POPnews - May 12th

[Bianca was already four months pregnant with the baby who would grow up to become Jade Sheena Jezebel Jagger when she married Mick at the town hall in Saint-Tropez; she was later quoted as saying 'My marriage ended on the day of my wedding' but is all smiles in this photo despite a tussle with photographers and police delayed the ceremony for ninety minutes, threatening the whole event. The couple separated in 1977 after she discovered his adultery with Jerry Hall; their divorce became final in 1979.]
1191 - England's King Richard I married Berengaria of Navarre in the Chapel of St. George at Limassol in Cyprus while en route to the Third Crusade. Like his kingdom, Richard also neglected his Queen - preferring to make war, not love - although a scurrilous rumour floating around for the past eight centuries has it that His Majesty would've preferred to have married (or at least spent the wedding night with) her brother Sancho VII, the King of Navarre.

1328 - Antipope Nicholas V - a spurious claimant to the papacy who was largely the puppet of the excommunicated Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV the Bavarian - was consecrated at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome by the James Albertini, the Bishop of Venice; within a year the former Pietro Rainalducci would also be excommunicated by Pope John XXII, although upon confession he was absolved of his sins (like magic!) and forced to live out his days in elegant captivity in France, at Avignon's Palais des Papes.

1551 - The National University of San Marcos in Lima, Peru - the oldest university in the Americas - was chartered by Spain's King Charles I.

1588 - During the French Wars of Religion France's King Henri III fled Paris after Henri, duc de Guise entered the city; theirs was a squabble over the succession, and in this they were perfectly matched - both of them being equally feckless and violent. Within two years their respective compatriots would see them both assassinated but alas, the best sovereign for the job - one Marguerite de Valois (shown, at right, circa 1572) - wasn't eligible due to the Salic Law; she had to settle for being Queen Consort to Henri IV, uniting the otherwise barren Valois line with that of the more vigourous Bourbon which superseded it. Their story (well, hers, anyway - along with that of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre) was later dramatized in the 1845 novel La Reine Margot by Alexandre Dumas, père as well as in the most recent of its three film adaptations, 1994's Queen Margot.

1780 - Near the end of the American Revolution, Charleston was taken by British forces under Sir Henry Clinton and Admiral Mariot Arbuthnot following the Siege of Charleston.

1870 - The Manitoba Act was given Royal Assent, allowing for Manitoba to become a province of Canada on July 15.

1885 - During the North-West Rebellion the four-day Battle of Batoche in Saskatchewan - pitting the rebellious Métis against the Canadian government's North West Mounted Police - came to an end with a decisive rebel defeat.

1926 - A nine-day General Strike in the United Kingdom - called in sympathy for coal miners by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and due in part to the recommendations of the Royal Commission chaired by Sir Herbert Samuel that miners' wages be reduced from 10-25% - ended, thanks in no small part to a passel of lies told by the Conservative government of Stanley Baldwin and the duplicity of the TUC itself.

1932 - Ten weeks after his abduction, the infant son of Charles Lindbergh was found dead by a truck driver named William Allen in a roadside ditch near the Lindbergh home in Hopewell, New Jersey.

1941 - Konrad Zuse demonstrated the Z3 - the world's first working programmable, fully automatic, Turing-complete computer - to the Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt in Berlin; it was used by the Nazis to perform statistical analyses of wing flutter in aircraft design. Though the original was destroyed during an Allied air raid in 1944, a replica was later built and is currently on display at the Deutsches Museum in München.

1955 - The last portion of the IRT's Third Avenue Elevated subway line serving Manhattan - from Chatham Square to East 149th Street in the Bronx - closed.

1962 - Douglas MacArthur delivered his famous Duty, Honor, Country valedictory speech at West Point.

1965 - The Soviet spacecraft Luna 5 crash-landed in the Sea of Clouds on the Moon as part of a project to study the lunar soft landing.

1971 - Mick Jagger married Bianca Perez Morena de Macias in Saint-Tropez.

1975 - During the Mayagüez Incident the Cambodian navy seized the American merchant ship SS Mayaguez in international waters; considered the final battle of the Vietnam War (despite its tenuous connection to it) the names of the 18 Marines killed in the action nonetheless appear at the very end of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

1981 - Francis Hughes starved to death during the second hunger strike at the HM Prison Maze in Ulster just one week after his compatriot Bobby Sands did the same; it was all part of a campaign for Special Category Status to be re-granted to IRA prisoners. In all, ten prisoners died before the British government relented.

1982 - During a procession outside the shrine of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Fátima, Portugal, security guards overpowered Juan Fernandez Krohn before he could assassinate Pope John Paul II with a bayonet. Krohn, an ultraconservative Spanish priest opposed to the Vatican II reforms, decided that the Pope must be killed for being - get this! - 'an agent of Moscow'.

1994 - Head of Britain's Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition John Smith died at London's St. Bartholomew's Hospital after two serious heart attacks; he was succeeded by Tony Blair.

1999 - David Steel became the first Presiding Officer of the modern Scottish Parliament.
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