POPnews - June 19th

[Edouard Manet's rightly famous depiction of the execution of Mexican Emperor Maximilian contains echoes of another work recently posted here, namely The Third of May 1808 by Francisco Goya, which was completed in 1814; this work - executed the year after His Majesty, in 1868 - suffers not one whit from the comparison, being like its fellow artwork both a compassionate and dispassionate rendering of not only human suffering but of the callous and apathetic way in which it is often meted out.]
1269 - France's King Louis IX ordered all Jews found in public without an identifying yellow badge to be fined ten livres of silver.
1306 - The army of Edward I under the Earl of Pembroke defeated Robert the Bruce's Scottish force at the Battle of Methven during the Wars of Scottish Independence.

1807 - Russian Admiral Dmitry Senyavin engaged the Ottoman Empire at the sea-borne Battle of Athos during the Russo-Turkish War; over the next ten days the Turkish fleet was so badly defeated it would later took ten years to rebuild.

1816 - The Battle of Seven Oaks took place between rival fur-traders the North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company near Winnipeg; HBC governor Robert Semple - along with 21 others - was killed in the skirmish, which was precipitated by the theft of a wagonload of pemmican by a band of Métis under Cuthbert Grant.

1850 - Princess Louise of the Netherlands married Crown Prince Karl of Sweden-Norway, who later reigned as Charles XV.

1865 - Over two years after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, slaves in Galveston were finally informed of their freedom - the anniversary of which is still officially celebrated in Texas and 13 other contiguous states as Juneteenth.

1867 - The Austrian-born Hapsburg archduke elected Maximilian I - first and only Emperor of the Mexican Empire - was executed by a firing squad in Querétaro.

1875 - The Herzegovinian rebellion against the Ottoman Empire began.

1910 - America's first Father's Day was celebrated on this day in Spokane, Washington, at the behest of Sonora Smart Dodd, or so they say; others claim it was held in July 1908 in Fairmont, West Virginia. Dolts, mostly.

1934 - The Communications Act of 1934 established the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

1961 - Kuwait declared its independence from the United Kingdom.

1970 - The Patent Cooperation Treaty was signed.

1975 - An inquest by the British government found mysteriously missing peer Lord Lucan guilty of the killing of Sandra Rivett, his children's nanny.

1978 - Jim Davis' Garfield comic strip debuted; over the next few years the franchise would grow to included books, plush toys, and various other ancillary materials - as well as a television series and feature films - to help it yield as much as $1 billion in revenue annually. Currently the strip is distributed to over 110 countries in an estimated 2,560 newspapers.

1982 - In one of the first militant attacks by Hezbollah, David S. Dodge, president of the American University in Beirut, was kidnapped.

1986 - Len Bias, an American college basketball player from the University of Maryland, suffered a fatal cardiac arrhythmia resulting from a cocaine overdose less than 48 hours after being selected by the Boston Celtics in that year's NBA Draft.

1987 - The ETA committed one of its most violent attacks - setting off a bomb in the underground car park of a Hipercor supermarket in Barcelona - which killed 21 and injured 45.

2006 - Prime ministers of several northern European nations participated in a ceremonial 'laying of the first stone' at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Spitsbergen, Norway.

2009 - British troops begin Operation Panther's Claw, one of the largest air operations in modern times, when more than 350 troops made an aerial assault on Taliban positions and subsequently repelled Taliban counter-attacks.
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