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539 BCE Babylon fell to Cyrus the Great of Persia.

437 Valentinian III, Western Roman Emperor, married Eudoxia, daughter of his cousin Theodosius II, Eastern Roman Emperor in Constantinople. This unified the two branches of the House of Theodosius.

969 Byzantines troops occupied Antioch, Syria.

1061 Peter Cadalus (d. 1072), the Bishop of Parma,  was elected Pope (actually, Antipope) Honorius II.

1138 Death of Bolesław III Kryzwousty, (Scheefmond), duke of Poland.

1422 Charles VII of France became king in succession to his father Charles VI of France. Charles VI (Charles the Well Beloved, or Charles the Mad) probably suffered from schizophrenia. At times he forgot he was king; he also heard voices and was known to physically assault even his closest supporters.

1467 Battle of Brusthem: Charles the Bold defeated Liege.

1618 London, England: In the Old Palace Yard of Westminster, just by the Tower of London where he had been held, English adventurer, writer, and courtier Sir Walter Raleigh was executed by beheading. His crime: an alleged conspiracy against James I of England.

In 1595, Raleigh had sailed up the Orinoco River, and, in 1617, he was released from prison in England in order to explore the Guianas, all in search of El Dorado, the legendary South American 'Golden Man', who was supposed to rule a civilization fabulously wealthy in gold. Unfortunately, his failure to set up Guiana for English exploitation did his cause no good at home, and he paid with his life.

At his execution Raleigh requested to see the axe that was to do him in and remarked, "This is a sharp Medicine, but it is a Physician for all Diseases".

"As was common at the time, his head was embalmed and presented to his wife. She apparently carried it with her at all times until she died 29 years later at the age of 82."   Source

More    Yea, verily, more

1675 Gottfried Leibniz made the first use of the long s, ∫, for the mathematical term 'integral'.

1712 "Settlers in Portsmouth, New Hampshire hold a conference to advise belligerent Indians that 'Queen Anne's War' is over, and the fighting should stop. It would take almost 9 months before a local treaty would be signed."   Source

1783 Death of Jean le Rond d'Alembert (b. 1717), French mathematician, mechanician, physicist, philosopher and encyclopædist.

1787 Mozart's opera Don Giovanni received its first performance in Prague.

1792 Mt Hood (Oregon, USA) was named after the British naval officer Alexander Arthur Hood by Lt William E Broughton who spotted the mountain near the mouth of the Willamette River.

1832 "Today, the PIANKASHAW, and WEA Indians will conclude a treaty at Castor Hill, William Clark's home. They will receive land in Kansas, in exchange for their lands in Illinois, and Missouri."   Source

1858 Australia: Telegraphic communication was completed between Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.

1863 Sixteen countries meeting in Geneva agreed to form the International Red Cross.

1863 American Civil War: Battle of Wauhatchie – Forces under Union General Ulysses S Grant warded off a Confederate attack led by General James Longstreet. Union forces thus opened a supply line into Chattanooga, Tennessee.

1877 Death of Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate general and leader of the Ku Klux Klan.  

1880 In Melbourne, Australia, Judge Sir Redmond Barry sentenced bushranger and folk hero Ned Kelly to hanging; the execution took place on November 11.

Gang leader Kelly was captured at Glenrowan at dawn on June 28, 1880, sentenced to death by Sir Redmond Barry on October 29, and hanged in Melbourne on November 11, 1880 (qv).

Ned Kelly    Kelly's 'Jerilderie Letter'    Ned Kelly's trial    Shop Bushrangers    Capt. Thunderbolt

Ned Kelly's Last Stand, in the Scriptorium    Text of 'The Jerilderie Letter' at Wikisource

Highwaymen, outlaws, bushrangers, pirates, gangsters, etc in the Book of Days

1889 Hawaii, USA: Katsu Goto was lynched. A prominent merchant and interpreter, Goto was killed by those who didn't like the advocacy work he performed on behalf of Japanese plantation workers.

1901 USA: In Amherst, Massachusetts nurse Jane Toppan was arrested for murdering the Davis family of Boston with an overdose of morphine.

1901 Capital punishment: Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated US President William McKinley, was executed by electrocution.

1902 The Dinwiddle Quartet from Virginia became the first African-American singing group on record when they recorded six single-sided discs, including Down at the Old Camp Ground, on the Victory Talking Machine Company's Monarch label.

1914 Prince Louis Alexander of Battenburg (1854 - 1921), First Sea Lord of Britain, was forced to resign because of his German ancestry.

1923 Turkey became a republic following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.

1927 Russian archaeologist Peter Kozlov discovered the tomb of Genghis Khan. Today in Mongolia, for Chinese propaganda purposes, there is a modern ersatz 'tomb'.

