected as Bishop of Rome; first to style himself Pope.

1650: French mathematician and philosopher, René Descartes dies, at age 53, in Stockholm, Sweden.

1809: Robert Fulton patents the steamboat.

1847: Thomas Edison was born.

1858: Marie-Bernarde Soubirous, a 14-year-old French peasant girl [canonized as St. Bernadette, in 1933], first claims to see the Virgin Mary, near Lourdes, France.

1907: Passenger ship “Larchmont” sinks, by Block Island, off Rhode Island, 322 die.

1926: Tokelau [Union] Islands, in South Pacific, transfers to NZ.

1942: The German battleships “Gneisenau”, “Scharnhorst”, and “Prinz Eugen” begin their famed channel dash, from the French port of Brest. Their journey takes them through the English Channel, on their way back to Germany.

1945: The ‘Yalta Conference’, between the Allied leaders of World War II, came to a close. ‘Declaration of Liberated Europe’ signed, by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin.

1954: A 75,000-watt light bulb is lit, at the Rockefeller Center, in New York, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Thomas Edison's first light bulb.

1990: Nelson Mandela, leader of the movement to end South African apartheid, is released from prison, in Paarl, South Africa, after serving more than 27 years, of a life sentence.

2011: Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak stepped down, after nearly 30 years in power, following mass demonstrations, that were part of the pro-democracy uprisings, known as the ‘Arab Spring’.

2015: Francesco Schettino, Captain of the “Costa Concordia”, that ran aground 2012, is convicted of manslaughter, in Grosseto, and sentenced to 16 years in jail.

2020: A few months after the first known case was detected in Wuhan, China, and approximately three weeks after the first U.S. case was reported, the World Health Organization officially named the illness, that would go on to cause a pandemic "coronavirus disease 2019," shortened to the acronym COVID-19.

[GordMay]

February 12

1294: Kublai Khan, the conqueror of Asia, dies at the age of 80.

1502: Vasco da Gama sets sail from Lisbon, Portugal, on his second voyage to India.

1554: Lady Jane Grey, the Queen of England for thirteen days, is beheaded [for treason] on Tower Hill. She was 17 years old.

1777: Captain James Cook arrives at Queen Charlotte Sound, New Zealand, aboard “Resolution”, on his 3rd trip to Pacific Ocean.

1793: US Congress enacts first fugitive slave law, requiring all states, including those that forbid slavery, to forcibly return enslaved people who have escaped from other states, to their original owners. The laws stated that: “no person held to service of labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such labor or service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”

1804: Immanuel Kant died in Königsberg, Prussia [now Kaliningrad, Russia].

1809: Charles Darwin is born.
1809: Abraham Lincoln is born.

1851: Edward Hargraves, and three other men, discover gold at Ophir, New South Wales, beginning Australia's first gold rush.

1909: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP] is founded.

1912: Hsian-T’ung, the last emperor of China, is forced to abdicate, ending 267 years of Manchu rule in China [& 2,000 years of imperial rule]. following Sun Yat-sen’s republican revolution.

1915: Adolf Hitler receives the relatively common Iron Cross second class, for bravery, in World War I.

1949: Team Canada beats Denmark 47-0, in hockey.

1950: Senator Joe McCarthy claims to have list of 205 communist government employees.

1979: “Kosmos 1076", 1st Soviet oceanographic satellite, launched.

1987: A Court in Texas upholds $8.5 billion of a fine, imposed on Texaco, for the illegal takeover of Getty Oil.

1988: US Navy frigate USS “Yorktown” bumped by Russian frigate “Bezzavetny”, in the Black Sea, in dispute over right of innocent passage.

1989: “Thursday's Child” sets sailing record, NY ☞ Cape Horn ☞ SF, 80 d 20 h.

1994: ’The Scream’, by Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1893 pastel version), is stolen in Oslo.

1998: Intel unveils its 1st graphics chip, ‘i740'.

2002: Former Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, goes on trial for war crimes, which ended without a verdict, when the so-called “Butcher of the Balkans” was found dead, at age 64 from an apparent heart attack, in his prison cell, on March 11, 2006.

2016: Fiji becomes the first country to ratify the UN climate accords [signed Paris, December 2015].

2018: Tropical cyclone ‘Gita’ strikes Tonga, as a category four cyclone, causing widespread damage.

[GordMay]

February 13

1258: Baghdad, then a city of 1 million, falls to the Mongols, as the Abbasid Caliphate is destroyed, tens of thousands slaughtered, ending the Islamic Golden Age.

1502: Nicolás de Ovando y Cáceres, new Governor of the Indies, sets sail for the Indies, with a fleet of 30 ships, largest-ever fleet to the New World.

1633: Italian philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician, Galileo Galilei, arrives in Rome, to face charges of heresy, for advocating Copernican theory, which holds that the Earth revolves around the Sun. In 1992, the Vatican formally acknowledged its mistake, in condemning Galileo.

1692: Scottish soldiers, under Archibald Campbell, 10th earl of Argyll, slaughtered members of the MacDonald clan of Glencoe, after their chief, Alexander MacDonald, missed the deadline for swearing allegiance to King William III. Ironically, the pledge had been made, but not communicated to the clans. The event is remembered as the Massacre of Glencoe.

1945: A series of Allied firebombing raids begins, against the German city of Dresden, reducing the ‘Florence of the Elbe’ to rubble and flames, and killing roughly 25,000 people. More than 3,400 tons of explosives were dropped on Dresden, by 800 American and British aircraft.

1960: France detonated its first atomic bomb [ 70 kilo-ton ‘Gerboise Bleue’], at Reggane Proving Grounds, Algeria, in the Sahara desert.

2000: The last ‘Peanuts’ comic strip was published in newspapers, just hours after the death of creator Charles Schulz.

2008: Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, makes an historic apology to Indigenous Australians, especially to the ‘Stolen Generations’, who suffered forced child removal, and assimilation.

2020: January 2020 was the hottest January in recorded history, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
➥ https://www.noaa.gov/news/january-20...uary-on-record

2021: Former US President, Donald Trump, acquitted, in second Senate impeachment trial, on charge of incitement of insurrection, after senators vote 57 to 43, in favor of conviction, less than the two thirds majority, required for impeachment.
2021: Archaeologists announce discovery of oldest known beer factory in Abydos, Egypt, from early Dynastic period 3150 B.C.- 2613 B.C.
➥ https://www.theguardian.com/science/...rthed-in-egypt