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Strike.
Cicero, to his assassins, December 7, 43 BCE

Alone with none but Thee, my God,
I journey on my way;
What need I fear when Thou art near,
Oh King of night and day?
More safe am I within Thy hand
Than if a host did round me stand.
Attributed to Saint Columba

We know for certain that Columba left successors distinguished for their purity of life, their love of God, and their loyalty to the rules of the monastic life.
The Venerable Bede

When looks were fond and words were few.
Allan Cunningham, Scottish poet and author, born on December 7, 1784; from The Poet's Bridal-day Song, line 20

... a poet & painter easily understands how you feel about leaving any beloved place - he's always putting huge pieces of myself into whens & people & wheres & animals & trees & stones. For human creatures (& I hope we're human!) "things" equal illusion; actually, nothing's inanimate.
e e cummings in a letter to Gabrielle David, September 5, 1949; cummings attended a party with Hart Crane on December 7, 1929

Sir James Frazer was able to keep his beautiful rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge, until his death by carefully and methodically sailing all around his dangerous subject, as if charting the coastline of a forbidden island without actually committing himself to a declaration that it existed. What he was saying-not-saying was that Christian legend, dogma and ritual are the refinement of a great body of primitive and even barbarous beliefs, and that almost the only original element in Christianity is the personality of Jesus.
Robert Graves who died on December 7, 1985; The White Goddess

Celtic cross of Iona

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.
Howell Forgy, US naval lieutenant, when Pearl Harbour was attacked, December 7, 1941

The world there was the flat world of the ancients; to the east, a cornfield that stretched to daybreak; to the west, a corral that reached to the sunset; between, the conquests of peace, dearer-bought than those of war.
Wilella Sibert 'Willa' Cather, American author, born on December 7, 1873; from Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920), 'A Wagner Matinee'

The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
Wilella Sibert 'Willa' Cather; from One of Ours (1922), Bk II, Ch. 6

He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon it when already its glory was nearly spent. So in the buffalo times a traveller used to come upon the embers of a hunter's fire on the prairies, after the hunter was up and gone; the coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm, and the flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed, told the story.
This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even the successful ones were hunting for rest and a brief reprieve from death. It was already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed, – these he had caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces, – and this would always be his.
Wilella Sibert 'Willa' Cather; from A Lost Lady, Part II, Ch. 9

The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy's mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.
Wilella Sibert 'Willa' Cather; from O Pioneers! (1913), Part I, Ch. 1

The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.
Wilella Sibert 'Willa' Cather; from O Pioneers! (1913), Part I, Ch. 5

There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share – black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.
Wilella Sibert 'Willa' Cather; from My Antonia (1918), Book II, Ch. 14

Unfortunately, you can't vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place.
Noam Chomsky, American professor of linguistics, anarchist thinker, human rights activist and political analyst, born on December 7, 1928; from a talk entitled 'Government in the Future', given at the Poetry Center of the New York YM-YWHA, February 16, 1970

In the United States, the political system is a very marginal affair. There are two parties, so-called, but they're really factions of the same party, the Business Party. Both represent some range of business interests. In fact, they can change their positions 180 degrees, and nobody even notices. In the 1984 election, for example, there was actually an issue, which often there isn't. The issue was Keynesian growth versus fiscal conservatism. The Republicans were the party of Keynesian growth: big spending, deficits, and so on. The Democrats were the party of fiscal conservatism: watch the money supply, worry about the deficits, et cetera. Now, I didn't see a single comment pointing out that the two parties had completely reversed their traditional positions. Traditionally, the Democrats are the party of Keynesian growth, and the Republicans the party of fiscal conservatism. So doesn't it strike you that something must have happened? Well, actually, it makes sense. Both parties are essentially the same party. The only question is how coalitions of investors have shifted around on tactical issues now and then. As they do, the parties shift to opposite positions, within a narrow spectrum.
Noam Chomsky; from an interview by Adam Jones, February 20, 1990

'Tough love' is just the right phrase: love for the rich and privileged, tough for everyone else.
Noam Chomsky; from Powers and Prospects (1996)

See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.
Noam Chomsky; from Understanding Power (2002)

