POPnews - January 5th

[Engineer Joseph Strauss faced many uphill battles in building his most famous structure, almost none of which were geographical; once construction got underway he was ably aided by Irving Morrow, who designed the towers, and San Francisco city engineer Michael O'Shaughnessy, who named it. It was the city's residents who persuaded them to leave the bridge International Orange, which is the colour of the sealant used.]
1463 - Poet François Villon was banished from Paris and thereafter dropped out of the historical record...

1477 - Charles the Bold was killed at the Battle of Nancy, whereupon Burgundy became part of France.

1527 - Felix Manz, a leader of the Anabaptist congregation in Zürich, was the first person to be executed by drowning under an edict aimed at outlawing adult re-baptism - which is a key precept of his religion.

1675 - At the Battle of Colmar a French army commanded by Vicomte of Turenne defeated Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg, who headed a unified force of Brandenburgian and Austrian troops.

1757 - France's King Louis XV survived an assassination attempt by Robert-François Damiens - who then went on to become the last person executed in France by the traditional and gruesome form of capital punishment used for regicides and wannabes alike: drawing and quartering.

1895 - In the midst of the Dreyfus Affair French army officer Alfred Dreyfus was publicly stripped of his rank and sentenced to life imprisonment on French Guiana's Devil's Island following a secret court martial.

1896 - An Austrian newspaper reported that Wilhelm Roentgen had discovered a type of radiation later known as X-rays.

1933 - Construction of the Golden Gate Bridge - connecting San Francisco to Marin County across San Francisco Bay - began.

1949 - Work began on the foundation of Basildon new town, in the British county of Essex.

1968 - Alexander Dubček came to power at the head of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, thus beginning the so-called Prague Spring.

1970 - The long-running American soap opera All My Children premiered; the show - created by Agnes Nixon - has since surpassed its 10,000th episode.

1974 - Antarctica's warmest reliably measured temperature, 59°F (15°C), was recorded at Vanda Station.

1975 - The Tasman Bridge - which spans the Derwent River, near the central business district of Hobart, in Tasmania - was struck by the bulk ore carrier Lake Illawarra, killing twelve people.

1976 - The Kingsmill Massacre occurred when 10 Protestant textile workers were murdered by the IRA in retaliation for the killing of six Catholic men the previous day.

1981 - Peter Sutcliffe was charged with committing the Yorkshire Ripper murders.

1993 - Washington state executed Westley Allan Dodd by hanging - the first legal hanging in the US since 1965.

1996 - Hamas operative Yahya Ayyash was killed by an Israeli-planted booby-trapped cell phone.

2003 - London's Metropolitan Police arrested seven suspects in connection with the Wood Green ricin plot, which had allegedly been organized as an attack against the London Underground.

2005 - Eris, the largest known dwarf planet in our solar system, was discovered by the team of Michael E. Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David L. Rabinowitz using images originally taken in October 2003 at the Palomar Observatory.
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POPnews - November 18th

[By 1450, when this image was made, the Renaissance St. Peter's Basilica which had grown up around the tomb of Saint Peter had itself grown too old-fashioned for the silk- and velvet-dressed, perfumed and bejewelled he-men who lived and worked there; originally intending to preserve the old building, Pope Julius II eventually tore one architectural masterpiece down with an unshakable faith that someday an even greater one would arise...]
326 CE - The Old St. Peter's Basilica was consecrated, during the papal reign of St. Sylvester I.

1302 - When Pope Boniface VIII issued the Papal bull Unam sanctam - 'The One Holy' - it wasn't the first bull issued by a Pope (and Lord knows it wouldn't be the last) but it was one of the strongest statements to date about Papal infallibility, and is probably responsible for that holier-than-Thou attitude of theirs the rest of us must contend with to this day.

1307 - According to legend, William Tell shot an apple off his son's head.

1477 - When William Caxton produced Dictes, or Sayengis of the Philosophres (written by the King's brother-in-law Earl Rivers, whose sister Elizabeth married Edward IV), it would be the first book printed on a printing press in England.

1626 - The extensively remodeled St. Peter's Basilica was re-consecrated by Pope Urban VIII.

1803 - At Battle of Vertières, the last major battle of the Haitian Revolution, Jean-Jacques Dessalines defeated French troops under Vicomte de Rochambeau - leading to the establishment of the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere, the Republic of Haiti, where the day is still celebrated.

1863 - Denmark's King Christian IX signed that country's November Constitution, which (in part) declared Schleswig to be part of Denmark; this was seen by the German Confederation as a violation of the London Protocol and would eventually lead to the German-Danish War of 1864.

1865 - Mark Twain's story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County was first published, in the New York Saturday Press.

1905 - Denmark's Prince Carl became King Haakon VII of Norway following the 1905 dissolution of the union between the two countries.

1916 - The First Battle of the Somme ended when British Expeditionary Force commander Douglas Haig called off the battle - which had started on July 1st.

1928 - The animated short Steamboat Willie, the first fully-synchronized sound cartoon, was released; directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, it featured the second appearances of cartoon stars Mickey and Minnie Mouse. This date is also considered by the Disney Corporation to be Mickey's birthday.

1929 - The Grand Banks earthquake - a submarine seismic event recorded at 7.2 on the Richter scale and centred on the Grand Banks in the Atlantic Ocean off the south coast of Newfoundland - broke 12 underwater transatlantic telegraph cables and triggered a tsunami that destroyed many south coast communities in the Burin Peninsula area.

1947 - A fire at Ballantyne's Department Store fire in Christchurch killed 41, making it the worst such catastrophe in New Zealand history.

1978 - At the Jonestown incident in Guyana, Jim Jones led his Peoples Temple cult in a mass murder-suicide that claimed 918 lives in all, 909 of them at Jonestown itself, including over 270 children; the event had been precipitated by the fact-finding mission of Congressman Leo Ryan (D.-Calif.) and his subsequent murder (along with four journalists) at the hands of Jonestown thugs, also on this day.

1985 - Bill Watterson's legendary comic strip Calvin and Hobbes debuted.

1987 - During a fire in London, 31 people died at the city's busiest Tube station, King's Cross St Pancras.

1991 - Following the 87-day siege of Vukovar, that Croatian city capitulated to the besieging Yugoslav People's Army and allied Serb paramilitary forces.

2000 - Welsh beauty Catherine Zeta-Jones married Hollywood royalty Michael Douglas at New York City's famed Plaza Hotel.

2003 - The UK's Local Government Act 2003 received Royal Assent, repealing the Thatcher government's controversial anti-gay amendment Section 28 in England and Wales; Scotland had already repealed it in June 2000 with the passage of its Ethical Standards in Public Life etc. (Scotland) Act 2000. First passed in May 1988 and championed by, among many others, Michael Howard, Section 28 remains one of the most loathsome pieces of legislation ever produced by the Mother of All Parliaments.
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