POPnews - December 15th

[Baudouin, King of the Belgians, married Spanish noblewoman Fabiola Fernanda María de las Victorias Antonia Adelaida de Mora y Aragón in Brussels on this day in 1960; wearing Queen Astrid's 1926 Art Deco tiara and a gown designed by Cristóbal Balenciaga the bride here strikes an uncharacteristically Evita-esque pose. Though it was by all accounts a happy enough marriage, dynastically it proved a heartache, as Her Majesty would suffer five miscarriages but provide no heir; following His Majesty's death in July 1993 she has maintained a high profile in Belgium in support of the new king, her brother-in-law Albert II.]
533 CE - Byzantine general Belisarius defeated Gelimer, King of the Vandals, at the Battle of Ticameron.

1167 - Sicilian chancellor Stephen du Perche moved the royal court from Palermo to Messina in order to prevent a rebellion against King William II's regent and mother, Margaret of Navarre.

1256 - Hulagu Khan captured and destroyed the Hashshashin stronghold at Alamut (in present-day Iran) as part of the Mongol offensive on Islamic southwest Asia.

1467 - At the Battle of Baia, Moldavia's Prince Stephen III defeated Hungarian King Matthias Corvinus, who was later said to have been injured three times at the battle.

1791 - The US Bill of Rights became law upon its ratification by the Commonwealth of Virginia.

1868 - Shogunate rebels founded the Ezo Republic on Japan's northernmost island, Hokkaidō.

1891 - The first basketball game was played; invented by Canadian James Naismith while a teacher in Springfield, Massachusetts, the game was apparently derived from a childhood pastime of Naismith's called Duck on a Rock.

1939 - Gone with the Wind had its world premiere, at the Loew's Grand Theater in Atlanta.

1941 - In temperatures hovering around -15 degrees Celsius, Nazi troops executed over 15,000 Jews at Drobitsky Yar, a ravine southeast of the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.

1960 - Richard Paul Pavlick was arrested for attempting to blow up and assassinate the U.S. President-Elect, John F. Kennedy only four days earlier.

1961 - Adolph Eichmann was sentenced to death in a Jerusalem courtroom after being found guilty of 15 criminal charges, including charges of crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people, and membership in an outlawed organization.

1965 - As part of NASA's Gemini Program, Gemini 6A - crewed by Wally Schirra and Thomas Stafford - was launched from Florida's Cape Kennedy; four orbits later, it achieved the first space rendezvous with Gemini 7.

1967 - 46 people died when the Silver Bridge connecting Point Pleasant, in West Virginia, to Gallipolis, Ohio, collapsed into the Ohio River during rush hour; the ruin was demolished and in 1969 the Silver Memorial Bridge was opened to replace it.

1970 - The Illinois State Constitution was adopted at a special election.

1973 - John Paul Getty III, grandson of American billionaire J. Paul Getty, was found alive near Naples, having being kidnapped by an Italian gang on July 10th.

1982 - The gates connecting Gibraltar to Spain were re-opened on humanitarian grounds.

1993 - The Downing Street Declaration was issued by British Prime Minister John Major and Irish Taoiseach Albert Reynolds.

2001 - The Leaning Tower of Pisa reopened after 11 years and a $27,000,000 restoration to fortify it, without fixing its famous lean.

2005 - The 2005 Atlantic Power Outage began, plunging the American Eastern Seaboard into bitter cold and darkness; owing to the seriousness of the ice storm that'd caused it, power wouldn't be fully restored until December 20th.
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POPnews: September 10th

[If this photo of Mike the Headless Chicken with his executioner-exploiter Lloyd Olsen doesn't turn you into a vegetarian, nothing will; the story behind the picture - literally, click on the picture, it's back there - is too crazy not to be true.]

506 CE - The bishops of Visigothic Gaul met at the Council of Agde under the stewardship of Caesarius of Arles to deal with 'ecclesiastical discipline' - which sounds way kinkier than it is.

1167 - Empress Matilda - daughter of England's King Henry I, widow of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, wife of Geoffrey V, Count of Anjou, mother of another English King (Henry II), and would-be Queen-regnant of England herself, whose abortive attempts to claim her father's throne from her cousin King Stephen led to a civil war in England called The Anarchy - died.

1419 - John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, was assassinated by adherents of the Dauphin, the future Charles VII of France; turns out being fearless isn't so great for your health after all.

1547 - The Battle of Pinkie Cleugh - the last full scale military confrontation between England and Scotland - resulted in a decisive victory for the forces of Edward VI, commanded by the Duke of Somerset, over those of Scotland's Earl of Arran.

1608 - John Smith was elected council president of Jamestown, Virginia.

1823 - Simón Bolívar was named President of Peru.

1846 - Elias Howe was granted a patent for the sewing machine.

1858 - George Mary Searle discovered the asteroid 55 Pandora; however, it's not the largest object in our galaxy named Pandora, not by a long shot. There's a moon of Saturn named Pandora, and then there's this...

1897 - During the so-called Lattimer Massacre a sheriff's posse killed twenty unarmed immigrant miners in Pennsylvania.

1919 - The Republic of Austria and the Allies of World War I signed the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, which recognized the independence of the former Austro-Hungarian possessions of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs.

