KWSN Orbiting Fortress

[Duke of Buckingham [TeaM]]

Nov 14, 1851:
Moby-Dick published

On this day in 1851, Moby-Dick, a novel by Herman Melville about the voyage of the whaling ship Pequod, is published by Harper & Brothers in New York. Moby-Dick is now considered a great classic of American literature and contains one of the most famous opening lines in fiction: "Call me Ishmael." Initially, though, the book about Captain Ahab and his quest for a giant white whale was a flop.

Herman Melville was born in New York City in 1819 and as a young man spent time in the merchant marines, the U.S. Navy and on a whaling ship in the South Seas. In 1846, he published his first novel, Typee, a romantic adventure based on his experiences in Polynesia. The book was a success and a sequel, Omoo, was published in 1847. Three more novels followed, with mixed critical and commercial results. Melville's sixth book, Moby-Dick, was first published in October 1851 in London, in three volumes titled The Whale, and then in the U.S. a month later. Melville had promised his publisher an adventure story similar to his popular earlier works, but instead, Moby-Dick was a tragic epic, influenced in part by Melville's friend and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose novels include The Scarlet Letter.

After Moby-Dick's disappointing reception, Melville continued to produce novels, short stories (Bartleby) and poetry, but writing wasn't paying the bills so in 1865 he returned to New York to work as a customs inspector, a job he held for 20 years.

Melville died in 1891, largely forgotten by the literary world. By the 1920s, scholars had rediscovered his work, particularly Moby-Dick, which would eventually become a staple of high school reading lists across the United States. Billy Budd, Melville's final novel, was published in 1924, 33 years after his death.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TQhdqTaL_NY/TsEBuzm4nvI/AAAAAAAAAWY/J_SwBy_6xck/s1600/Moby-Dick-3.jpg


Nov 14, 1776:
Benjamin Franklin takes sides

On this day in 1776, the St. James Chronicle of London carries an item announcing "The very identical Dr. Franklyn [Benjamin Franklin], whom Lord Chatham [former leading parliamentarian and colonial supporter William Pitt] so much caressed, and used to say he was proud in calling his friend, is now at the head of the rebellion in North America."

Benjamin Franklin, joint postmaster general of the colonies (1753-1774), and his son William traveled to London together in 1757. There, for the next five years, William studied law, and Franklin studied social climbing. They had remarkable success for a candle-maker's son and his illegitimate progeny. By the end of their sojourn, William had become an attorney and received an honorary Master of Arts from Oxford University, while his father reveled in honorary doctorates from Oxford and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. The elder Franklin's plans for his son's advancement succeeded, and his son won the choicest of appointments, a royal governorship, in 1762.

Franklin then accompanied his son from London to Pennsylvania, only to return to London as Pennsylvania's agent in 1764, where he lobbied for the placement of the colony under direct royal control. He soon added Georgia, New Jersey and Massachusetts to the list of colonies for which he served as spokesperson in Parliament.

In 1775, Franklin returned to America as the American Revolution approached; he served as a delegate to the Continental Congress and, in 1776, signed the Declaration of Independence. Ironically, his son William came out on the side of the British during the War of Independence and was imprisoned while serving as the Loyalist governor of New Jersey.



Nov 14, 2006:
Last day for Texas' celebrated drive-in Pig Stands

On November 14, 2006, state officials close the last two of Texas' famed Pig Stand restaurants, the only remaining pieces of the nation's first drive-in restaurant empire. The restaurants' owners were bankrupt, and they owed the Texas comptroller more than $200,000 in unpaid sales taxes.

A Dallas entrepreneur named Jessie G. Kirby built the first Pig Stand along the Dallas-Fort Worth Highway in October 1921. It was a roadside barbecue restaurant unlike any other: Its patrons could drive up, eat and leave, all without budging from their automobiles. ("People with cars are so lazy," Kirby explained, "they don't want to get out of them.") Kirby lured these car-attached customers with great fanfare and spectacle. When a customer pulled into the Pig Stand parking lot, teenaged boys in white shirts and black bow ties jogged over to his car, hopped up onto the running board—sometimes before the driver had even pulled into a parking space—and took his order. (This daredevilry won the servers a nickname: carhops.) Soon, the Pig Stand drive-ins replaced the carhops with attractive young girls on roller skates, but the basic formula was the same: good-looking young people, tasty food, speedy service and auto-based convenience.

That first Pig Stand was a hit with hungry drivers, and soon it became a chain. (The slogan: "America's Motor Lunch.") Kirby and his partners made one of the first franchising arrangements in restaurant history, and Pig Stands began cropping up everywhere. By 1934, there were more than 130 Pig Stands in nine states. (Most were in California and Florida.) Meanwhile, the chain kept innovating. Many people say that California's Pig Stand No. 21 became the first drive through restaurant in the world in 1931, and food historians believe that Pig Stand cooks invented deep-fried onion rings, chicken-fried steak sandwiches and a regional specialty known as Texas Toast.

But wartime gasoline and food rationing hit the Pig Stands hard, and after the war they struggled to compete with newer, flashier drive-ins. By the end of the 1950s, all of the franchises outside of Texas had closed. By 2005, even the Texas Pig Stands were struggling to survive—only six remained in the whole state—and by the next year they had all disappeared.

In 2007, state bankruptcy trustees found a way for one Pig Stand, in San Antonio, to reopen. Though it will probably never be as popular as it once was, and customers now have to get out of their cars and go inside to eat, the restaurant remains a sentimental favorite of many Texans.
[IMG]http://www.pedaltothemetal.com/index.php?ct=news&action=file&id=3114[/IMG]


Nov 14, 1951:
United States gives military and economic aid to communist Yugoslavia
In a surprising turn of events, President Harry Truman asks Congress for U.S. military and economic aid for the communist nation of Yugoslavia. The action was part of the U.S. policy to drive a deeper wedge between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.

Yugoslavia ended World War II with the communist forces of Josip Broz Tito in control. The United States supported him during the war when his group battled against the Nazi occupation. In the postwar period, as Cold War hostilities set in, U.S. policy toward Yugoslavia hardened. Tito was viewed as simply another tool of Soviet expansion into eastern and southern Europe. In 1948, however, Tito openly broke with Stalin, though he continued to proclaim his allegiance to the communist ideology. Henceforth, he declared, Yugoslavia would determine and direct its own domestic and foreign policies without interference from the Soviet Union.

U.S. officials quickly saw a propaganda opportunity in the fallout between the former communist allies. Although Tito was a communist, he was at least an independent communist who might prove a useful ally in Europe. To curry favor with Tito, the United States supported Yugoslavia's efforts in 1949 to gain a seat on the prestigious Security Council at the United Nations. In 1951, President Truman asked Congress to provide economic and military assistance to Yugoslavia. This aid was granted.

Yugoslavia proved to be a Cold War wild card, however. Tito gave tacit support to the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, but harshly criticized the Russian intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968. While the United States admired Tito for his independent stance, he could sometimes be a bit too independent. During the 1950s and 1960s he encouraged and supported the nonalignment movement among Third World nations, a policy that concerned American officials who were intent on forcing those nations to choose sides in the East-West struggle. Relations between the United States and Yugoslavia warmed considerably after Tito's denunciation of the Czech intervention, but cooled again when he sided with the Soviets during the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1973. Tito died in 1980.



Nov 14, 1985:
Volcano erupts in Colombia and buries nearby towns

On this day in 1985, a volcano erupts in Colombia, killing well over 20,000 people as nearby towns are buried in mud, ice and lava.

The Nevado del Ruiz volcano is situated in the north-central part of Colombia. Over the centuries, various eruptions caused the formation of large mudflows in the valleys beneath the volcano. When the Nevado del Ruiz went an extended period of time without erupting, people began to build towns over the mudflow areas and glacial ice built up near the volcano's crater.

In last few months of 1984, activity picked up at the volcano. Multiple tremors were recorded and geologists from around the world traveled to Colombia to observe the situation. The following November, an eruption of steam and ash caused ice, rocks and mud to cascade down the mountain. Scientists, believing that a full-blown eruption was possible, recommended evacuating the area. Their concerns, however, were largely ignored.

On the afternoon of November 13, a major eruption occurred. Ash was sent 30 miles into the air, but still, possibly believing they had more time, few residents evacuated. Later that evening into the morning of the November 14, there were several more powerful eruptions. Lava flowed out of the crater, melting the glacial ice surrounding it and causing massive mudslides.

The town of Chinchina was first to be hit. Approximately 1,100 people were killed when a mudslide overwhelmed the village. The worst scene of destruction was the city of Armero. The wave of mud, rock and ice was nearly 100 feet high as it barreled down on the city. Although it could be heard for a full 30 minutes before it struck, there was little the residents could do to avoid it. Further, many radio reports were instructing the residents to stay in their homes. Close to 20,000 people were buried and killed by the slide.

Overall, the best estimate is that 25,000 lives were claimed by the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano.



Nov 14, 1969:
Apollo 12 lifts off

Apollo 12, the second manned mission to the surface of the moon, is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with astronauts Charles Conrad, Jr.; Richard F. Gordon, Jr.; and Alan L. Bean aboard. President Richard Nixon viewed the liftoff from Pad A at Cape Canaveral. He was the first president to attend the liftoff of a manned space flight.

Thirty-six seconds after takeoff, lightning struck the ascending Saturn 5 launch rocket, which tripped the circuit breakers in the command module and caused a power failure. Fortunately, the launching rocket continued up normally, and within a few minutes power was restored in the spacecraft.

On November 19, the landing module Intrepid made a precision landing on the northwest rim of the moon's Ocean of Storms. About five hours later, astronauts Conrad and Bean became the third and fourth humans to walk on the surface of the moon. During the next 32 hours, the two astronauts made two lunar walks, where they collected lunar samples and investigated the Surveyor 3 spacecraft, an unmanned U.S. probe that soft-landed on the moon in 1967. On November 24, Apollo 12 successfully returned to Earth, splashing down only three miles from one of its retrieval ships, the USS Hornet.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Apollo_12_crew.jpg


Nov 14, 1982:
Walesa released from jail

Lech Walesa, leader of communist Poland's outlawed Solidarity movement, returns to his apartment in Gdansk after 11 months of internment in a remote hunting lodge near the Soviet border. Two days before, hundreds of supporters had begun a vigil outside his home upon learning that the founder of Poland's trade union movement was being released. When Walesa finally did return home, on November 14, he was lifted above the jubilant crowd and carried to the door of his apartment, where he greeted his wife and then addressed his supporters from a second-story window.

Walesa, born in 1943, was an electrician at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk when he was fired for union agitation in 1976. When protests broke out in the Gdansk shipyard over an increase in food prices in August 1980, Walesa climbed the shipyard fence and joined the thousands of workers inside. He was elected leader of the strike committee, and three days later the strikers' demands were met. Walesa then helped coordinate other strikes in Gdansk and demanded that the Polish government allow the free formation of trade unions and the right to strike. On August 30, the government conceded to the strikers' demands, legalizing trade unionism and granting greater freedom of religious and political expression.

Millions of Polish workers and farmers came together to form unions, and Solidarity was formed as a national federation of unions, with Walesa as its chairman. Under Walesa's charismatic leadership, the organization grew in size and political influence, soon becoming a major threat to the authority of the Polish government. On December 13, 1981, martial law was declared in Poland, Solidarity was outlawed, and Walesa and other labor leaders were arrested.

In November 1982, overwhelming public outcry forced Walesa's release, but Solidarity remained illegal. In 1983, Walesa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Fearing involuntary exile, he declined to travel to Norway to accept the award. Walesa continued as leader of the now-underground Solidarity movement, and he was subjected to continual monitoring and harassment by the communist authorities.

In 1988, deteriorating economic conditions led to a new wave of labor strikes across Poland, and the government was forced to negotiate with Walesa. In April 1989, Solidarity was again legalized, and its members were allowed to enter a limited number of candidates in upcoming elections. By September, a Solidarity-led government coalition was in place, with Walesa's colleague Tadeusz Mazowiecki as premier. In 1990, Poland's first direct presidential election was held, and Walesa won by a landslide.

President Walesa successfully implemented free-market reforms, but unfortunately he was a more effective labor leader than president. In 1995, he was narrowly defeated in his reelection by former communist Aleksander Kwasniewski, head of the Democratic Left Alliance.



Nov 14, 1941:
Cary Grant stars in Hitchcock’s Suspicion

On this day in 1941, Suspicion, a romantic thriller starring Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, makes its debut. The film, which earned a Best Picture Academy Award nomination and a Best Actress Oscar for Fontaine, marked the first time that Grant, one of Hollywood’s quintessential leading men, and Hitchcock, one of the greatest directors in movie history, worked together. The two would later collaborate on Notorious, To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest.

Grant was born Archibald Alexander Leach on January 18, 1904, in Bristol, England. He made his big-screen debut in 1932’s This is the Night and had his first hit movie with the 1937 comedy Topper. Grant went on to develop his suave, sophisticated leading-man image with starring performances in a long string of successful comedies and dramas, including The Awful Truth (1937), with Irene Dunne; Bringing Up Baby (1938), with Katharine Hepburn; Only Angels Have Wings (1939), with Jean Arthur; Gunga Din (1939), with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Victor McLaglen; His Girl Friday (1940), with Rosalind Russell, and the Oscar-nominated The Philadelphia Story (1940), with Hepburn and James Stewart.

In 1946’s Notorious, Grant’s second film with Alfred Hitchcock, the actor co-starred alongside Ingrid Bergman as American agents who infiltrate a post-World War II spy ring. In Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955), Grant co-starred with Grace Kelly and played a retired jewel thief on the French Riviera. In his final Hitchcock film, 1959’s North by Northwest, which co-starred Eva St. Marie, Grant portrayed a businessman who is mistaken by enemy spies as an American undercover agent. Grant retired from moviemaking in 1966 after filming Walk, Don’t Run (1966). He died on November 29, 1986, at age 82.

Alfred Hitchcock, born August 13, 1899, in London, began directing movies in Great Britain in the 1920s. His early hits include The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938). Hitchcock began making movies in Hollywood in the 1940s, including Rebecca (1940), Lifeboat (1944) and Spellbound (1945), each of which earned him a Best Director Oscar nomination. Known as the “Master of Suspense,” Hitchcock also helmed such thrillers as Strangers on a Train (1951), Rear Window (1954), which earned him a fourth Best Director Oscar nomination; Vertigo (1958); Psycho (1960), for which he received his fifth Best Director Oscar nomination; and The Birds (1961). His final film was 1976’s Family Plot. Hitchcock died on April 29, 1980, at age 80, in Los Angeles.

_________________
Friends are like diamonds and diamonds are forever.

Together we stand - Divided we fall.

[Duke of Buckingham [TeaM]]

November 15

655 – Battle of the Winwaed: Penda of Mercia is defeated by Oswiu of Northumbria.

1315 – Battle of Morgarten: the Schweizer Eidgenossenschaft ambushes the army of Leopold I.

1532 – Commanded by Francisco Pizarro, Spanish conquistadors under Hernando de Soto meet Inca Empire leader Atahualpa for the first time outside Cajamarca, arranging a meeting on the city plaza the following day

1533 – Francisco Pizarro arrives in Cuzco, the capital of the Inca Empire.

1688 – The Glorious Revolution begins: William of Orange lands at Brixham.

1705 – Battle of Zsibó - Austrian-Danish victory above the Kurucs (Hungarians)

1777 – American Revolutionary War: After 16 months of debate the Continental Congress approves the Articles of Confederation.

1791 – The first U.S Catholic college, Georgetown University, opens its doors.

1806 – Pike expedition: Lieutenant Zebulon Pike sees a distant mountain peak while near the Colorado foothills of the Rocky Mountains (it is later named Pikes Peak).

1859 – The first modern revival of the Olympic Games takes place in Athens, Greece.

1864 – American Civil War: Union General William Tecumseh Sherman burns Atlanta, Georgia and starts Sherman's March to the Sea.

1889 – Brazil is declared a republic by Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca and Emperor Pedro II is deposed in a military coup.

1920 – First assembly of the League of Nations is held in Geneva, Switzerland.

1923 – The German Rentenmark is introduced in Germany to counter Inflation in the Weimar Republic.

1926 – The NBC radio network opens with 24 stations.

1928 – The RNLI lifeboat Mary Stanford capsized in Rye Harbour with the loss of the entire 17 man crew.

1935 – Manuel L. Quezon is inaugurated as the second President of the Philippines.

1939 – In Washington, D.C., US President Franklin D. Roosevelt lays the cornerstone of the Jefferson Memorial.

1942 – World War II: First flight of the Heinkel He 219.

1942 – World War II: The Battle of Guadalcanal ends in a decisive Allied victory.

1943 – Holocaust: German SS leader Heinrich Himmler orders that Gypsies are to be put "on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps". (see Porajmos)

1945 – Venezuela joins the United Nations.

1949 – Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte are executed for assassinating Mahatma Gandhi.

1951 – Greek resistance leader Nikos Beloyannis, along with 11 resistance members, is sentenced to death by the court-martial.

1959 – Four members of the Herbert Clutter Family are murdered at their farm outside Holcomb, Kansas.

1966 – Project Gemini: Gemini 12 completes the program's final mission, when it splashes down safely in the Atlantic Ocean.

1966 – A Boeing 727 carrying Pan Am Flight 708 crashes near Berlin, Germany, killing all three people on board.

1967 – The only fatality of the North American X-15 program occurs during the 191st flight when Air Force test pilot Michael J. Adams loses control of his aircraft which is destroyed mid-air over the Mojave Desert.

1969 – Cold War: The Soviet submarine K-19 collides with the American submarine USS Gato in the Barents Sea.

1969 – Vietnam War: In Washington, D.C., 250,000-500,000 protesters staged a peaceful demonstration against the war, including a symbolic "March Against Death".

1969 – In Columbus, Ohio, Dave Thomas opens the first Wendy's restaurant.

1971 – Intel releases world's first commercial single-chip microprocessor, the 4004.

1976 – René Lévesque and the Parti Québécois take power to become the first Quebec government of the 20th century clearly in favor of independence.

1978 – A chartered Douglas DC-8 crashes near Colombo, Sri Lanka, killing 183.

1979 – A package from the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski begins smoking in the cargo hold of a flight from Chicago, Illinois to Washington, D.C., forcing the plane to make an emergency landing.

1983 – Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is founded. Recognized only by Turkey.

1985 – A research assistant is injured when a package from the Unabomber addressed to a University of Michigan professor explodes.

1985 – The Anglo-Irish Agreement is signed at Hillsborough Castle by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Irish Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald.

1987 – Continental Airlines Flight 1713, a Douglas DC-9-14 jetliner, crashes in a snowstorm at Denver, Colorado Stapleton International Airport, killing 28 occupants, while 54 survive the crash.

1987 – In Brașov, Romania, workers rebel against the communist regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu.

1988 – In the Soviet Union, the unmanned Shuttle Buran makes its only space flight.

1988 – Israeli–Palestinian conflict: An independent State of Palestine is proclaimed by the Palestinian National Council.

1988 – The first Fairtrade label, Max Havelaar, is launched in the Netherlands.

1990 – Space Shuttle program: Space Shuttle Atlantis launches with flight STS-38.

1990 – The People's Republic of Bulgaria is disestablished and a new republican government is instituted.

2000 – A chartered Antonov An-24 crashes after takeoff from Luanda, Angola killing more than 40 people.

2000 – Jharkhand state comes into existence in India.

2003 – The first day of the 2003 Istanbul bombings, in which two car bombs, targeting two synagogues, explode, killing 25 people and wounding about 300. Additional bombings follow on November 20.

2005 – Boeing formally launches the stretched Boeing 747-8 variant with orders from Cargolux and Nippon Cargo Airlines.

2007 – Cyclone Sidr hit Bangladesh, killing an estimated 5000 people and destroyed the world's largest mangrove forest, Sundarbans.
_________________
Friends are like diamonds and diamonds are forever.

Together we stand - Divided we fall.

[Duke of Buckingham [TeaM]]

Nov 16, 1532:
Pizarro traps Incan emperor Atahualpa

On November 16, 1532, Francisco Pizarro, the Spanish explorer and conquistador, springs a trap on the Incan emperor, Atahualpa. With fewer than 200 men against several thousand, Pizarro lures Atahualpa to a feast in the emperor's honor and then opens fire on the unarmed Incans. Pizarro's men massacre the Incans and capture Atahualpa, forcing him to convert to Christianity before eventually killing him.