Shop Archaeology

1929 Great Depression began: Black Tuesday – The New York Stock Exchange crash deepened after four days, ushering in what would become a world-wide economic crisis.

"Black Tuesday hits Wall Street as investors trade 16,410,030 shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. Billions of dollars were lost, wiping out thousands of investors, and stock tickers ran hours behind because the machinery could not handle the tremendous volume of trading. In the aftermath of Black Tuesday, America and the rest of the industrialized world spiraled downward into the Great Depression.

"During the 1920s, the U.S. stock market underwent rapid expansion, reaching its peak in August 1929, a period of wild speculation. By then, production had already declined and unemployment had risen, leaving stocks in great excess of their real value. Among the other causes of the eventual market collapse were low wages, the proliferation of debt, a weak agriculture, and an excess of large bank loans that could not be liquidated.

"Stock prices began to decline in September and early October 1929, and on October 18 the fall began. Panic set in, and on October 24--Black Thursday--a record 12,894,650 shares were traded. Investment companies and leading bankers attempted to stabilize the market by buying up great blocks of stock, producing a moderate rally on Friday. On Monday, however, the storm broke anew, and the market went into free fall. Black Monday was followed by Black Tuesday, in which stock prices collapsed completely.

"After October 29, 1929, stock prices had nowhere to go but up, so there was considerable recovery during succeeding weeks. Overall, however, prices continued to drop as the United States slumped into the Great Depression, and by 1932 stocks were worth only about 20 percent of their value in the summer of 1929. The stock market crash of 1929 was not the sole cause of the Great Depression, but it did act to accelerate the global economic collapse of which it was also a symptom. By 1933, nearly half of America's banks had failed, and unemployment was approaching 15 million people, or 30 percent of the workforce. It would take World War II, and the massive level of armaments production taken on by the United States, to finally bring the country out of the Depression after a decade of suffering."   Source

Read the contemporary NY Times front-page report

1940 Sathya Sai Baba, Indian guru who claims, among other things, to be able to manifest objects by paranormal means, made an important career move.

"On October 29, 1940, at the age of 14, he declared to his family and to the people of his village that he would henceforth by [sic] known as Sai Baba and that his mission was to bring about the spiritual regeneration of humanity by demonstrating and teaching the highest principles of truth, righteous conduct, peace, and divine love."   Source

1942 Holocaust: In the United Kingdom, leading clergymen and political figures held a public meeting to register outrage over Nazi Germany's persecution of Jews.

1944 Breda in the Netherlands was liberated by 1st Polish Armoured Division

1945 Getulio Vargas, president of Brazil, resigned.

1945 At Gimbel's Department Store in New York City, the first ballpoint pens went on sale (price: $12.50 each).

1947 USA: An early attempt to trigger rain with dry ice.

"Flying in a specially outfitted aircraft, Vincent Schaefer of the General Electric Company drops small dry-ice pellets into cumulus clouds over a forest fire near Concord, Massachusetts, in an attempt to produce artificial precipitation and douse the flames. Shortly after Schaefer lands, a rain does indeed begin to fall over the area, but because of simultaneous rainfall from unseeded clouds nearby, it is impossible to determine how successful the experiment had been. Nevertheless, the forest fire is extinguished and Schaefer, who had succeeded in producing snow in a cold chamber in 1946 and performed his first dry-ice tests over Massachusetts in the same year, is encouraged to continue his work in the field of artificial weather."   Source

1948 The Safsaf massacre occurred when Israeli brigades captured the village of Safsaf.

1955 The Soviet battleship Novorossiisk struck a World War II mine in the harbor at Sevastopol.

1956 Suez Crisis began: Israel invaded the Sinai Peninsula and pushed Egyptian forces back towards the Suez Canal.

1956 The Tangier Protocol was signed: The international city Tangier was reintegrated into Morocco.

1958 Russian author, Boris Pasternak, under intense pressure from the Soviet government and press, wired the Swedish Royal Academy his "voluntary refusal" of the Nobel Prize in Literature. One of his crimes was to have written – in his novel, Dr Zhivago – too sympathetically of the anarchists, and not kindly enough of the Bolsheviks.

'Nobel Prize'

By Boris Pasternak, 1959

Like a beast in a pen, I'm cut off
From my friends, freedom, the sun,
But the hunters are gaining ground.
I've nowhere else to run. 

Dark wood and the bank of a pond,
Trunk of a fallen tree.
There's no way forward, no way back.
It's all up with me. 

Am I a gangster or murderer?
Of what crime do I stand
Condemned? I made the whole world weep
At the beauty of my land. 

Even so, one step from my grave,
I believe that cruelty, spite,
The powers of darkness will in time
Be crushed by the spirit of light. 

The beaters in a ring close in
With the wrong prey in view,
I've nobody at my right hand,
Nobody faithful and true. 

