POPnews - November 9th

[After it was destroyed by war in 1993, Stari Most was rebuilt almost immediately, and reopened in July 2004.]
694 CE - Egica - Visigoth King of Hispania - showed his utter ignorance in matters spiritual at the Seventeenth Council of Toledo when he accused Jews of aiding Muslims, and thereafter sentenced all Jews to slavery for something that not only never happened but never could or would happen.

1688 - William of Orange captured Exeter during Britain's Glorious Revolution.

1851 - Kentucky marshals abducted abolitionist minister Calvin Fairbank from Jeffersonville, Indiana, and returned him to Kentucky to stand trial for helping a slave named Tamar to escape from her owner, A. L. Shotwell of Louisville, who had recently hired her out to a Judge Purtle of that city. The following year Fairbank would be sentenced to 15 years hard labour, but was eventually pardoned in 1864.

1867 - The Tokugawa Shogunate handed power back to the Emperor of Japan, bringing about the so-called Meiji Restoration.

1872 - A fire destroyed much of Boston; ignited around 7:20 PM, within 12 hours it had destroyed 65 acres of the city's downtown including 776 buildings, and was responsible for at least 20 deaths, although a citizen's brigade managed to save the Old South Meeting House.

1888 - Jack the Ripper killed Mary Jane Kelly, his last known victim.

1906 - Theodore Roosevelt became the first sitting US President to make an official trip outside the country when he went to inspect progress on the Panama Canal.

1907 - The Cullinan Diamond was presented to Britain's King Edward VII on his birthday; at 530.2 carats, it was not only the largest finished diamond in the world until the 1985 discovery of the Golden Jubilee Diamond, it's also officially the best birthday present ever given.

1918 - Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated - effectively ending the German Revolution - following which the country was proclaimed a republic.

1921 - Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work with the photoelectric effect.

1923 - In Munich, Germany, police and government troops crushed the Beer Hall Putsch; the failed coup was the work of the Nazis, led by Adolf Hitler, Erich Ludendorff, and members of the Kampfbund.

1938 - Kristallnacht, Nazi Germany's first large-scale act of physical anti-Jewish violence, began.

1961 - Brian Epstein attended a gig by a new band called The Beatles at Liverpool's Cavern Club; by December he was managing the band and history (not to mention some bloody great pop music) was being made.

1965 - 22-year-old Catholic Worker member Roger Allen LaPorte, protesting against the Vietnam War, set himself on fire in front of the United Nations building - one week to the day after Norman Morrison did the same thing in front of The Pentagon.

1967 - The first issue of Rolling Stone magazine was published.

1979 - Four men now better known as the Bridgewater Four - Patrick Molloy, Jim Robinson and cousins Michael Hickey and Vincent Hickey - were found guilty of murdering 12 year-old paperboy Carl Bridgewater, which crime occurred outside Stourbridge in September 1978; their convictions would be overturned by the Court of Appeal in 1997 after it came to light that police fabricated evidence in order to extract a confession from Molloy - a confession around which the entire case against the four was.

1985 - Garry Kasparov became the youngest world chess champion by beating Anatoly Karpov.

1989 - Communist-controlled East Germany opened checkpoints in the Berlin Wall, allowing its citizens to travel to West Germany for the first time since 1961, at which point the city's citizenry began the demolition that resulted in the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

1993 - Stari Most, the 'old bridge' built spanning the river Neretva in the Bosnian city of Mostar in 1566, collapsed after several days of bombing.
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