Pizarro's timing for conquest was perfect. By 1532, the Inca Empire was embroiled in a civil war that had decimated the population and divided the people's loyalties. Atahualpa, the younger son of former Incan ruler Huayna Capac, had just deposed his half-brother Huascar and was in the midst of reuniting his kingdom when Pizarro arrived in 1531, with the endorsement of Spain's King Charles V. On his way to the Incan capital, Pizarro learned of the war and began recruiting soldiers still loyal to Huascar.

Pizarro met Atahualpa just outside Cajamarca, a small Incan town tucked into a valley of the Andes. Sending his brother Hernan as an envoy, Pizarro invited Atahualpa back to Cajamarca for a feast in honor of Atahualpa's ascendance to the throne. Though he had nearly 80,000 soldiers with him in the mountains, Atahualpa consented to attend the feast with only 5,000 unarmed men. He was met by Vicente de Valverde, a friar traveling with Pizarro. While Pizarro's men lay in wait, Valverde urged Atahualpa to convert and accept Charles V as sovereign. Atahualpa angrily refused, prompting Valverde to give the signal for Pizarro to open fire. Trapped in tight quarters, the panicking Incan soldiers made easy prey for the Spanish. Pizarro's men slaughtered the 5,000 Incans in just an hour. Pizarro himself suffered the only Spanish injury: a cut on his hand sustained as he saved Atahualpa from death.

Realizing Atahualpa was initially more valuable alive than dead, Pizarro kept the emperor in captivity while he made plans to take over his empire. In response, Atahualpa appealed to his captors' greed, offering them a room full of gold and silver in exchange for his liberation. Pizarro consented, but after receiving the ransom, Pizarro brought Atahualpa up on charges of stirring up rebellion. By that time, Atahualpa had played his part in pacifying the Incans while Pizarro secured his power, and Pizarro considered him disposable. Atahualpa was to be burned at the stake—the Spanish believed this to be a fitting death for a heathen—but at the last moment, Valverde offered the emperor clemency if he would convert. Atahualpa submitted, only to be executed by strangulation. The day was August 29, 1533.

Fighting between the Spanish and the Incas would continue well after Atahualpa's death as Spain consolidated its conquests. Pizarro's bold victory at Cajamarca, however, effectively marked the end of the Inca Empire and the beginning of the European colonization of South America.



Nov 16, 1776:
Fort Washington Is Captured

On this day in 1776, Hessian Lieutenant General Wilhelm von Knyphausen and a force of 3,000 Hessian mercenaries and 5,000 Redcoats lay siege to Fort Washington at the northern end and highest point of Manhattan Island.

Throughout the morning, Knyphausen met stiff resistance from the Patriot riflemen inside the fort, but by afternoon, the Patriots were overwhelmed, and the garrison commander, Colonel Robert Magaw, surrendered. Nearly 3,000 Patriots were taken prisoner, and valuable ammunition and supplies were lost to the Hessians. The prisoners faced a particularly grim fate: Many later died from deprivation and disease aboard British prison ships anchored in New York Harbor.

Among the 53 dead and 96 wounded Patriots were John and Margaret Corbin of Virginia. When John died in action, his wife Margaret took over his cannon, cleaning, loading and firing the gun until she too was severely wounded. The first woman known to have fought for the Continental Army, Margaret survived, but lost the use of her left arm.

Two weeks earlier, one of Magaw's officers, William Demont, had deserted the Fifth Pennsylvania Battalion and given British intelligence agents information about the Patriot defense of New York, including details about the location and defense of Fort Washington. Demont was the first traitor to the Patriot cause, and his treason contributed significantly to Knyphausen's victory.

Fort Washington stood at the current location of Bennet Park in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City, near the George Washington Bridge, at the corner of Fort Washington Avenue and 183rd Street. Fort Washington Park and Fort Washington Point lay beneath the site along the Hudson River.



Nov 16, 1945:
German scientists brought to United States to work on rocket technology

In a move that stirs up some controversy, the United States ships 88 German scientists to America to assist the nation in its production of rocket technology. Most of these men had served under the Nazi regime and critics in the United States questioned the morality of placing them in the service of America. Nevertheless, the U.S. government, desperate to acquire the scientific know-how that had produced the terrifying and destructive V-1 and V-2 rockets for Germany during WWII, and fearful that the Russians were also utilizing captured German scientists for the same end, welcomed the men with open arms.Realizing that the importation of scientists who had so recently worked for the Nazi regime so hated by Americans was a delicate public relations situation, the U.S. military cloaked the operation in secrecy. In announcing the plan, a military spokesman merely indicated that some German scientists who had worked on rocket development had "volunteered" to come to the United States and work for a "very moderate salary." The voluntary nature of the scheme was somewhat undercut by the admission that the scientists were in "protective custody." Upon their arrival in the United States on November 16, newsmen and photographers were not allowed to interview or photograph the newcomers. A few days later, a source in Sweden claimed that the scientists were members of the Nazi team at Peenemeunde where the V-weapons had been produced. The U.S. government continued to remain somewhat vague about the situation, stating only that "certain outstanding German scientists and technicians" were being imported in order to "take full advantage of these significant developments, which are deemed vital to our national security."The situation pointed out one of the many ironies connected with the Cold War. The United States and the Soviet Union, once allies against Germany and the Nazi regime during World War II, were now in a fierce contest to acquire the best and brightest scientists who had helped arm the German forces in order to construct weapons systems to threaten each other.



Nov 16, 1957:
Ed Gein kills final victim Bernice Worden

Infamous killer Edward Gein murders his last victim, Bernice Worden of Plainfield, Wisconsin. His grave robbing, necrophilia, and cannibalism gained national attention, and may have provided inspiration for the characters of Norman Bates in Psycho and serial killer Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs.

Gein was a quiet farmer who lived in rural Wisconsin with an extremely domineering mother. After she died in 1945, he began studying anatomy, and started stealing women's corpses from local cemeteries. In 1954, Gein shot and killed saloonkeeper Mary Hogan, piled the body onto a sled, and dragged it home.

On November 16, Gein robbed Worden at the local hardware store she owned and killed her. Her son, a deputy, discovered his mother's body and became suspicious of Gein, who was believed to be somewhat odd. When authorities searched Gein's farmhouse, they found an unimaginably grisly scene: organs were in the refrigerator, a heart sat on the stove, and heads had been made into soup bowls. Apparently, Gein had kept various organs from his grave digging and murders as keepsakes and for decoration. He had also used human skin to upholster chairs.

Though it is believed that he killed others during this time, Gein only admitted to the murders of Worden and Hogan. In 1958, Gein was declared insane and sent to the Wisconsin State Hospital in Mendota, where he remained until his death in 1984.



Nov 16, 1988:
Benazir Bhutto elected leader of Pakistan

In Pakistan, citizens vote in their first open election in more than a decade, choosing as prime minister the populist candidate Benazir Bhutto, daughter of former Pakistani leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. She was the first woman leader of a Muslim country in modern history.

After General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq seized power in Pakistan in a military coup in 1977, Zulfikar Bhutto was tried and executed on the charge of having ordered an assassination in 1974. Benazir Bhutto endured frequent house arrests during the next seven years. In 1984, she fled to England, where she became head of her father's former party, the Pakistan People's Party (PPP).

In 1988, President Zia died along with the American ambassador to Pakistan in a mysterious plane crash, leaving a power vacuum. Bhutto returned to Pakistan and launched a nationwide campaign for open elections. In elections on November 16, Bhutto's PPP won a majority in the National Assembly, and on December 1 Bhutto took office as prime minister of Pakistan. Her government fell in 1990, but from 1993 to 1996 she again served as Pakistani leader.



Nov 16, 1959:
The Sound of Music premieres on Broadway

Did the young Austrian nun named Maria really take to the hills surrounding Salzburg to sing spontaneously of her love of music? Did she comfort herself with thoughts of copper kettles, and did she swoon to her future husband's song about an alpine flower while the creeping menace of Nazism spread across central Europe? No, the real-life Maria von Trapp did none of those things. She was indeed a former nun, and she did indeed marry Count Georg von Trapp and become stepmother to his large brood of children, but nearly all of the particulars she related in her 1949 book, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, were ignored by the creators of the Broadway musical her memoir inspired. And while the liberties taken by the show's writers, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, and by its composer and lyricist, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, caused some consternation to the real Maria von Trapp and to her stepchildren, according to many later reports, those liberties made The Sound of Music a smash success from the very night of its Broadway opening on this day in 1959.

With a creative team made up of Broadway legends and a star as enormously popular and bankable as Mary Martin, it was no surprise that The Sound of Music drew enormous advance sales. But audiences continued to flock to The Sound of Music despite sometimes tepid reviews, like the one in The New York Times that said the show "lack[ed] the final exultation that marks the difference between a masterpiece and a well-produced musical entertainment." Reviewer Brooks Atkinson did, however, single out the "affecting beauty" of the music from The Sound of Music as saving it from a story verging on "sticky."

Sticky or no, The Sound of Music was an instant success, and numerous songs from its score— including "Do Re Mi," "My Favorite Things" and "Climb Every Mountain"—quickly entered the popular canon. Indeed, the original cast recording of The Sound of Music was nearly as big a phenomenon as the show itself. Recorded just a week after the show's premiere on this day in 1959 and released by Columbia Records, the album shot to the top of the Billboard album charts on its way to selling upwards of 3 million copies worldwide

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuWsQSntFf0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtEzZEe_5kA
_________________
Friends are like diamonds and diamonds are forever.

Together we stand - Divided we fall.

[Duke of Buckingham [TeaM]]

Nov 17, 1558:
Elizabethan Age begins

Queen Mary I, the monarch of England and Ireland since 1553, dies and is succeeded by her 25-year-old half-sister, Elizabeth.

The two half-sisters, both daughters of King Henry VIII, had a stormy relationship during Mary's five-year reign. Mary, who was brought up as a Catholic, enacted pro-Catholic legislation and made efforts to restore the pope to supremacy in England. A Protestant rebellion ensued, and Queen Mary imprisoned Elizabeth, a Protestant, in the Tower of London on suspicion of complicity. After Mary's death, Elizabeth survived several Catholic plots against her; though her ascension was greeted with approval by most of England's lords, who were largely Protestant and hoped for greater religious tolerance under a Protestant queen. Under the early guidance of Secretary of State Sir William Cecil, Elizabeth repealed Mary's pro-Catholic legislation, established a permanent Protestant Church of England, and encouraged the Calvinist reformers in Scotland.

In foreign affairs, Elizabeth practiced a policy of strengthening England's Protestant allies and dividing her foes. Elizabeth was opposed by the pope, who refused to recognize her legitimacy, and by Spain, a Catholic nation that was at the height of its power. In 1588, English-Spanish rivalry led to an abortive Spanish invasion of England in which the Spanish Armada, the greatest naval force in the world at the time, was destroyed by storms and a determined English navy.

With increasing English domination at sea, Elizabeth encouraged voyages of discovery, such as Sir Francis Drake's circumnavigation of the world and Sir Walter Raleigh's expeditions to the North American coast.

The long reign of Elizabeth, who became known as the "Virgin Queen" for her reluctance to endanger her authority through marriage, coincided with the flowering of the English Renaissance, associated with such renowned authors as William Shakespeare. By her death in 1603, England had become a major world power in every respect, and Queen Elizabeth I passed into history as one of England's greatest monarchs.



Nov 17, 1777:
Articles of Confederation submitted to the states

On this day in 1777, Congress submits the Articles of Confederation to the states for ratification.

The Articles had been signed by Congress two days earlier, after 16 months of debate. Bickering over land claims between Virginia and Maryland delayed final ratification for almost four more years. Maryland became the last state to approve the Articles on March 1, 1781, affirming them as the outline of the official government of the United States. The nation was guided by the document until the implementation of the current U.S. Constitution in 1789.

The critical distinction between the Articles of Confederation and the U.S. Constitution--the primacy of the states under the Articles--is best understood by comparing the following lines.

The Articles of Confederation begin:

"To all to whom these Present shall come, we the undersigned Delegates of the States..."

By contrast, the Constitution begins:

"We the People of the United States...do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

The predominance of the states under the Articles of Confederation is made even more explicit by the claims of Article II:

"Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled."

Less than five years after the ratification of the Articles of Confederation, enough leading Americans decided that the system was inadequate to the task of governance that they peacefully overthrew their second government in just over 20 years. The difference between a collection of sovereign states forming a confederation and a federal government created by a sovereign people lay at the heart of the debate as the new American people decided what form their government would take.

Between 1776 and 1787, Americans went from living under a sovereign king, to living in sovereign states, to becoming a sovereign people. That transformation defined the American Revolution.



Nov 17, 1969:
SALT I negotiations begin

Soviet and U.S. negotiators meet in Helsinki to begin the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). The meeting was the climax of years of discussions between the two nations concerning the means to curb the Cold War arms race. Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency Gerard Smith was put in charge of the U.S. delegation. At the same time, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger began negotiations with the Soviet ambassador in America. The negotiations continued for nearly three years, until the signing of the SALT I agreement in May 1972.Talks centered around two main weapon systems: anti-ballistic missiles (ABM) and multiple independent re-entry vehicles (MIRVs- missiles with multiple warheads, each capable of striking different targets). At the time the talks began, the Soviets held a slight advantage in ABM technology; the United States, however, was quickly moving ahead in developing MIRVs, which would give it a tremendous qualitative advantage over Soviet offensive missile systems. From the U.S. perspective, control of ABMs was key. After all, no matter how many missiles the United States developed, if the Soviets could shoot them down before they struck their targets they were of limited use. And, since the Soviets had a quantitative lead in the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), an effective Soviet ABM system meant that the Russians could launch devastating nuclear attacks with little fear of reprisal. From the Soviet side, the U.S. development of MIRV technology was particularly frightening. Not only were MIRV missiles technologically superior to Soviet weapons, there were also questions as to whether even an advanced ABM system could protect the Soviet Union from this type of missile. It was obviously time to discuss what seemed to be a never-ending arms race.The SALT I agreement reached in May 1972 limited each nation to no more than 100 ABM launchers at each of two sites of their own choosing. Offensive weapons were also limited. The United States would be held to 1,000 ICBMs and 710 SLBMs; the Soviets could have 1,409 ICBMs and 950 SLBMs. The administration of President Richard Nixon defended the apparent disparity by noting that nothing had been agreed to concerning MIRVs. American missiles, though fewer in number, could therefore carry more warheads.Whether all of this made the world much safer was hard to say. The United States and Soviet Union essentially said they would limit efforts to both defend themselves and destroy the other. Their nuclear arsenals, however, were still sufficient to destroy the world many times over.



Nov 17, 1972:
A wealthy heiress is murdered by her son

Wealthy socialite Barbara Baekeland is stabbed to death with a kitchen knife by her 25-year-old son, Antony, in her London, England, penthouse. When police arrived at the scene, Antony was calmly placing a telephone order for Chinese food.

Antony's great-grandfather, Leo Baekeland, acquired his family's fortune with the creation of Bakelite, an early plastic product. Though financially successful, the family was far from stable. Leo's son Brooks was a decadent adventurer and a self-described writer who rarely put pen to paper. Brooks' wife Barbara, a model and would-be Hollywood starlet, had her own problems: she attempted suicide several times and was reportedly so deeply distressed by her son Antony's homosexuality that she attempted to seduce him as a "cure." Though Antony displayed signs of schizophrenia, his father called psychiatry "professionally amoral" and refused to pay for treatment.

Barbara and Antony's tempestuous mother-son relationship worried her friends. Indeed, Antony's erratic behavior was cause for concern, and over the years the two had several threatening arguments involving knives.

After the murder, Antony was institutionalized at Broadmoor until a bureaucratic mistake resulted in his release in July 1980. He then relocated to New York City, where he lived with his grandmother for a short time until he beat and stabbed her in 1980; she survived. Antony was sent to Riker's Island, where he killed himself by suffocation on March 21, 1981.



Nov 17, 1421:
Thousands die in massive flood

On this day in 1421, a storm in the North Sea batters the European coastline. Over the next several days, approximately 10,000 people in what is now the Netherlands died in the resulting floods.

The lowlands of the Netherlands near the North Sea were densely populated at the time, despite their known vulnerability to flooding. Small villages and a couple of cities had sprung up in what was known as the Grote Waard region. The residents built dikes throughout the area to keep the water at bay, but fatal floods still struck in 1287, 1338, 1374, 1394 and 1396. After each, residents fixed the dikes and moved right back in after the floods.

Even the St. Elisabeth's flood of November 1404 (named after the November 19 feast day for St. Elisabeth of Hungary), in which thousands died, could not dissuade the residents from living in the region. Seventeen years later, at the same time of year, another strong storm struck the North Sea. The resulting storm surge caused waves to burst hundreds of dikes all over Grote Waard. The city of Dort was devastated and 20 whole villages were wiped off the map. The flooding was so extensive this time that the dikes were not fully rebuilt until 1500. This meant that much of Zeeland and Holland--the area that now makes up the Netherlands--was flooded for decades following the storm. The town of Dordrecht was permanently separated from the mainland in the flood.



Nov 17, 2003:
“The Terminator” becomes “The Governator” of California

On this day in 2003, the actor and former bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger is sworn in as the 38th governor of California at the State Capitol in Sacramento. Schwarzenegger, who became a major Hollywood star in the 1980s with such action movies as Conan the Barbarian and The Terminator, defeated Governor Gray Davis in a special recall election on October 7, 2003. Prior to Schwarzenegger, another famous actor, Ronald Reagan, served as the 33rd governor of California from 1967 to 1975 before going on to become the nation’s 40th president in 1980.

Schwarzenegger was born July 30, 1947, in Austria. He trained as a bodybuilder and at the age of 20 became the youngest person to win the Mr. Universe title. In 1968, Schwarzenegger, dubbed “The Austrian Oak,” came to the United States, speaking little English, and went on to win a dozen more world bodybuilding titles. In 1977, he gained notice when he was featured in the documentary Pumping Iron, about the Mr. Olympia competition. Schwarzenegger’s acting career took off with the 1982 blockbuster Conan the Barbarian, in which he played a sword-wielding hero avenging his parents’ deaths, and its 1984 sequel, Conan the Destroyer. He later became an international star with roles in a long list of action films including The Terminator (1984), in which he plays a cyborg assassin who utters the now-famous line “I’ll be back”; the Oscar-nominated sci-fi thriller Total Recall (1990), co-starring Sharon Stone; Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), which contains the memorable catchphrase “Hasta la vista, baby”; and True Lies (1994), co-starring Jamie Lee Curtis and directed by James Cameron, who also helmed the Terminator films.

In addition to action films, Schwarzenegger also had box-office success with comedies, including Twins (1988), co-starring the diminutive Danny DeVito, and Kindergarten Cop (1990), in which he played a detective who goes undercover as a kindergarten teacher in order to nab a drug dealer. While continuing to make movies into the 2000s--notably including Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)-- Schwarzenegger also built a reputation as a savvy businessman and an advocate of physical fitness and after-school programs for children.

In 1986, Schwarzenegger, a committed Republican, married the broadcast journalist Maria Shriver, a niece of President John F. Kennedy and a member of one of America’s most famous Democratic families. In August 2003, Schwarzenegger, who became a U.S. citizen in 1983 and had never served in public office, announced on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno that he intended to seek the California governorship in the special recall election that year. After winning the election and serving out the remainder of former governor Gray Davis’s term, “The Governator,” as he was dubbed, was re-elected in November 2006 to serve a full term in office.



Nov 17, 1839:
Verdi's first opera opens

Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi's first opera, Oberto, conte di San Bonifacio, debuts in Milan. The premiere was held at La Scala, Italy's most prestigious theater. Oberto was received favorably, and the next day the composer was commissioned by Bartolomeo Merelli, the impresario at La Scala, to write three more operas. In 1842, after some personal and professional setbacks, the opera Nabucco made Verdi an overnight celebrity. He would go on to compose such classic operas as Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, La Traviata, Aída, and Otello.

Giuseppe Verdi was born in Le Roncole in the former duchy of Parma in 1813. His father was a tavern keeper and grocer, and Verdi demonstrated a natural gift for music early. He studied music in the neighboring town of Busseto and at the age of 18 was sent to Milan by a sponsor to enter the Milan Conservatory. He was rejected for being overage but stayed in Milan and studied under Vincenzo Lavigna, a composer and former harpsichordist at La Scala. In 1834, Verdi returned to Busseto and became musical director of the Philharmonic Society.

