POPnews - February 28th

[Waco's shoddily built Mount Carmel Center met its fiery end on April 19th after a fifty-one day standoff (begun on this day in 1993) along with 79 pseudo-Christian fanatics obsessed with Armageddon who more than got their wish; the worst of it was that 21 of those who died were children, whose brief lives had already been tainted by hateful rhetoric, religious brainwashing and, it was reported, sexual abuse.]

202 BCE - The coronation ceremony of Liu Bang as Emperor Gaozu of Han took place, initiating four centuries of the Han Dynasty's rule over China.

870 CE - The Fourth Council of Constantinople closed.

1827 - The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was incorporated, becoming the first railroad in America to offer the commercial transportation of both people and freight.

1838 - Robert Nelson, leader of the Patriotes, proclaimed the independence of Lower Canada - better known today as Québec.

1844 - A gun on the USS Princeton exploded while on a cruise of the Potomac River, killing 8 US Cabinet members - Secretary of State Abel P. Upshur and Secretary of the Navy Thomas Gilmer among them - and several others besides, including Colonel David Gardiner, the father of President John Tyler's fiance Julia Gardiner (both of whom had been lucky enough to escape injury).

1850 - The University of Utah opened in Salt Lake City.

1870 - The Bulgarian Exarchate was established by decree of Sultan Abd-ul-Aziz of the Ottoman Empire.

1897 - Queen Ranavalona III, Madagascar's last reigning monarch, was deposed by a French military force.

1935 - Nylon was discovered by Wallace Carothers.

1947 - In Taiwan, civil disorder was put down at a loss of 30,000 civilian lives; the event later became known as the 228 Incident.

1953 - James D. Watson and Francis Crick announced to friends that they'd determined the chemical structure of DNA, which would be formally announced the following April.

1975 - A major crash at London's Moorgate Tube station killed 43 people.

1983 - The final episode of the long-running TV sitcom M*A*S*H was domestically broadcast, becoming the most watched television episode in history to date, with 106 million viewers in the US; these figures have since been surpassed, by Super Bowl XLIV, which attracted 106.5 million viewers in February 2010.

1985 - The Provisional IRA carried out a mortar attack on the Royal Ulster Constabulary police station at Newry, killing nine officers; it was the the highest loss of life for a single day in the history of the RUC.

1993 - Who could have guessed that when Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents raided the Branch Davidian church with a warrant to arrest the group's leader David Koresh that it would all end so thrillingly? While four ATF agents and five Davidians died in this initial raid, a further 82 Davidians (including their leader) died in the brimstone-less fire shown above.

1997 - The North Hollywood shootout took place, in which bank robbers Larry Phillips, Jr. and Emil Matasareanu were killed in a shootout with police.

2001 - The Nisqually Earthquake - measuring 6.8 on the Richter Scale - affected the Nisqually Valley, Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia in Washington state.

2004 - Over 1 million Taiwanese took part in the 228 Hand-in-Hand Rally, forming a 500-kilometre (300-mile) long human chain to commemorate that country's 228 Incident in 1947.

2007 - The New Horizons spacecraft - on its way to Pluto - flew past Jupiter.
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POPnews - November 3rd

[A few hours after returning from her history-making space flight Laika died from stress and overheating, which fact wasn't made public for decades; while her presence in pop culture has long been felt, now not only does she appear in bas-relief on the Monument to the Conquerors of Space (built in 1964) at Russia's Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics, in November 1997 a plaque honouring Laika was unveiled at the Star City cosmodrome, and since April 2008 a statue of her has adorned the military facility near Moscow where she'd been prepared for her fatal adventure.]
1493 - Christopher Columbus first sighted the Caribbean island of Dominica.

1783 - John Austin, a highwayman, was the last person to be publicly hanged at London's Tyburn gallows.

1793 - French playwright, journalist and feminist Olympe de Gouges was guillotined during the Reign of Terror for criticizing the tyrannical regime of Maximilien Robespierre as well as daring to write Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen in response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

1817 - The Bank of Montreal, Canada's oldest chartered bank, opened in, of all places, Montreal.

1838 - The Times of India, the world's largest (in terms of circulation) English-language daily broadsheet, was founded as The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce.

1868 - Ulysses S. Grant was elected 18th US President over Democrat Horatio Seymour.

