POPnews - March 18th

[The globular cluster in the constellation Hercules now known as M92 was first discovered by Johann Elert Bode in 1777, but was named for Charles Messier who independently rediscovered it* in 1781; located 26,000 light years from Earth, it contains a shitload** of stars and potentially an equal number of inhabited Earth-like planets. Although one of the larger globular clusters visible from the Northern Hemisphere, it is easily outshone by the even bigger and brighter Messier 13, just like Nick Jonas outshines his equally talented brothers Joe and the ugly one***.]

1227 - Pope Honorius III died; he was succeeded by Gregory IX the following day.

1229 - Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II was crowned King of Jerusalem during the Sixth Crusade.

1314 - Jacques de Molay - the 23rd and last Grand Master of the Knights Templar - was burned at the stake at Paris' Île de la Cité on the orders of France's King Philip IV.

1608 - Susenyos was formally crowned Emperor of Ethiopia.

1781 - Charles Messier rediscovered the global cluster M92.

1871 - Following the Declaration of the Paris Commune, Adolphe Thiers - the President of the French Republic - ordered the evacuation of Paris.

1913 - Greece's King George I was assassinated by Alexandros Schinas in the recently liberated city of Thessaloniki.

1922 - The first public celebration of a Bat mitzvah, for the daughter of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, was held in New York City at the headquarters of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism.

1937 - An explosion caused by a natural gas leak killed and/or injured hundreds, most of them children, at a school in New London, Texas; of the approximately 600 students and 40 teachers in the building at the time, only about 130 escaped without serious injury.

1940 - Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met at Brenner Pass in the Alps, when they agreed to form an alliance against France and the United Kingdom.

1950 - The Belgian government fell after a referendum in which 57% of Belgians favoured the return of King Leopold III from exile in Switzerland; his return to Belgium was nevertheless met by widespread unrest, following which he abdicated in favour of his son Baudouin in July 1951.

1962 - The Evian Accords put an end to the Algerian War of Independence, which had begun in November 1954.

1967 - The oil supertanker Torrey Canyon (chartered by British Petroleum) ran aground on Pollard's Rock in the Seven Stones reef off the Cornish coast, spilling 100,000 tons of crude oil; 15,000 sea birds were killed in the aftermath, many from the toxic detergents used in an attempt to clean them.

1982 - Britain's Attorney General Sir Michael Havers halted an obscenity trial brought by Mary Whitehouse against director Michael Bogdanov and the National Theatre for its production of Howard Brenton's The Romans in Britain.

1990 - In the largest art theft in US history, 12 paintings (collectively worth around $300 million) were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts.

1992 - South Africa voted to end apartheid in a special referendum.

2003 - British Sign Language was recognized as a language, but not as an official language of Britain, meaning it has no legal protections.

2005 - Terri Schiavo's feeding tube was removed at the request of her husband, fueling a worldwide debate on euthanasia; Schiavo died less than two weeks later.

2009 - Iranian blogger Omid Reza Mir Sayafi was murdered in Tehran's Evin Prison, where he'd been incarcerated for telling the truth about the mullahs and their Islamic Republic. He was 29. Despite the removal of his blog - which was ostensibly concerned with traditional Persian music - by the authorities, his work will live on thanks to the power of the Internet and foes of tyranny like the Pop Culture Institute. The March 18 Movement was created to honour his memory, and to oppose any attempts to silence new media and citizen journalists; it's a movement which this humble blog is proud to have joined.

*Hard as it may be for modern minds to comprehend, in the olden days e'rybody wasn't up in e'rybody else's bidness like they are today; there was no Twitter in 1781 - except by birds - so two different people could easily discover something at around the same time without it devolving into a spate of name-calling on YouTube. Geez, huh? Old-timey guys were some messed up shizzle!
**In Canada, a 'shitload' is an official measure; all's I know is it's bigger than a 'buttload'. Maybe it's metric... Look it up!
***Ummm... In the interest of full disclosure I should say that this photo caption is a blatant hit grab... Not unlike the Jonas Brothers themselves!
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"All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You" by Heart

Birthday wishes go out today to Nancy Wilson - whom dupes to the patriarchy like me might refer to as Mrs. Cameron Crowe, even despite their recent divorce - but whom rock fans will best know as the blonde half of the trailblazing rock duo Heart.