Five years later, Verdi, at 26 years of age, saw his first opera debut at La Scala, the finest theater in Italy. Oberto was followed by Un giorno di regno (King for a Day, 1840), a comic opera that was a critical and commercial failure. Verdi, lamenting its poor reception and also the recent deaths of his wife and two children, decided to give up composing. A year later, however, the director of La Scala convinced him to write an opera based on the story of the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II. Nabucco (1842) was a sensational success, followed by I Lombardi (The Lombards, 1843) and Ernani (1844).

Rigoletto (1851) is considered his first masterpiece, and Il Trovatore (The Troubadour, 1853) and La Traviata (The Fallen Woman, 1853) brought him international fame and cemented his reputation as a major composer of opera. Verdi's melodic and dramatic style was further developed in Un ballo in maschera (A Masked Ball, 1859) and La forza del destino (The Power of Destiny, 1862). Aída (1871), commissioned by the khedive of Egypt and first performed in Cairo, is his most famous work.

Late expressions of his genius are Otello (Othello, 1887), completed at age 73, and Falstaff, which premiered in 1893 when Verdi was 80. Falstaff was Verdi's last opera and is considered one of the greatest comic operas. Verdi died in Milan in 1901. He was greatly honored in his lifetime and is credited with transforming Italian opera into true musical drama.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiV5B3-pDcI
_________________
Friends are like diamonds and diamonds are forever.

Together we stand - Divided we fall.

[Duke of Buckingham [TeaM]]

Nov 18, 1991:
Terry Waite released

Shiite Muslim kidnappers in Lebanon free Anglican Church envoy Terry Waite after more than four years of captivity. Waite, looking thinner and his hair grayer, was freed along with American educator Thomas M. Sutherland after intense negotiations by the United Nations.

Waite, special envoy of the archbishop of Canterbury, had secured the release of missionaries detained in Iran after the Islamic revolution. He also extracted British hostages from Libya and even succeeded in releasing American hostages from Lebanon in 1986.

A total of 10 captives were released through Waite's efforts before Shiite Muslims seized him during a return mission to Beirut on January 20, 1987. He was held captive for more than four years before he was finally released.

During captivity, Waite said he was frequently blindfolded, beaten and subjected to mock executions. He spent much of the time chained to a radiator, suffered from asthma and was transported in a giant refrigerator as his captors moved him about.

Waite, 52, made an impromptu, chaotic appearance before reporters in Damascus after his release to Syrian officials. He said one of his captors expressed regret as he informed Waite he was about to be released.

"He also said to me: 'We apologize for having captured you. We recognize that now this was a wrong thing to do, that holding hostages achieves no useful, constructive purpose,'" Waite said.

The release of Waite and Sutherland left five Western hostages left in Beirut—three Americans, including Terry Anderson, and two Germans. The Americans would be released by December 1991, the Germans in June 1992.

Some 96 foreign hostages were taken and held during the Lebanon hostage crisis between 1982 and 1992. The victims were mostly from Western countries, and mostly journalists, diplomats or teachers. Twenty-five of them were Americans. At least 10 hostages died in captivity. Some were murdered and others died from lack of adequate medical attention to illnesses.

The hostages were originally taken to serve as insurance against retaliation against Hezbollah, which was thought to be responsible for the killing of over 300 Americans in the Marine barracks and embassy bombings in Beirut. It was widely believed that Iran and Syria also played a role in the kidnappings.



Nov 18, 1996:
Volkswagen's "Dream Factory" opens in Resende, Brazil

On this day in 1996, a revolutionary new Volkswagen factory opens in Resende, Brazil. The million-square-meter Resende factory did not have an ordinary assembly line staffed by Volkswagen workers: In fact, the only people on Volkswagen's payroll were the quality-control supervisors. Independent subcontractors were responsible for putting together every part of the trucks and buses that the factory produced. This process, which Volkswagen called the "modular consortium," reduced the company's labor costs considerably by making them someone else's problem: The company simply purchased its labor from the lowest bidder. Eventually, Volkswagen hoped to export this new system to all of its factories in developing countries.

In the modular consortium system, eight different subcontractors operated their own mini-assembly shops along the main line—MWM/Cummins built and installed the transmissions and engines, for example, while Ford Motor Company supplied the cabs—and each of those companies was responsible for installing and inspecting its own components. Any quality problems in the finished product were blamed on—and charged to—the subcontractor responsible.

The system was an enormously profitable one for Volkswagen. The company was able to negotiate very low rates from its subcontractors for parts and labor, so it saved money on every truck and bus that passed through the Resende plant and could pass those savings along to its customers. Meanwhile, competitors who did not use a subcontractor system had difficulty matching Volkswagen's low prices.

The Resende facility may have been Volkswagen's "Dream Factory," as some reporters called it, but for General Motors it was a nightmare. The mastermind behind the modular consortium idea was VW's head of purchasing, Jose Ignacio Lopez de Arriortua, who had defected from GM three years before. When he left, he took millions of top-secret documents, plans and blueprints for a factory that GM called "Plant X": a plant, GM argued, that was remarkably similar to the one VW ended up building at Resende. By the end of 1996, Lopez and VW faced industrial-espionage charge in Germany and the U.S., as well as a hefty GM lawsuit, which they settled for millions of dollars the next year. (Lopez resigned from VW and fled to Spain, his home country, which refused to extradite him for trial.)

Today, some 4,500 people work at the Resende plant. In all, it has produced more than 300,000 trucks and buses.



Nov 18, 1863:
President Lincoln travels to Gettysburg

On this day in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln boards a train for Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to deliver a short speech at the dedication of a cemetery of soldiers killed during the battle there on July 1 to July 3, 1863. The address Lincoln gave in Gettysburg became one of the most famous speeches in American history.

Lincoln had given much thought to what he wanted to say at Gettysburg, but nearly missed his chance to say it. Shortly before the trip, Lincoln's son, Tad, became ill with a fever. The president and his wife Mary Todd Lincoln were no strangers to juvenile illness: They had already lost two sons to disease. Prone to fits of hysteria, Mary Lincoln panicked when her husband prepared to leave. However, Lincoln felt the opportunity to speak at Gettysburg and present his defense of the war was too important to miss, so he boarded a train and headed to Pennsylvania.

Despite his son's illness, Lincoln was in good spirits during the journey. He was accompanied by an entourage that included Secretary of State William Seward, Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, Interior Secretary John Usher, Lincoln's personal secretaries John Hay and John Nicolay, several members of the diplomat corps, some foreign visitors, a Marine band, and a military escort.

When Lincoln arrived in Gettysburg, he was handed a telegram that lifted his spirits: Tad was feeling much better. Lincoln enjoyed an evening dinner and a serenade by the Fifth New York Artillery Band before he retired to finalize his famous Gettysburg Address.



Nov 18, 1996:
High-profile expert on exotic birds is sentenced for smuggling parrots

Tony Silva, a world-renowned expert and outspoken protector of exotic birds, is sentenced to seven years in prison without parole for leading an illegal parrot smuggling operation. Silva was only one of many to be arrested during "Operation Renegade," a three-year international probe into bird smuggling by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Division of Law Enforcement, although his case was by far the best known.

Silva's indictment and guilty plea shocked the international community of academic experts, conservationists, zoologists, and collectors interested in exotic birds, most of whom had known and respected him as a benevolent bird lover. Since his childhood, Silva had championed the cause of protecting wildlife. His parents, who had emigrated to the U.S. from Cuba when he was a boy, encouraged his love of birds, thinking it was a good way to keep their son out of trouble. Silva began breeding birds at a young age, and, by his 20s, he had already written hundreds of articles and two books on rare parrots and had been named curator of Loro Park, a wildlife sanctuary in the Canary Islands.

However, Silva's image greatly changed when he was accused of smuggling more than 100 hyacinth macaws, valued at almost $1.4 million, as well as hundreds of other exotic birds. Hyacinth macaws are extremely rare, having a wild population numbering between only 2,000 and 5,000. During smuggling operations, many of the birds die.

U.S. District Court Judge Elaine Bucklo, outraged at the inhumane treatement the birds had received at the hands of the smugglers, handed down a uniquely harsh sentence in the Silva case: an 82-month prison term, a $100,000 fine and an order to perform 200 hours of community service during a three-year supervised release program after his prison term. "The real victims of these crimes, " the judge said, "were the birds themselves and our children and future generations who may never have the opportunity to see any of these rare birds."

Silva later claimed that he was set up and had only been trying to protect the birds. However, many disagree with Silva's interpretation of the events, citing the evidence from his trial, which included photographs of dead parrots, a book detailing his smuggling operations found at his home, and a taped conversation of Silva saying that he had 50 hyacinth macaws for sale.



Nov 18, 1916:
Haig ends Battle of Somme

Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force in World War I, calls off the Battle of the Somme in France after nearly five months of mass slaughter.

The massive Allied offensive began at 7:30 a.m. on July 1, 1916, when 100,000 British soldiers poured out of their trenches and into no-man's-land. During the preceding week, 250,000 Allied shells had pounded German positions near the Somme River, and the British expected to find the way cleared for them. However, scores of heavy German machine guns had survived the artillery onslaught, and the invading infantry were massacred. By the end of the day, 20,000 British soldiers were dead and 40,000 wounded. It was the single heaviest day of casualties in British military history.

After the initial disaster, Haig resigned himself to smaller but equally ineffectual advances, and more than 1,000 Allied lives were extinguished for every 100 yards gained on the Germans. Even Britain's September 15 introduction of tanks into warfare for the first time in history failed to break the deadlock in the Battle of the Somme. In October, heavy rains turned the battlefield into a sea of mud, and on November 18 Haig called off the Somme offensive after more than four months of slaughter.

Except for its effect of diverting German troops from the Battle of Verdun, the offensive was a miserable disaster. It amounted to a total gain of just 125 square miles for the Allies, with more than 600,000 British and French soldiers killed, wounded, or missing in action. German casualties were more than 650,000. Although Haig was severely criticized for the costly battle, his willingness to commit massive amounts of men and resources to the stalemate along the western front eventually contributed to the collapse of an exhausted Germany in 1918.



Nov 18, 1978:
Mass suicide at Jonestown

On this day in 1978, Peoples Temple founder Jim Jones leads hundreds of his followers in a mass murder-suicide at their agricultural commune in a remote part of the South American nation of Guyana. Many of Jones’ followers willingly ingested a poison-laced punch while others were forced to do so at gunpoint. The final death toll at Jonestown that day was 909; a third of those who perished were children.

Jim Jones was a charismatic churchman who established the Peoples Temple, a Christian sect, in Indianapolis in the 1950s. He preached against racism, and his integrated congregation attracted many African Americans. In 1965, he moved the group to Northern California, settling in Ukiah and after 1971 in San Francisco. In the 1970s, his church was accused by the media of financial fraud, physical abuse of its members and mistreatment of children. In response to the mounting criticism, the increasingly paranoid Jones invited his congregation to move with him to Guyana, where he promised they would build a socialist utopia. Three years earlier, a small group of his followers had traveled to the tiny nation to set up what would become Jonestown on a tract of jungle.

Jonestown did not turn out to be the paradise their leader had promised. Temple members worked long days in the fields and were subjected to harsh punishments if they questioned Jones' authority. Their passports were confiscated, their letters home censored and members were encouraged to inform on one another and forced to attend lengthy, late-night meetings. Jones, by then in declining mental health and addicted to drugs, was convinced the U.S. government and others were out to destroy him. He required Temple members to participate in mock suicide drills in the middle of the night.

In 1978, a group of former Temple members and concerned relatives of current members convinced U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan, a Democrat of California, to travel to Jonestown and investigate the settlement. On November 17, 1978, Ryan arrived in Jonestown with a group of journalists and other observers. At first the visit went well, but the next day, as Ryan's delegation was about to leave, several Jonestown residents approached the group and asked them for passage out of Guyana. Jones became distressed at the defection of his followers, and one of Jones' lieutenants attacked Ryan with a knife. The congressman escaped from the incident unharmed, but Jones then ordered Ryan and his companions ambushed and killed at the airstrip as they attempted to leave. The congressman and four others were murdered as they boarded their charter planes.

Back in Jonestown, Jones commanded everyone to gather in the main pavilion and commit what he termed a "revolutionary act." The youngest members of the Peoples Temple were the first to die, as parents and nurses used syringes to drop a potent mix of cyanide, sedatives and powdered fruit juice into children's throats. Adults then lined up to drink the poison-laced concoction while armed guards surrounded the pavilion.

When Guyanese officials arrived at the Jonestown compound the next day, they found it carpeted with hundreds of bodies. Many people had perished with their arms around each other. A few residents managed to escape into the jungle as the suicides took place, while at least several dozen more Peoples Temple members, including several of Jones' sons, survived because they were in another part of Guyana at the time.



Nov 18, 1978:
Billy Joel earns his first #1 album when 52nd Street tops the Billboard pop chart

At just 16, William Martin Joel of Hicksville, Long Island, got his first taste of chart success playing piano on the Shangri-Las' #1 hit "Leader of the Pack,". At 18, he dropped out of high school to pursue a full-time career as a professional musician. After several years moving from band to band, he released his first solo album at age 22 in 1971, and then four more in quick succession after that, with ever-increasing success. Finally, on this day in 1978, Billy Joel earned his first #1 album when his sixth release, 52nd Street, hit the top of the Billboard pop chart

52nd Street was the highly anticipated follow-up to Joel's 1977 breakthrough album The Stranger, which had achieved Platinum status and made Joel a household name on the strength of singles like "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)," "Just The Way You Are" and "She's Always A Woman." The Stranger surpassed Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water as the biggest-selling album in Columbia Records history, but it just missed reaching #1 on the Billboard chart. 52nd Street, which included the radio hits "Big Shot," "My Life" and "Honesty," achieved that feat on November 18, 1978, and remained at the top of the charts for the next seven straight weeks, becoming the top-selling album of the year. It also went on to earn Billy Joel his first Album of the Year award at the 22nd Annual Grammy Awards in February 1980.

Nearly half of the songs that would make up Billy Joel's 1985 21-times Platinum Greatest Hits Volume I and II (1985) were already under his belt with the release of 52nd Street. The rest would come from the albums Glass Houses (1980), The Nylon Curtain (1982) and An Innocent Man (1983)—albums that would all be certified multi-Platinum. With the additional success of Joel's 10th, 11th and 12th albums, The Bridge (1986), Storm Front (1989) and River of Dreams (1993), Billy Joel ranks as the sixth best-selling recording artist in American history with nearly 80 million albums sold, trailing only The Beatles, Garth Brooks, Elvis Presley, Led Zeppelin and The Eagles
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vbxe7piRqCU
_________________
Friends are like diamonds and diamonds are forever.

Together we stand - Divided we fall.

[Duke of Buckingham [TeaM]]

Nov 19, 1863:
Lincoln delivers Gettysburg Address

On November 19, 1863, at the dedication of a military cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, during the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln delivers one of the most memorable speeches in American history. In just 272 words, Lincoln brilliantly and movingly reminded a war-weary public why the Union had to fight, and win, the Civil War.

The Battle of Gettysburg, fought some four months earlier, was the single bloodiest battle of the Civil War. Over the course of three days, more than 45,000 men were killed, injured, captured or went missing. The battle also proved to be the turning point of the war: General Robert E. Lee's defeat and retreat from Gettysburg marked the last Confederate invasion of Northern territory and the beginning of the Southern army's ultimate decline.

Charged by Pennsylvania's governor, Andrew Curtin, to care for the Gettysburg dead, an attorney named David Wills bought 17 acres of pasture to turn into a cemetery for the more than 7,500 who fell in battle. Wills invited Edward Everett, one of the most famous orators of the day, to deliver a speech at the cemetery's dedication. Almost as an afterthought, Wills also sent a letter to Lincoln—just two weeks before the ceremony—requesting "a few appropriate remarks" to consecrate the grounds.

At the dedication, the crowd listened for two hours to Everett before Lincoln spoke. Lincoln's address lasted just two or three minutes. The speech reflected his redefined belief that the Civil War was not just a fight to save the Union, but a struggle for freedom and equality for all, an idea Lincoln had not championed in the years leading up to the war. This was his stirring conclusion: "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Reception of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was initially mixed, divided strictly along partisan lines. Nevertheless, the "little speech," as he later called it, is thought by many today to be the most eloquent articulation of the democratic vision ever written.



Nov 19, 1776:
Congress pleads for soldiers

On this day in 1776, Congress pleads for the states to send more soldiers to serve in the Continental Army, reminding them "how indispensable it is to the common safety, that they pursue the most immediate and vigorous measures to furnish their respective quotas of Troops for the new Army, as the time of service for which the present Army was enlisted, is so near expiring."

Just as the British had discovered the difficulties of waging war with obstreperous Yankees for soldiers during the Seven Years' War, Commander in Chief George Washington, the Virginia planter-cum-soldier, was unimpressed upon meeting his supposed army outside Boston in 1775. He saw "stupidity" among the enlisted men, who were used to the easy familiarity of being commanded by neighbors in local militias with elected officers. Washington promptly insisted that the officers behave with decorum and the enlisted men with deference. Although he enjoyed some success with this original army, the New Englanders went home to their farms at the end of 1775, and Washington had to start fresh with new recruits in 1776. Washington and Congress struggled to reconstitute the army at the beginning of each new year throughout the war.

Washington fought an uphill battle for military order until Friedrich von Steuben arrived at the Continental Army encampment at Valley Forge on February 23, 1778. The Prussian military officer commenced training soldiers in close-order drill, instilling new confidence and discipline in the demoralized Continental Army. Before von Steuben's arrival, colonial American soldiers were notorious for their slovenly camp conditions. Von Steuben insisted on reorganization to establish basic hygiene, ordering that kitchens and latrines be put on opposite sides of the camp, with latrines facing a downhill slope. Just having latrines was a novelty to the Continental troops, who were accustomed to living in their own filth.



Nov 19, 1985:
Reagan and Gorbachev hold their first summit meeting

For the first time in eight years, the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States hold a summit conference. Meeting in Geneva, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev produced no earth-shattering agreements. However, the meeting boded well for the future, as the two men engaged in long, personal talks and seemed to develop a sincere and close relationship.
The meeting came as somewhat of a surprise to some in the United States, considering Reagan's often incendiary rhetoric concerning communism and the Soviet Union, but it was in keeping with the president's often stated desire to bring the nuclear arms race under control. For Gorbachev, the meeting was another clear signal of his desire to obtain better relations with the United States so that he could better pursue his domestic reforms.
Little of substance was accomplished. Six agreements were reached, ranging from cultural and scientific exchanges to environmental issues. Both Reagan and Gorbachev, however, expressed satisfaction with the summit, which ended on November 21. The next summit was held in October 1986 in Reykjavik and ended somewhat disastrously, with Reagan's commitment to the Strategic Defense Initiative (the so-called "Star Wars" missile defense system) providing a major obstacle to progress on arms control talks. However, by the time of their third summit in Washington, D.C. in 1987, both sides made concessions in order to achieve agreement on a wide range of arms control issues.



Nov 19, 1976:
Patty Hearst out on bail

Patricia Campbell Hearst, a granddaughter of the legendary publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, is released on bail pending the appeal of her conviction for participating in a 1974 San Francisco bank robbery that was caught on camera.

Hearst’s ordeal began on the night of February 4, 1974, when, as a 19-year-old college student, she was kidnapped from her Berkeley, California, apartment by armed gunmen. The kidnappers, members of a political terrorist group called the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), beat Hearst’s fiancé and drove off with the heiress in the trunk of their car to a hideout near San Francisco.

The kidnappers demanded the release of two SLA members in prison for murder, a request that was denied, and called for Hearst’s family to donate millions of dollars to feed the poor. The Hearsts eventually established a program called People in Need (PIN) to distribute $2 million worth of food, but negotiations with the SLA deteriorated after the group demanded additional millions for PIN.

After being abducted, Patricia Hearst was locked in a closet by her captors for two months and subjected to mental and physical abuse. As a result, she later claimed, she was brainwashed into becoming an SLA member, adopting the name Tania and renouncing her family.

In April 1974, the SLA robbed the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco and surveillance videotape captured Hearst holding a gun. In May of that same year, six SLA members, including the group’s leader Donald DeFreeze (who called himself Field Marshall Cinque Mtume), were killed when their house went up in flames during a shootout with police in Los Angeles that was broadcast on live television. Hearst, along with several other SLA members not in the house at the time, remained on the lam for another year.

