POPnews - June 29th

[Every year Canada House is the site of London's largest Canada Day celebration, drawing thousands of revellers to Trafalgar Square to celebrate the culture of Britain's quiet, well-behaved Commonwealth offspring; unlike Australia - which has pretty thoroughly insinuated itself into the rich tapestry of English life in the tried-and-true manner of a middle child - Canada and Canadians whether in the Mother Country or on the world stage have been content to sit back and not draw too much attention to themselves...]

1149 - Raymond of Poitiers was defeated and killed by Nur ad-Din at the Battle of Inab.

1194 - Sverre was crowned King of Norway.

1252 - Denmark's King Abel was murdered by a wheelwright named Henner on Husum Bridge near Eiderstedt, following the shortest reign in that country's history; since his son Valdemar was being held prisoner by the Archbishop of Cologne at the time, Abel's brother would be crowned Christopher I at Lund Cathedral on Christmas Day.

1444 - Albania's national hero Skanderbeg defeated an Ottoman invasion force commanded by Ali Pasha at the Battle of Torvioll.

1613 - London's Globe Theatre burnt to the ground during a performance of William Shakespeare's play Henry VIII when a shot from a prop cannon set the thatched roof on fire.

1644 - England's King Charles I defeated a Parliamentarian detachment under Sir William Waller at the Battle of Cropredy Bridge - making it the last battle won by an English King on English soil.

1659 - The Russians, led by Prince Trubetskoy were defeated by the Ukrainian armies of Ivan Vyhovsky in the Battle of Konotop.

1888 - George Frideric Handel's Israel in Egypt became the first music ever recorded, when the oratorio was preserved on a wax cylinder at The Crystal Palace by Col. George Gouraud.

1914 - Jina Guseva attempted to assassinate Grigori Rasputin while he was on a visit to his Siberian home town of Pokrovskoye; Rasputin survived the knife attack, and history does not record what became of Guseva following her placement in an asylum for having committed it.

1925 - Canada House was opened, in London's Trafalgar Square, by King George V and Queen Mary.

1926 - Arthur Meighen (shown, at right) returned to office as Prime Minister of Canada; unlike his first term, which lasted a comparably lengthy 17 months between July 1920 and December 1921, this second term would not last twelve weeks*, at which time the fragile Conservative-Unionist coalition assembled by his predecessor Sir Robert Borden would topple before the mighty Liberal Party and its indefatigable leader, Mackenzie King.

*In addition to owning the historical footnote of Canada's shortest-serving head of government, Meighen was also the first Prime Minister to serve as a Member of Parliament from Manitoba.

1928 - The Outerbridge Crossing and Goethals Bridge in the New York City borough of Staten Island both opened.

1956 - The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 was signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, officially creating America's Interstate Highway System.

1967 - Hollywood actress Jayne Mansfield died when when the car in which she was a passenger struck the rear of a tanker truck on US Highway 90 outside New Orleans...  Also killed was her driver, Ronnie Harrison; her three children - Miklós, Zoltán, and Mariska, who were passengers in the back seat of the 1966 Buick Electra 225 belonging to Mansfield's latest employer, supper club impresario Gus Stevens - were uninjured.  Mansfield, on the other hand, was scalped* as part of a massive head injury caused when the front end of the vehicle went under the truck.

*Not decapitated, as legend would have it.

1976 - The Seychelles became independent from the United Kingdom.

1995 - During NASA's STS-71 space shuttle mission Atlantis docked with the Russian space station Mir for the first time.

2001 - The British government announced that a £3.6m memorial fountain - designed by Kathryn Gustafson and dedicated to Diana, Princess of Wales - would be placed in London's Hyde Park; it was opened by HM The Queen in July 2006.

2006 - The US Supreme Court ruled, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that President George W. Bush's plan to try Guantanamo Bay detainees in military tribunals violated US and international law.