The United States is deeply in debt – that was part of the whole Reagan/Bush program, in fact: to put the country so deeply in debt that there would be virtually no way for the government to pursue programs of social spending anymore. And what "being in debt" really means is that the Treasury Department has sold a ton of securities – bonds and notes and so on – to investors, who then trade them back and forth on the bond market. Well, according to the Wall Street Journal, by now about $150 billion a day worth of U.S. Treasury securities alone is traded this way. The article then explained what this means: it means that if the investing community which holds those securities doesn't like any U.S. government policies, it can very quickly sell off just a tiny signal amount of Treasury bonds, and that will have the automatic effect of raising the interest rate, which then will have the further automatic effect of increasing the deficit. Okay, this article calculated that if such a "signal" sufficed to raise the interest rate by 1 percent, it would add $20 billion to the deficit overnight – meaning if Clinton (say in someone's dream) proposed a $20 billion social spending program, the international investing community could effectively turn it into a $40 billion program instantly, just by a signal, and any further moves in that direction would be totally cut off.
Noam Chomsky; ibid

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Noam Chomsky; his famous grammatical dictum

December 7 is the 341^st day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (342^nd in leap years), with 24 days remaining.
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Haloia of Demeter, ancient Greece

This festival commemorated the goddess Demeter's sorrow at the loss of her daughter Persephone, and the coming of the winter months.

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Feast day of St Ambrose of Milan, bishop and confessor, Doctor of the Church
(Hairy achania, Achania pilosa, is today's plant, dedicated to this saint.)

Saint Ambrose, (Latin Sanctus Ambrosius, Italian Sant'Ambrogio) (c. 340 - April 4, 397), bishop of Milan, was one of the most eminent bishops of the 4^th Century. Together with Augustine of Hippo, Jerome, and Gregory I, he his counted one of the four Doctors of the West of antique church history.

Ambrose was highly influential in the destruction of paganism in the Roman Empire. A pagan delegation led by Quintus Aurelius Symmachus (c. 340 - c. 402), consul in 391, presented to the Christian, Emperor Valentinian II, a forcible but unsuccessful petition pleading for tolerance for traditional cult practices and beliefs that Christianity was poised to suppress in the Theodosian edicts of 391. Ambrose successfully argued that it was the duty of a Christian prince to suppress pagan ceremonies.

A legend has it that as an infant, a swarm of bees settled on Ambrose's face while he lay in his cradle, leaving behind a drop of honey. His father, a praetorian prefect of Gallia Narbonensis, considered this a sign of his son's future eloquence and 'honeyed tongue'. For this reason, bees and beehives often appear in the saint's symbology. In art he is sometimes depicted with other 'attributes', including a child, a whip, and/or bones.

According to another legend, Ambrose was admonished in a dream to search for, and found under the pavement of the church, the remains of two martyrs, Gervasius and Protasius. The saints, although they would have had to have been hundreds of years old, looked as if they had just died.

Ambrose surprised St Augustine by his habit of reading silently, indicating that this was an unusual practice in those times. Augustine records in his Confessions:

"When [Ambrose] read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud."

St Ambrose is the patron of beekeepers; bees; candle makers; domestic animals; the French Commissariat; learning; Milan, Italy; students; and wax refiners.

"... Ambrose, bishop of Milan ... persuaded the emperor [Julian – PW] to withdraw the state subsidies and prohibit the legacies and revenues that maintained many of the pagan cults, including endowment of the Vestal Virgins and college of pontiffs ... The Altar [Altar of Victory] was not restored; indeed, measures against pagans became more repressive. Ambrose also exerted extraordinary dominance over Theodosius I (AD 379-395), to whom he threatened excommunication for having ordered the massacre of thousands in the circus at Thessalonica. The chastened emperor presented himself, bareheaded and in sackcloth at the cathedral in Milan. The next year, in AD 391, he issued the first in a series of edicts that prohibited all pagan cult worship and effectively made Christianity the official religion in the empire. They are preserved in the Codex Theodosianus, a codification of legislative enactments (constitutiones) from the time of Constantine, issued by Theodosius II in AD 438. Divided into titles and arranged chronologically, it is comprised [sic] of sixteen books, the last of which deals with pagans, sacrifices, and temples." Source: The End of Paganism

More More about the folklore of bees

Burning the Devil Celebrations (La Quema del Diablo), Antigua, Guatemala

"Guatemalans are habitual victims of early spring cleaning. By late afternoon on 7 December each year, the eve of the Fiesta de La Virgen de Inmaculada Concepción (Feast day of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception), town and cityfolk have cleared their homes of all unwanted bits and pieces and erected vast heaps of rubbish on the streets.

