POPnews - February 20th

[The fact that most of the Canadian engineers who worked on Canada's Avro Arrow supersonic jet fighter just happened to end up working for NASA on the American space program is no proof whatsoever that they were poached by the US government or that Canada's Conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbaker canceled the program on direct orders from the White House - effectively selling out Canada to the United States, which is at the core of that party's ideology. It's all just a huge coincidence, I'm sure.]
1547 - England's King Edward VI was crowned at Westminster Abbey.

1792 - The Postal Service Act, establishing the US Post Office, was signed into law by President George Washington.

1798 - Louis Alexandre Berthier removed Pope Pius VI from power after declaring the Roman Republic.

1810 - Andreas Hofer, Tyrolean patriot and the leader of a rebellion against Napoleon's forces in Austria, was executed.

1835 - An earthquake destroyed the Chilean city of Concepción.

1864 - The Battle of Olustee - the largest battle fought in Florida during the American Civil War - pitted the Union's General Truman Seymour against Confederate General Joseph Finegan, whose victory was nevertheless the third bloodiest of the war.

1872 - New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art opened at 681 Fifth Avenue in New York City; its original collection was the personal gift of a railroad executive, John Taylor Johnston.

1909 - The Futurist Manifesto of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was first published in the French journal Le Figaro; it promoted the cause of Futurism, a kind of short-sighted progressivism which called for everything from the past to be discarded in favour of the new and modern.

1913 - Work began on Australia's new Federal Capital at Canberra, when King O'Malley drove in the first survey spike.

1921 - The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, starring Rudolph Valentino, premiered.

1931 - The US Congress approved the construction of the San Francisco - Oakland Bay Bridge by the state of California.

1933 - Congress proposed the Twenty-first Amendment to the US Constitution that would ultimately end Prohibition in that country.

1935 - Caroline Mikkelsen became the first woman to set foot in Antarctica.

1943 - The Parícutin volcano began to form in Mexico.

1952 - Emmett Ashford became the first African-American umpire in organized baseball when he was authorized as a substitute umpire in the Southwestern International League; Ashford later worked in the Pacific Coast League and reached the pinnacle of his career when he officiated at the 1970 World Series.

1959 - Canada's Avro Arrow program was controversially canceled by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker.

1962 - While aboard the Mercury Program's Friendship 7, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth, making three orbits in 4 hours and 55 minutes.

1991 - An enormous statue of Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha was pulled down in Tirana.

2003 - During a Great White concert in the Rhode Island city of West Warwick, a pyrotechnics display set the club ablaze - killing 100 and injuring over 300 others.
*