And with such a noose on my throat
I should like for one second
My tears to be wiped away
By someone at my right hand. 

 

Shop Pasternak    Was Pasternak starved to death by the Communists?

International PEN protects human rights for writers

International PEN was founded in London in 1921 by Mrs CA Dawson Scott. Its first president was John Galsworthy. The only worldwide association of writers, its aims are to: 

1.   Promote intellectual co-operation and understanding among writers. 

2.   Create a world community of writers that would emphasize the central role of literature in the  development of world culture. 

3.   Defend literature against the many threats to its survival which the modern world poses.

1964 A collection of irreplaceable gems, including the world's largest sapphire, the 565-carat (113-g) Star of India, was stolen from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The thieves were caught and most of the jewels recovered, including the famed sapphire.

1964 Tanganyika and Zanzibar became a single political entity, Tanzania.

1966 USA: Founding of the National Organization of Women.

1969 The first computer-to-computer link was established on ARPANET.

1971 Vietnam War: Vietnamization – The total number of American troops still in Vietnam dropped to a record low of 196,700 (the lowest level since January 1966).

1982 Lindy Chamberlain was convicted of murdering her baby daughter, Azaria, at Uluru (Ayers Rock), Central Australia, and her husband Michael was found guilty of being an accessory after the fact. On June 2, 1987, they were exonerated. The Chamberlain story became the basis of the movie, Evil Angels, released in some places as A Cry in the Dark.

The story involved some very poorly conducted forensic blood tests – on a substance that later proved to be not blood at all, but a spray-on material used in the normal manufacture of a car. Lindy Chamberlain and her husband Michael survived years of assault by media and the law. Despite the weakness and outlandishness of the case against them, and perhaps due to a tabloid media witchhunt, a considerable number of Australians believed Lindy and Michael Chamberlain guilty.

"A search of the Chamberlain's car produced what appeared to be the blood of an infant on the seats and on a pair of scissors in the vehicle.  After that, the Chamberlains were arrested and tried for the murder of their baby daughter. They insisted they were innocent, but the evidence appeared to say otherwise. Lindy was convicted of murder and Michael was declared an accessory to the crime. Lindy went to prison."   Source

1983 'Dangers of Genetic Manipulation', a speech to the United Nations by Pope John Paul II.

1985 Major General Samuel K Doe was announced the winner of the first multiparty election in Liberia.

1988 In Japan, the Sega Megadrive was released for the first time.

1991 The American Galileo spacecraft made its closest approach to 951 Gaspra, becoming the first probe to visit an asteroid.

1992 The Food and Drug Administration approved Depo Provera for use as a contraceptive in the United States.

1994 Francisco Martin Duran fired more than two dozen shots at the White House. Duran was later convicted of trying to kill US President Bill Clinton.

1998 Apartheid: In South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission presented its report, which condemned both sides for committing atrocities.

1998 Space Shuttle Discovery blasted off with 77-year old John Glenn on board, making him the oldest person to go into space. He was the first American to orbit Earth, on February 20, 1962.

1998 While en route from Adana to Ankara, a Turkish Airlines flight with a crew of 6 and 33 passengers was hijacked by a Kurdish militant who ordered the pilot to fly to Switzerland. The plane instead landed in Ankara after the pilot tricked the hijacking into thinking that he was landing in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia to refuel.

1998 USA: In Freehold, New Jersey, Melissa Drexler pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter for killing her baby moments after delivering him in the bathroom at her senior prom; Drexler was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment.

1998 Hurricane Mitch made landfall in Honduras.

2002 Some 2,000 to 3,000 caribou were detected to have crossed the Yukon River into Canada, the first such crossing by the endangered mammals since 1973.

 
Copyright-free toons

Iraq: 100,000 dead since coalition invasion

2004 The prestigious international medical science journal, The Lancet, published a scientific paper that estimated the number of people killed as a result of the invasion of Iraq in March the previous year, to be about 100,000. (By September, 2007, a figure of 1,200,000 was proposed for the number of people who had met violent deaths in Iraq since the illegal invasion.)

The paper said "Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths."

Clare Short, the former British cabinet minister who resigned over the war, said: "It is really horrifying. When will Tony Blair stop saying it is all beneficial for the Iraqi people since Saddam Hussein has gone? How many more lives are to be taken? It is no wonder, given this tragic death toll, that the resistance to the occupation is growing.

"We have all relied on Iraqi body counts from media reports. That is clearly an under-estimate and this shows that it was a very big under-estimate. It is truly dreadful. Tony Blair talks simplistically about it getting better in Iraq. These figures prove it is just an illusion."

More    Myths of the War on Terrorism and Iraq    

2004 In Rome, European heads of state signed the Treaty and Final Act establishing the first European Constitution.

Tomorrow: The Pope's chestnut orgy

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