Heart's output contains much quality material, from gentle ballads to hard rock, but far and away the worst of them is this little ditty which, while it was their biggest hit, was also their last; it turns out, rock fans did not respect them in the morning. Released in March 1990 from their album Brigade, All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You was written by Robert 'Mutt' Lange - whom dupes to the matriarchy like me (turns out I'm easily duped - who knew?) will know as Mr. Shania Twain, even despite their somewhat less recent divorce - and it features such an egregious display of male fantasy female behaviour that I just couldn't resist holding it up for ridicule here.

Keeping in mind the song was released in 1990, the woman in the video a) picks up a hitch-hiker on a dark, deserted road, b) takes him to a motel, and c) fucks his brains out. Nowhere in the video is there a condom (let alone pepper spray). We're expected to believe that because the guy's hot he's okay ('cause Ted Bundy was such an uggo); the lyrics are similarly icky, but I won't repeat them here because a) you can listen to them for yourself, and b) I'm trying to keep my dinner down*.

In the end, though, it's alright because she simply needed a sperm donor; the man she loves can't give her a baby, and she really wants one, so she's forced to conduct this brazen spunk mugging to get one**. This sort of thing happens all the time, apparently. Yeah, maybe in porno.

*From yesterday!
**Because then as now there are no sperm banks...
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POPnews - March 15th

[Considered a detached object but too far out to be considered a scattered disk object, the planetoid Sedna is the largest body so far detected in the Oort cloud, almost a quarter of the way to the next star, Proxima Centauri.]
44 BCE - Roman dictator perpetuo (or 'dictator in perpetuity') Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus, Decimus Junius Brutus and several others on this, the Ides of March. Even though the assassins popularized the world's rockingest reason for murder - tyrannicide! - for some reason their actions have cast a pall on the day ever since...

351 CE - Constantius II elevated his cousin Gallus to the rank of Caesar, putting him in charge of the Eastern part of the Roman Empire.

933 CE - After a ten-year truce, German King Henry I defeated a Hungarian army at the Battle of Riade, near the Unstrut river.

1311 - At the Battle of Halmyros the Catalan Company defeated Walter V of Brienne to take control of the Duchy of Athens, a Crusader state in Greece.

1493 - Christopher Columbus returned to Spain at the end of his First Voyage of Discovery to the Americas.

1672 - England's Charles II issued the Royal Declaration of Indulgence, which many Protestants in Parliament construed as being proof of his own latent Roman Catholicism.

1781 - During the American Revolutionary War, at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse - near present-day Greensboro, North Carolina - 1,900 British troops under General Charles Cornwallis defeated an American force numbering 4,400.

1783 - In an emotional speech in Newburgh, New York, George Washington asked his officers not to support the Newburgh Conspiracy; the plea was successful and the threatened coup d'etat never took place.

1820 - Maine became the 23rd US state.

1827 - The University of Toronto was established by a royal charter from George IV, mainly due to the efforts of John Strachan, who became the school's first president.

1909 - London's Selfridges department store opened.

1917 - Nicholas II abdicated the Russian throne, initially in favour of his son the Tsarevich Alexei, and later still his brother the Grand Duke Mikhail, although a republic was declared before he could become Tsar.

1931 - The SS Viking exploded off the coast of Newfoundland (near the Horse Islands) killing 27 of the 147 on board including Varick Frissel, who had chartered the vessel in order to make a film of that year's seal hunt. Alas, in amongst the cameras and lights, the erstwhile producer had also brought along a considerable quantity of dynamite in order to sex-up his footage... The bodies of Frissel and his dog Cabot have never been found.

1952 - In Cilaos, a city on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion, 1,870 mm (73 inches) of rain fell in a single day, setting a new world record.

1956 - My Fair Lady opened on Broadway at the Mark Hellinger Theatre and ran for 2,717 performances, setting a record for the time.

1961 - South Africa was kicked out of the Commonwealth due to its adherence to a policy of apartheid.

1972 - Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, based on the novel by Mario Puzo, premiered.