1896 - William McKinley was elected 25th US President over Democrat William Jennings Bryan.

1908 - William Howard Taft was elected 27th US President over Democrat William Jennings Bryan.

1930 - The Detroit-Windsor Tunnel was opened to traffic.

1935 - Greece's King George II regained his throne following a plebiscite.

1936 - Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to a second term as US President over Republican Alf Landon.

1954 - Gojira - the first in the Godzilla series of films - was released in Japan.

1957 - The Soviet Union launched Sputnik 2; onboard was a dog named Laika, a 6 kg (13 lb) stray abducted from the streets of Moscow.

1964 - Lyndon Baines Johnson was elected 36th US President over Republican Barry Goldwater.

1970 - Salvador Allende was inaugurated as president of Chile.

1978 - Dominica gained its independence from the United Kingdom.

1979 - Five members of the Communist Workers Party - Sandi Smith, Dr. James Waller, Bill Sampson, Cesar Cause, and Dr. Michael Nathan - were shot dead and seven were wounded in 88 seconds by a group of Klansmen and neo-Nazis during a 'Death to the Klan' rally in what came to be known as the Greensboro massacre. One of the gravest miscarriages of justice in American history occurred without the presence of the police, who normally would have been present; of the 40 thugs involved only sixteen were arrested, only six of them were ever brought to trial and all were acquitted.

1986 - The Federated States of Micronesia gained its independence from the United States of America.

1992 - Bill Clinton was elected 42nd US President over Republican incumbent George H. W. Bush and third-party candidate Ross Perot.
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POPnews - October 27th

[This map of Amsterdam, from Civitates orbis terrarum, was made by Georg Braun and Frans Hogenburg, circa 1572, at which time the city was a major international port - a far cry from the three little shacks in a swamp
it had been just 300 years before.]
312 CE - Roman Emperor Constantine the Great is said to have received his famous Vision of the Cross during the Battle of Milvian Cross; his rival for the imperial throne, Maxentius, was drowned during the fighting - settling the disputed succession in an entirely effective, if unduly brutal, manner. Whether or not divine intervention was responsible for either event is a matter of faith (the Arch of Constantine, which was erected in celebration, bears no Christian imagery, for instance) but as far as history is concerned Constantine's conversion to Christianity at this time would change the world forever...  And not for the better either!

939 CE - Edmund I succeeded his half-brother Athelstan as King of England.

1275 - The earliest record of Amsterdam was made on this day; traditionally, then, this is the date of the city's founding.

1553 - Condemned as a heretic, Michael Servetus - one of the most renowned scientists of his day - was burned at the stake outside Geneva.  Because that's what Jesus would have done.

1644 - The Second Battle of Newbury, during the English Civil War, provided as indecisive an outcome for the Parliamentary forces commanded by the Earl of Essex, Sir William Waller, and the Earl of Manchester as it did for those of King Charles I's Royalists under his nephew-by-marriage Prince Maurice of the Palatinate-Simmern.

1682 - The city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was founded.

1795 - The United States and Spain signed the Treaty of Madrid, which established mutually acceptable boundaries between the Spanish colonies of the Western Hemisphere and the US.

1810 - The US government annexed the former Spanish colony of West Florida.

1838 - Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs issued the Extermination Order, which ordered all Mormons to leave the state or be exterminated.

1870 - Marshal François Achille Bazaine surrendered to the Prussian forces of Prince Friedrich Karl at Metz - along with 140,000 French soldiers - in one of the biggest defeats for France during the Franco-Prussian War, and after the city had withstood a siege lasting more than two months.

1904 - The first underground section of the New York City Subway opened; the city had already been served by elevated lines for 35 years.

1916 - At the Battle of Segale Negus Mikael, marching on the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa in support of his son Emperor Iyasus V, was defeated by Fitawrari Habte Giyorgis - securing the throne for Empress Zauditu.

1924 - The Uzbek SSR was founded in the Soviet Union.

1936 - Wallis Simpson's decree nisi was granted, clearing the way for her to marry England's Edward VIII.

1949 - An Air France flight from Paris to New York City bearing concert violinist Ginette Neveu, boxer Marcel Cerdan (the lover of Édith Piaf), and 46 others, crashed in the Azores, killing everyone onboard.

