POPnews: September 21st

[When it was completed in January 2010, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill had given Dubai not only the biggest erection in the world but the biggest in history; fortunately, since the country is heavily favoured by the Saudi elite, it's unlikely anyone will fly a plane into it.]
454 CE - Roman Emperor Valentinian III assassinated his top general Aëtius in the Imperial throne room at Ravenna.

1217 - The Estonian tribal leader Lembitu of Lehola was killed in a battle against Teutonic Knights during the Battle of St. Matthew's Day, at a pivotal moment in the Livonian Crusade.

1745 - At the Battle of Prestonpans (near Edinburgh) a Hanoverian army under the command of Sir John Cope was defeated - in ten minutes! - by the Jacobite forces of Prince Charles Edward Stuart.

1765 - Antoine de Beauterne announced that he had killed the Beast of Gévaudan - a claim which was later proven wrong when the attacks resumed.

1780 - Benedict Arnold delivered the plans for West Point to the British; the plot to seize the military academy and it's prime location alongside the Hudson River, however, failed - and his name has been synonymous with treachery in America ever since.

1792 - The French National Convention voted to abolish that country's monarchy.

1827 - According to Joseph Smith, Jr., the angel Moroni led him to a set of golden plates, some of which he later translated with the aid of a seer stone or stone spectacles into The Book of Mormon; the plates were found buried under Cumorah hill in upstate New York - Manchester, to be precise - and are supposedly the chronicle of the prophet Mormon, a Nephrite who, along with his son, visited America in the 4th Century CE.

1897 - Virginia O'Hanlon's letter to the New York Sun - better known by its accompanying headline 'Yes Virginia, There Is A Santa Claus' - was published; Francis Pharcellus Church's philosophical response has been a part of Christmas lore ever since.

1898 - China's Empress Dowager Cixi seized power and ended that country's Hundred Days' Reform.

1921 - During what came to be known as the Oppau explosion, a storage silo at a fertilizer plant in that German city exploded, killing between 500 and 600; even though only about 10% of the ammonium sulfate and ammonium nitrate fertilizer at the facility was involved, a 90 m by 125 m crater - and 19 m deep - was created at the site, damage to nearby property was immense, and the blast was heard 300 kilometres away in München.

1937 - J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit was published in the UK by George Allen & Unwin.

1938 - The Great Hurricane of 1938 made landfall on Long Island, New York, killing between 500 and 700 as it roared up the Eastern Seaboard, before finally dissipating in New Hampshire.

1939 - Romanian Prime Minister Armand Calinescu was assassinated in Bucharest by ultranationalist members of the Iron Guard, apparently on orders from Nazi Germany.

1964 - Malta became independent from the United Kingdom.

1970 - The Cleveland Browns beat the New York Jets at home on the first-ever showing of Monday Night Football.

1976 - Orlando Letelier - a member of the Chilean socialist government of Salvador Allende, overthrown in September 1973 by Augusto Pinochet - was assassinated in Washington, D.C.

1981 - Sandra Day O'Connor's appointment to the US Supreme Court was unanimously approved by the Senate.

1995 - The Hindu milk miracle occurred, in which statues of the Hindu God Ganesh began drinking milk when spoonfuls were placed near their mouths.

2004 - Construction of the Burj Dubai (now known as the Burj Khalifa) began.
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POPnews - June 16th

[Fortress Louisbourg was a ruin when, in 1961, the reconstruction of about one-quarter of the site was undertaken at the behest of Victor Malm; with as many of its original stones as possible, and availing themselves of the labour of unemployed coal miners who were specially trained in 18th Century building techniques, the archaeologists, historians, engineers, and architects responsible for one of Canada's most popular National Historic Sites have managed to plausibly recreate what fort life must have been like in Colonial Cape Breton Island in the 1740s.]
1487 - The Battle of Stoke Field - considered the final battle of the Wars of the Roses - pitted the Yorkist forces of the pretender Lambert Simnel under John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln (who died in battle on that day) against those of the Lancastrian usurper Henry VII.

1745 - Sir William Pepperell captured Nova Scotia's French-held Fortress Louisbourg during the War of the Austrian Succession.

1755 - The French surrender to the British at New Brunswick's Fort Beauséjour during the French and Indian War would eventually lead to the expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia - a time in Canadian history known as the Great Upheaval.

1858 - Abraham Lincoln delivers his House Divided speech in Springfield, Illinois.

1883 - At the Victoria Hall Disaster 183 children were crushed or trampled to death during a stampede at a theatre in Sunderland.

1891 - John Abbott became Canada's third prime minister.

1897 - A treaty annexing the Republic of Hawai'i to the United States, was signed, although the Republic would not be dissolved until a year later, when - under the terms of the Newlands Resolution - it became the Territory of Hawai'i.

1903 - The Ford Motor Company was incorporated.

1904 - Irish author James Joyce began a relationship with Nora Barnacle, and subsequently used the date to set the actions for his 1922 novel Ulysses; in the literary world - and especially in Dublin - today is traditionally regarded as Bloomsday.

1911 - A stony meteorite weighing 772 grams fell to Earth near the Wisconsin town of Kilbourn, damaging a barn.

1924 - China's Whampoa Military Academy was founded.

1958 - Imre Nagy, Pál Maléter and other leaders of 1956's Hungarian Uprising were executed.

1963 - On the Soviet Union's Vostok 6 mission, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space.

1967 - The three-day Monterey International Pop Music Festival began in Monterey, California.

1976 - The Soweto Uprising - initially a non-violent march by 15,000 students in the Johannesburg township of Soweto - turned into days of rioting when police opened fire on the crowd, killing 566; the anniversary of the massacre is now commemorated as Youth Day in South Africa.

1977 - Oracle Corporation was incorporated by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates as Software Development Laboratories (SDL) in Redwood Shores, California.

1989 - Imre Nagy, the former Hungarian Prime Minister, was reburied in Budapest - 31 years to the day after his death.

1997 - At the Dairat Labguer massacre in Algeria, 50 people were killed by some 30 guerrillas; the massacre has been attributed to Islamist groups such as the GIA.

2008 - On the first day they were allowed to marry in California, many gay couples tied the knot throughout the state; despite the fact that their marriages were later ruled invalid by the passage of Proposition 8, their relationships remained intact - no doubt much to the chagrin of the haters responsible for denying as many as 18,000 couples their civil rights.
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