1990 - The government of Saddam Hussein hanged Iranian-born UK-based journalist Farzad Bazoft as an Israeli spy, having arrested him during his investigation of a mysterious August 1989 explosion at the al-Iskandaria military complex, 48 km (30 miles) south of Baghdad, which may have killed as many as 7000 people while badly damaging the Al Qaqaa munitions plant; Bazoft had been tried and convicted by a kangaroo court five days earlier, on March 10th, despite assurances to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher by the Iraqi president himself that Bazoft would get a fair trial. Mere months later the West undertook the first Gulf War against the rogue regime - not due to their judicial murder of a member of the press doing yeoman service by exposing a dangerous tyrant's nuclear capabilities (a feat intelligence agents around the world hadn't even thought to do, let alone done, for themselves) or for any such righteous reason - but because its tin-pot dictator had jeopardized their precious oil supply by ordering an invasion of Kuwait.

2004 - The discovery of Sedna was announced; whether categorized as a dwarf planet or merely a trans-Neptunian object, it is the farthest thing from Earth ever discovered. Named for the Inuit goddess of the sea, Sedna is (in technical terms) a bloody great long way away. One year on Sedna lasts 12,000 Earth years, giving it something in common with where I grew up.
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POPnews - March 11th

[Try as they might to imagine they'd achieved dominion over the Earth, the Victorians were too often let down by their early attempts at civil engineering; one such event was the flood caused by a dam failure at Low Bradfield, which destroyed 800 houses and killed 240 as it swept inexorably down the River Loxley toward Sheffield.]
1708 - Queen Anne withheld Royal Assent from the Scottish Militia Bill, apparently; it was the last time a British monarch vetoed legislation.

1801 - Eccentric, tyrannical Paul I (the son of Catherine the Great) was assassinated by a group of thirty Russian nobles led by Count von Benningsen (on the orders of the Tsar's most trusted advisor, Count Peter Alekseyevich Pahlen) after refusing to abdicate; he was succeeded by his son Alexander I.

1824 - The United States War Department created the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which ought to give one some idea of the US government's attitude towards its indigenous peoples.

1845 - In New Zealand, Chiefs Hone Heke and Kawiti led 700 Māoris to chop down the flagpole and drive settlers out of Kororareka owing to the British settlers there having breached 1840's Treaty of Waitangi; the incident would cause the so-called Flagstaff War.

1848 - Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin became the first Prime Ministers of the Province of Canada to be democratically elected under what was then a uniquely Canadian interpretation of the Westminster system known as responsible government.

1851 - Giuseppe Verdi's opera Rigoletto made its debut at La Fenice in Venice.

1861 - The Constitution of the Confederate States of America was adopted.

1864 - The Great Sheffield Flood - the worst man-made disaster in English history - killed over 240 people when the newly-built Dale Dyke Dam broke; these events have formed the basis for Phil Parkin's 2004 documentary The Forgotten Flood.

1867 - Giuseppe Verdi's opera Don Carlos debuted at the Paris Opéra.

1872 - Japan's Meiji government officially annexed the Ryukyu Kingdom into what would become the Okinawa prefecture.

1888 - What later became known as the Great Blizzard of '88 began along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, blanketing parts of New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut in more than 100 cm of snow, shutting down commerce and killing more than 400.

1927 - Samuel Roxy Rothafel opened the Roxy Theatre in New York City.

1941 - President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Act into law, allowing American-built war supplies to be shipped to the Allies on loan.

1959 - The original Broadway production of A Raisin In The Sun by Lorraine Hansberry - and starring (among others) Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, and Louis Gossett Jr. - opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York City.

1985 - Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet leader following the death of Konstantin Chernenko.

1990 - Lithuania declared itself independent from the Soviet Union during the so-called Singing Revolution.

1993 - Janet Reno was confirmed by the US Senate as the first female Attorney General of the United States; she was sworn in the following day.

1996 - John Winston Howard became the 25th Prime Minister of Australia; his would be the 2nd longest term in Australian history - only Sir Robert Menzies served longer - lasting until December 2007, when his Liberal/National coalition was defeated at the polls by the Australian Labor Party, led by Kevin Rudd.