1945 - Mike the Headless Chicken was decapitated; he survived for another 18 months by being fed with an eyedropper via his neck before eventually choking to death at a motel in Phoenix.

1961 - At the Italian Grand Prix a crash caused the death of German driver Wolfgang von Trips and 15 spectators, who joined him when his Ferrari crashed into Jim Clark's Lotus.

1967 - Gibraltar voted to remain a British holding rather than join Spain.

1974 - Portugal recognized the independence of Guinea-Bissau, which had been declared in September 1973.

1977 - Hamida Djandoubi was the last person in France to be executed by the guillotine. [Insert tasteless Mike the Headless Chicken joke here.]

2000 - The musical Cats closed on Broadway; they've been trying to get that smell out of the Winter Garden Theatre ever since.

2001 - Ignorance was bliss.

2003 - Sweden's Foreign Minister Anna Lindh was fatally stabbed while shopping outside the Nordiska Kompaniet department store in Stockholm by a man later identified as Mijailo Mijailović; she died the following day.

2008 - The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, described as the biggest scientific experiment in the history of mankind, was powered up in Geneva, although it did not bring about the end of the universe as some nutjobs - the same ones who were to blame for all that Y2K mishegas, I'll bet - had feared.
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POPnews - May 29th

[For nearly 200 years after the fact the triumphant return of Charles II to London, on this day in 1660 - no less than his escape from Parliamentary forces on the same day in 1651 following the Battle of Worcester - was commemorated as Oak Apple Day in Britain; as depicted in this 1862 canvas by Reuben Bussey, the event was intended to be celebrated by raising a glass in toast to the King. Although the holiday was formally abolished in 1859 it is still observed by the famous red-coated Chelsea pensioners in the central court of the Royal Hospital Chelsea. Then again, it doesn't take an event half as exciting as the restoration of a monarchy to get the British to engage in a little chin-chin, does it?]
363 CE - Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate defeated the Sassanids under the walls of their capital during the Battle of Ctesiphon, although Persian Emperor Shapur II did manage to prevent Roman forces from taking the city; their hollow victory on this day would become even hollower when the Emperor was killed on June 26th at the Battle of Samarra.

1167 - At the Battle of Monte Porzio near the city of Tusculum a Roman army supporting Pope Alexander III was defeated by Christian of Buch and Rainald of Dassel whose force represented Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa.

1176 - At the Battle of Legnano the Lombard League defeated Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I - the same dude whose army won the battle mentioned immediately above this one.

1660 - Charles II was restored to the throne of Great Britain, on his 30th birthday; the King (who managed to be crowned King of Scots in January 1651 before fleeing to the Continent) had spent the previous 11 years in exile during the Interregnum, while the English suffered under the Puritan dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell.

1677 - Following the bloodshed of Bacon's Rebellion, a treaty between the Virginia colonists of Middle Plantation and the local tribes - including the Weyanoke, the Pamunkey, the Nottoway, and the Nansemond - sought to establish a lasting peace. Try and guess how (or indeed, if) they did...

1780 - At the Battle of Waxhaws during the American Revolution Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton massacred 113 of Colonel Abraham Buford's continentals in Lancaster, South Carolina, allegedly after they had surrendered.

1790 - Rhode Island became the last of the Thirteen Colonies to ratify the US Constitution and was admitted to the Union as the 13th US state.

1848 - Wisconsin became the 30th US state.

1867 - An agreement between Austria and Hungary called Ausgleich (or 'the Compromise') was born through Act 12, which established the Austro-Hungarian Empire with its capital at Vienna; the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph was later crowned King of Hungary to solidify what became known as the Dual Monarchy.

1913 - Igor Stravinsky's ballet score for The Rite of Spring was premiered in Paris at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, conducted by Pierre Monteux; almost from the first note of the opening movement the atonal music brought catcalls from the audience. When the dancers of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes - as choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky - appeared, eschewing the grace of classical ballet for what we would recognize as modern dance, a riot broke out.

1914 - In a heavy fog the ocean liner RMS Empress of Ireland collided with the Norwegian collier Storstad in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, near the Quebec town of Rimouski; in just 14 minutes the liner sank, with a loss of 1,024 lives, leaving just 453 survivors among the passengers and crew.

1919 - The Republic of Prekmurje was founded.

1953 - Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay became the first known people to reach the summit of Mount Everest and return safely from the summit.

1954 - The first of the annual Bilderberg conferences was held in the Netherlands.

1964 - The Arab League met in East Jerusalem to discuss the Palestinian situation in Israel, which led to the formation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

1969 - A general strike in Córdoba, Argentina, led to a period of civil unrest known as Cordobazo.

1982 - Pope John Paul II became the first pontiff ever to visit Canterbury Cathedral.

1985 - Amputee Steve Fonyo completed his cross-Canada marathon at Victoria, British Columbia; the 14-month run was intended to complete the work left undone by Terry Fox on his earlier Marathon of Hope, as well as to honour him for having done it.

2004 - The World War II Memorial - located in the National Mall - was dedicated by President George W. Bush in Washington, DC; ironically, World War II was one war a member of the Bush family had actually fought in.
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