1949 On the Day of the Covenant, a South African national day, 250,000 Afrikaners attended the dedication of the Voortrekker Monument, a shrine to Boer pioneers of that country.

1954 American scientist, H Tracy Hall (1919 - 2008), became the first person to produce diamond from carbon using a verifiable and reproducible process.

1963 "In 1963 John Flaxton, 17, from Saltwood, Kent, and three friends walking along a country road near Sandling Park, Hythe, Kent, at night observed a 'star' which descended and followed them at a distance of 80 yards. Then a human-sized headless figure with bat-like wings and webbed feet shambled towards them and they fled. Later, flattened bracken and footprints two feet long were found. There are several reports of man-like creatures with bat-like wings like West Virginia's Mothman, the Cornish Owlman or the black bat woman spotted in Vietnam in 1969."   Source

1968 Spain revoked the order expelling Jews from the country, imposed by Queen Isabella in 1492.

1976 Australian indigenous people (see Australian aborigines, a term not used so much these days) were granted freehold title to former reserve land in the Northern Territory along with the right to claim other Crown Land.

1988 Edwina Currie, a junior health minister in Britain, was forced to resign following her controversial statement that most British eggs are infected with Salmonella.

1988 The Australian government announced that the entire continent had finally been recorded on topographic maps for the first time.

1989 Azaria case: Australia: At the inquest into the death of baby Azaria Chamberlain, a foreign expert witness, Professor Cameron, said that the baby's jump suit had been cut with scissors and the child decapitated. It is now generally accepted that Azaria had been taken by a dingo (Australian native dog). See also Lindy Chamberlain.

1990 Rod Stewart, 45-year-old rock singer, married 22-year-old model, Rachel Hunter.

1991 Stella Rimington became the first female Director General of Britain's MI5 security agency, and the first security boss to be named publicly.

1991 USA: Activists in Brussels, protesting Vatican funding for an observatory desecrating a sacred Apache site at Mount Graham, Arizona, brought a bulldozer up to a prominent local cathedral.

1997 More than 700 children in Japan were hospitalised after a televised cartoon triggered a condition called 'light epilepsy' or 'Nintendo epilepsy', which is caused by intense flashes of light viewed from close to the source.

1997 The highest wind speed ever measured – 236 mph – was recorded at Anderson Air Force Base in Guam as Typhoon Paka hit the Pacific island.

Weapons inspectors withdrawn from Iraq, 
not expelled by Saddam Hussein as reported

1998 Richard Butler (pictured), Australian diplomat and head of UNSCOM, the UN weapons inspection team withdrew the team from Iraq, to protect his staff from the air strikes that the US and UK governments were threatening. According to Butler, UNSCOM was ordered out of Iraq by the USA, not expelled by Saddam Hussein as so often asserted.

Within hours, Operation Desert Fox began: the US and UK began pre-emptively bombing Iraq – hundreds of cruise missiles raining down on the population, marking the start of strikes to punish the Baghdad government. An avalanche of US and British propaganda was published by a mostly unsuspecting world media, justifying the aggression and ignoring the destruction of Baghdad's utilities and the deaths of many innocent civilians and service people. On ABC's This Week (September 27, 2003), Colin Powell (USA Secretary of State under George W Bush) publicly lied that the Bill Clinton administration had "conducted a four-day bombing campaign in late 1998 based on the intelligence that he had. That resulted in the weapons inspectors being thrown out."

Funeral services were held for 68 people whom Iraqi officials say were killed in the raids. But Iraq's Ambassador to the UN, Nizar Hamdoon, said: "I'm told that the casualties are in the thousands in terms of numbers of people who were killed or wounded."

US bombs food storage, schools, college, maternity centres

Several weeks after the strikes, the UN children's fund, UNICEF, made a first preliminary assessment of damage to civilian facilities. They reported the destruction of a rice warehouse in Tikrit in northern Iraq, damage to ten schools in the southern port city of Basra, and an agricultural college in Kirkuk in northern Iraq received a direct hit. They said that in Baghdad medical and maternity centres, a water supply system and parts of the health and social affairs ministries were damaged.