2006 - Michelle Bachelet was inaugurated as the first female president of Chile.
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POPnews - March 10th

[Today the Chinese occupiers of Tibet operate Lhasa's Potala Palace as a museum; until the flight into exile of the 14th Dalai Lama on this day in 1959 it served as his official residence. Begun by the 5th Dalai Lama, Lozang Gyatso, in 1645, it wouldn't be finished in 1694, 12 years after his death; it was the 6th Dalai Lama, Tsangyang Gyatso, who was first to use it, which he did as a winter palace. Slightly damaged in the uprising of 1959, it was spared total destruction during the Cultural Revolution of 1966 by Zhou Enlai although as many 100,000 of its literary and artistic treasures were destroyed.]

1629 - England's King Charles I dissolved Parliament for the fourth and final time - which was nonetheless his Royal Prerogative - thereby beginning the Eleven Years Tyranny, during which era the King ruled without the advice of the 'people'.

1762 - French Huguenot Jean Calas, who had been wrongly convicted of killing his son Marc-Antoine, died after being tortured on the Catherine wheel; the event inspired Voltaire to begin a campaign for religious tolerance and legal reform, which would later lead to Calas' posthumous exoneration in March 1765, when it became clear the younger Calas had committed suicide and not been murdered.

1804 - A ceremony was conducted in St. Louis to formalize the Louisiana Purchase, thereby officially transferring ownership of the Louisiana Territory from France to the United States.

1814 - Napoleon was defeated by the Prussian forces of Blücher at the Battle of Laon.

1831 - The French Foreign Legion was established by King Louis-Philippe to support his war in Algeria.

1846 - Prince Osahito, fourth son of deceased Emperor Ninko of Japan, became Emperor Kōmei.

1848 - The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was ratified by the US Senate, thus ending the Mexican-American War.

1864 - The Red River Campaign began as Union troops under Major-General Nathaniel P. Banks reached Alexandria, Louisiana; there they would clash with a Confederate army led by Major-General Richard Taylor until May, with the aim of cutting off supply lines from Texas.

1893 - Côte d'Ivoire became a French colony.

1906 - The Courrières mine disaster - Europe's worst ever - killed 1099 miners in Northern France's Pas-de-Calais département.

1922 - Mahatma Gandhi was arrested in India; he was later tried for sedition and sentenced to six years in prison, although he would be released after only two years in February 1924 following an operation for appendicitis.

1945 - American forces conducted the firebombing of Tokyo; the resulting firestorm killed more than 100,000 people, mostly civilians.

1948 - The Indian Union Muslim League was founded by remnants of the old Muslim League.

1952 - Fulgencio Batista led a successful coup in Cuba.

1959 - An unsuccessful uprising against ten years of unlawful Chinese occupation in Lhasa - a pivotal moment in the Tibetan resistance movement - resulted in the massacre of thousands of Tibetans by occupying soldiers and the exile of the 14th Dalai Lama to the Indian city of Dharamsala. China continues its illegal occupation of Tibet to this day.

1969 - James Earl Ray pleaded guilty to assassinating Martin Luther King Jr; he recanted his guilty plea three days later, but pleaded guilty anyway and was sentenced to 99 years in prison for the crime, even though in later years the King family lobbied for his release.

1977 - Astronomers discovered rings around Uranus, which the planet's discoverer William Herschel first claimed to have seen in 1798; the same day those same scientists rediscovered how those jokes never gets old.

1990 - Prosper Avril was ousted 18 months after seizing power in Haiti following the departure of Jean-Claude Duvalier; he was succeeded by Herard Abraham.

2006 - The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter arrived, appropriately enough, at Mars.
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POPnews - March 9th

[The Murder of David Rizzio, painted by William Allen in 1833, had previously been painted by John Opie in 1787.]
1202 - Norway's King Sverre died; he was succeeded by his illegitimate son Håkon, as chronicled in the Sverris saga and the Bagler sagas.

1230 - Bulgarian Tsar Ivan Asen II defeated Theodore of Epirus at the Battle of Klokotnitsa.

1566 - David Rizzio - the private secretary to Mary, Queen of Scots - was murdered in her presence in Edinburgh's Palace of Holyroodhouse; stabbed more than fifty times before being thrown down a flight of stairs, his body was then taken and hastily buried. The Queen's jealous husband Lord Darnley was said to be responsible, although the plot may have been funded by her rival Elizabeth I of England in an effort to weaken Mary both politically and emotionally; Darnley's equally ghastly murder in February 1567 is thought to have been in retribution.

