Monday, February 14, 2011

POPnews - February 14th

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[When it came to tit-for-tat retaliations surely neither the the Allies nor the Nazis could have hoped for a worse Hell on Earth than Dresden; once the cultural and artistic capital of Germany, the morning after the city was relentlessly firebombed it was home to cinders and little more...
Yet from its ashes it has risen, reborn!
]

842 CE - Charles the Bald and Louis the German swore the Oaths of Strasbourg in both German and French, allying West Francia and East Francia.

1556 - Protestant Thomas Cranmer - Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI - was declared a heretic by their Catholic successor, Mary I; he would be burned at the stake five weeks later.

1779 - Captain James Cook was killed by native Hawaiians near Kealakekua on the Island of Hawaii.

1859 - Oregon became the 33rd US state.

1912 - Arizona became the 48th US state.

1945 - On the second day of an intensive two-day operation Allied forces began a devastating aerial fire-bombing of Dresden; the event was later famously recounted in Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five.

1949 - The Asbestos Strike began, marking the beginning of Quebec's Quiet Revolution against the tyranny and cronyism of Union Nationale Premier Maurice Duplessis.

1962 - First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy took television viewers on a tour of the White House.

1966 - The Australian dollar was introduced on the day that country's currency was decimalized.

1979 - In Kabul, Muslim terrorists kidnapped Adolph Dubs, the American ambassador to Afghanistan; Dubs was later killed during the ensuing gun battle between his kidnappers and police.

1981 - A fire at Dublin's Stardust Nightclub killed 48.

1990 - 92 people were killed when Indian Airlines Flight 605 crashed near Bengaluru.

1994 - Andrei Chikatilo - also known as the Rostov Ripper - a Russian serial killer convicted of murdering 52 women and children between 1978 and 1990, was executed by a single bullet to the back of the head.

2005 - Lebanon's former Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri, was assassinated, prompting the country to once again fall into chaos.

(Although by tradition POPnews items are always an odd number - and I try my best to always include 19 items - in honour of Valentine's Day, today there are 14. ~ MSM)
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3 comments:

Daniel said...

I was in Dresden last year, at the Semper Opera House, and I was in awe of the beauty of the architecture there. Walking around I felt ashamed that the Allies, claiming the side of good, could do something so spiteful and tactically worthless. But talking to a few of the locals, they don't blame the Allies at all. For them, it all comes down to that little Austrian with the funny tache...

Anonymous said...

Hey, do you know of POPnews (http://www.POPnews.com) ?

michael sean morris said...

When I first started publishing my POPnews under that name in September 2007 I Googled the name and found nothing online that matched it; I have since discovered the POPnews you link to, unsure of what that means to my blog or if I should change it. I hope there won't be a conflict...