1962 - Major Rudolph Anderson of the US Air Force became the only direct human casualty of the Cuban Missile Crisis when his U-2 reconnaissance airplane was shot down over Cuba.

1991 - Poland held its first free parliamentary election since 1936.

1992 - Allen R. Schindler, Jr., USN, was brutally murdered by his shipmates Terry M. Halvey and Charles Vins because he was gay.

2004 - The Boston Red Sox won the World Series for the first time in 86 years - events captured quite by accident during production of the film Fever Pitch, starring Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon.
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POPnews - September 3rd

[Frederick Douglass escaped slavery via train and ferry, taking
24 hours to travel from Maryland to New York City dressed
as a sailor and using another man's identification papers.]


36 BCE - At the sea-going Battle of Naulochus - fought off the coast of Sicily, oddly enough near Naulochus - Octavian's admiral Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa defeated Sextus Pompeius, son of Pompey, thus ending Pompeian resistance to the Second Triumvirate and (not inconsequentially) freeing up a vital portion of Rome's grain supply.

301 CE - The Republic of San Marino was founded by its namesake, St. Marinus.

590 CE - Gregory I was elected Pope to replace the recently deceased Pelagius II.

1189 -England's King Richard I (since better known as 'Richard the Lionhearted') was crowned at Westminster Abbey; not only was his coronation marred by anti-Semitic violence - notably killed in sectarian attacks that day was the scholar Jacob of Orléans - but owing to his involvement in the Crusades, the King would spend a scant ten months of his ten-year reign in his kingdom, allowing his brother John pretty much free reign to hone his already considerable skills as an absolute douchebag monarch.

1777 - During a skirmish between British/Hessian and American forces at Cooch's Bridge in New Castle County, Delaware - known as the Battle of Cooch's Bridge* - the Stars and Stripes was flown in battle for the first time; while technically an American loss, the battle was an unqualified victory for the nascent nation's propagandists, who've been waving the flag over battlegrounds ever since.

*Incidentally, the only battle of the American Revolution to be fought in Delaware.

1783 - The American Revolution was officially concluded with the signing of the Treaty of Paris by Americans John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay and British emissary David Hartley at the Hotel d'York in Paris.

1812 - 24 settlers were killed by Shawnee raiders near Underwood, Indiana, in what came to be known as the Pigeon Roost Massacre; the location of the killings, which occurred shortly after the opening of the War of 1812, is now a State Historic Site.

1838 - Frederick Douglass stole his freedom.

1870 - Prussia's Second Army under Prince Friedrich Karl undertook the Siege of Metz, which would result in a decisive Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian War against the defenses of Metz when France's Marshal François Bazaine finally surrendered on October 23rd.

1878 - Over 640 people died when the crowded pleasure boat Princess Alice collided with the coal ship Bywell Castle within sight of London's North Woolwich Pier; owing to severe pollution in the River Thames many of those who didn't die on that day perished in the subsequent months.

1914 - William, Prince of Albania left the country after just six months due to opposition to his rule.

1925 - The American zeppelin USS Shenandoah crashed near Caldwell, Ohio, killing 14 - including its commander, Zachary Lansdowne.

1935 - Sir Malcolm Campbell became the first person to ever drive a car faster than 300 mph.

1951 - Search for Tomorrow made its TV debut on CBS; it would be broadcast for 35 years, not going off the air until 1986.

1967 - On what came to be known as Dagen H in Sweden, traffic changed from driving on the left to driving on the right overnight; to be more precise, the change-over occurred at 4:50 AM.

1971 - Qatar gained its independence from the United Kingdom.

1976 - The Viking 2 spacecraft landed at Utopia Planitia on Mars.

1995 - eBay was founded.

2004 - Day 3 of the Beslan school hostage crisis ended with the deaths of more than 300 people, over half of whom were children.
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POPnews - August 18th

[The misshapen lump of rock orbiting Mars now known as Phobos also has a more tragic moniker - the 'doomed moon'... Thought to be an asteroid trapped by Martian gravity, in about eleven million years or so the same pull that brought them together will either a) send Phobos careening into the so-called Red Planet or else b) shatter it into rubble - which debris will then give Mars one of those snazzy rings like Saturn has; at least for awhile, that is, until those rings begin raining down onto the planet below. Hopefully by then the human settlers of the place will have long since blasted Phobos into oblivion to give themselves a clearer view of the Crab Nebula!]
1201 - The Latvian capital of Riga was founded.