1765 - After a public campaign by the writer Voltaire, judges in Paris posthumously exonerated Protestant merchant Jean Calas of murdering his own son Marc-Antoine three years to the day after Calas had been sentenced to die. The elder Calas had been tortured and executed in March 1762 on the charge, even though the younger Calas had actually committed suicide; the harsh and ultimately spurious judgement against him had been motivated by religious bigotry in what was still a very Catholic country.

1776 - Adam Smith's landmark book on economics, The Wealth of Nations, was published.

1796 - Napoléon Bonaparte married his first wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais.

1841 - The US Supreme Court delivered its decision in the Amistad case, concerning captive Africans who had seized control of the slave-trading ship carrying them in July 1839: the court ruled that they had been taken into slavery illegally, events recounted cinematically in Steven Spielberg's 1997 film Amistad.

1842 - Giuseppe Verdi's third opera Nabucco premiered at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan; concerning the anti-Semitism of Nebuchadnezzar, its success established Verdi as one of Italy's foremost opera writers.

1862 - During the American Civil War the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia fought to a draw at the Battle of Hampton Roads, the first fight between two ironclad warships.

1908 - The Italian football club Inter Milan was founded.

1910 - The Westmoreland County Coal Strike, involving 15,000 coal miners represented by the United Mine Workers trade union, began in Pennsylvania; the strike would last until July 1911.

1916 - Outraged at the US government's support for the regime of President Venustiano Carranza, revolutionary Pancho Villa led 1,500 Mexican raiders in an attack against Columbus, New Mexico, killing 17.

1933 - Congress began its first 100 days of enacting New Deal legislation - with the aim of alleviating an ever-worsening Great Depression - when President Franklin D. Roosevelt submitted the Emergency Banking Act.

1954 - CBS television broadcast an episode of its news program See It Now, entitled A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy; produced by Fred W. Friendly and legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow, the program's attack on McCarthyism has since been called 'Television's Finest Hour'.

1957 - The magnitude 8.6 Andreanof Islands Earthquake and its resultant tsunami (which caused damage as far away as Hawai'i) struck Alaska's Aleutian Islands.

1977 - During the Hanafi Muslim Siege approximately a dozen armed Hanafi Muslims seized 3 buildings in Washington, DC (city hall, B'nai B'rith headquarters, and the Islamic Center) killing reporter Maurice Williams and security guard Mack Cantrell and taking 149 hostages; the situation ended 2 days later with only the two fatalities, due in part to the intervention of three Muslim ambassadors - Egypt's Ashraf Ghorbal, Pakistan's Sahabzada Yaqub-Khan and Iran's Ardeshir Zahedi.

1990 - Dr. Antonia Novello was sworn in as Surgeon General of the United States, becoming both the first female and Hispanic American to serve in that position.

1997 - Rapper The Notorious B.I.G. - aka Christopher Wallace - was murdered, following an after-party for that year's Soul Train Music Awards at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles; a 2009 biopic entitled Notorious starring Jamal 'Gravy' Woolard dramatized his life and death.

2006 - Liquid water was discovered on Enceladus, the sixth largest moon of Saturn.
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POPnews - February 14th

[When it came to tit-for-tat retaliations surely neither the the Allies nor the Nazis could have hoped for a worse Hell on Earth than Dresden; once the cultural and artistic capital of Germany, the morning after the city was relentlessly firebombed it was home to cinders and little more...
Yet from its ashes it has risen, reborn!]
842 CE - Charles the Bald and Louis the German swore the Oaths of Strasbourg in both German and French, allying West Francia and East Francia.

1556 - Protestant Thomas Cranmer - Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI - was declared a heretic by their Catholic successor, Mary I; he would be burned at the stake five weeks later.

1779 - Captain James Cook was killed by native Hawaiians near Kealakekua on the Island of Hawaii.

1859 - Oregon became the 33rd US state.

1912 - Arizona became the 48th US state.

1945 - On the second day of an intensive two-day operation Allied forces began a devastating aerial fire-bombing of Dresden; the event was later famously recounted in Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five.

1949 - The Asbestos Strike began, marking the beginning of Quebec's Quiet Revolution against the tyranny and cronyism of Union Nationale Premier Maurice Duplessis.