Since Butler's forced withdrawal in the face of US-UK threats, many Western media and politicians have usually pretended to the public that Iraq "expelled" the team.

The events surrounding the withdrawal are recounted in Butler's book, Saddam Defiant: (2000):

"I received a telephone call from US Ambassador Peter Burleigh inviting me for a private conversation at the US mission ... Burleigh informed me that on instructions from Washington it would be 'prudent to take measures to ensure the safety and security of UNSCOM staff presently in Iraq.' I told him that I would act on his advice and remove my staff from Iraq."

Widely reported error that Iraq expelled the weapons inspectors

The 'mistake' has been made not only by pro-war people such as George W Bush in his State of the Union address ('the axis of evil' speech), Dick Cheney, Alexander Rose, the Canadian right-wing Washington correspondent of the National Post, and the editorial writers of the Sunday Times. It has also been made by those who have shown concern for the humanitarian situation in Iraq, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, UK Liberal Democrats foreign affairs spokesperson Menzies Campbell, and the usually trustworthy Guardian Middle East editor Brian Whitaker. The BBC often makes the same incorrect assertion, although it usually acknowledges its error when it is pointed out to them.

Richard Butler became a fierce critic of the invasion of Iraq, strongly criticising Australian Prime Minister Howard and marching with more than a quarter of a million others in the Sydney pro-peace march on February 16, 2003. On the morning of the peace march, he told ABC interviewer Terry Lane:

"I believe that there is a very real prospect now that the United States of America will attack Iraq without the approval of the UN Security Council. That is contrary to international law, it should not happen, and I believe the consequences of such an action could be possibly catastrophic. I also finally believe that war is almost certain not to be the solution to any of the problems that are posed by Saddam Hussein, and they are real problems. The smaller reason, not so small for we Australians, is, I don't know how to put this as simply as possible ... Let me just say that I'm sick to death of the lies that we're being told about this by the Prime Minister of Australia. I heard him again this morning on a national television interview, and it was shocking, it was astonishing to hear him duck and weave, including by the way, say that in answer to a question about the possible deaths of Iraqi women and children, that something broadly like, 'Well, you know, that was unfortunate but it was their fault that Saddam Hussein was their president, and that's how it goes'. Astonishing, and I'm really deeply distressed by his position …

"International law is important here, and we mustn't commit the terrible mistake and folly in our pursuit of a criminal, by ourselves breaking the law. Because then it brings the whole system into disrepute and that is what I fear we face if the Americans go it alone here. We will trash 50 years of post World War II international law and replace it with the rule that might is right, and that's what we've been trying to get away from."   Source

Myths of the 'War on Terrorism' and Iraq

Iraq crisis timeline    Chronology from UNSCOM website   

How US Congress was fooled by a PR firm and the daughter of the Ambassador of Kuwait

How the West made a Highway of Death in Iraq

1999 Mud streams killed thousands in Venezuela.

2000 USA: The president of the Florida Holocaust Museum recently noted that George W Bush's Skull and Bones grandfather derived a portion of his personal fortune through his affiliation with a Nazi-controlled bank.

John Loftus, former prosecutor in the Justice Department's Nazi War Crimes Unit, said Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush (pictured), was a principal in the Union Banking Corp. in the late 1930s and the 1940s.

Leading Nazi industrialists secretly owned the bank and were moving money into it through a second bank in Holland even after the US declared war. The bank was liquidated in 1951 and Bush's grandfather and great-grandfather received $1.5 million as part of that dissolution. That money flows into American politics today, Loftus said, from "a series of multinational corporations behaving like pirates. They don't care about ideology; they care about money."

"That's where the Bush family fortune came from: It came from the Third Reich."

Loftus is the co-author (with Mark Aarons) of Unholy Trinity, documenting the Swiss bank accounts that harboured funds confiscated from Holocaust victims and the participation of Italian Catholic priests in smuggling Nazi war criminals to safe haven in Canada, Central and South America and the United States after the war.

Source: The Daily Bleed

2003 Deborah Jin induced the formation of a fermionic condensate among fermionic atoms.

Tomorrow: Saturnalia

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