1572 - Henry of Navarre - the future Huguenot King of France, Henri IV - married Marguerite de Valois in a supposed attempt to reconcile Protestants and Catholics in a country badly riven by sectarian strife; nevertheless, Henri IV ended up converting to Catholicism in July 1593 at the behest of his mistress, Gabrielle d'Estrées. Even that wasn't enough to avert disaster for long... His Majesty would be assassinated by the rabidly Catholic François Ravaillac in May 1610.

1587 - The first British child native to America, Virginia Dare, was born in the Roanoke Colony.

1634 - Urbain Grandier, accused and convicted of sorcery, was burned alive in the French town of Loudun.

1838 - The Wilkes Expedition - which would explore the Puget Sound and Antarctica - weighed anchor at Hampton Roads, Virginia.

1848 - Camila O'Gorman and Ladislao Gutierrez were executed by firing squad on the orders of Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas - an action so shocking given that the 20-year-old socialite was at the time heavily pregnant it hastened the collapse of the de Rosas Regime. The fact that it was Gutierrez' child she was carrying (let alone that the child had been conceived out of wedlock) was shocking enough in those days in and of itself, but the fact that he was a priest also upset a few delicate sensibilities. The story later inspired the two films: Mario Gallo's 1910 work Camila O'Gorman, starring Blanca Podestá (itself one of the first films ever made in Argentina and now considered lost), and Camila; directed by María Luisa Bemberg and starring Susú Pecoraro in the title role - with Imanol Arias and Héctor Alterio - it became Argentina's second-ever entry into consideration for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film*.

*It lost to Switzerland's first-ever winner in the category, La diagonale du fou.

1862 - Trader Andrew Myrick was killed at the Battle of Lower Sioux Agency; when his body was found days later his mouth stuffed with grass. Myrick had earlier refused to aid in the alleviation of famine in the area by suggesting the local First Nations 'eat grass' to survive.

1868 - French astronomer Pierre Jules César Janssen discovered helium.

1877 - Asaph Hall discovered the Martian moon Phobos, having already discovered Mars' other moon Deimos a week earlier.

1904 - Chris Watson resigned as Prime Minister of Australia, only to be succeeded by George Reid.

1920 - The 19th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified by the state of Tennessee, thus ensuring American women the right to vote. Despite the fact that the measure had the vocal support of President Woodrow Wilson as early as January 1918, the Senate repeatedly held up the measure - at one point defeating it by a mere three votes. The Senate's recalcitrance inspired the National Woman's Party to call for the defeat of those Senators who'd gone on record as opposed to it in the 1918 midterm election - an action which was seen as effective, since after the Senate's next vote the tally was 56 to 25 in favour! Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified the amendment's adoption on August 26th, and in February 1922 the US Supreme Court ruled in Leser v. Garnett that the 19th Amendment had been properly adopted.

1938 - The Thousand Islands Bridge was dedicated by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt; more correctly called a causeway, it links Upstate New York with Ontario between Kingston and Cornwall at the scenic Thousand Islands region, where the St. Lawrence River flows into Lake Ontario.

1958 - Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel Lolita was published in the US, having already published in France in 1955.

1964 - South Africa was barred from sending any athletes to the 18th Olympic Summer Games (held in Tokyo) due to its horrendous record on human rights; these days, of course, any country with a dire attitude towards its own citizens and their liberty would be hosting the games.

1976 - In the Korean Demilitarized Zone at Panmunjeom, the Axe Murder Incident resulted in the death of two US soldiers, Captain Arthur Bonifas and First Lieutenant Mark Barrett, at the hands of North Korean soldiers.

1977 - Anti-apartheid activist Steven Biko was arrested in King William's Town, South Africa.

1989 - Leading Colombian presidential hopeful Luis Carlos Galán was assassinated near Bogotá.

1992 - Wang Laboratories filed for bankruptcy.