"By 6pm the piles are set alight and throngs of onlookers gather round to celebrate an ancient tradition called La Quema del Diablo (The Burning of the Devil). Guatemalans strongly believe that by burning the rubbish they are purging their homes and towns of evil.

"This fire and brimstone ritual is interestingly a throwback to 18th century Catholic folkore and represents the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception's merciless struggle with the devil. The Virgin is a very special saint for Guatemala – she was declared patron Saint of Guatemala City as early as 1738, and patron Saint of the Americas by Charles III in 1756.

"Today the nation's capital honours long-standing traditions as men dress up as devils and give chase to local children, while Antigua's Convent of Conception erects an effigy of Lucifer himself, which is also set ablaze. You'll never see clergy in the same light ever again ..." Source

The festivities of the Faunalia continued on this day, ancient Rome

Egyptian day (dies egypticus, dies ægypticus or dies mala), unlucky day in Medieval Europe. ("But, notwithstanding, I will trust the Lord" was the associated saying.)

Advent (Nov 30 - Dec 25), season of the coming of Jesus Christ

Feast day of St Humbert

Feast day of St Mary Joseph Rosello

Feast day of St Victor of Piacenza

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Hari Kugo; Daitosai, or Good-Luck Market, Omiya, Japan (Nov 30 - Dec 11)

Iyomante Matsuri, Kutcharo, Japan (Dec 1 - 15)

Pearl Harbor Day, USA (observance)

521 St Columba, Irish abbot, 'apostle to the Picts'

About the time that St Patrick was taken to Ireland as a slave, Columba was born. It was in the heart of the so called Dark Ages, the 6^th Century, when Irish colonists and invaders, the Scots, began migrating to Caledonia (later known as Scotland).

Columba (Columkill; Colmcille; Colum; Columbus; Columcille; Columkill; Combs; December 7, 521 - June 9, 597, his feast day) was an Irish missionary who helped re-introduce Christianity to Scotland and the north of England. He was born in Donegal to Irish royalty, the son of Fedhlimidh and Eithne of the Ui Neill clan.

Columba was a poet, who had learned Irish history and poetry from a bard named Gemman. Tradition has it that, sometime around 560, he became involved in a copyright wrangle with St Finnian over a psalter. The dispute eventually led to a pitched battle in 561 during which many men were killed. (Columba's copy of the psalter has been traditionally associated with the Cathach of St Columba.) It is said that on one occasion, so anxious was Columba to have a copy of the Psalter that he shut himself up for a whole night in the church that contained it, transcribing it laboriously by hand. He was discovered by a monk who watched him through the keyhole and reported it to his superior, Finnian of Moville. The Scriptures were so scarce in those days that the abbot claimed the copy, refusing to allow it to leave the monastery. Columba refused to surrender it, until he was obliged to do so, under protest, on the abbot's appeal to the High King Diarmaid, who said: "Le gach buin a laogh" or "To every cow her own calf", meaning to every book its copy.

As penance for these deaths, Columba was ordered to make the same number of new converts as had been killed. Exiled in 563 to the island of Iona off the west coast of Scotland, he founded and led a monastery there for 12 years, which became the centre of his evangelizing mission to Scotland. They built a monastery consisting of huts with roofs of branches set upon wooden props, a rough and primitive settlement. For over 30 years, he slept on the hard ground with no pillow but a stone. He and the monks of Iona, including St Baithen of Iona and Saint Eochod, then evangelized the Picts.

There are many stories of miracles that Columba performed during his mission to convert the Picts. He made water from wine; made water issue from a rock; calmed a storm at sea; provided a miraculous catch of fish; multiplied a herd of cattle; drove a demon out of a milk pail; and cured the sick. A book owned by the saint could not be destroyed by water; through his prayers he destroyed a wild boar; he stopped serpents from harming people; angels and manifestations of divine light attended him throughout his life.