Law enforcement finally caught up with Hearst in September 1975 in San Francisco, where she was arrested and charged with armed robbery and use of a firearm during a felony, in connection with the Hibernia Bank heist. When authorities asked her occupation, Hearst famously replied "urban guerilla." During her widely publicized trial, Hearst’s famous defense attorney, F. Lee Bailey, claimed she’d been brainwashed and made to believe she’d be killed if she didn’t comply with her captors and go along with their criminal activities. However, in March 1976, a jury found her guilty of armed robbery and she was sentenced to seven years in prison. In November of that year she was released on bail while lawyers tried to appeal her conviction, but the appeal was later denied and Hearst went back to prison.

Hearst spent almost two years behind bars before her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter in 1979. Shortly thereafter, she married Bernard Shaw, her former bodyguard, and went on to raise a family in Connecticut. She later became a writer and actress. In 2001, President Bill Clinton granted Hearst a presidential pardon.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_JnfwCALOmPk/SwVsHJG6QhI/AAAAAAAAA1A/Ewwb3syfSP8/s400/hearst+2


Nov 19, 1977:
Sadat visits Israel

In an unprecedented move for an Arab leader, Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat travels to Jerusalem to seek a permanent peace settlement with Israel after decades of conflict. Sadat's visit, in which he met with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and spoke before the Knesset (Parliament), was met with outrage in most of the Arab world.

Despite criticism from Egypt's regional allies, Sadat continued to pursue peace with Begin, and in 1978 the two leaders met again in the United States, where they negotiated a historic agreement with President Jimmy Carter at Camp David, Maryland. The Camp David Accords, signed in September 1978, laid the groundwork for a permanent peace agreement between Egypt and Israel after three decades of hostilities. The final peace agreement--the first between Israel and one of its Arab neighbors--was signed in March 1979. The treaty ended the state of war between the two countries and provided for the establishment of full diplomatic and commercial relations.

Sadat and Begin were jointly awarded the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts. However, Sadat's peace efforts were not so highly acclaimed in the Arab world, and he was assassinated on October 6, 1981, by Muslim extremists in Cairo. Despite Sadat's death, the peace process continued under Egypt's new president, Hosni Mubarak. In 1982, Israel fulfilled the 1979 peace treaty by returning the last segment of the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. Egyptian-Israeli peace continues today.



Nov 19, 1942:
Soviet counterattack at Stalingrad

The Soviet Red Army under General Georgi Zhukov launches Operation Uranus, the great Soviet counteroffensive that turned the tide in the Battle of Stalingrad.

On June 22, 1941, despite the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, Nazi Germany launched a massive invasion against the USSR. Aided by its greatly superior air force, the German army raced across the Russian plains, inflicting terrible casualties on the Red Army and the Soviet population. With the assistance of troops from their Axis allies, the Germans conquered vast territory, and by mid October the great Russian cities of Leningrad and Moscow were under siege. However, the Soviets held on, and the coming of winter forced the German offensive to pause.

For the 1942 summer offensive, Adolf Hitler ordered the Sixth Army, under General Friedrich von Paulus, to take Stalingrad in the south, an industrial center and obstacle to Nazi control of the precious Caucasus oil wells. In August, the German Sixth Army made advances across the Volga River while the German Fourth Air Fleet reduced Stalingrad to burning rubble, killing more than 40,000 civilians. In early September, General Paulus ordered the first offensives into Stalingrad, estimating that it would take his army about 10 days to capture the city. Thus began one of the most horrific battles of World War II and arguably the most important because it was the turning point in the war between Germany and the USSR.

In their attempt to take Stalingrad, the German Sixth Army faced General Vasily Zhukov leading a bitter Red Army employing the ruined city to their advantage, transforming destroyed buildings and rubble into natural defensive fortifications. In a method of fighting the Germans began to call the Rattenkrieg, or "Rat's War," the opposing forces broke into squads eight or 10 strong and fought each other for every house and yard of territory. The battle saw rapid advances in street-fighting technology, such as a German machine gun that shot around corners and a light Russian plane that glided silently over German positions at night, dropping bombs without warning. However, both sides lacked necessary food, water, or medical supplies, and tens of thousands perished every week.

Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was determined to liberate the city named after him, and in November he ordered massive reinforcements to the area. On November 19, General Zhukov launched a great Soviet counteroffensive out of the rubble of Stalingrad. German command underestimated the scale of the counterattack, and the Sixth Army was quickly overwhelmed by the offensive, which involved 500,000 Soviet troops, 900 tanks, and 1,400 aircraft. Within three days, the entire German force of more than 200,000 men was encircled.

Italian and Romanian troops at Stalingrad surrendered, but the Germans hung on, receiving limited supplies by air and waiting for reinforcements. Hitler ordered Von Paulus to remain in place and promoted him to field marshal, as no Nazi field marshal had ever surrendered. Starvation and the bitter Russian winter took as many lives as the merciless Soviet troops, and on January 21, 1943, the last of the airports held by the Germans fell to the Soviets, completely cutting off the Germans from supplies. On January 31, Von Paulus surrendered German forces in the southern sector, and on February 2 the remaining German troops surrendered. Only 90,000 German soldiers were still alive, and of these only 5,000 troops would survive the Soviet prisoner-of-war camps and make it back to Germany.

The Battle of Stalingrad turned the tide in the war between Germany and the Soviet Union. General Zhukov, who had played such an important role in the victory, later led the Soviet drive on Berlin. On May 1, 1945, he personally accepted the German surrender of Berlin. Von Paulus, meanwhile, agitated against Adolf Hitler among the German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union and in 1946 provided testimony at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. After his release by the Soviets in 1953, he settled in East Germany.



Nov 19, 1975:
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest debuts

On this day in 1975, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a film about a group of patients at a mental institution, opens in theaters. Directed by Milos Forman and based on a 1962 novel of the same name by Ken Kesey, the film starred Jack Nicholson and was co-produced by the actor Michael Douglas. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest went on to become the first film in four decades to win in all five of the major Academy Award categories: Best Actor (Nicholson), Best Actress (Louise Fletcher, who played Nurse Ratched), Best Director, Best Screenplay (Adapted) and Best Picture.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest marked Jack Nicholson’s first Oscar win, although the actor, who was born April 22, 1937, in Neptune, New Jersey, had already received four other Academy Award nominations by that time. Nicholson’s first nomination, in the Best Supporting Actor category, came for his performance as an alcoholic lawyer in 1969’s Easy Rider, co-starring Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda. He earned his next Oscar nomination, for Best Actor, for 1970’s Five Easy Pieces, in which he played a drifter. For 1973’s The Last Detail, Nicholson earned another Best Actor Oscar nomination. His fourth Best Actor Oscar nomination came for his performance as Detective Jake Gittes in director Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974). In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Nicholson played Randle McMurphy, a convict who pretends to be crazy so he can be sent to a mental institution and avoid prison work detail. Once at the asylum, McMurphy encounters a varied cast of inmates and clashes memorably with the authoritative Nurse Ratched.

During the 1980s, Nicholson, known for his charisma and devilish grin, appeared in such films as Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), which was based on a Stephen King horror novel; The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), with Jessica Lange; Reds (1981), which was directed by Warren Beatty and earned Nicholson another Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination; Terms of Endearment (1983), for which he collected a second Best Actor Oscar; Prizzi’s Honor (1985), for which he received another Best Actor Oscar nomination; The Witches of Eastwick (1987), with Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer; Ironweed (1987), for which he took home yet another Best Actor Academy Award nomination; and Batman (1989), in which he portrayed the villainous Joker.

Nicholson’s prolific film work in the 1990s included The Two Jakes (1990), a sequel to Chinatown directed by Nicholson himself, the biopic Hoffa (1992) and A Few Good Men (1992), for which he earned another Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. A Few Good Men features Tom Cruise and Demi Moore and includes the now-famous Nicholson line “You can’t handle the truth.” Nicholson won his third Best Actor Oscar for 1997’s As Good as it Gets, which co-stars Helen Hunt, and earned his 12th Academy Award nomination for his performance in 2002’s About Schmidt. The iconic actor’s more recent film credits include Something’s Gotta Give (2003), with Diane Keaton, and The Departed (2006), directed by Martin Scorsese.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WSyJgydTsA
_________________
Friends are like diamonds and diamonds are forever.

Together we stand - Divided we fall.

[Duke of Buckingham [TeaM]]

Nov 20, 1945:
Nuremberg trials begin

Twenty-four high-ranking Nazis go on trial in Nuremberg, Germany, for atrocities committed during World War II.

The Nuremberg Trials were conducted by an international tribunal made up of representatives from the United States, the Soviet Union, France, and Great Britain. It was the first trial of its kind in history, and the defendants faced charges ranging from crimes against peace, to crimes of war, to crimes against humanity. Lord Justice Geoffrey Lawrence, the British member, presided over the proceedings, which lasted 10 months and consisted of 216 court sessions.

On October 1, 1946, 12 architects of Nazi policy were sentenced to death. Seven others were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 10 years to life, and three were acquitted. Of the original 24 defendants, one, Robert Ley, committed suicide while in prison, and another, Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, was deemed mentally and physically incompetent to stand trial. Among those condemned to death by hanging were Joachim von Ribbentrop, Nazi minister of foreign affairs; Hermann Goering, leader of the Gestapo and the Luftwaffe; Alfred Jodl, head of the German armed forces staff; and Wilhelm Frick, minister of the interior.

On October 16, 10 of the architects of Nazi policy were hanged. Goering, who at sentencing was called the "leading war aggressor and creator of the oppressive program against the Jews," committed suicide by poison on the eve of his scheduled execution. Nazi Party leader Martin Bormann was condemned to death in absentia (but is now believed to have died in May 1945). Trials of lesser German and Axis war criminals continued in Germany into the 1950s and resulted in the conviction of 5,025 other defendants and the execution of 806.



Nov 20, 1789:
New Jersey ratifies the Bill of Rights

On this day in 1789, New Jersey ratifies the Bill of Rights, becoming the first state to do so. New Jersey's action was a first step toward making the first 10 amendments to the Constitution law and completing the revolutionary reforms begun by the Declaration of Independence.

The Anti-Federalist critics of the U.S. Constitution were afraid that a too-strong federal government would become just another sort of the monarchical regime from which they had recently been freed. They believed that the Constitution gave too much power to the federal government by outlining its rights but failing to delineate the rights of the individuals living under it. Before the Massachusetts ratifying convention would accept the Constitution, then, which they finally did in February 1788, the document's Federalist supporters had to promise to create a Bill of Rights to be amended to the Constitution immediately upon the creation of a new government under the document. This helped to assuage the Anti-Federalists' concerns.

As promised, the newly elected Congress drafted the Bill of Rights on December 25, 1789. Drafted by James Madison and loosely based on Virginia's Declaration of Rights, the first 10 amendments give the following rights to all United States citizens:

1. Freedom of religion, speech and assembly
2. Right to keep and bear arms for the purpose of a well-regulated militia
3. No forcible quartering of soldiers during peacetime
4. Freedom from unreasonable search and seizure
5. Right to a grand jury for capital crimes and due process. Protection from double jeopardy, self-incrimination and public confiscation of private property without "just compensation"
6. Right to "speedy and public" trial by jury and a competent defense
7. Right to trial by jury for monetary cases above $20
8. Protection against "excessive" bail or fines and "cruel and unusual" punishments
9. Rights not enumerated are "retained by the people"
10. Rights not given to the federal government or prohibited the state governments by the Constitution, "are reserved to the States... or to the people"



Nov 20, 1923:
Garrett Morgan patents three-position traffic signal

On this day in 1923, the U.S. Patent Office grants Patent No. 1,475,074 to 46-year-old inventor and newspaperman Garrett Morgan for his three-position traffic signal. Though Morgan's was not the first traffic signal (that one had been installed in London in 1868), it was an important innovation nonetheless: By having a third position besides just "Stop" and "Go," it regulated crossing vehicles more safely than earlier signals had.

Morgan, the child of two former slaves, was born in Kentucky in 1877. When he was just 14 years old, he moved north to Ohio to look for a job. First he worked as a handyman in Cincinnati; next he moved to Cleveland, where he worked as a sewing-machine repairman. In 1907, he opened his own repair shop, and in 1909 he added a garment shop to his operation. The business was an enormous success, and by 1920 Morgan had made enough money to start a newspaper, the Cleveland Call, which became one of the most important black newspapers in the nation.

Morgan was prosperous enough to have a car at a time when the streets were crowded with all manner of vehicles: Bicycles, horse-drawn delivery wagons, streetcars and pedestrians all shared downtown Cleveland's narrow streets and clogged its intersections. There were manually operated traffic signals where major streets crossed one another, but they were not all that effective: Because they switched back and forth between Stop and Go with no interval in between, drivers had no time to react when the command changed. This led to many collisions between vehicles that both had the right of way when they entered the intersection. As the story goes, when Morgan witnessed an especially spectacular accident at an ostensibly regulated corner, he had an idea: If he designed an automated signal with an interim "warning" position—the ancestor of today's yellow light—drivers would have time to clear the intersection before crossing traffic entered it.

The signal Morgan patented was a T-shaped pole with three settings. At night, when traffic was light, it could be set at half-mast (like a blinking yellow light today), warning drivers to proceed carefully through the intersection. He sold the rights to his invention to General Electric for $40,000.



Nov 20, 1948:
American consul in China held "hostage" by communists

In what begins as a fairly minor incident, the American consul and his staff in Mukden, China, are made virtual hostages by communist forces in China. The crisis did not end until a year later, by which time U.S. relations with the new communist government in China had been seriously damaged.
Mukden was one of the first major trade centers in China to be occupied by Mao's communist forces in October 1948 during the revolution against the Nationalist Chinese government. In November, American Consul Angus Ward refused to surrender the consulate's radio transmitter to the communists. In response, armed troops surrounded the consulate, trapping Ward and 21 staff members. The Chinese cut off all communication, as well as water and electricity. For months, almost nothing was heard from Ward and the other Americans.
The U.S. response to the situation was to first order the consulate closed and call for the withdrawal of Ward and his staff. However, Ward was prevented from doing so after the Chinese communists, in June 1949, charged the consulate with being a headquarters for spies. With the situation worsening, the United States tried to exert diplomatic pressure by calling upon its allies to withhold recognition of the new communist Chinese government. Chinese forces thereupon arrested Ward, charging him and some of his staff with inciting a riot outside the consulate in October 1949. President Harry Truman was incensed at this action and met with his military advisors to discuss the feasibility of military action. Secretary of State Dean Acheson bluntly and angrily informed the new People's Republic of China that no U.S. recognition would ever be forthcoming until the Americans at Mukden were released. On November 24, 1949, Ward and his staff were allowed to leave the consulate. Ward and four other Americans had actually been found guilty of the inciting-to-riot charge and were ordered deported. Together with the other Americans, they left China in December.
The Chinese actions, which are still difficult to explain or understand, no doubt damaged any possibilities that might have existed for U.S. recognition of the People's Republic of China. Truman, already under heavy attacks at home for not "saving" the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, could ill-afford to show weakness in dealing with the Chinese communists, particularly after the arrest of Ward and the other Americans so angered the American public.



Nov 20, 1820:
American vessel sunk by sperm whale

The American whaler Essex, which hailed from Nantucket, Massachusetts, is attacked by an 80-ton sperm whale 2,000 miles from the western coast of South America.

The 238-ton Essex was in pursuit of sperm whales, specifically the precious oil and bone that could be derived from them, when an enraged bull whale rammed the ship twice and capsized the vessel. The 20 crew members escaped in three open boats, but only five of the men survived the harrowing 83-day journey to the coastal waters of South America, where they were picked up by other ships. Most of the crew resorted to cannibalism during the long journey, and at one point men on one of the long boats drew straws to determine which of the men would be shot in order to provide sustenance for the others. Three other men who had been left on a desolate Pacific island were saved later.

The first capture of a sperm whale by an American vessel was in 1711, marking the birth of an important American industry that commanded a fleet of more than 700 ships by the mid 18th century. Herman Melville's classic novel Moby Dick (1851) was inspired in part by the story of the Essex.



Nov 20, 1947:
Princess Elizabeth marries Philip Mountbatten

In a lavish wedding ceremony at Westminster Abbey in London, Princess Elizabeth marries her distant cousin, Philip Mountbatten, a dashing former prince of Greece and Denmark who renounced his titles in order to marry the English princess.

Princess Elizabeth, heir to the British throne, was 21 years old. Philip Mountbatten, age 26, had fought as a British naval officer during World War II and was made the duke of Edinburgh on the eve of his wedding to Elizabeth. The celebrations surrounding the wedding of the popular princess lifted the spirits of the people of Britain, who were enduring economic difficulties in the aftermath of World War II.

On February 6, 1952, the death of King George VI sent Elizabeth to the throne, and Philip ended his naval career to concentrate on his new duties as consort of the British monarch. Elizabeth and Philip eventually had four children--Prince Charles, Princess Anne, Prince Andrew, and Prince Edward.



Nov 20, 1955:
Bo Diddley makes his national television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show

Born Ellas Otha Bates in McComb, Mississippi, in 1928, the man better known as Bo Diddley introduced himself and his namesake beat to the world on this day in 1955 with his television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Bo Diddley opened his appearance on Ed Sullivan with the eponymously titled song "Bo Diddley,". This now-famous number set portions of the children's rhyme "Mockingbird" to what is now known as "the Bo Diddley beat"—a syncopated rhythm in 4/4 time that is the foundation of such rock-and-roll classics as Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away" and the Stangeloves' "I Want Candy," among countless others. Five months before Elvis Presley would make his famous Ed Sullivan debut, Diddley's performance gave many Americans their first exposure to rock and roll, though that term was not yet familiar to mainstream audiences. Neither was the Bo Diddley beat, yet within just a few seconds of the drum-and-maraca opening of "Bo Diddley," the live Ed Sullivan audience can be heard spontaneously clapping along to the distinctive rhythm in the surviving kinescope recording of the performance.

As Diddley would later tell the story, Ed Sullivan had expected him to perform only a cover version of "Tennessee" Ernie Ford's "Sixteen Tons" and was furious enough with him for opening with "Bo Diddley" that Sullivan banned him from future appearances on his show. Be that as it may, Diddley's appearance on this day in 1955 introduced a sound that would influence generations of followers. As blues-rock artist George Thorogood—who performed and recorded many Bo Diddley covers during his own career—once told Rolling Stone: "[Chuck Berry's] 'Maybellene' is a country song sped up... 'Johnny B. Goode' is blues sped up. But you listen to 'Bo Diddley,' and you say, 'What in the Jesus is that?'"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeZHB3ozglQ
_________________
Friends are like diamonds and diamonds are forever.

Together we stand - Divided we fall.

[Duke of Buckingham [TeaM]]

Nov 21, 1980:
Millions tune in to find out who shot J.R.

On this day in 1980, 350 million people around the world tune in to television's popular primetime drama "Dallas" to find out who shot J.R. Ewing, the character fans loved to hate. J.R. had been shot on the season-ending episode the previous March 21, which now stands as one of television's most famous cliffhangers. The plot twist inspired widespread media coverage and left America wondering "Who shot J.R.?" for the next eight months. The November 21 episode solved the mystery, identifying Kristin Shepard, J.R.'s wife's sister and his former mistress, as the culprit.

The CBS television network debuted the first five-episode pilot season of "Dallas" in 1978; it went on to run for another 12 full-length seasons. The first show of its kind, "Dallas" was dubbed a "primetime soap opera" for its serial plots and dramatic tales of moral excess. The show revolved around the relations of two Texas oil families: the wealthy, successful Ewing family and the perpetually down-on-their-luck Barnes family. The families' patriarchs, Jock Ewing and Digger Barnes, were former partners locked in a years-long feud over oil fields Barnes claimed had been stolen by Ewing. Ewing's youngest son Bobby (Patrick Duffy) and Barnes' daughter Pam (Victoria Principal) had married, linking the battling clans even more closely. The character of J.R. Ewing, Bobby's oldest brother and a greedy, conniving, womanizing scoundrel, was played by Larry Hagman.

As J.R. had many enemies, audiences were hard-pressed to guess who was responsible for his attempted murder. That summer, the question "Who Shot J.R.?" entered the national lexicon, becoming a popular t-shirt slogan, and heightening anticipation of the soap's third season, which was to air in the fall. After a much-talked-about contract dispute with Hagman was finally settled, the season was delayed because of a Screen Actors Guild strike, much to the dismay of "Dallas" fans. When it finally aired, the episode revealing J.R.'s shooter became one of television's most watched shows, with an audience of 83 million people in the U.S. alone—a full 76 percent of all U.S. televisions on that night were tuned in—and helped put "Dallas" into greater worldwide circulation. It also popularized the use of the cliffhanger by television writers.

