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 - September 2nd

[A memorial to the victims of Swissair Flight 111 was placed on The
Whalesback, a promontory 1 km north of Peggys Cove, Nova Scotia.]
44 BCE -Egyptian Pharaoh Cleopatra declared her three-year-old son Caesarion co-ruler of Egypt as Ptolemy XV.

31 BCE - The Battle of Actium, the decisive battle of the Roman civil war, saw the forces of Octavian defeat the combined fleets of Mark Antony and Cleopatra off the coast of Greece near modern-day Preveza. As a result of their loss the lovers would individually take their own lives; Octavian later killed Caesarion, Cleopatra's son by Julius Caesar, to ensure no challenges remained to his reign as Caesar Augustus.

1649 - The Pope Destroyed Castro! (Okay, okay... It was Pope Innocent X, and the Castro in question is a town in Italy, but I made you look.) Anyway, despite the fact that the siege ended the so-called Wars of Castro, the Vatican's very real war on a very different Castro persists to this day...

1752 - The United Kingdom adopted the Gregorian Calendar, nearly two centuries later than most of Western Europe; that year September 2nd was followed by September 14th.

1789 - The US Department of the Treasury was founded; the first Secretary of the Treasury was Alexander Hamilton, who'd been suggested for the position by Robert Morris, who himself declined it despite being President George Washington's first choice.

1792 - During what became known as the September Massacres of the French Revolution, rampaging mobs slaughtered three Catholic bishops, more than two hundred priests, and prisoners believed to be royalist sympathizers.

1807 - England's Royal Navy bombarded Copenhagen with fire bombs and phosphorus rockets to prevent Denmark from surrendering its fleet to Napoleon.

1833 - Ohio's Oberlin College was founded by John Shipherd and Philo P. Stewart.

1867 - Mutsuhito - the Meiji Emperor of Japan - married Masako Ichijō, following which the Empress consort was known as Lady Haruko; since her death in April 1914, she's been known by the posthumous name - as per the tradition of Japanese royalty - of Empress Shōken.

1898 - At the Battle of Omdurman British and Egyptian troops commanded by General Sir Horatio Kitchener defeated Sudanese tribesmen led by Abdullah al-Taashi and established British dominance in the Sudan.

1901 - US Vice President Theodore Roosevelt uttered his famous phrase, 'Speak softly and carry a big stick' at the Minnesota State Fair; henceforth Big Stick Ideology would provide a handy corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, allow for the establishment of an American Empire, and give rise to the impression that, diplomatically at least, the United States is something of a bully.

1935 - The worst hurricane in American history struck the Florida Keys, killing 423.

1945 - Envoys from the Empire of Japan and dignitaries from various Allied nations attended the signing of Japan's Instrument of Surrender aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay; the first to sign was Japan's Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu.

1960 - The historic first election of the Parliament of the Central Tibetan Administration was conducted; the Tibetan community in exile still observes this date as Democracy Day.

1967 - A micronation called The Principality of Sealand, ruled by Prince Paddy Roy Bates, was established on a disused Maunsell Sea Fort located off of England's Suffolk coast.

1969 - America's first electronic ATM was installed at Rockville Center, New York.

1979 - The body of a young woman named Barbara Leach, thought to be the twelfth victim of the so-called Yorkshire Ripper, was discovered in an alley near the centre of Bradford.

1990 - Transnistria was unilaterally proclaimed as a Soviet republic, which decision Mikhail Gorbachev declared null and void by presidential decree the following December.

1998 - Swissair Flight 111 crashed near Peggys Cove, Nova Scotia, killing all 229 on board.
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