2005 - Dennis Rader was sentenced to serve 10 consecutive life sentences in prison for his having committed the BTK serial killings in and around Wichita between 1974 and 1991; his earliest eligibility for parole will be in 2180, after having served 175 years.
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POPnews - June 10th

[If you're like me - and let's face it, would you be if you didn't have to be? - you like gawking at super fit college aged men clad only in revealing sporting costumes, all the while enjoying yourself a pleasant afternoon in an idyllic riverside setting... Which makes the annual Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race the ideal way to combine my hobbies (and/or pervs). The image above shows a practice run by the Cambridge team in 1866 along the River Cam, near the Plough Inn at Fen Ditton. You know the place I mean. Anyway, that year Cambridge lost to Oxford - a race which included a dramatic near-collision with a barge!]
1190 - Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa drowned in Turkey's Saleph river while leading an army to Jerusalem on his way to fight the Third Crusade.

1619 - The Battle of Záblatí proved a turning point in the Bohemian Revolt during the Thirty Years' War when Karel Bonaventura Buquoy won the day for the Holy Roman Empire, while Ernst von Mansfeld suffered heavily losses in personnel and a baggage train as well, following which he was forced to lift the siege of Budějovice.

1692 - During the Salem Witch Trials, Bridget Bishop was hanged at Gallows Hill for 'certaine Detestable Arts called Witchcraft & Sorceries'. Which, I'm sure, is what Jesus would have done...

1719 - The Battle of Glen Shiel proved a decisive victory for its commander Joseph Wightman and put an end to the Jacobite Rising, whose commander Lord George Murray (among others) had hoped to put the Catholic Bonnie Prince Charlie on the throne of England as Charles III in place of the Protestant George I.

1786 - A landslide dam on the Dadu River created by the Kangding Louding earthquake ten days earlier collapsed, killing 100,000 in the Chinese province Sichuan province as far as 1400 km upriver, making it the second deadliest landslide on record.

1805 - Yussif Karamanli signed a treaty ending hostilities with the United States following the First Barbary War; try and guess whether or not that lasted...

1829 - The first Boat Race between the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge took place; annually pitting eights against each other on the River Thames since 1856 (and four times unofficially elsewhere during the Second World War) the brain-child of Charles Merivale, a student at St John's College, Cambridge, and his chum Charles Wordsworth, who was at Christ Church, Oxford, today the 6.8 km- (4 mile, 374 yard-) long race is attended by a quarter million spectators bankside along the course from Putney to Mortlake, while 7-9 million watch on telly in the UK, and more than 20 million people tune in worldwide.

1838 - At Australia's Myall Creek Massacre 28 Aboriginals were murdered near Inverell, a sheep station in New South Wales; seven of the 11 whites responsible were later found guilty, a first for Australian jurisprudence.

1886 - Following the eruption of New Zealand's Mount Tarawera, 153 people were killed and the country's famous Pink and White Terraces were destroyed.

1924 - Fascists kidnapped and killed Italian socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti in Rome, a crime which historians now believe was ordered by Il Duce himself, Benito Mussolini.

1925 - The inaugural service for the United Church of Canada - a union of Presbyterian, Methodist, and Congregationalist churches - was held in Toronto Arena.

1935 - With the assistance of Bill Wilson, Dr. Robert Smith took his last drink, thereby helping to found Alcoholics Anonymous.

1942 - The Nazi occupiers of Czechoslovakia burned the village of Lidice in reprisal for the earlier killing of Reinhard Heydrich as part of Operation Anthropoid.

1944 - 15-year old Joe Nuxhall of the Cincinnati Reds became the youngest player ever in a Major League game.

1967 - The Six-Day War 'ended' when Israel and Syria agreed to a cease-fire... There are those, however, who feel a war cannot truly be over as long as one side continues to call for the death of all of those on the other side, in addition to all of their co-religionists throughout the world, and the total destruction of their country besides. I'm just saying, is all.

1977 - James Earl Ray escaped from Brushy Mountain State Prison in Petros, Tennessee; he was recaptured three days later.

1986 - Patrick Magee was found guilty of planting the bomb that damaged Brighton's Grand Hotel during a Conservative Party conference in October 1984, killing five.

2001 - Pope John Paul II canonized Lebanon's first female saint, Rafqa.

2003 - The Spirit Rover was launched, beginning NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission; it landed successfully the following January 4th, three weeks before its twin Opportunity landed on the other side of the planet.
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