1962 - First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy took television viewers on a tour of the White House.

1966 - The Australian dollar was introduced on the day that country's currency was decimalized.

1979 - In Kabul, Muslim terrorists kidnapped Adolph Dubs, the American ambassador to Afghanistan; Dubs was later killed during the ensuing gun battle between his kidnappers and police.

1981 - A fire at Dublin's Stardust Nightclub killed 48.

1990 - 92 people were killed when Indian Airlines Flight 605 crashed near Bengaluru.

1994 - Andrei Chikatilo - also known as the Rostov Ripper - a Russian serial killer convicted of murdering 52 women and children between 1978 and 1990, was executed by a single bullet to the back of the head.

2005 - Lebanon's former Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri, was assassinated, prompting the country to once again fall into chaos.

(Although by tradition POPnews items are always an odd number - and I try my best to always include 19 items - in honour of Valentine's Day, today there are 14. ~ MSM)
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"Hold On" by Wilson Phillips

Birthday wishes go out today to Chynna Phillips, one-third of early-90s harmonizers Wilson Phillips. Hold On was the trio's first ever single, originally appearing on their self-titled 1990 album; that same album also produced the Top-5 singles Release Me, Impulsive, and You're in Love. Naturally, the video for Hold On isn't available, but this fine live performance gets the point of it across.

Looking back on it now, Wilson Phillips was one of the first inklings that show business was set to become hereditary... Carnie and Wendy Wilson, of course, are the daughters of Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, while Chynna is the daughter of John Phillips and Michelle Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas. Not that pedigree alone is a determining factor in success; the band broke up after the release of their second album Shadows and Light when Chynna decided to pursue a solo career, a career which fizzled before it even appeared.
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Now Showing: Nelson Mandela's First Interview

On this day in 1990, after years of pressure on South Africa's apartheid governments by the West, Nelson Mandela was released from prison; he is interviewed here by James Robbins of the BBC upon his release. No one quite knew what to expect of a man who'd been in prison for 27 years - many of them either at hard labour or in isolation - but from the first he appeared poised and spoke like a diplomat and statesman.

Through the years ahead he would continue to serve as a model for African leadership, steering his country through a rocky transition to majority rule, jettisoning the wife who stood by him throughout his incarceration when the full extent of her criminal activities became known, and keeping the potential for rancour in a body such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu) at bay.
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Pop History Moment: Nelson Mandela Released From Prison

On this day in 1990, leading human rights campaigner Nelson Mandela was freed from Victor Verster Prison in South Africa after a 27-year-long incarceration conducted most famously at Robben Island and also later at Pollsmoor Prison. Mandela had been imprisoned since 1964 as an outspoken opponent of apartheid.

Nine days earlier President F. W. de Klerk - who'd replaced hard-line pro-apartheid president P. W. Botha after he suffered a stroke in September 1989 - lifted a ban on the African National Congress; in an instant de Klerk went from being a life-long conservative to a hero of South Africa's new enlightenment. The negotiation process which eventually took the country from official bigotry to the modern age would eventually earn de Klerk and Mandela the Nobel Peace Prize and, of course, lead to the inauguration of Mandela as South Africa's first black president in May 1994.
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POPnews - January 20th

[While the city of Rio de Janeiro was founded in March 1565 by Estácio de Sá, the area where it was eventually established was first explored by Gaspar de Lemos on this day in 1502, 63 years earlier. Which begs the question: what the heck were they waiting for? More paradise?]
250 CE - Emperor Decius began a widespread persecution of Christians in Rome with the martyrdom of Pope Fabian; thanks to his efforts, not only do most Christians still have an entirely unfounded persecution complex but ever since then around the world they've been complicit in the persecution of millions of people over the past two millenia - what with the Crusades and the witch-burnings, missionaries and sectarianism and being all judgemental against the express orders of Jesus, leading to the murders and suicides of untold numbers, many of them their fellow Christians. So thanks for that half-assed effort, Emperor Decius, you shit... At least Diocletian put a little effort into it.*

*While it's not entirely tongue-in-cheek, my tongue was in the vicinity of my cheek when I wrote this. ~ MSM

1320 - Duke Wladyslaw Lokietek became King of Poland.

1356 - Scotland's Kind Edward Balliol abdicated.

