POPnews - January 10th

[Even though some of his adventures are unavailable due to the censorious nature of political correctness, those Tintin books still being reprinted continue to delight fans more than eighty years after they first began appearing.]
49 BCE - Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, sparking both a civil war and a cliché.

681 CE - Pope Agatho died; he was succeeded by Leo II who, although he'd been elected shortly after his predecessor's death, wouldn't be crowned until August of the following year.

1276 - Pope Gregory X died; he was succeeded by Innocent V eleven days later.

1475 - Moldavia's Prince Stephen III defeated the Ottoman Empire's Hadân Suleiman Pasha at the Battle of Vaslui, near the town of Vaslui in what is now eastern Romania.

1645 - Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud was beheaded at the Tower of London for opposing Puritanism and for his support of King Charles I.

1662 - Monaco's ruling Prince Honoré II died; he was succeeded by his son, Louis I.

1776 - Thomas Paine published his famous pamphlet Common Sense.

1810 - The marriage of Napoleon Bonaparte and Josephine de Beauharnais was annulled.

1842 - Sir Charles Bagot arrived in Kingston to become Governor-General of what was then the newly-created Province of Canada, succeeding Lord Sydenham; although ordered by the British government to resist the colonist's demand for responsible government, Bagot did allow Robert Baldwin and Sir Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine to form a ministry on the basis of their parliamentary majority.

1863 - The London Underground, the world's oldest underground railway, opened between London Paddington station and Farringdon station.

1901 - The first great Texas oil gusher was discovered at Spindletop in Beaumont.

1922 - Arthur Griffith was elected President of the Irish Free State.

1927 - Fritz Lang's cinematic masterpiece, Metropolis, had its world premiere in Berlin.

1929 - The comic book character Tintin, by Hergé, made his debut in Tintin in the Land of the Soviets.

1942 - Elizabeth Monk and Suzanne Pilon became the first female lawyers in Quebec.

1957 - HM The Queen invited Chancellor of the Exchequer Harold Macmillan to become Prime Minister of Great Britain following the resignation of Sir Anthony Eden over his mishandling of the Suez Crisis.

1962 - As part of its Apollo Project, NASA announced plans to build the C-5 rocket booster, which later became better known as the Saturn V moon rocket, and which would be used to launch all 17 Apollo moon missions.

1971 - Masterpiece Theatre premiered on PBS.

1982 - The Freezer Bowl - the NFL's coldest game in terms of wind chill, at -37°F - was won by the Cincinnati Bengals who defeated the San Diego Chargers 27-7 and advanced to Super Bowl XVI.
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