Columba and Nessie

Columba is also the source of the first known reference to the Loch Ness Monster. According to the story, in 565, he came across a group of Picts who were burying a man killed by the monster, and brought the man back to life. In another version, he is said to have saved the man while the man was being attacked, driving away the monster with the sign of the cross ...

Read on at the Saint Columba page at the Scriptorium

1598 Gian Lorenzo Bernini (d. 1680), Italian baroque sculptor and architect who designed the colonnade at St Peter's in Rome. The bulk of Benini's work is in St Peter's. From 1623, until his death in 1680, most of Bernini's time was spent embellishing the basilica. Eminently a sculptor, he was also an architect, painter, draftsman, designer of stage sets, fireworks displays, and funeral trappings.

1637 Bernardo Pasquini (d. 1710), composer

1670 John Aislabie (d. 1742), director of the South Sea Company

1784 Allan Cunningham (d. 1842), Scottish poet

1801 Johann Nestroy (d. 1862), dramatist and actor

1810 Theodor Schwann, German physiologist, co-originator of the theory of the cell and the first to use the term

1847 George Grossmith (d. 1912), English actor and comic writer, best remembered for his work with Gilbert & Sullivan

1860 Sir Joseph Cook (d. 1947), 6^th Prime Minister of Australia

1863 Pietro Mascagni (d. 1945), composer

1863 Richard Sears (d. 1914), department store founder

1873 Willa Cather, (d. 1947) novelist

1879 Rudolf Friml, (d. 1972) American composer

1887 Ernst Toch (d. 1964), composer

1888 Joyce Cary (Arthur Joyce Lunel Cary; d. 1957), Irish novelist (Famous trilogy: Herself Surprised; To Be a Pilgrim; The Horse's Mouth)

1888 Hamilton Fish (d. 1991), American politician

1903 Danilo Blanusa (d. 1987), Croatian mathematician

1905 Gerard Kuiper (d. 1973), astronomer

1910 Louis Prima (d. 1978), musician

1912 Daniel Jones, composer

1915 Eli Wallach, Hollywood actor (The Magnificent Seven; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly)

1924 Mário Soares, President of Portugal 1986 - 96

1927 Helen Watts, Welsh contralto

1928 Noam Chomsky, linguist, anarchist, social critic, activist. He is a critic in the manner of the great IF Stone – and just as ignored and vilified by the establishment.

Chomsky learned a lot about linguistics from his father, William. Among his many accomplishments Chomsky is most famous for his work on generative grammar, which he developed from his interest in modern logic and mathematical foundations.

He was always interested in politics, and politics brought him into the linguistics field. His political tendencies result from "the radical Jewish community in New York".

Since 1965, Chomsky has become one of the leading critics of US foreign policy. He has many books and essays published arguing against American involvement in Vietnam, Latin America and Indonesia's political involvement in East Timor.

Chomsky has many contributions to anarchism, constantly stressing that we are all capable of become more aware of what is fundamentally right and wrong, and that life itself is bigger and brighter than passively consuming state led propaganda and mis-information.

Source: The Daily Bleed More And more

1932 Ellen Burstyn, American actress (The Last Picture Show; Oscar: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore)

1934 Gordon Parks Jr (d. 1979), director

1942 Harry Chapin (d. 1981), musician

1942 Peter Tomarken, game show host

1944 Daniel Chorzempa, organist

1945 Marion Rung, Finnish singer

1947 Sasha Soldatow (d. August 30, 2006), Russian-born Australian writer, editor and activist. He edited the works of Australian poet and philosopher, Harry Hooton. In the week or two before his death, Sasha offered to edit my just-completed novel, Faces in the Street, at no charge. His generosity was widely known. A good bloke, and a remarkable one.

"Sasha Soldatow was born in Plochingen, Germany of Russian parents. A speaker of Russian, he has worked as a freelance journalist and a translator of Russian for SBS Television. As well as writing and presenting performance poetry, he has been involved in filmscript editing, the production and direction of videos and acting in theatre productions. He has also exhibited, between 1974 and 1987, in the visual arts. In 1985 he won the C. H. Currey Memorial Fellowship for research on Harry Hooton." Source
"He was also a forerunner in the gay liberation movement, often in unexpected ways. His cabaret performances were steeped in libertarianism, cheek and political incorrectness. When the rest of fashionably leftist Sydney was busy discovering itself, Sash turned up at one party with a copy of their latest, very serious hero Althusser's book on a leash like some sort of pet puppy.