1502 - The location of the present-day city of Rio de Janeiro was first explored, giving the area its name.

1523 - Christian II was forced to abdicate as King of Denmark and Norway; after he'd gone into exile the crown was offered to his uncle, Frederick of Holstein, who reigned as Frederick I.

1576 - The Mexican city of León was founded by order of the viceroy Don Martín Enríquez de Almanza.

1649 - England's King Charles I went on trial for treason and other 'high crimes'.

1839 - At the Battle of Yungay, Chile defeated an alliance between Peru and Bolivia.

1841 - Hong Kong Island was occupied by the British when Captain Charles Elliot of the Royal Navy landed at Possession Point; the occupation was formalized by the Treaty of Nanking in August 1842.

1921 - The first Constitution of Turkey was ratified; the country had until recently been part of the Ottoman Empire.

1936 - Edward VIII was proclaimed King of England following the death of his father, George V.

1942 - At the Wannsee Conference - held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee at the height of World War II - senior Nazi officials decided on the 'Final Solution to the Jewish Question', accelerating The Holocaust.

1972 - After British Prime Minister Edward Heath rose in the House of Commons and announced unemployment figures of 1,023,583 - the highest rate of joblessness in the United Kingdom since the 1930s - Speaker of the House of Commons Selwyn Lloyd was forced to suspend the sitting for ten minutes before order could be restored.

1987 - Church of England envoy Terry Waite was kidnapped in Lebanon, where he was held captive for 1,763 days; he was finally released in November 1991.

1990 - The Black January crackdown of Azerbaijani pro-independence demonstrations was undertaken by the Soviet army in Baku.

1994 - Telesat Canada's Anik E-1 communications satellite spun out of control, forcing newspapers and radio and TV broadcasters to scramble to re-establish their news feeds.

2001 - Philippine president Joseph Estrada was ousted in the EDSA II Revolution and was succeeded by Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
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POPnews - January 18th

[Normally Tagish Lake in Canada's Yukon is as tranquil as this picture would suggest; certainly it was just before it was struck by a meteorite on this day in 2000, and indeed it would be again after more than 500 fragments - most the size and with the appearance of charcoal briquettes scattered over the lake's Taku Arm - had been gathered up and analyzed. Initially as large as 4 metres in diameter and weighing 56 tonnes, less than a quarter of the meteorite was ever recovered, suggesting it had experienced significant vaporization upon entering the Earth's atmosphere.]
474 CE - Leo II became Byzantine Emperor following the death of his grandfather Leo I; his reign would last just ten months, and after his suspicious death there were rumours he'd been poisoned by his mother Ariadne so her husband Zeno could become emperor, which he did.

1126 - Emperor Huizong abdicated the throne of China in favour of his son, Emperor Qinzong.

1213 - Georgia's Queen regnant Tamar died; she was succeeded by her son, George IV.

1471 - Japan's Emperor Go-Hanazono died; he'd already abdicated in favour of his son - who reigned as Emperor Go-Tsuchimikado - in 1464.

1591 - King Naresuan of Siam killed Crown Prince Minchit Sra of Burma in hand-to-hand combat - albeit while riding war elephants - which event is now observed as Royal Thai Armed Forces Day.

1701 - Frederick I, formerly the Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia, crowned himself the first King of Prussia - although to soothe the nerves of the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I, he styled himself King in Prussia instead.

1871 - Wilhelm I was proclaimed the first German Emperor in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles near the end of the Franco-Prussian War; the empire he commanded became known as the Second Reich.

1915 - Japan issued the Twenty-One Demands to the Republic of China in a bid to increase its power in East Asia.

1919 - The Paris Peace Conference - whose mandate was to divvy up a world recently devastated by World War I - opened at the Palace of Versailles. The story of the conference, and the numerous egos that ran it, is brilliantly told in Margaret MacMillan's Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World.

1943 - The first uprising of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto - oddly enough, known as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising - took place.

1955 - The Battle of Yijiangshan occurred on the Yijiangshan Islands, pitting the National Revolutionary Army of Wang Shen-Ming against the victorious Zhang Aiping's People's Liberation Army during the First Taiwan Strait Crisis.

1958 - Canadian Willie O'Ree, the first black player in the NHL, made his debut when he took to the ice for the Boston Bruins against the Montreal Canadiens.

