POPnews - January 10th

[Even though some of his adventures are unavailable due to the censorious nature of political correctness, those Tintin books still being reprinted continue to delight fans more than eighty years after they first began appearing.]
49 BCE - Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, sparking both a civil war and a cliché.

681 CE - Pope Agatho died; he was succeeded by Leo II who, although he'd been elected shortly after his predecessor's death, wouldn't be crowned until August of the following year.

1276 - Pope Gregory X died; he was succeeded by Innocent V eleven days later.

1475 - Moldavia's Prince Stephen III defeated the Ottoman Empire's Hadân Suleiman Pasha at the Battle of Vaslui, near the town of Vaslui in what is now eastern Romania.

1645 - Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud was beheaded at the Tower of London for opposing Puritanism and for his support of King Charles I.

1662 - Monaco's ruling Prince Honoré II died; he was succeeded by his son, Louis I.

1776 - Thomas Paine published his famous pamphlet Common Sense.

1810 - The marriage of Napoleon Bonaparte and Josephine de Beauharnais was annulled.

1842 - Sir Charles Bagot arrived in Kingston to become Governor-General of what was then the newly-created Province of Canada, succeeding Lord Sydenham; although ordered by the British government to resist the colonist's demand for responsible government, Bagot did allow Robert Baldwin and Sir Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine to form a ministry on the basis of their parliamentary majority.

1863 - The London Underground, the world's oldest underground railway, opened between London Paddington station and Farringdon station.

1901 - The first great Texas oil gusher was discovered at Spindletop in Beaumont.

1922 - Arthur Griffith was elected President of the Irish Free State.

1927 - Fritz Lang's cinematic masterpiece, Metropolis, had its world premiere in Berlin.

1929 - The comic book character Tintin, by Hergé, made his debut in Tintin in the Land of the Soviets.

1942 - Elizabeth Monk and Suzanne Pilon became the first female lawyers in Quebec.

1957 - HM The Queen invited Chancellor of the Exchequer Harold Macmillan to become Prime Minister of Great Britain following the resignation of Sir Anthony Eden over his mishandling of the Suez Crisis.

1962 - As part of its Apollo Project, NASA announced plans to build the C-5 rocket booster, which later became better known as the Saturn V moon rocket, and which would be used to launch all 17 Apollo moon missions.

1971 - Masterpiece Theatre premiered on PBS.

1982 - The Freezer Bowl - the NFL's coldest game in terms of wind chill, at -37°F - was won by the Cincinnati Bengals who defeated the San Diego Chargers 27-7 and advanced to Super Bowl XVI.
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POPnews - August 3rd

[When Ralph Metcalfe, Jesse Owens, and Frank Wykoff posed for this publicity shot on-board the ocean liner SS Manhattan as part of the largest American Olympic team to date they were not only boldly repudiating the cockamamie ideas a certain sawed-off Austrian paper-hanger had about so-called 'racial purity' but confronting some pretty deep-seated prejudices from back home as well.]

435 CE - The deposed Patriarch of Constantinople Nestorius - who is fortuitously considered the originator of Nestorianism - was exiled by Byzantine Emperor Theodosius II to a monastery in Egypt's Great Oasis of Hibis (also known as al-Khargah).

881 CE - Louis III, King of Western Francia, defeated the Vikings at the Battle of Saucourt-en-Vimeu, an event celebrated in the poem Ludwigslied.

1460 - Scotland's King James II died, aged only 29, when the cannon he was standing next to during a siege of Roxburgh Castle exploded; he was succeeded by his 9-year-old son, James III, who governed under the regency of his mother Mary of Guelders until her death in December 1463*. The siege, on the other hand, was continued by the late King's commander George Douglas, 4th Earl of Angus. After the castle capitulated a few days later, the widowed queen ordered it demolished.

*Following her death the regency passed to James Kennedy, Bishop of St Andrews (who had also served as regent to James II), and Gilbert, Lord Kennedy, until 1466, and then to Robert, Lord Boyd until 1469, at which time he attained his majority.

1492 - Christopher Columbus set out on his famous voyage of discovery to the New World from Palos de la Frontera.

1527 - The first-known letter from North America was sent by John Rut, who had just arrived at St. John's, Newfoundland, to King Henry VIII back in England, detailing the number and nationality of fishing vessels in the vicinity.

1645 - During the Thirty Years' War at the Second Battle of Nördlingen (also known as the Battle of Allerheim) the combined French and Weimar forces of Louis II de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, and Vicomte de Turenne scored a victory over the Bavarian Johann von Werth and Franz Baron von Mercy of the Holy Roman Empire, who died in battle.

1811 - Jungfrau - the third highest summit in the Bernese Alps - was ascended for the first time by the Meyer brothers, sons of the topographer J. R. Meyer.

1852 - The first Harvard-Yale Regatta - itself the first American intercollegiate athletic event - was held between (you guessed it!) Yale and Harvard; for the record, Harvard won...

1913 - The Wheatland Hop Riot - a labour action involving the Industrial Workers of the World - occurred at the Durst Ranch near Wheatland, California.

1914 - Germany declared war on France at the outset of what would become known as World War I.

1916 - Irish rebel Sir Roger Casement (shown, at left) was hanged at London's Pentonville Prison, having undergone the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults and been accepted into the Roman Catholic faith while incarcerated at the Tower of London; Casement's legacy remains a conflicted one, since any efforts on his behalf in favour of the independence of Ireland were tainted after his death by revelations contained in the so-called Black Diaries he kept that he was not only actively but pretty unapologetically homosexual.