The last premiere episode of "Dallas" aired on May 3, 1991. A spin-off, "Knots Landing," aired from December 27, 1979 until May 13, 1993. "Dallas" remains in syndication around the world.



Nov 21, 1927:
Holland Tunnel appears on the cover of Time

On this day in 1927, Time magazine puts the week-old Holland Tunnel on its cover. The tunnel, which runs under the Hudson River between New York City and Jersey City, New Jersey, had opened to traffic the week before, at the stroke of midnight on November 13. (Earlier that day, President Calvin Coolidge had ceremonially opened the tunnel from his yacht on the Potomac by turning the same key that had "opened" the Panama Canal in 1915—Time called it "the golden lever of the Presidential telegraphic instrument"—which rang a giant brass bell at the tunnel's entrances.) On that first day, 51,694 vehicles traveled through the tunnel.

Time presented all of the tunnel's vital statistics: its total length (9,250 feet, the "longest of its kind in the world"), length under the river (5,480 feet), hourly and yearly vehicle capacity (3,800 and 15,000,000, respectively), excavation (500,000 cubic yards of soil and rock) and cost ($48.4 million). It also explained the most significant thing about the tunnel: its sophisticated ventilation system.

Until its engineers could figure out a way to keep carbon monoxide out of the air, building an underground road for cars and trucks had been a foolishly dangerous idea. A team of scientists from Yale, the University of Illinois and the Bureau of Mines discovered that only four parts of the poisonous gas per 10,000 of air could be lethal, and they recommended that the tunnel's builders design a two-duct ventilating system to ensure that people in the tunnel would always have fresh air to breathe. As Time explained: "To prevent disaster absolutely Chief Engineer Holland installed 84 ventilating fans in four 10 story buildings, two on each side of the Hudson. Part of them blow fresh air into the tunnel floor through vents, others suck vitiated air through ducts in the tunnel ceiling. Thus they change the tunnel air completely 42 times an hour and but 56 of the fans are needed to do so." (The other 28 were reserved for emergency use.) It took—and still takes—about 90 seconds to replace all of the air in the tunnel with fresh air.

On the day the tunnel opened, the toll was 50 cents per car in both directions. In 1970, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey switched to one-way tolls. By 2009, the one-way toll was $8.



Nov 21, 1861:
Judah Benjamin becomes Confederate secretary of war

On this day in 1861, Confederate President Jefferson Davis names Judah Benjamin the secretary of war.

A Jew who was born in the West Indies in 1811, Judah Benjamin was an exception to the rule in the Protestant South. After growing up largely in South Carolina, Benjamin attended Yale Law School and went on to practice law and own a slave plantation near New Orleans. He married the daughter of a wealthy Catholic couple, but the marriage was distant--Natalie Benjamin moved to Paris soon after the birth of their daughter and the couple spent little of their 50-plus-year marriage together.

Benjamin became a representative in the Louisiana state legislature in 1842, and was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1852. While there, he became a close friend of Jefferson Davis, who was then a Mississippi senator. Benjamin resigned during the secession crisis of 1860 and 1861, even before Louisiana officially left the Union. Davis selected Benjamin as the Confederacy's first attorney general, and he quickly became the president's most trusted advisor. After the Battle of First Bull Run, Virginia, in July 1861, Secretary of War Leroy Walker resigned amid criticism that the Confederate army did not pursue the defeated Yankees. Davis appointed Benjamin to the position.

Although Benjamin had no military experience, his appointment allowed Davis to dominate Confederate military affairs. Placing his trusted friend in the position of secretary of war ensured that Davis would not be challenged on important military decisions. Benjamin efficiently managed the day-to-day work of the war department, but began to quarrel with some of the top generals who resented taking orders from a non-military bureaucrat. Benjamin also drew criticism because of his religion--many openly questioned his loyalty because of his Jewish faith.

When Roanoke Island fell to the Yankees in March 1862, criticism of Benjamin peaked. Many censured him for not sending men and supplies to the island's garrison. Furthermore, the war was going badly for the Confederates in the West. Davis recognized that the storm of complaints was crippling Benjamin's ability to perform his duty, so he appointed Benjamin secretary of state when Robert M. T. Hunter resigned that position. As the outlook for the Confederacy grew bleaker in 1863 and 1864, Benjamin floated the idea that the South could obtain foreign recognition only by promising emancipation. This radical concept fell on deaf ears until the last weeks of the war.

When the Confederacy finally collapsed, Benjamin fled with the rest of the Confederate government to Danville, Virginia. When President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, it was discovered that Benjamin had ties to the Surratt family, who were implicated in the conspiracy to kill the president. Fearing capture and prosecution, Benjamin fled the country. He settled in England and practiced law there, often visiting his wife and daughter in Paris. During the rest of his life, Benjamin rarely spoke of his service to the Confederacy. He died in Paris in 1884.



Nov 21, 1975:
Congressional report charges U.S. involvement in assassination plots

A Senate committee issues a report charging that U.S. government officials were behind assassination plots against two foreign leaders and were heavily involved in at least three other plots. The shocking revelations suggested that the United States was willing to go to murderous levels in pursuing its Cold War policies.
The Senate Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Senator Frank Church, alleged that U.S. officials instigated plots to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba of the Congo. In addition, the U.S. officials "encouraged or were privy to" plots that led to the assassinations of Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, General Rene Schneider of Chile, and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. The attempts against Castro failed, but the other four leaders were killed. There was also evidence suggesting U.S. involvement in a number of other assassination plots against foreign leaders.
The committee indicated that it had no specific evidence that an American president ever authorized an assassination. However, it went on to declare that "whether or not the President in fact knows about the assassination plots, and even if their subordinates failed in their duty of full disclosure, it still follows that the President should have known about the plots." The Central Intelligence Agency came in for special condemnation for its efforts to recruit Mafia hit men to kill Castro and mercenaries to assassinate Lumumba. In the report's conclusion, the committee declared that, "We condemn the use of assassination as a tool of foreign policy [and] find that assassination violates moral precepts fundamental to our way of life."
President Gerald Ford criticized the decision to release the report, claiming that it would do "grievous damage to our country" and would be used by "groups hostile to the United States in a manner designed to do maximum damage to the reputation and foreign policy of the United States."



Nov 21, 1916:
Britannic sinks in Aegean Sea

The Britannic, sister ship to the Titanic, sinks in the Aegean Sea on this day in 1916, killing 30 people. More than 1,000 others were rescued.

In the wake of the Titanic disaster on April 14, 1912, the White Star Line made several modifications in the construction of its already-planned sister ship. First, the name was changed from Gigantic to Britannic (probably because it seemed more humble) and the design of the hull was altered to make it less vulnerable to icebergs. In addition, it was mandated that there be enough lifeboats on board to accommodate all passengers, which had not been the case with the Titanic.

The nearly 50,000-ton luxury vessel, the largest in the world, was launched in 1914, but was requisitioned soon afterward by the British government to serve as a hospital ship during World War I. In this capacity, Captain Charlie Bartlett led the Britannic on five successful voyages bringing wounded British troops back to England from various ports around the world.

On November 21, the Britannic was on its way to pick up more wounded soldiers near the Gulf of Athens, when at 8:12 a.m., a violent explosion rocked the ship. Captain Bartlett ordered the closure of the watertight doors and sent out a distress signal. However, the blast had already managed to flood six whole compartments—even more extensive damage than that which had sunk the Titanic. Still, the Britannic had been prepared for such a disaster and would have stayed afloat except for two critical matters.

First, Captain Bartlett decided to try to run the Britannic aground on the nearby island of Kea. This might have been successful, but, earlier, the ship's nursing staff had opened the portholes to air out the sick wards. Water poured in through the portholes as the Britannic headed toward Kea. Second, the disaster was compounded when some of the crew attempted to launch lifeboats without orders. Since the ship was still moving as fast as it could, the boats were sucked into the propellers, killing those on board.

Less than 30 minutes later, Bartlett realized that the ship was going to sink and ordered it abandoned. The lifeboats were launched and even though the Britannic sank at 9:07, less than an hour after the explosion, nearly 1,100 people managed to make it off the ship. In fact, most of the 30 people who died were in the prematurely launched lifeboats. In 1976, famed ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau found the Britannic lying on its side 400 feet below the surface of the Aegean. The cause of the explosion remains unknown, but many believe that the Britannic hit a mine.



Nov 21, 1783:
Men fly over Paris

French physician Jean-François Pilatre de Rozier and François Laurent, the marquis d' Arlandes, make the first untethered hot-air balloon flight, flying 5.5 miles over Paris in about 25 minutes. Their cloth balloon was crafted by French papermaking brothers Jacques-Étienne and Joseph-Michel Montgolfier, inventors of the world's first successful hot-air balloons.

For time immemorial, humanity has dreamed of flight. Greek mythology tells of Daedalus, who made wings of wax, and Leonardo da Vinci drew designs of flying machines and envisioned the concept of a helicopter in the 15th century. It was not until the 1780s, however, that human flight became a reality.

The first successful flying device may not have been a Montgolfier balloon but an "ornithopter"--a glider-like aircraft with flapping wings. According to a hazy record, the German architect Karl Friedrich Meerwein succeeded in lifting off the ground in an ornithopter in 1781. Whatever the veracity of this record, Meerwein's flying machine never became a viable means of flight, and it was the Montgolfier brothers who first took men into the sky.

Joseph and Étienne Montgolfier ran a prosperous paper business in the town of Vidalon in southern France. Their success allowed them to finance their interest in scientific experimentation. In 1782, they discovered that combustible materials burned under a lightweight paper or fabric bag would cause the bag to rise into the air. From this phenomenon, they deduced that smoke causes balloons to rise. Actually, it is hot air that causes balloons to rise, but their error did not interfere with their subsequent achievements.

On June 4, 1783, the brothers gave the first public demonstration of their discovery, in Annonay. An unmanned balloon heated by burning straw and wool rose 3,000 feet into the air before settling to the ground nearly two miles away. In their test of a hot-air balloon, the Montgolfiers were preceded by Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão, a Brazilian priest who launched a small hot-air balloon in the palace of the king of Portugal in 1709. The Montgolfiers were unaware of Lourenço's work, however, and quickly surpassed it.

On September 19, the Montgolfiers sent a sheep, a rooster, and a duck aloft in one of their balloons in a prelude to the first manned flight. The balloon, painted azure blue and decorated with golden fleurs-de-lis, lifted up from the courtyard of the palace of Versailles in the presence of King Louis XVI. The barnyard animals stayed afloat for eight minutes and landed safely two miles away. On October 15, Jean-François Pilátre de Rozier made a tethered test flight of a Montgolfier balloon, briefly rising into the air before returning to earth.

The first untethered hot-air balloon flight occurred before a large, expectant crowd in Paris on November 21. Pilátre and d'Arlandes, an aristocrat, rose up from the grounds of royal Cháteau La Muette in the Bois de Boulogne and flew approximately five miles. Humanity had at last conquered the sky.

The Montgolfier brothers were honored by the French Acadámie des Sciences for their achievement. They later published books on aeronautics and pursued important work in other scientific fields.



Nov 21, 1934:
Ella Fitzgerald wins Amateur Night at Harlem's Apollo Theater

On the evening of November 21, 1934, a young and gangly would-be dancer took to the stage of Harlem's Apollo Theater to participate in a harrowing tradition known as Amateur Night. Finding herself onstage as a result of pure chance after her name was drawn out of a hat, the aspiring dancer spontaneously decided to turn singer instead—a change of heart that would prove momentous not only for herself personally, but also for the future course of American popular music. The performer in question was a teenaged Ella Fitzgerald, whose decision to sing rather than dance on this day in 1934 set her on a course toward becoming a musical legend. It also led her to victory at Amateur Night at the Apollo, a weekly event that was then just a little more than a year old but still thrives today.

Born in 1917 in New York City and orphaned at the age of 15, Ella Fitzgerald was a high-school dropout and a ward of New York State when she made her way to the Apollo that autumn night in 1934 with two of her girlfriends. "It was a bet," she later recalled. "We just put our names in....We never thought we'd get the call." But Ella did get the call, and as it happened, she came to the stage immediately after a talented and popular local dance duo. Afraid that she couldn't measure up to the dancing talents of the preceding act, Ella was petrified. "I looked and I saw all those people, and I said, 'Oh my gosh, what am I going to do out here?'" she told National Public Radio decades later. "Everybody started laughing and said, 'What is she gonna do?' And I couldn't think of nothing else, so I tried to sing 'The Object of My Affection.'"

By her own admission, Fitzgerald was blatantly imitating the singer who popularized that song, Connie Boswell of the Boswell Sisters, and the first few notes were a disaster. Rushing onstage to protect her from the jeers of the notoriously tough Apollo Theater crowd, however, was the famous Amateur Night master of ceremonies, Ralph Cooper, who helped Ella gather her wits and try again. On her second attempt, she brought down the house.

Within the year, Ella Fitzgerald had been discovered by Chick Webb, to whose band she was legally paroled by the State of New York while still shy of her 18th birthday. It was with Webb's band that she scored her career-making hit, "A-Tisket A-Tasket" in 1938, but it was as a solo performer that she would become a jazz legend in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a revolutionary innovator in vocal jazz.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g47Q8QRHe0s
_________________
Friends are like diamonds and diamonds are forever.

Together we stand - Divided we fall.

[Duke of Buckingham [TeaM]]

Nov 22, 1963:
John F. Kennedy assassinated

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, is assassinated while traveling through Dallas, Texas, in an open-top convertible.

First lady Jacqueline Kennedy rarely accompanied her husband on political outings, but she was beside him, along with Texas Governor John Connally and his wife, for a 10-mile motorcade through the streets of downtown Dallas on November 22. Sitting in a Lincoln convertible, the Kennedys and Connallys waved at the large and enthusiastic crowds gathered along the parade route. As their vehicle passed the Texas School Book Depository Building at 12:30 p.m., Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly fired three shots from the sixth floor, fatally wounding President Kennedy and seriously injuring Governor Connally. Kennedy was pronounced dead 30 minutes later at Dallas' Parkland Hospital. He was 46.

Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who was three cars behind President Kennedy in the motorcade, was sworn in as the 36th president of the United States at 2:39 p.m. He took the presidential oath of office aboard Air Force One as it sat on the runway at Dallas Love Field airport. The swearing in was witnessed by some 30 people, including Jacqueline Kennedy, who was still wearing clothes stained with her husband's blood. Seven minutes later, the presidential jet took off for Washington.

The next day, November 23, President Johnson issued his first proclamation, declaring November 25 to be a day of national mourning for the slain president. On that Monday, hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets of Washington to watch a horse-drawn caisson bear Kennedy's body from the Capitol Rotunda to St. Matthew's Catholic Cathedral for a requiem Mass. The solemn procession then continued on to Arlington National Cemetery, where leaders of 99 nations gathered for the state funeral. Kennedy was buried with full military honors on a slope below Arlington House, where an eternal flame was lit by his widow to forever mark the grave.

Lee Harvey Oswald, born in New Orleans in 1939, joined the U.S. Marines in 1956. He was discharged in 1959 and nine days later left for the Soviet Union, where he tried unsuccessfully to become a citizen. He worked in Minsk and married a Soviet woman and in 1962 was allowed to return to the United States with his wife and infant daughter. In early 1963, he bought a .38 revolver and rifle with a telescopic sight by mail order, and on April 10 in Dallas he allegedly shot at and missed former U.S. Army general Edwin Walker, a figure known for his extreme right-wing views. Later that month, Oswald went to New Orleans and founded a branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a pro-Castro organization. In September 1963, he went to Mexico City, where investigators allege that he attempted to secure a visa to travel to Cuba or return to the USSR. In October, he returned to Dallas and took a job at the Texas School Book Depository Building.

Less than an hour after Kennedy was shot, Oswald killed a policeman who questioned him on the street near his rooming house in Dallas. Thirty minutes later, Oswald was arrested in a movie theater by police responding to reports of a suspect. He was formally arraigned on November 23 for the murders of President Kennedy and Officer J.D. Tippit.

On November 24, Oswald was brought to the basement of the Dallas police headquarters on his way to a more secure county jail. A crowd of police and press with live television cameras rolling gathered to witness his departure. As Oswald came into the room, Jack Ruby emerged from the crowd and fatally wounded him with a single shot from a concealed .38 revolver. Ruby, who was immediately detained, claimed that rage at Kennedy's murder was the motive for his action. Some called him a hero, but he was nonetheless charged with first-degree murder.

Jack Ruby, originally known as Jacob Rubenstein, operated strip joints and dance halls in Dallas and had minor connections to organized crime. He features prominently in Kennedy-assassination theories, and many believe he killed Oswald to keep him from revealing a larger conspiracy. In his trial, Ruby denied the allegation and pleaded innocent on the grounds that his great grief over Kennedy's murder had caused him to suffer "psychomotor epilepsy" and shoot Oswald unconsciously. The jury found Ruby guilty of "murder with malice" and sentenced him to die.

In October 1966, the Texas Court of Appeals reversed the decision on the grounds of improper admission of testimony and the fact that Ruby could not have received a fair trial in Dallas at the time. In January 1967, while awaiting a new trial, to be held in Wichita Falls, Ruby died of lung cancer in a Dallas hospital.

The official Warren Commission report of 1964 concluded that neither Oswald nor Ruby were part of a larger conspiracy, either domestic or international, to assassinate President Kennedy. Despite its seemingly firm conclusions, the report failed to silence conspiracy theories surrounding the event, and in 1978 the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in a preliminary report that Kennedy was "probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy" that may have involved multiple shooters and organized crime. The committee's findings, as with those of the Warren Commission, continue to be widely disputed.



Nov 22, 1900:
First Mercedes goes for a test drive

On this day in 1900, the first car to be produced under the Mercedes name is taken for its inaugural drive in Cannstatt, Germany. The car was specially built for its buyer, Emil Jellinek, an entrepreneur with a passion for fast, flashy cars. Jellinek had commissioned the Mercedes car from the German company Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft: it was lighter and sleeker than any car the company had made before, and Jellinek was confident that it would win races so handily that besotted buyers would snap it up. (He was so confident that he bought 36 of them.) In exchange for this extraordinary patronage, the company agreed to name its new machine after Jellinek's 11-year-old daughter, Mercedes.

In 1886, the German engineers Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach had built one of the world's first "horseless carriages," a four-wheeled carriage with an engine bolted to it. In 1889, the two men built the world's first four-wheeled automobile to be powered by a four-stroke engine. They formed Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft the next year.

In 1896, Emil Jellinek saw an ad for the D-M-G auto in a German magazine. Then, as the story goes, he traveled to D-M-G's Cannstatt factory, charged onto the factory floor wearing a pith helmet, pince-nez and mutton-chop sideburns and demanded that the company sell him the most spectacular car it had.

That car was sturdy, but it could only go 15 miles per hour--not even close to fast enough for Jellinek. In 1898, he ordered two more cars, stipulating that they be able to go at least 10 miles per hour faster than the first one could. Daimler complied; the result was the 8-horsepower Phoenix. Jellinek was impressed enough with the Phoenix that he began to sell them to his friends: 10 in 1899, 29 in 1900.

At the same time, he needed a racing car that could go even faster. Jellinek went back to D-M-G with a business proposition: if it would build him the world's best speedster (and name it the Mercedes), he would buy 36 of them.

The new Mercedes car was fast. It also introduced the aluminum crankcase, magnalium bearings, the pressed-steel frame, a new kind of coil-spring clutch and the honeycomb radiator (essentially the same one that today's Mercedes use). It was longer, wider, and lower than the Phoenix and had better brakes. Also, a mechanic could convert the new Mercedes from a two-seat racer to a four-seat family car in just a few minutes.

In 1902, the company legally registered the Mercedes brand name.
[IMG]http://www.pedaltothemetal.com/index.php?ct=news&action=thumb&id=3155[/IMG]


Nov 22, 1950:
Commuter trains collide in New York City

Two Long Island Railroad (LIRR) commuter trains collide on this day in 1950, killing 79 people. Defective equipment caused this horrific rear-end collision, the worst in the history of the LIRR.