"He did a lot of voluntary work, some of it in prisons, and worked as a sub-titler for SBS, sometimes coming to work with a bottle of vodka. But mostly he survived on little money, enraged into legal action against the Australia Council questioning its grant procedures ...
"'Don't just be ordinary, be extraordinary,' he demanded of those around him. Always! 'And always demand honesty from people! The truth is everything.'" Source

Obituary 1 Obituary 2

1948 Gary Morris, American c ountry music singer and actor

1949 Tom Waits, singer, composer, actor

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1966 C Thomas Howell, actor

1971 Chasey Lain, erotic actress

1987 Aaron Carter, singer

2003 Princess Catharina-Amalia of the Netherlands

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43 BCE The greatest Roman orator, Marcus Tullius Cicero (b. 106 BCE) was executed (his head and hands were amputated) for his Philippics, a series of speeches attacking Mark Antony (83 BCE - 30 BCE) and calling for a restoration of the Republic.

The execution took place at Formiae by order of Mark Antony, who ordered that the great statesman's hands and head be displayed on the rostra in the Roman forum. Cicero is generally considered the greatest Latin prose stylist.

283 Death of St Eutychian, Pope.

430 At the Synod of Rome, Cyril of Alexandria (376 - June 27, 444) formally condemned the Nestorian heresy, based on the teachings of the Antiochene monk Nestorius, who had claimed that there were two separate Persons in the Incarnate Christ (one Divine, the other Human).

St Cyril has his feast in the Western Church on June 27; in the Greek Menaea it is found on June 9, and (together with St Athanasius) on January 18.

983 Death of Otho II, called the Red, Holy Roman Emperor, the third ruler of the Saxon or Ottonian dynasty, the son of Otto I (Otto the Great) and St Adelaide of Italy.

1254 Death of Pope Innocent IV.

1539 In a remarkable display of the ability of power to corrupt doctrine, Reformers Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon gave special dispensation to Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, to commit bigamy, as long as he did so in secret.

1724 Tumult of Thorn: religious unrest followed by the execution of nine Protestant citizens and the mayor of Thorn (Toruń) by Polish authorities.

1732 The Royal [Italian] Opera House opened at Covent Garden, London, with a performance of The Beggar's Opera, by John Gay who had died just three days earlier.

1783 William Pitt, the Younger, became prime minister of England at only 24 years of age.

1787 Delaware becomes the first state to ratify the United States Constitution.

1815 Michel Ney, Marshal of France, was executed by firing squad, after having been convicted of treason by the Bourbon Restoration government of Louis XVIII for his support of Napoleon Bonaparte during the Hundred Days.

1817 William Bligh, British naval officer, died in London, after an eventful life that included being mutinied against on the Bounty, and again in New South Wales where he was governor.

1872 A strange occurrence at Banbury (Great Britain).

"Nature, 7-112: That, according to a correspondent to the Birmingham Morning News, the people living near King's Sutton, Banbury, saw, about one o'clock, Dec. 7, 1872, something like a haycock hurtling through the air. Like a meteor it was accompanied by fire and a dense smoke and made a noise like a railway train. 'It was sometimes high in the air and sometimes near the ground.' The effect was tornado-like: trees and walls were knocked down. It's a late day now to try to verify this story, but a list is given of persons whose property was injured. We are told that this thing then disappeared 'all at once.'"
The Complete Books of Charles Fort. New York: Dover, 1974, p.237

Source

1893 Spain: A special unit of the Guardia Civil was created for the repression of Spanish anarchists.

1894 Death of Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps (b. 1805), French diplomat and engineer responsible for the Suez Canal.

1902 Thomas Nast, American political cartoonist died, Guayaquil, Ecuador.

Comix, comics and cartoons in the Book of Days

1909 Bakelite was patented by Leo Baekeland, giving birth to the modern plastics industry.

1912 USA: Gala celebration of anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin's 70^th birthday in New York City, cosponsored by the progressive journals Freie Arbeiter Stimme and Mother Earth; pioneer anarcho-feminist and founder of Mother Earth, Emma Goldman, was a featured speaker.