1923 - At 2:47 AM Republican Calvin Coolidge was sworn in as the 30th President of the United States following the death of Warren G. Harding the previous day; the presidential oath was administered by Coolidge's father, John Calvin Coolidge, Sr, who was a notary public.  The office of Vice President was left vacant until the 1924 Election, at which time Coolidge was re-elected alongside Charles G. Dawes.

 1934 - Hitler became Führer of Germany after combining the Presidency and Chancellorship.

1936 - Jesse Owens won the 100-metre dash at the Berlin Olympics, defeating Ralph Metcalfe, who was also black.

1949 - The National Basketball Association (NBA) was founded in New York City with the merger of the Basketball Association of America (BAA) and the National Basketball League (NBL).

1958 - The nuclear submarine USS Nautilus became the first such vessel to reach the North Pole by traveling beneath the Arctic ice cap.

1966 - Controversial comedian Lenny Bruce was found dead on the floor of the bathroom of his Hollywood Hills home at 8825 N. Hollywood Blvd.; he was 40.  Although the official cause of death was 'acute morphine poisoning caused by an accidental overdose' and Bruce was known to be a heavy drug user, the legal battles he faced in his later years - brought on by obscenity charges pressed by people with little or no understanding of the First Amendment - couldn't have helped matters.

2001 - The Real IRA detonated a car bomb in the London borough of Ealing, injuring seven people.

2005 - Mauritania's President Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya was overthrown in a military coup while attending the funeral of Saudi Arabia's King Fahd in Riyadh.
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POPnews - June 14th

[As depicted by Jean Froissart in his famous Chronicles (which principally concerns itself with the events of the Hundred Years' War, albeit from a French perspective) peasants from Essex and Kent opposed to the poll tax stormed into the capital across London Bridge and temporarily seized the Tower of London - summarily executing Simon of Sudbury, the Lord Chancellor and Archbishop of Canterbury, as well as the Lord Treasurer Robert de Hales, both of whom were behind the tax's implementation and had taken refuge there in the (mistaken, as it turns out) belief they would be safe within its sturdy walls; whether or not the rebels had been let in to the Tower by sympathetic keepers remains one of history's great unanswered questions... Meanwhile, in nearby Westminster, another group was responsible for destroying John of Gaunt's Savoy Palace on the Strand.]

1381 - England's 15 year-old King Richard II met with the leaders of the Peasants' Revolt - including a face-to-face confrontation with Wat Tyler - on Blackheath, near London; at the meeting Tyler was mortally wounded by London mayor William Walworth, and without Tyler's leadership the revolt soon dispersed.

1645 - At the Battle of Naseby - the key battle of the first English Civil War - 12,000 Cavalier troops loyal to King Charles I were badly beaten by 15,000 Roundheads of the New Model Army commanded by Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell.

1775 - At the outset of the American Revolution the Continental Army was established by the Continental Congress, marking the birth of the US Army.

1777 - The Stars and Stripes was adopted by Congress for use as the American Flag, today the source of the little-observed Flag Day.

1807 - Emperor Napoleon I's French Grande Armee defeated its Russian counterpart at the Battle of Friedland in Poland (near the modern-day Russian enclave of Kaliningrad Oblast) ending the War of the Fourth Coalition.

1821 - Badi VII, king of Sennar, surrendered his throne and realm to Ismail Pasha, general of the Ottoman Empire, ending the existence of that Sudanese kingdom.

1846 - The Bear Flag Revolt began when English-speaking settlers in Sonoma, California, started a rebellion against the Mexican government of Alta California and proclaimed the California Republic.

1919 - John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown departed St. John's, Newfoundland, on the first nonstop transatlantic flight.

1934 - James J. Braddock scored one of the most upsetting victories of his boxing career - not to mention riveted an America deep in the throes of the Great Depression - by defeating the 'Ozark Cyclone' John 'Corn' Griffin in three rounds. The bout marked the beginning of one of boxing's greatest comeback stories - for Braddock, that is; for Griffin... Not so much. In the days after the fight noted wag Damon Runyon dubbed Braddock 'Cinderella Man', much to his manager Joe Gould's delight; and to think it only took seventy years to be made into a movie!

1937 - The US House of Representatives passed the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act effectively rendering pot illegal.

1941 - The Soviet Union's so-called June Deportation - a series of mass deportations and murder of Estonians, Lithuanians and Latvians - began.

1951 - UNIVAC I was dedicated by the US Census Bureau.

1952 - The keel of the nuclear submarine USS Nautilus was laid by US President Harry S. Truman.

1954 - US President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a bill into law placing the words 'under God' into the Pledge of Allegiance, thereby ruining the nation and all it once stood for.

1962 - Albert DeSalvo, better known as the Boston Strangler, murdered his first victim, Anna Slesers.

1966 - The Vatican announced the abolition of its Index Librorum Prohibitorum - an index of prohibited books originally instituted in 1557.

1967 - Mariner 5 was launched toward Venus.

1982 - The Falklands War ended when Argentine forces in the capital Stanley unconditionally surrendered to Britain.

2002 - The near-Earth asteroid 2002 MN came within 75,000 miles (120,000 km) of the Earth, which is about one-third of the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
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