The accident occurred in the Richmond Hills section of Queens. A 12-car train carrying commuters from Manhattan to Hempstead on Long Island was ordered to slow down as it entered the station in Queens. Engineer William Murphy cut the speed to 15 miles per hour and then to a complete stop. As the train stood still on the tracks, rear flagman Bertram Biggin got off the train with a red lamp in order to warn any approaching trains of its presence.

Soon, the train got a green light to move on and the Hempstead train attempted to restart its journey. Biggin got back on the train, but the stop had caused the train's brakes to lock. The express train to Babylon was on the same tracks just minutes behind and had green lights to proceed. It hit the rear of the Hempstead train going 40 miles per hour, smashing into and under the rear car, throwing it high into the air. Benjamin Pokorney, the motorman of the Babylon train, was killed, along with everyone traveling in the rear car. Another 363 people suffered significant injuries.

New York City Mayor Vincent Impellitari called the LIRR a "disgraceful common carrier" following the discovery that defective equipment that was not maintained properly was responsible for the accident. Millions of dollars in damages were eventually paid to the victims and their families.



Nov 22, 1718:
Blackbeard killed off North Carolina

Edward Teach, also known as Blackbeard, is killed off North Carolina's Outer Banks during a bloody battle with a British navy force sent from Virginia.

Believed to be a native of England, Edward Teach likely began his pirating career in 1713, when he became a crewman aboard a Caribbean sloop commanded by pirate Benjamin Hornigold. In 1717, after Hornigold accepted an offer of general amnesty by the British crown and retired as a pirate, Teach took over a captured 26-gun French merchantman, increased its armament to 40 guns, and renamed it the Queen Anne's Revenge.

During the next six months, the Queen Anne's Revenge served as the flagship of a pirate fleet featuring up to four vessels and more than 200 men. Teach became the most infamous pirate of his day, winning the popular name of Blackbeard for his long, dark beard, which he was said to light on fire during battles to intimidate his enemies. Blackbeard's pirate forces terrorized the Caribbean and the southern coast of North America and were notorious for their cruelty.

In May 1718, the Queen Anne's Revenge and another vessel were shipwrecked, forcing Blackbeard to desert a third ship and most of his men because of a lack of supplies. With the single remaining ship, Blackbeard sailed to Bath in North Carolina and met with Governor Charles Eden. Eden agreed to pardon Blackbeard in exchange for a share of his sizable booty.

At the request of North Carolina planters, Governor Alexander Spotswood of Virginia dispatched a British naval force under Lieutenant Robert Maynard to North Carolina to deal with Blackbeard. On November 22, Blackbeard's forces were defeated and he was killed in a bloody battle of Ocracoke Island. Legend has it that Blackbeard, who captured more than 30 ships in his brief pirating career, received five musket-ball wounds and 20 sword lacerations before dying.



Nov 22, 1988:
Stealth bomber unveiled

In the presence of members of Congress and the media, the Northrop B-2 "stealth" bomber is shown publicly for the first time at Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California.

The aircraft, which was developed in great secrecy for nearly a decade, was designed with stealth characteristics that would allow it to penetrate an enemy's most sophisticated defenses unnoticed. At the time of its public unveiling, the B-2 had not even been flown on a test flight. It rapidly came under fire for its massive cost--more than $40 billion for development and a $1 billion price tag for each unit.

In 1989, the B-2 was successfully flown, performing favorably. Although the aircraft had a wingspan of nearly half a football field, its radar signal was as negligible as that of a bird. The B-2 also successfully evaded infrared, sound detectors, and the visible eye.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the original order for the production of 132 stealth bombers was reduced to 21 aircraft. The B-2 has won a prominent place in the modern U.S. Air Force fleet, serving well in bombing missions during the 1990s.



Nov 22, 1990:
Margaret Thatcher resigns

Margaret Thatcher, the first woman prime minister in British history, announces her resignation after 11 years in Britain's top office.

Margaret Hilda Roberts was born in Grantham, England, in 1925. In 1959, after marrying businessman Denis Thatcher and giving birth to twins, she was elected to Parliament as a Conservative for Finchley, a north London district. During the 1960s, she rose rapidly in the ranks of the Conservative Party and in 1967 joined the shadow cabinet sitting in opposition to Harold Wilson's ruling Labour cabinet. With the victory of the Conservative Party under Edward Health in 1970, Thatcher became secretary of state for education and science.

In 1974, the Labour Party returned to power, and Thatcher served as joint shadow chancellor before replacing Edward Health as the leader of the Conservative Party in February 1975. She was the first woman to head the Conservatives. Under her leadership, the Conservative Party shifted further right in its politics, calling for privatization of national industries and utilities and promising a resolute defense of Britain's interests abroad. She also sharply criticized Prime Minister James Callaghan's ineffectual handling of the chaotic labor strikes of 1978 and 1979.

In March 1979, Callaghan was defeated by a vote of no confidence, and on May 3 a general election gave Thatcher's Conservatives a 44-seat majority in Parliament. Sworn in the next day, Prime Minister Thatcher immediately set about dismantling socialism in Britain. She privatized numerous industries, cut back government expenditures, and gradually reduced the rights of trade unions. In 1983, despite the worst unemployment figures for half a decade, Thatcher was reelected to a second term, thanks largely to the decisive British victory in the 1982 Falklands War with Argentina.

In other foreign affairs, the "Iron Lady" presided over the orderly establishment of an independent Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) in 1980 and took a hard stance against Irish separatists in Northern Ireland. In October 1984, an Irish Republican Army (IRA) bomb exploded at the Conservative Party conference in Brighton. The prime minister narrowly escaped harm.

In 1987, an upswing in the economy led to her election to a third term, but Thatcher soon alienated some members of her own party because of her poll-tax policies and opposition to further British integration into the European Community. In November 1990, she failed to receive a majority in the Conservative Party's annual vote for selection of a leader. She withdrew her nomination, and John Major, the chancellor of the Exchequer since 1989, was chosen as Conservative leader. On November 22, she announced her resignation and six days later was succeeded by Major. Thatcher's three consecutive terms in office marked the longest continuous tenure of a British prime minister since 1827. In 1992, she was made a baroness and took a seat in the House of Lords.



Nov 22, 1975:
KC and the Sunshine band top the U.S. pop charts with "That's The Way (I Like It)"

One of the most popular American pop groups of its time, KC and the Sunshine Band earned the second of their five #1 pop hits on this day in 1975 when "That's The Way (I Like It)" reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100.

With their breakthrough single, "Get Down Tonight" (1975), having implored listeners to "Do a little dance" and "Make a little love...," KC and the Sunshine Band's follow-up mined very much the same territory with its driving, danceable beat and its frank declaration, "That's the way/Uh-huh, Uh-huh/I like i/Uh-Huh." But as risqué as the lyrics written by Harry Wayne Casey and his songwriting partner (and Sunshine Band co-founder), Richard Finch, tended to be, they were always delivered in a way that was more exuberant than suggestive. AM radio—white pop stations and black R&B stations alike—loved the racially integrated KC and the Sunshine Band, and so did many critics. As Steven Ditlea wrote in a rave New York Times review of one of the group's live appearances, "KC has the stage presence and the musical ability to bridge the cultural chasm separating white performers and black listeners as well as between black music and white audiences."

Harry Wayne Casey and Richard Finch first began working together musically as low-level employees at a small, Hialeah-based record label called T.K. Their big break came in 1974, when a struggling T.K. artist named George McCrae overheard an instrumental track Casey and Finch had recorded on their own and volunteered his services as a singer. In just two takes, McCrae recorded the vocal track on a record called "Rock Your Baby," which was released in the spring of 1974 and went on to sell upwards of 3 million copies on its way to becoming a #1 pop hit. Following the success of "Rock Your Baby," Casey and Finch released an album called Do It Good that failed to find a large audience, but their second studio album, KC and the Sunshine Band (1975), was a multi-platinum smash that included both of the group's first two #1 pop hits as well as a third major hit in "Boogie Shoes."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3svW8PM_jc
_________________
Friends are like diamonds and diamonds are forever.

Together we stand - Divided we fall.

[Duke of Buckingham [TeaM]]

Nov 23, 1936:
First issue of Life is published

On November 23, 1936, the first issue of the pictorial magazine Life is published, featuring a cover photo of the Fort Peck Dam by Margaret Bourke-White.

Life actually had its start earlier in the 20th century as a different kind of magazine: a weekly humor publication, not unlike today's The New Yorker in its use of tart cartoons, humorous pieces and cultural reporting. When the original Life folded during the Great Depression, the influential American publisher Henry Luce bought the name and re-launched the magazine as a picture-based periodical on this day in 1936. By this time, Luce had already enjoyed great success as the publisher of Time, a weekly news magazine.

From his high school days, Luce was a newsman, serving with his friend Briton Hadden as managing editors of their school newspaper. This partnership continued through their college years at Yale University, where they acted as chairmen and managing editors of the Yale Daily News, as well as after college, when Luce joined Hadden at The Baltimore News in 1921. It was during this time that Luce and Hadden came up with the idea for Time. When it launched in 1923, it was with the intention of delivering the world's news through the eyes of the people who made it.

Whereas the original mission of Time was to tell the news, the mission of Life was to show it. In the words of Luce himself, the magazine was meant to provide a way for the American people "to see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events ... to see things thousands of miles away... to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed... to see, and to show..." Luce set the tone of the magazine with Margaret Bourke-White's stunning cover photograph of the Fort Peck Dam, which has since become an icon of the 1930s and the great public works completed under President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

Life was an overwhelming success in its first year of publication. Almost overnight, it changed the way people looked at the world by changing the way people could look at the world. Its flourish of images painted vivid pictures in the public mind, capturing the personal and the public, and putting it on display for the world to take in. At its peak, Life had a circulation of over 8 million and it exerted considerable influence on American life in the beginning and middle of the 20th century.

With picture-heavy content as the driving force behind its popularity,the magazine suffered as television became society's predominant means of communication. Life ceased running as a weekly publication in 1972, when it began losing audience and advertising dollars to television. In 2004, however, it resumed weekly publication as a supplement to U.S. newspapers. At its re-launch, its combined circulation was once again in the millions.



Nov 23, 1966:
Elvis Presley's "Spinout" opens in U.S. theaters

On this day in 1966, Elvis Presley's 22nd film, a rock 'n' roll musical called "Spinout" in which Elvis played a singing race car driver, opens in theaters across the U.S. The movie was the year's 57th highest-grossing film. "Spinout" was released on DVD in August 2004.

In the movie, Elvis played Mike McCoy, the lead singer in a touring rock band and a race car driver. Toward the end of a weeklong gig in Southern California, McCoy goes for an afternoon spin in his Cobra racer and gets run into a ditch by Cynthia Foxhugh, a crazed fan (played by Shelley Fabares, who had starred in "The Donna Reed Show" and later had a big part in the sitcom "Coach"). Cynthia happens to be the daughter of local auto magnate Howard Foxhugh. She spends the rest of the film trying to win McCoy's heart, but she has competition: The snobbish intellectual Diana St. Clair (played by actor Diane McBain), who has just completed a book called "The Perfect American Male," and Les (played by Deborah Walley), the drummer in McCoy's band, are also vying for the suave singer/racer's affections. Meanwhile, Cynthia's father is pressuring McCoy to drive his fancy new "Fox Fire" car to victory in an upcoming race. In the end, McCoy manages to pair each of his admirers up with someone else, while he remains a happy bachelor, free to hit the road again in search of love.

Presley's films are rarely noteworthy for their writing or their acting, but many people think that "Spinout" was better than average: The songs were catchy, and the racing scenes were comparatively exciting. Even some critics genuinely enjoyed the film. "Unusual for an Elvis comedy," one wrote, "'Spinout' is actually funny. Intentionally." The film is harmless enough," another said, "if about as deep as the stream Presley crashes his jaunty sports car into during the opening sequence." (On the other hand, the film was included in the book "The Fifty Worst Films of All Time (And How They Got That Way)," so it's clear that not everyone shares this point of view.)

"Spinout" was filmed on location at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles and the Ascot Motor Car Racing Ground, a well-known dirt track nearby. Two hundred extras had bit parts in the road race scene.



Nov 23, 1981:
Reagan gives CIA authority to establish the Contras

On this day, President Ronald Reagan signs off on a top secret document, National Security Decision Directive 17 (NSDD-17), which gives the Central Intelligence Agency the power to recruit and support a 500-man force of Nicaraguan rebels to conduct covert actions against the leftist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. A budget of $19 million was established for that purpose. NSDD-17 marked the beginning of official U.S. support for the so-called Contras in their struggle against the Sandinistas.
The decision came several months after President Reagan directed the CIA to develop a plan to stop what his administration believed to be a serious flow of arms from Nicaragua to rebels in neighboring El Salvador. The administration also believed that the Sandinista regime was merely a cat's paw for the Soviet Union. CIA officials subsequently set about securing pledges from Honduras to provide training bases and Argentina to give training to about 1,000 rebels (these would be in addition to the 500-man force trained and supplied by the CIA). Beyond the original goal of halting the flow of arms from Nicaragua, the tasks of the rebels were expanded to include spy missions and even paramilitary actions inside Nicaragua.
News of the directive leaked out to the press in March 1982, but Reagan administration officials quickly downplayed the significance of the action. They argued that the CIA plan was designed to support Nicaraguan "moderates" who opposed the Sandinista regime, not the disreputable former soldiers and allies of Anastasio Somoza, whom the Sandinista overthrew in 1979. Deputy Director of the CIA Admiral Bobby R. Inman argued that the $19 million allocation provided little buying power for arms and other materials, saying that "Nineteen million or $29 million isn't going to buy you much of any kind these days, and certainly not against that kind of military force."
In the years to come, U.S. support of the Contras became a highly charged issue among the American public. Congressional and public criticisms of the program eventually drove the Reagan administration to subvert congressional bans on aid to the Contras. These actions resulted in what came to be known as the Iran-Contra scandal of 1986.



Nov 23, 1959:
The Birdman of Alcatraz is allowed a small taste of freedom

Robert Stroud, the famous "Birdman of Alcatraz," is released from solitary confinement for the first time since 1916. Stroud gained widespread fame and attention when author Thomas Gaddis wrote a biography that trumpeted Stroud's ornithological expertise.

Stroud was first sent to prison in 1909 after he killed a bartender in a brawl. He had nearly completed his sentence at Leavenworth Federal Prison in Kansas when he stabbed a guard to death in 1916. Though he claimed to have acted in self-defense, he was convicted and sentenced to hang. A handwritten plea by Stroud's mother to President Woodrow Wilson earned Stroud a commuted sentence of life in permanent solitary confinement.

For the next 15 years, Stroud lived amongst the canaries that were brought to him by visitors, and became an expert in birds and ornithological diseases. But after being ordered to give up his birds in 1931, he redirected his energies to writing about them and published his first book on ornithology two years later. When the publisher failed to pay Stroud royalties because he was barred from filing suit, Stroud took out advertisements complaining about the situation. Prison officials retaliated by sending him to Alcatraz, the federal prison with the worst conditions.

In 1943, Stroud's Digest of the Diseases of Birds, a 500-page text that included his own illustrations, was published to general acclaim. In spite of his success, Stroud was depressed over the isolation he felt at Alcatraz, and he attempted suicide several times. The legendary "Birdman of Alcatraz" died in a Missouri prison in 1963 at the age of 73.



Nov 23, 1979:
IRA member sentenced for Mountbatten's assassination

Thomas McMahon, a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), is sentenced to life imprisonment for preparing and planting the bomb that killed Lord Louis Mountbatten and three others three months before.

On August 27, 1979, Lord Mountbatten was killed when McMahon and other IRA terrorists detonated a 50-pound bomb hidden on his fishing vessel Shadow V. Mountbatten, a World War II hero, elder statesman, and second cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, was spending the day with his family in Donegal Bay off Ireland's northwest coast when the bomb exploded. Three others were killed in the attack, including Mountbatten's 14-year-old grandson, Nicholas. Later that day, an IRA bombing attack on land killed 18 British paratroopers in County Down, Northern Ireland.

The assassination of Mountbatten was the first blow struck against the British royal family by the IRA during its long terrorist campaign to drive the British out of Northern Ireland and unite it with the Republic of Ireland to the south. The attack hardened the hearts of many Britons against the IRA and convinced Margaret Thatcher's government to take a hard-line stance against the terrorist organization.

The IRA immediately claimed responsibility for the Mountbatten attack, saying it detonated the bomb by remote control from the coast. It also took responsibility for the same-day bombing attack against British troops in County Down, which claimed 18 lives.

IRA member Thomas McMahon was later arrested and convicted for his role in the Mountbatten bombing. A near-legend in the IRA, he was a leader of the IRA's notorious South Armagh Brigade, which killed more than 100 British soldiers. He was one of the first IRA members to be sent to Libya to study detonators and timing devices and was an expert in explosives. Authorities believe the Mountbatten assassination was the work of many people, but McMahon was the only individual convicted. Sentenced to life in prison, he was released in 1998, along with other IRA and Unionist terrorists, under a controversial provision of the Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland's peace deal. McMahon claimed he had turned his back on the IRA and was becoming a carpenter.



Nov 23, 1936:
Blues legend Robert Johnson makes first-ever recording

Bluesman Robert Johnson is recorded for the very first time in a San Antonio recording studio on November 23, 1936.

The legend of Robert Johnson, arguably the most influential blues performer of all time, began growing in earnest only in the early 1960s, more than 20 years after his death. It was the 1959 publication of Samuel Charters's The Country Blues that introduced his name to many, but as Charters himself observed of Johnson at the time, "Almost nothing is known about his life....He is only a name on a few recordings." What is well known about those recordings is that they helped inspire a blues-rock revolution in the decade that followed—a revolution led by young British musicians like Eric Clapton and Keith Richard. What is less well known, perhaps, is just how small that body of work actually is.

In his short but hugely influential life, Robert Johnson spent only five days in the recording studio, recording only 41 total takes of 29 different songs. Thirteen of those takes and eight of those songs—including "Sweet Home Chicago" and "Terraplane Blues"—were captured during his first-ever session, on this day in 1936, in a makeshift studio set up in adjoining rooms of the Gunter Hotel in downtown San Antonio. Johnson returned to the Gunter Hotel twice more later in that same week, and then recorded once more over the course of two days in 1937 in Dallas. The results of those sessions were 12 78-rpm records issued on the Vocalion label in 1937 and 1938, the last of them after Johnson's death by poisoning at the hands of a jealous husband on August 16, 1938.

Almost immediately, Johnson's recordings gained a cult following among blues collectors like John Hammond, who would later gain fame as the "discoverer" of artists ranging from Billie Holliday and Big Joe Turner to Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin and Bruce Springsteen. Yet from 1938 to 1961, when Hammond convinced Columbia Records to release an album of Robert Johnson recordings called King of the Delta Blues, Johnson was more of a rumor than a reality. King of the Delta Blues, however, would spark a strong resurgence of interest in his life and work—a resurgence that would nevertheless fail to turn up many verifiable details of his life beyond the dates of his birth and death and of his few recording sessions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgYlmiKBAlY
_________________
Friends are like diamonds and diamonds are forever.

Together we stand - Divided we fall.

[Duke of Buckingham [TeaM]]

Nov 24, 1859:
Origin of Species is published

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, a groundbreaking scientific work by British naturalist Charles Darwin, is published in England. Darwin's theory argued that organisms gradually evolve through a process he called "natural selection." In natural selection, organisms with genetic variations that suit their environment tend to propagate more descendants than organisms of the same species that lack the variation, thus influencing the overall genetic makeup of the species.

Darwin, who was influenced by the work of French naturalist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck and the English economist Thomas Mathus, acquired most of the evidence for his theory during a five-year surveying expedition aboard the HMS Beagle in the 1830s. Visiting such diverse places as the Galapagos Islands and New Zealand, Darwin acquired an intimate knowledge of the flora, fauna, and geology of many lands. This information, along with his studies in variation and interbreeding after returning to England, proved invaluable in the development of his theory of organic evolution.

The idea of organic evolution was not new. It had been suggested earlier by, among others, Darwin's grandfather Erasmus Darwin, a distinguished English scientist, and Lamarck, who in the early 19th century drew the first evolutionary diagram—a ladder leading from one-celled organisms to man. However, it was not until Darwin that science presented a practical explanation for the phenomenon of evolution.

Darwin had formulated his theory of natural selection by 1844, but he was wary to reveal his thesis to the public because it so obviously contradicted the biblical account of creation. In 1858, with Darwin still remaining silent about his findings, the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace independently published a paper that essentially summarized his theory. Darwin and Wallace gave a joint lecture on evolution before the Linnean Society of London in July 1858, and Darwin prepared On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection for publication.