Early progressives in the Book of Days CounterCulture Wiki More

1917 USA President Woodrow Wilson declared war on Austria.

1926 The inaugural meeting of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (now called Campaign to Protect Rural England).

1927 Waterside workers ended an Australia-wide strike that tied up all shipping.

1929 US author Hart Crane gave a party for his publishers Harry and Caresse Crosby (Black Sun Press); William Carlos Williams, Malcolm Cowley, e e cummings, and a group of drunken sailors attended. Crosby, 31, killed himself and his mistress, Josephine Bigelow, three days later.

1931 USA: President Herbert Hoover refused to see a group of 'hunger marchers' at the White House.

1934 American pilot, Wiley Post, discovered that a jet stream of air current exists over the USA.

1941 The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor officially brought the United States into World War II.

Three hundred and fifty aircraft destroyed most of the US Pacific fleet. Despite an official warning that an attack might be imminent, US commanders seem to have been taken completely by surprise. Nineteen US ships were sunk or severely damaged and 150 US planes destroyed. We hear about this often; less frequently do we hear that 2,335 people were killed.

On November 17, 1941, Joseph Grew, the United States ambassador to Japan, cabled the State Department that Japan had plans to launch an attack against Pearl Harbor. His cable was ignored. Day Of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, by Robert Stinnett, asserts that the US Government under President Franklin D Roosevelt had foreknowledge of the attack. The advance-knowledge debate still runs strong.

"Although negotiations between the two nations continued up to the very last minute, Roosevelt was aware of a secret November 25 deadline, established by Tokyo, that confirmed military action on the part of the Japanese should they not received satisfaction from the negotiations. While forewarned, Washington could not pinpoint the time or place of an attack." Source

1949 Chinese Civil War: The government of the Republic of China moved from Nanking to Taipei.

1949 The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions was founded, London, UK.

1963 Oldies might remember The Singing Nun. Her record 'Dominique' hit Number 1 in the USA on this date. The following year she left the convent and recorded a timeless gem under the name Luc Dominique, 'Glory Be to God for The Golden Pill', a paean to contraception. Even most oldies won't remember that one.

1964 Later-Yippie Abbie Hoffman registered for the draft. He was not accepted into service due to bronchial asthma and defective vision.

1965 Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras simultaneously lifted mutual excommunications that had been in place since 1054. On January 4, 1964, they had met in Jerusalem.

1967 American singer Otis Redding recorded his signature tune, '(Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay'. Three days later he was killed in a plane crash.

1967 The Beatles opened their Apple Boutique in Baker St, London.

Wilson's Almanac Book of Days hip list

1968 USA: Richard Dodd returned to the Medical Library of the University of Cincinatti, Ohio, a a library book that his great-grandfather had borrowed in 1823. The $22,646 fine for the book on diseases went unpaid.

1970 Death of improbable machine-designing cartoonist, Rube Goldberg (b. 1883), something of an American William Heath Robinson; New York City, USA.

1972 Apollo 17, the last Apollo moon mission, was launched.

1975 Indonesia invaded East Timor. With US, Australian and British complicity, the dictatorship of Indonesia invaded and annexed the small state just north of Australia, overthrowing the popularly elected government. Genocide occurred (200,000 probably killed, an estimated one-third of the East Timorese population) but almost no attention was paid in most Western media for many years.

Indonesian invasion of East Timor Amnesty International and East Timor Chomsky on Timor

Gendercide Watch. Case Study: East Timor (1975-'99)

War, Genocide, and Resistance in East Timor, 1975–99: Comparative Reflections on Cambodia

1975 USA: In his campaign to free boxer Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter from prison, Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue performed a show at the Correctional Institution For Women at Clinton, NJ, where Carter was temporarily imprisoned.

1977 The USA FBI finally released certain JFK assassination files due to requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

1982 The first US execution by lethal injection was carried out. Charles Brooks, Jr was killed by the State (of Texass).

1982 An IRA bomb exploded in an Ulster disco.

1985 Robert Graves (b. 1895), English poet, novelist (I, Claudius; IV Claudius; Claudius the God), mythographer, critic and historian, died in Deya, Mallorca, Spain. Graves wrote more than 140 works.

In 1946, Graves re-established a home in Deya, and he married Beryl Hodge in 1950, and went on to a series of affairs and lesser amours with his 'muses'.