2007 - Apple Inc. released the iPhone for the United States market, resulting in the widespread tizzification of Apple acolytes everywhere.
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POPnews - May 15th

[The tragedy of Van Gogh's life is nothing compared to the circumstances surrounding some of his works... While the private purchase and subsequent removal of this painting from its rightful place (namely, on public view) was bad enough, having changed hands at least twice since 1990 - it's thought to have been bought and sold by Austrian businessman Wolfgang Flöttl - its whereabouts are currently unknown.]
1252 - Pope Innocent IV issued a papal bull entitled Ad exstirpanda, authorizing the torture of heretics during the Medieval Inquisition - which is what Jesus would have done, I'm sure.

1514 - Jodocus Badius Ascensius published Christiern Pedersen's Latin version of Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum, making it the oldest known version of the work which chronicles Denmark's past from prehistory to the 12th Century.

1525 - The Battle of Frankenhausen ended the Peasants' War, when the mercenary troops of the Landgrave Philipp I of Hesse and George, Duke of Saxony were defeated by a rag tag group commanded by Anabaptist leader Thomas Müntzer.

1567 - Mary Queen of Scots married her third and worst husband James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, in the Great Hall at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh.

1602 - Bartholomew Gosnold became the first European to see Cape Cod; not only did he name it, he also named Martha's Vineyard after his daughter. Gosnold's voyage was written about by one of the adventurers who sailed onboard the barque Concord with him, John Brereton.

1776 - In an event considered to have prompted the American Revolution the Virginia Convention instructed its delegation to the Continental Congress - which was led by Richard Henry Lee - to propose a resolution of independence from Great Britain, paving the way for the Declaration of Independence.

1869 - Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton formed the National Woman Suffrage Association in New York City.

1905 - Las Vegas was founded when 44.5 hectares (110 acres) of what later would become downtown - owned by the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad - were auctioned off.

1918 - The Finnish Civil War - between the Social Democrats led by the People's Deputation of Finland (supported by Bolshevist Russia and known as the 'Reds') and the conservative forces of the Senate, (supported by the German Empire and commonly called the 'Whites') - ended; in the end, victory went to the Whites, but it was to be short-lived. Following the collapse of the German Empire in November 1918 the country became a sovereign republic.

1919 - The Winnipeg General Strike began; by 11AM virtually the entire working population of the city - as many as 35,000 - had walked off the job.

1932 - During the May 15 Incident - an attempted coup by radical, ultranationalist elements within the Japanese military - Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi was assassinated; some historians view this event as part of the larger League of Blood Incident, in which Finance Minister Inoue Junnosuke and businessman Takuma Dan were killed ten weeks earlier.

1935 - The Moscow Metro was opened to public.

1941 - New York Yankees center fielder Joe DiMaggio began a record-breaking 56-game hitting streak, earning him the sobriquet 'the Yankee Clipper'.

1954 - The Queen and Prince Philip returned to the United Kingdom after a six-month tour of the Commonwealth, making her the first British monarch to circumnavigate the globe. Having covered 43,618 miles by land, sea, and air the royal yacht HMY Britannia sailed triumphantly up the Thames, under Tower Bridge, and into the Pool of London; on board with the royal couple were their two children - Prince Charles and Princess Anne - as well as Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who'd come aboard the previous night. Docking at the Tower of London, they were joined by the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret for the short jaunt to Westminster where, following a carriage ride to Buckingham Palace, they then made four appearances on the balcony to rapturous applause, the last at 11 PM.

1955 - The first successful ascent of Makalu - the world's fifth highest mountain, located near Mount Everest on the border between Nepal and Tibet - was made by French mountaineers by Lionel Terray and Jean Couzy.

1957 - Britain tested its first H-bomb high above Christmas Island, in the South Pacific.

1972 - Arthur Bremer shot Alabama Governor George Wallace four times at a campaign stop in Maryland during Wallace's bid for the Presidency, permanently paralyzing him from the waist down. Bremer eventually served 35 years of a 63 year sentence - a sentence which was reduced to 53 years on appeal; he was released from prison in November 2007, whereas Wallace was only released from his own prison when he died in September 1998.

1990 - Vincent van Gogh's Portrait of Doctor Gachet was sold to Japanese businessman Ryoei Saito for a record $82.5 million, making it the world's most expensive painting at the time.

1991 - Edith Cresson became France's first female prime minister.
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