1977 - The worst rail crash in Australian history occurred at Granville, near Sydney, killing 83.

1990 - Washington, DC mayor Marion Barry was arrested for drug possession during an FBI sting.

1994 - During the Cando Event - a possible bolide impact over Cando, Spain - witnesses claim to have seen a fireball in the sky lasting for almost one minute.

1995 - Cave paintings estimated to be at least 17,000 years old were discovered at Vallon-Pont d'Arc in France.

1997 - Norway's Boerge Ousland became the first person to cross Antarctica alone and unaided.

2000 - The Tagish Lake Meteorite impacted the Earth at Tagish Lake in Canada's Yukon.

2003 - A bushfire killed 4 people and destroyed more than 500 homes in the Australian capital of Canberra.
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POPnews - January 14th

[The Human Be-In expressed the highest ideals of the 1960s counterculture - ideals that would soon enough be undone by the highest members of the movement's leadership; still, people like artist Michael Bowen and poet Allen Ginsberg were definitely on to something... For liberating people unsuited to the treadmill of the bourgeoisie (myself included) they and their ilk will forever be considered heroes, at least by me.]
1301 - King Andrew III died, ending the Arpad dynasty in Hungary; he was succeeded there by Wenceslas III of Bohemia, who took the throne as Ladislaus V, and in Croatia by Charles I.

1639 - The Fundamental Orders, the first written constitution that created a government in Western history, was adopted by the council of the Connecticut Colony; to this day Connecticut is known as the Constitution State for this singular contribution to democracy.

1724 - Spain's King Philip V abdicated, only to be restored seven months later in August when his son and successor Louis died of smallpox six days after his 17th birthday.

1761 - The Third Battle of Panipat was fought in India between the Afghans under Ahmad Shah Durrani and the French-supplied Marathas; the Afghan victory changed the course of Indian history by allowing the British to gain a military advantage in the Subcontinent over the Marathas, who sustained heavy casualties.

1832 - Edgar Allan Poe published his first short story, Metzengerstein.

1858 - Emperor Napoleon III of France and his wife Eugénie escaped assassination while on their way to the opera in Paris; the botched attempt was plotted by Italian nationalist Felice Orsini and carried out with the assistance of Giuseppe Pieri, Antonio Gomez and Carlo di Rudio. While the royal couple were unhurt by the trio of bomb blasts, eight others were killed and 142 were injured in the attempt, including Orsini himself.

1939 - Norway claimed Queen Maud Land in Antarctica; this claim has never been universally recognized, and is subject to the Antarctic Treaty System.

1942 - The US government began its internment of Japanese-Americans; Japanese-Canadians experienced a similar atrocity on the same day in British Columbia.

1943 - US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met at the Casablanca Conference to discuss strategy and study the next phase of World War II.

1952 - The Today Show, the world's first morning/breakfast program, premiered on NBC.

1953 - Marshal Josip Broz Tito was elected President of Yugoslavia, replacing Ivan Ribar.

1954 - The Hudson Motor Car Company merged with Nash-Kelvinator Corporation to form the American Motors Corporation.

1967 - Between 20,000 and 30,000 people attended the Human Be-In in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, the event which launched that year's Summer of Love.

1972 - Queen Margrethe II ascended the throne of Denmark following the death of her father Frederick IX, thanks to a referendum in May 1953 which changed the rules of succession; not only was she the first queen regnant in that country since Margrethe I died in October 1412, she was the first Danish monarch not named Frederick or Christian since the death of King John in February 1513.

1975 - Teenage heiress Lesley Whittle was kidnapped by serial killer Donald Neilson, who was known as the Black Panther; her body was discovered seven weeks later, in March 1975.

1990 - L. Douglas Wilder became the first elected African-American governor when he took office in Richmond, Virginia.

1994 - US President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed the Kremlin accords; on the same day, England's Duchess of Kent converted to Roman Catholicism, the first member of the Royal Family to do so for 300 years.

2004 - The so-called five cross flag of Georgia (the country, not the state) was restored to official use after a hiatus of some 500 years.

2005 - The European Space Agency's Huygens probe landed near the Xanadu region of Saturn's moon Titan, having been launched in October 1997.
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