Published on November 24, 1859, Origin of Species sold out immediately. Most scientists quickly embraced the theory that solved so many puzzles of biological science, but orthodox Christians condemned the work as heresy. Controversy over Darwin's ideas deepened with the publication of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), in which he presented evidence of man's evolution from apes.

By the time of Darwin's death in 1882, his theory of evolution was generally accepted. In honor of his scientific work, he was buried in Westminster Abbey beside kings, queens, and other illustrious figures from British history. Subsequent developments in genetics and molecular biology led to modifications in accepted evolutionary theory, but Darwin's ideas remain central to the field.



Nov 24, 1807:
Mohawk Chief Joseph Brant dies

On this day in 1807, Mohawk Chief Thayendanegea, also known by his English name, Joseph Brant, dies at his home in Burlington, Ontario. Before dying, he reportedly said, "Have pity on the poor Indians. If you have any influence with the great, endeavour to use it for their good."

Brant ranked among Britain's best commanders during the American War for Independence. He was an educated Christian and Freemason who studied directly with Eleazer Wheelock at Moor's Indian Charity School, the parent institution of Dartmouth College. His older sister Mary was founding father Sir William Johnson's common-law wife and also played a significant role in colonial and revolutionary Indian affairs.

The Iroquois, an alliance of Native Americans including the Mohawk, attempted to maintain neutrality at the beginning of War for Independence, but by 1777, Joseph Brant had led the Iroquois into an alliance with Britain. He, like most Native Americans, saw Great Britain as their last defense against the land-hungry colonial settlers who were encroaching into their ancestral territory.

Following the alliance with Britain, Brant led successful raids in the civil war for upstate New York. On August 6, 1777, with the Patriots en route to relieve British-occupied Fort Stanwix, a mixed party of British regulars and Brant's Mohawk Indians launched the ambush known as the Battle of Oriskany, during which Patriot General Nicholas Herkimer was wounded and his horse was shot.

One year later, on September 17, 1778, Brant launched a successful attack on German Flats, now known as Herkimer, New York. Brant led a force of 150 Iroquois and 300 British Loyalists under the command of Captain William Caldwell against the small community, which had been left virtually undefended by Patriot troops.

The following summer, on July 20, 1779, Brant's party of 90 Tories and Loyalist Iroquois executed a successful raid in the Neversink Valley of New York, during which they destroyed a school and a church, as well as farms in Peenpack and Mahackamack. When the Patriot militia responded by attempting to ambush Brant as he traveled up the Delaware River on July 22, Brandt again defeated them, killing between 45 and 50 Patriots at what is known as the Battle of Minisink.

A little over a month later, on August 29, in southwestern New York near present-day Elmira, Continental forces led by Major General John Sullivan and Brigadier General James Clinton defeated a combined force of Loyalists and Indians commanded by Captain Walter Butler and Brant in what is known as The Battle of Chemung. Sullivan subsequently embarked on a scorched-earth campaign against the Iroquois in retaliation for their raids against frontier settlements. At least 40 of the tribe's villages were destroyed along with valuable supplies. As a result, the winter of 1779 was particularly brutal for the Iroquois. Nonetheless, they managed to increase their pressure on frontier settlements in 1780.

Despite the best efforts of the Iroquois, however, the Chemung Valley fell into the hands of American settlers following the war. As a result, Iroquois attached to Chief Joseph Brant followed him in a resettlement to Canada, where they found land and safety with their British allies.



Nov 24, 1932:
The FBI Crime Lab opens its doors for business

The crime lab that is now referred to as the FBI Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory officially opens in Washington, D.C., on this day in 1932. The lab, which was chosen because it had the necessary sink, operated out of a single room and had only one full-time employee, Agent Charles Appel. Agent Appel began with a borrowed microscope and a pseudo-scientific device called a helixometer. The helixometer purportedly assisted investigators with gun barrel examinations, but it was actually more for show than function. In fact, J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, provided the lab with very few resources and used the "cutting-edge lab" primarily as a public relations tool. But by 1938, the FBI lab added polygraph machines and started conducting controversial lie detection tests as part of its investigations. In its early days, the FBI Crime Lab worked on about 200 pieces of evidence a year. By the 1990s, that number multiplied to approximately 200,000. Currently, the FBI Crime Lab obtains 600 new pieces of criminal evidence everyday.



Nov 24, 1999:
Ferry sinks in Yellow Sea, killing hundreds

A ferry sinks in the Yellow Sea off the coast of China, killing hundreds of people on this day in 1999. The ship had caught fire while in the midst of a storm and nearly everyone on board perished, including the captain.

The Dashun, a 9,000-ton vessel, was transporting passengers from the port city of Yantai in China's Shandong province to Dalian, near Korea, on November 24. It was snowing and windy when the ship, carrying approximately 300 passengers and 40 crew members, left Yantai. Just a short way into the journey, a fire broke out on board. Although the exact cause is unknown, many believe that the gas tank on a vehicle the ship was carrying may have ruptured.

The fire forced the passengers to the lifeboats. A distress signal was sent out at 4:30 p.m (apparently officials already knew about the problems on board because a passenger had called for help on a cell phone), but the stormy weather delayed rescue efforts until the next morning. Reportedly, Ma Shuchi, a crew member, swam six miles to safety, though many others died after jumping into the freezing water. Even most of those who made it to the lifeboats ended up freezing to death as they waited for rescue ships. By the time rescuers appeared, most could only try to retrieve the bodies from the sea. Only 36 people survived. The fire on the Dashun was not put out until the evening of November 25; the ship then drifted toward shore before sinking about a mile off the coast.

This was the second disaster of November 1999 for the Yantai Car Ferry Company; another ship, the Shenlu, had sunk off the coast of Dalian just weeks earlier. Four officers of the company, including the general manager, were later brought to trial in China.

The capsizing of the Dashun was the worst maritime accident in China since 133 people had died in a ferry collision on the Yangtze River in 1994.



Nov 24, 1963:
Jack Ruby kills Lee Harvey Oswald

At 12:20 p.m., in the basement of the Dallas police station, Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy, is shot to death by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner.

On November 22, President Kennedy was fatally shot while riding in an open-car motorcade through the streets of downtown Dallas. Less than an hour after the shooting, Lee Harvey Oswald killed a policeman who questioned him on the street. Thirty minutes after that, he was arrested in a movie theater by police. Oswald was formally arraigned on November 23 for the murders of President Kennedy and Officer J.D. Tippit.

On November 24, Oswald was brought to the basement of the Dallas police headquarters on his way to a more secure county jail. A crowd of police and press with live television cameras rolling gathered to witness his departure. As Oswald came into the room, Jack Ruby emerged from the crowd and fatally wounded him with a single shot from a concealed .38 revolver. Ruby, who was immediately detained, claimed that rage at Kennedy's murder was the motive for his action. Some called him a hero, but he was nonetheless charged with first-degree murder.

Jack Ruby, originally known as Jacob Rubenstein, operated strip joints and dance halls in Dallas and had minor connections to organized crime. He also had a relationship with a number of Dallas policemen, which amounted to various favors in exchange for leniency in their monitoring of his establishments. He features prominently in Kennedy-assassination theories, and many believe he killed Oswald to keep him from revealing a larger conspiracy. In his trial, Ruby denied the allegation and pleaded innocent on the grounds that his great grief over Kennedy's murder had caused him to suffer "psychomotor epilepsy" and shoot Oswald unconsciously. The jury found him guilty of the "murder with malice" of Oswald and sentenced him to die.

In October 1966, the Texas Court of Appeals reversed the decision on the grounds of improper admission of testimony and the fact that Ruby could not have received a fair trial in Dallas at the time. In January 1967, while awaiting a new trial, to be held in Wichita Falls, Ruby died of lung cancer in a Dallas hospital.

The official Warren Commission report of 1964 concluded that neither Oswald nor Ruby were part of a larger conspiracy, either domestic or international, to assassinate President Kennedy. Despite its seemingly firm conclusions, the report failed to silence conspiracy theories surrounding the event, and in 1978 the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in a preliminary report that Kennedy was "probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy" that may have involved multiple shooters and organized crime. The committee's findings, as with those of the Warren Commission, continue to be widely disputed.



Nov 24, 1973:
Ringo Starr earns a solo #1 hit with "Photograph"

Ringo Starr becomes the third former Beatle to earn a solo #1 hit when "Photograph" tops the Billboard Hot 100 on November 24, 1973.

Ringo Starr—the man who replaced Pete Best on drums in the Beatles in 1962—once famously proclaimed of his role in the group that he was "joost happy to be here." But just because he was willing to act the part of the blindly lucky tagalong on the Beatles' gravy train doesn't mean that it was true. Ringo Starr's quietly spectacular drumming laid a foundation for the Beatles' revolutionary sound, and his self-effacing charm became a key component of the Fab Four's popular identity. But Starr's likability was no creation of the media. Indeed, even if fans could never agree on who their favorite Beatle was, there can be no question who was the Beatles' own favorite: It was Ringo—the one and only member of the Fab Four who maintained a solid friendship with each of his former band mates even after their acrimonious breakup.

Proof of Ringo Starr's special place within the Beatles can be found in his beautiful 2004 book Postcards from the Boys, a collection of sweet, funny and heartfelt cards sent to Starr by his famous former band mates both during and after their years together as Beatles. It is no accident that the former Mr. Richard Starkey was the only former Beatle to have such a collection gathering dust in a drawer at home, just as it is no accident that the only musical project to which all four Beatles ever contributed after their 1970 breakup was his 1973 album Ringo.

Ringo yielded two #1 hits for Starr: "Photograph," which topped the Billboard pop chart on this day in 1973; and "You're Sixteen," which did the same just two months later. "Photograph" was co-written by George Harrison, who also contributed backing vocals and a 12-string guitar solo to the track. Harrison had been the first solo Beatle to top the pop charts back in December 1970 with "My Sweet Lord," followed shortly thereafter by Paul McCartney with his two-sided 1971 hit "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey." McCartney contributed the song "Six O'Clock" to Ringo as well as backing vocals on "You're Sixteen." John Lennon, who became the final former Beatle to top the pop charts when "Whatever Gets You Thru The Night" hit #1 in November 1974, wrote the opening track of Ringo—"I'm The Greatest"—on which he also played piano and sang backup.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGuPfCD9kdk
_________________
Friends are like diamonds and diamonds are forever.

Together we stand - Divided we fall.

[Duke of Buckingham [TeaM]]

Nov 26, 1941:
FDR establishes modern Thanksgiving holiday

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs a bill officially establishing the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day.

The tradition of celebrating the holiday on Thursday dates back to the early history of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies, when post-harvest holidays were celebrated on the weekday regularly set aside as "Lecture Day," a midweek church meeting where topical sermons were presented. A famous Thanksgiving observance occurred in the autumn of 1621, when Plymouth governor William Bradford invited local Indians to join the Pilgrims in a three-day festival held in gratitude for the bounty of the season.

Thanksgiving became an annual custom throughout New England in the 17th century, and in 1777 the Continental Congress declared the first national American Thanksgiving following the Patriot victory at Saratoga. In 1789, President George Washington became the first president to proclaim a Thanksgiving holiday, when, at the request of Congress, he proclaimed November 26, a Tuesday, as a day of national thanksgiving for the U.S. Constitution. However, it was not until 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving to fall on the last Thursday of November, that the modern holiday was celebrated nationally.

With a few deviations, Lincoln's precedent was followed annually by every subsequent president--until 1939. In 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt departed from tradition by declaring November 23, the next to last Thursday that year, as Thanksgiving Day. Considerable controversy surrounded this deviation, and some Americans refused to honor Roosevelt's declaration. For the next two years, Roosevelt repeated the unpopular proclamation, but on November 26, 1941, he admitted his mistake and signed a bill into law officially making the fourth Thursday in November the national holiday of Thanksgiving Day.



Nov 26, 1931:
First U.S. "cloverleaf" appears on the cover of the Engineering News-Record

The first cloverleaf interchange to be built in the United States, at the junction of NJ Rt. 25 (now U.S. Rt. 1) and NJ Rt. 4 (now NJ Rt. 35) in Woodbridge, New Jersey, is featured on the cover of this week's issue of the Engineering News-Record. (By contrast, a piece on the under-construction Hoover Dam was relegated to the journal's back pages.)

With their four circular ramps, cloverleaf interchanges were designed to let motorists merge from one road to another without braking. They worked well enough—and became so ubiquitous as a result—that writer Lewis Mumford once declared that "our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf." But many of the older cloverleaves were not built to handle the volume and speed of traffic they now receive, and many have been demolished and rebuilt.

Many people associate cloverleaf interchanges first of all with Southern California, which is famous for its loops and tangles of freeways. But it was an engineer from Maryland, Arthur Hall, who patented the cloverleaf in 1916, and it was an engineer from New Jersey, Edward Delano, who—inspired by a picture he saw in a magazine of a cloverleaf in Argentina—built the U.S.'s first one in Woodbridge. The intersection was a tricky one, since both highways were so heavily traveled: Rt. 25 carried Philadelphia traffic from Camden to Jersey City and Rt. 4 ran from New York City all the way down the Jersey Shore. About 60,000 cars used the interchange each day. Turning from one busy road onto the other was usually difficult and frequently disastrous. The cloverleaf solved this problem: Drivers could merge by looping to the right under an overpass, joining the traffic stream without stopping or making a left-hand turn into oncoming traffic.

These circular ramps move cars from one road to the other fairly efficiently, as long as the roads aren't too busy—but once traffic speed and volume increases, cloverleaves can be just as dangerous as the intersections they replaced. The Woodbridge interchange, for instance, had no merge lanes, so it forced motorists to stop without warning or to plunge directly into highway traffic. Many thousands of fender-benders were the result. It was "the Model T of cloverleafs," said a spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Transportation (NJDOT). "It worked well at one time, but it's beginning to reach the end of its usefulness." As a result, it's getting a facelift: the NJDOT plans to replace the sprawling cloverleaf with a more compact, diamond-style interchange that will eliminate both the dangerous merges and the associated gridlock.



Nov 26, 1950:
Chinese counterattacks in Korea change nature of war

In some of the fiercest fighting of the Korean War, thousands of communist Chinese troops launch massive counterattacks against U.S. and Republic of Korea (ROK) troops, driving the Allied forces before them and putting an end to any thoughts for a quick or conclusive U.S. victory. When the counterattacks had been stemmed, U.S. and ROK forces had been driven from North Korea and the war settled into a grinding and frustrating stalemate for the next two-and-a-half years.
In the weeks prior to the Chinese attacks, ROK and U.S. forces, under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, had succeeded in driving deeper into North Korea and were nearing the border with the People's Republic of China (PRC). The PRC issued warnings that the Allied forces should keep their distance, and beginning in October 1950 troops from the Chinese People's Liberation Army began to cross the border to assist their North Korean ally. Their numbers grew to around 300,000 by early November. Some bloody encounters occurred between the Chinese and ROK and U.S. forces, but the Chinese troops suddenly broke off offensive operations on November 6. This spurred MacArthur, who had always discounted the military effectiveness of the Chinese troops, to propose a massive new offensive by U.S. and ROK forces. Alternately referred to as the "End the War" or "Home by Christmas" offensive, the attack began on November 24. The offensive almost immediately encountered heavy resistance, and by November 26 the Chinese were launching destructive counterattacks along a 25-mile front. By December, U.S. and ROK forces had been pushed out of North Korea. Eventually, U.S. and ROK forces stopped the Chinese troops and the war settled into a military stalemate.
The massive Chinese attack brought an end to any thoughts that U.S. boys would be "home by Christmas." It also raised the specter of the war expanding beyond the borders of the Korean peninsula, something U.S. policymakers-leery of becoming entangled in a land war in Asia that might escalate into a nuclear confrontation with the Soviets-were anxious to avoid.



Nov 26, 1933:
Vigilantes in California lynch two suspected murderers

Thousands of peoples in San Jose, California, storm the jail where Thomas Thurmond and John Holmes are being held as suspects in the kidnapping and murder of Brooke Hart, the 22-year-old son of a local storeowner. The mob of angry citizens proceeded to lynch the accused men and then pose them for pictures.

On November 9, Brooke Hart was abducted by men in his own Studebaker. His family received a $40,000 ransom demand and, soon after, Hart's wallet was found on a tanker ship in a nearby bay. The investigative trail led to Holmes and Thurmond, who implicated each other in separate confessions. Both acknowledged, though, that Hart had been pistol-whipped and then thrown off the San Mateo Bridge.

After Hart's body washed ashore on November 25, a vigilante mob began to form. Newspapers reported the possibility of a lynching and local radio stations broadcast the plan. Not only did Governor James Rolph reject the National Guard's offer to send assistance, he reportedly said he would pardon those involved in the lynching.

On November 26, the angry mob converged at the jail and beat the guards, using a battering ram to break into the cells. Thurmond and Holmes were dragged out and hanged from large trees in a nearby park.

The public seemed to welcome the gruesome act of vigilante violence. After the incident, pieces of the lynching ropes were sold to the public. Though the San Jose News declined to publish pictures of the lynching, it condoned the act in an editorial. Seventeen-year-old Anthony Cataldi bragged that he had been the leader of the mob but he was not held accountable for his participation. At Stanford University, a professor asked his students to stand and applaud the lynching. Perhaps most disturbing, Governor Rolph publicly praised the mob. "The best lesson ever given the country," said Governor Rolph. "I would like to parole all kidnappers in San Quentin to the fine, patriotic citizens of San Jose."



Nov 26, 1898:
Winter storm paralyzes southern New England

A powerful early winter storm batters the New England coast on this day in 1898, killing at least 450 people in New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts.

It was Thanksgiving Day when strong winds, in excess of 40 miles per hour, began blowing from the Atlantic Ocean across the New England coast. This was followed, in short order, by gales from the other direction. Equally strong winds roared across upstate New York from the west.

Blizzard conditions disrupted the entire area. Transportation became impossible; some trains were halted by 20-foot snow drifts. Communication was interrupted as the wind and snow brought down telephone and telegraph lines. In some towns and villages, residents were forced to dig tunnels through the snow from their front doors to the streets. In New York City, 2,000 workers attempted to clear the key streets and avenues.

Boston was perhaps worst hit by the storm. Approximately 100 ships were blown ashore from the city's harbor and another 40 were sunk. About 100 people died when a Portland-based steamer sank near Cape Cod. Bodies and debris filled the harbors and nearby beaches.

The storm is thought to have killed at least 450 people, though due to the wide extent of the storm and the poor record-keeping of the time, it is impossible to determine exactly how many people died.



Nov 26, 1942:
Casablanca premieres in NYC

On this day in 1942, Casablanca, a World War II-era drama starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, premieres in New York City; it will go on to become one of the most beloved Hollywood movies in history.

In the film, Bogart played Rick Blaine, a former freedom fighter and the owner of a swanky North African nightclub, who is reunited with the beautiful, enigmatic Ilsa Lund (Bergman), the woman who loved and left him. Directed by Michael Curtiz, Casablanca opened in theaters across America on January 23, 1943, and was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Bogart. It took home three Oscars, for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. The film featured a number of now-iconic quotes, including Rick’s line to Ilsa: “Here’s looking at you, kid,” as well as “Round up the usual suspects,” “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” and “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”

Bogart was born on December 25, 1899, in New York City, and during the 1930s established his movie career playing tough-guy roles. He gained fame as Detective Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941), which marked John Huston’s directorial debut. Bogart and Huston later collaborated on such films as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and The African Queen (1951) with Katharine Hepburn, which earned Bogart a Best Actor Oscar. In 1945, Bogart married his fourth wife, the actress Lauren Bacall, with whom he co-starred for the first time in 1944’s To Have and Have Not. Bogey and Bacall became one of Hollywood’s legendary couples and went on to appear together in The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947) and Key Largo (1948). Among Bogart’s other film credits are The Barefoot Contessa (1954), with Ava Gardner; Sabrina (1954), with Audrey Hepburn; and The Caine Mutiny (1954), which earned him another Best Actor nomination. Bogart’s final film was The Harder They Fall (1956). He died on January 14, 1957.