In 1948, he published the controversial The White Goddess in which he explored and expounded upon a central theme: that "true poetry" or "pure poetry" has inextricable links with the ancient cult-ritual of the White Goddess and of her Son and deals with goddess worship as the prototypical religion. In 1961, he became Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, a post he held until 1966.

Seymour-Smith, M, Robert Graves: His Life and Work

Future Poet
One day when he was four years old, Robert Graves casually asked his mother whether she planned to leave him any money when she died. "If you left me as much as five pounds," he observed, "I could buy a bicycle."

"Surely you'd rather have me, Robby," she protested. The future poet agreed. "But," he added, "I could ride to your grave on a bicycle."
Source: M Seymour-Smith, Robert Graves: His Life and Work, via Anecdotage

1988 In Armenia, an earthquake measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale killed nearly 25,000, injured 15,000 and left 400,000 people homeless.

"In the Soviet Union, an earthquake of a 6.9 magnitude on the Richter scale hits northwestern Armenia, affecting an area eighty kilometers in diameter. Four minutes later, the initial earthquake is followed by a powerful 5.8 magnitude aftershock. More than twenty towns and 342 villages are affected, and fifty-eight of them are heavily damaged. Spitak, a major population center, was almost totally destroyed. The earthquake killed more than 25,000 people, injured at least 15,000, and left at least 400,000 Armenians homeless. Direct economic losses are estimated at fourteen billion dollars." Source

1988 Yasser Arafat recognized the right of Israel to exist.

1988 President Mikhail Gorbachev announced the cutting of Soviet military strength by ten per cent over the next two years.

1988 Nelson Mandela was moved to a luxury home in the grounds of Pollsmoor Prison, South Africa.

1989 A revolt in the Philippines ended as 400 rebel troops gave up their siege of central Manila.

1989 At the University of Montreal, a gunman massacred 14 women before turning his gun on himself.

1991 Yugoslavian forces destroyed Dubrovnik's historic Old Town.

1992 The destruction of a 16^th-Century mosque by militant Hindus ignited five days of violence across India that left more than 1,100 people dead.

1993 USA: Energy Secretary, Hazel O'Leary, revealed that the United States Government had conducted 204 underground nuclear tests from 1963 to 1990 without even informing the American people, who had voted them in. The deadly blasts, more than one-fifth of total US tests, were conducted at its Nevada test site, to keep the Soviet Union in the dark about the United States arsenal.

1993 The South Africa transitional executive council was established.

1993 A gunperson opened fire on a crowded Long Island, NY, USA, commuter train, killing several persons.

1993 US astronauts aboard the shuttle Endeavour fixed the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope.

1993 Guns N' Roses announced they would keep the Charles Manson-penned tune, 'Look at Your Game, Girl' on their album, The Spaghetti Incident?. They decided to kept it on after they learned that the royalties from the song would go to the son of one of Manson's victims.

1993 Four Plowshares activists were arrested for disarming an F-15E Strike Eagle nuclear war jet at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, North Carolina, USA.

2002 "At the Ethiopian government's Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Commission's emergency appeal, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi tells diplomats and UN officials that, in his country, there is a 'chronic, predictable underlying structural problem that needs to be addressed' and he appeals for help to feed the 11.3 million of the 62 million Ethiopians who face severe food shortages. Ethiopia, with an average annual income of $108, is one of the world's 10 poorest countries and is regularly beset by serious food shortages. Between 1984 and 1985 famine devastated the nation, and in 2000 an estimated 10 million persons needed food aid. In 'normal' years some four million Ethiopians need food aid to survive. Ethiopia is also still trying to overcome the effects of a 2 1/2-year border war with Eritrea which ended in December 2000. Worse-than-usual harvests in 2002 have accentuated the problem. In 2002, throughout Africa more than 30 million persons are in danger of severe malnutrition or starvation because of food shortages caused by drought, poor management and corruption." Source

2002 Father William Gulas, OFM, 68, was shot in the chest and hit on the head by Franciscan novice brother Daniel Montgomery, 37, who then set fire to the rectory of St Stanislaus Catholic church in Cleveland, where Montgomery was an assistant. Gulas died in the attack.

Tomorrow: John Lennon shot dead

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