Casablanca was also the movie for which the Swedish-born actress Ingrid Bergman is perhaps best remembered. Bergman, born August 29, 1915, received a Best Actress Academy Award nomination for 1943’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, which was followed by a win in the same category for 1944’s Gaslight. She was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar again for 1945’s The Bells of St. Mary’s and 1948’s Joan of Arc. Bergman worked with the acclaimed director Alfred Hitchcock on Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946) and Under Capricorn (1949). In 1949, the then-married Bergman began a romance with director Roberto Rossellini that created a huge scandal after she became pregnant with his child. (Bergman and Rossellini, who later married, had three children together, including the noted actress Isabella Rossellini.) Although Bergman won another Best Actress Academy Award for 1956’s Anastasia, the actor Cary Grant accepted the award on her behalf, and Bergman did not return publicly to Hollywood until the 1958 Oscars, at which she was a presenter. She won her third Academy Award, in the category of Best Supporting Actress, for 1974’s Murder on the Orient Express. Her final Oscar nomination, in the Best Actress category, was for 1978’s Autumn Sonata, which was helmed by famed Swedish director Ingmar Bergman (to whom she was not related). She died on August 29, 1982.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vThuwa5RZU
_________________
Friends are like diamonds and diamonds are forever.

Together we stand - Divided we fall.

[Duke of Buckingham [TeaM]]

Nov 27, 1095:
Pope Urban II orders first Crusade

On November 27, 1095, Pope Urban II makes perhaps the most influential speech of the Middle Ages, giving rise to the Crusades by calling all Christians in Europe to war against Muslims in order to reclaim the Holy Land, with a cry of "Deus vult!" or "God wills it!"

Born Odo of Lagery in 1042, Urban was a protege of the great reformer Pope Gregory VII. Like Gregory, he made internal reform his main focus, railing against simony (the selling of church offices) and other clerical abuses prevalent during the Middle Ages. Urban showed himself to be an adept and powerful cleric, and when he was elected pope in 1088, he applied his statecraft to weakening support for his rivals, notably Clement III.

By the end of the 11th century, the Holy Land—the area now commonly referred to as the Middle East—had become a point of conflict for European Christians. Since the 6th century, Christians frequently made pilgrimages to the birthplace of their religion, but when the Seljuk Turks took control of Jerusalem, Christians were barred from the Holy City. When the Turks then threatened to invade the Byzantine Empire and take Constantinople, Byzantine Emperor Alexius I made a special appeal to Urban for help. This was not the first appeal of its kind, but it came at an important time for Urban. Wanting to reinforce the power of the papacy, Urban seized the opportunity to unite Christian Europe under him as he fought to take back the Holy Land from the Turks.

At the Council of Clermont, in France, at which several hundred clerics and noblemen gathered, Urban delivered a rousing speech summoning rich and poor alike to stop their in-fighting and embark on a righteous war to help their fellow Christians in the East and take back Jerusalem. Urban denigrated the Muslims, exaggerating stories of their anti-Christian acts, and promised absolution and remission of sins for all who died in the service of Christ.

Urban's war cry caught fire, mobilizing clerics to drum up support throughout Europe for the crusade against the Muslims. All told, between 60,000 and 100,000 people responded to Urban's call to march on Jerusalem. Not all who responded did so out of piety: European nobles were tempted by the prospect of increased land holdings and riches to be gained from the conquest. These nobles were responsible for the death of a great many innocents both on the way to and in the Holy Land, absorbing the riches and estates of those they conveniently deemed opponents to their cause. Adding to the death toll was the inexperience and lack of discipline of the Christian peasants against the trained, professional armies of the Muslims. As a result, the Christians were initially beaten back, and only through sheer force of numbers were they eventually able to triumph.

Urban died in 1099, two weeks after the fall of Jerusalem but before news of the Christian victory made it back to Europe. His was the first of seven major military campaigns fought over the next two centuries known as the Crusades, the bloody repercussions of which are still felt today. Urban was beatified by the Roman Catholic Church in 1881.



Nov 27, 2007:
Indy 500 champ Hélio Castroneves wins "Dancing with the Stars"

On November 27, 2007, the Brazilian racecar driver Hélio Castroneves and his partner, professional ballroom dancer Julianne Hough, win the fifth season of the TV show "Dancing with the Stars." The runners-up were former Spice Girl Mel B ("Scary Spice") and her partner, dancer Maksim Chmerkovskiy. After his victory, Castroneves returned to the Indycar racing circuit, but his good luck did not hold: though he finished second overall in the 2008 season (and fourth in that year's Indy 500), in 2009 the racer found himself in federal court, charged with conspiracy, fraud and income-tax evasion.

"Dancing with the Stars," the American version of the hit BBC series "Strictly Come Dancing," pairs celebrity dancers with professional partners. Each week, the teams perform a specific dance—the mambo, the foxtrot or the paso doble, for example—for a panel of judges. The judges give the dancers a score; meanwhile, in typical reality-show fashion, viewers may also vote, and one pair of dancers is eliminated each week. Castroneves faced a motley crew of celebrity competitors, some better known than others: the actors Josie Maran ("Melrose Place"), Jane Seymour ("Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman"), and Jennie Garth ("Beverly Hills, 90210") along with entertainers Marie Osmond and Wayne Newton and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.

Though he had won back-to-back victories in the Indianapolis 500 race, in 2001 and 2002, it took "DWTS" to make Castroneves really famous across the United States. "When I'm in the airport people recognize me now," he told a reporter after his victory, "but I never know if it's for my racing or my dancing." (It's probably for his dancing: 25 million people watched the "DWTS" finale in 2007, and only about 5 million watch the Indy 500 each year.)

In 2009, the IRS accused Castroneves of failing to pay more than $2.3 million in taxes on almost $6 million in licensing fees from his racing team, Penske Racing. In April of that year, a jury acquitted him of the fraud charges and prosecutors decided to drop the others.

Castroneves won the Indy 500 again in 2009.



Nov 27, 1954:
Alger Hiss released from prison

After 44 months in prison, former government official Alger Hiss is released and proclaims once again that he is innocent of the charges that led to his incarceration. One of the most famous figures of the Cold War period, Hiss was convicted in 1950 of perjury for lying to a federal grand jury. Specifically, Hiss was judged to have lied about his complicity in passing secret government documents to Whittaker Chambers, who thereupon passed the papers along to agents of the Soviet Union
Upon his release, Hiss immediately declared that he wished to "reassert my complete innocence of the charges that were brought against me by Whittaker Chambers." He claimed that his conviction was the result of the "fear and hysteria of the times," and stated that he was going to "resume my efforts to dispel the deception that has been foisted on the American people." He was confident that such efforts would "vindicate my name."
Some observers remained skeptical of Hiss's protestations. Senator Karl Mundt felt that further investigation of the matter would probably be a waste of time, unless Hiss decided "to come clean and tell the whole story." Chambers issued a brief statement in which he declared that the "saddest single factor about the Hiss case is that nobody can change the facts as they are known...They are there forever. That is the inherent tragedy of this case."
The controversy over the facts in the Hiss case is also here forever. It remains a highly charged issue. His defenders argue that Hiss was a victim of the Red Scare that swept through the U.S. during the 1940s and 1950s. Others are equally adamant in maintaining his guilt, claiming that documents recently released from Soviet archives strongly support the case that Hiss was a spy for the Soviet Union.



Nov 27, 1703:
Freak storm dissipates over England

On this day in 1703, an unusual storm system finally dissipates over England after wreaking havoc on the country for nearly two weeks. Featuring hurricane strength winds, the storm killed somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 people. Hundreds of Royal Navy ships were lost to the storm, the worst in Britain's history.

The unusual weather began on November 14 as strong winds from the Atlantic Ocean battered the south of Britain and Wales. Many homes and other buildings were damaged by the pounding winds, but the hurricane-like storm only began doing serious damage on November 26. With winds estimated at over 80 miles per hour, bricks were blown from some buildings and embedded in others. Wood beams, separated from buildings, flew through the air and killed hundreds across the south of the country. Towns such as Plymouth, Hull, Cowes, Portsmouth and Bristol were devastated.

However, the death toll really mounted when 300 Royal Navy ships anchored off the country's southern coast—with 8,000 sailors on board—were lost. The Eddystone Lighthouse, built on a rock outcropping 14 miles from Plymouth, was felled by the storm. All of its residents, including its designer, Henry Winstanley, were killed. Huge waves on the Thames River sent water six feet higher than ever before recorded near London. More than 5,000 homes along the river were destroyed.

The author Daniel Defoe, who would later enjoy worldwide acclaim for the novel Robinson Crusoe, witnessed the storm, which he described as an "Army of Terror in its furious March." His first book, The Storm, was published the following year.



Nov 27, 1940:
Iron Guard massacres former Romanian government

Two months after General Ion Antonescu seized power in Romania and forced King Carol II to abdicate, Antonescu's Iron Guard arrests and executes more than 60 aides of the exiled king, including Nicolae Iorga, a former minister and acclaimed historian.

The extreme right-wing movement known as the Iron Guard was founded by Corneliu Codreanu in the 1920s, imitating Germany's Nazi Party in both ideology and methods. In 1938, King Carol II managed to establish a stronger dictatorship in Romania and took steps to suppress the activities of the Iron Guard as well as its left-wing antithesis, the Romanian Communist Party. However, the control fell into violent turmoil after the Munich Pact of 1939 was signed, seen as an abandonment of Romania by its Western allies from World War I, followed by a Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact in 1939, which ceded portions of Romania to the USSR.

General Ion Antonescu emerged from the chaos victorious and established a dictatorship with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's approval, killing, exiling, or imprisoning most of his former political opposition. Nevertheless, Romanian resistance to the Iron Guard and Nazi occupation persisted during the war, and in August 1944 a massive revolt toppled Antonescu's government in the Romanian capital of Bucharest, allowing the Soviet liberators to capture the city without firing a shot. In 1945, Romanian communists came to power with the backing of the Soviet Union.



Nov 27, 1957:
Nehru appeals for disarmament

Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru makes an impassioned speech for nuclear disarmament in New Delhi.

Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India's first prime minister, was born in Allahabad, India, in 1889. He was educated in England and in 1912 returned to India to become a lawyer. After the 1919 massacre at Amritsar, in which 379 unarmed protesters were gunned down by British troops, he decided to devote himself to the struggle for Indian independence. He became closely associated with the Indian National Congress Party and developed a friendship with independence movement leader Mohandas Gandhi, who was 20 years his senior. In 1921, British authorities imprisoned Nehru for his political activities for the first time. During the next 24 years, he was to serve another eight prison terms for his civil disobedience, which added up to a total of more than nine years behind bars.

In 1929, Gandhi helped Nehru become leader of the Indian National Congress, and Nehru soon emerged as Gandhi's political heir. In 1942, Gandhi and Nehru launched the Quit India campaign, declaring that India would offer no war-time aid to Britain unless Indian independence was immediately granted. Britain responded by jailing them and other Indian leaders from 1942 until after Germany's defeat in 1945. After the war, Nehru participated in the talks that led to the division of the Indian subcontinent into the independent states of India and Pakistan.

In 1947, Nehru became independent India's first prime minister. Subsequently reelected three times, he was an enormously popular leader. He skillfully led India through the difficult early years of independence, which saw bloody fighting between Hindus and Muslims. In foreign affairs, he advocated nonalignment for India in the divided Cold War world and sought diplomatic and nonviolent solutions in his conflicts with other nations. On November 27, 1957, he appealed to the United States and the USSR to end nuclear tests and begin disarmament, which, he said, would "save humanity from the ultimate disaster." Nehru's 17 years in office ended with his death in 1964.



Nov 27, 2005:
Aerosmith and 50 Cent headline a $10 million bar mitzvah

For seasoned showbiz veterans Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith—middle-aged men long past worrying over their perceived "legitimacy"— the offer of a $2 million appearance fee for a 45-minute performance at a private event in New York City must have been a true no-brainer. For Curtis James Jackson III, on the other hand, there were likelycompeting impulses. Jackson—better known as the rapper 50 Cent—had built his professional persona on the image of a street-hardened former criminal who was tough enough to survive being shot nine times at point-blank range in 2001. So there were legitimate concerns that his image might take a hit if word leaked out about the event in question. Ultimately, however, Mr. Jackson made the decision that the title of his multi-platinum 2003 album Get Rich or Die Tryin' suggested he might: In exchange for a multimillion-dollar fee, 50 Cent took to the stage at New York City's famous Rainbow Room in the early morning hours of this day in 2005, joining Tyler and Perry as headline performers at the $10 million bat mitzvah of Long Island 13-year-old, Elizabeth Brooks

According to the ensuing coverage of the event in the New York Daily News, guests at the Brooks bat mitzvah began their celebration unaware of what lay ahead. When a soprano-sax player who looked suspiciously like Kenny G turned out, in fact, to be Kenny G, the bizarrely star-studded event was only getting started. In the hours preceding the appearances of Aerosmith and 50 Cent, former A-list stars Don Henley, Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty all graced the stage at the Rainbow Room, entertaining guests who had been given gift bags containing upwards of $1,000 in personal electronics, including digital cameras that 50 Cent's bodyguard reportedly tried and failed to stop guests from using to snap keepsake photos of the event. Within days, however, those photos had appeared on numerous Internet blogs, along with thousands of snarky comments about 50 Cent's questionable "gangsta" credibility.

The father who spent $10 million celebrating his daughter's coming-of-age was defense contractor David H. Brooks, CEO of DHB Industries, a Long Island company that manufactured body armor for the United States military. Two years after the lavish event, Brooks was served with a 71-page federal indictment featuring charges of insider trading, tax evasion and raiding his company's coffers for personal gain—including for the $10 million he used to pay for his daughter's lavish bat mitzvah

_________________
Friends are like diamonds and diamonds are forever.

Together we stand - Divided we fall.

[Duke of Buckingham [TeaM]]

Nov 28, 1520:
Magellan reaches the Pacific

After sailing through the dangerous straits below South America that now bear his name, Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan (Fernão de Magalhães) enters the Pacific Ocean with three ships, becoming the first European explorer to reach the Pacific from the Atlantic.

On September 20, 1519, Magellan set sail from Spain in an effort to find a western sea route to the rich Spice Islands of Indonesia. In command of five ships and 270 men, Magellan sailed to West Africa and then to Brazil, where he searched the South American coast for a strait that would take him to the Pacific. He searched the Rio de la Plata, a large estuary south of Brazil, for a way through; failing, he continued south along the coast of Patagonia. At the end of March 1520, the expedition set up winter quarters at Port St. Julian. On Easter day at midnight, the Spanish captains mutinied against their Portuguese captain, but Magellan crushed the revolt, executing one of the captains and leaving another ashore when his ship left St. Julian in August.

On October 21, he finally discovered the strait he had been seeking. The Strait of Magellan, as it became known, is located near the tip of South America, separating Tierra del Fuego and the continental mainland. Only three ships entered the passage; one had been wrecked and another deserted. It took 38 days to navigate the treacherous strait, and when ocean was sighted at the other end Magellan wept with joy. His fleet accomplished the westward crossing of the ocean in 99 days, crossing waters so strangely calm that the ocean was named "Pacific," from the Latin word pacificus, meaning "tranquil." By the end, the men were out of food and chewed the leather parts of their gear to keep themselves alive. On March 6, 1521, the expedition landed at the island of Guam.

Ten days later, they dropped anchor at the Philippine island of Cebu—they were only about 400 miles from the Spice Islands. Magellan met with the chief of Cebu, who after converting to Christianity persuaded the Europeans to assist him in conquering a rival tribe on the neighboring island of Mactan. In fighting on April 27, Magellan was hit by a poisoned arrow and left to die by his retreating comrades.

After Magellan's death, the survivors, in two ships, sailed on to the Moluccas and loaded the hulls with spice. One ship attempted, unsuccessfully, to return across the Pacific. The other ship, the Vittoria, continued west under the command of Basque navigator Juan Sebastian de Elcano. The vessel sailed across the Indian Ocean, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and arrived at the Spanish port of Sanlucar de Barrameda on September 6, 1522, becoming the first ship to circumnavigate the globe.



Nov 28, 1989:
Czechoslovakian Communist Party gives up monopoly on political power

Confronted by the collapse of communist regimes in neighboring countries and growing protests in the streets, officials of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party announce that they will give up their monopoly on political power. Elections held the following month brought the first noncommunist government to office in over 40 years.
Czechoslovakia, led by the communist hard-liner Gustav Husak, tried to ignore the signs that the political winds were shifting in east Europe. Mikhail Gorbachev was in power in the Soviet Union, calling for political and economic reforms. Old-line communist officials, such as Erich Honecker in East Germany, were falling from power. Husak and his supporters tried to retain their base of power in Czechoslovakia by bringing new communist faces into the government, but these cosmetic changes did not quell the growing demands from the nation's people for dramatic political restructuring. In November 1989, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Prague and other Czech cities calling for the removal of the Husak regime. Though police responded with vicious beatings, this violence only hardened the resolve of the protesters. Husak, with no hope of receiving assistance from the Soviet Union, announced on November 28 that the Communist Party would agree to eliminate the nation's one-party political system. A few days later, Husak resigned. A coalition government was established, with the communists a distinct minority. On December 29, Vaclav Havel was elected president, becoming the first noncommunist leader of Czechoslovakia in more than 40 years.
The success of the "Velvet Revolution" in Czechoslovakia (so-called because of its relatively peaceful nature) was another sign of the ebbing fortunes of communism in eastern Europe. The fact that the Soviet Union refrained from action (unlike 1968, when Soviet tanks crushed protesters in Prague) signaled the waning power of the communist giant, as well as Gorbachev's commitment to economic and political reform in the eastern bloc.



Nov 28, 1987:
A media controversy ignites over the case of Tawana Brawley

Tawana Brawley is found covered with feces and wrapped in garbage bags outside the Pavilion Condominiums in Wappingers Falls, New York. Brawley appeared to have undergone an extremely traumatic experience: parts of her hair were cut off, her pants were slightly burned, and there was a racial slur scrawled on her body. Brawley told authorities that for four days she had been held against her will and repeatedly raped by a gang of white men, one of whom she claimed had a police badge.

The Brawley case became a 'cause celebre' when controversial attorney C. Vernon Mason, Alton Maddox, and community activist Al Sharpton declared their support for Brawley and alleged that there was a cover-up in the investigation. Unfortunately, Brawley's story did not hold up to the close scrutiny that followed.

Although she claimed to have been abducted and held for four days, nobody had filed a missing person's report for the teenager during that time. In fact, there was little concrete evidence that Brawley had been attacked and increasing suspicion that her story was fabricated. According to several witnesses, Brawley had attended a party while she was supposedly missing, and fiber evidence showed that Brawley had likely written the racial slurs on herself. In the face of mounting criticism, Brawley's advisers began making wild, unfounded accusations, charging that Assistant District Attorney Stephen Pagones had participated in the alleged rape and that Special Prosecutor Robert Abrams was masturbating to the evidentiary photos.

While the controversy surrounding the case became a media circus, Brawley and her family refused to testify or cooperate with the investigation. They did, however, accept financial contributions. In October 1988, a Grand Jury dismissed the entire matter. Attorneys Mason and Maddox faced disciplinary proceedings from the New York State Bar for their conduct during the investigation and Pagones filed a libel suit against Mason, Maddox, and Sharpton, which he won in 1998.



Nov 28, 1979:
Plane crashes over Antarctica

A New Zealander sightseeing plane traveling over Antarctica crashes, killing all 257 people on board, on this day in 1979. It was the worst airplane accident in New Zealand's history.

During the 1970s, air travel to Antarctica became more popular, as tourists sought to view the isolated and mysterious continent at the bottom of the world firsthand. Day-long excursions from New Zealand gave people tremendous views of the Ross Ice Shelf. However, the trips did pose a danger, as flights to Antarctica can be problematic.

The vast ice plains provide virtually no visual reference points for pilots and magnetic compasses are useless so close to the South Pole. The McDonnell Douglas DC-10 that carried 257 people to Antarctica on November 28 was piloted by five officers who had no experience flying to the icy continent. To make matters even worse, the data entered into the flight profile was wrong. When this same data had been used on prior flights, no problems had been encountered because visibility was good. The poor visibility on November 28, though, led to a fatal pilot error.

As the plane headed over the Ross Ice Shelf, the pilot descended below the clouds to give the passengers a better view. The pilot was supposed to stay above 6,000 feet at all times, but went down to 1,500 feet due to the overcast skies. Because of the wrong data on the flight profile, the pilot didn't know that his descent came right as the plane reached Mount Erebus, a 12,444-foot volcano. The plane crashed into the side of the mountain at 300 miles per hour. There were no survivors.



Nov 28, 1964:
The Shangri-Las score a #1 hit with "Leader Of The Pack"

During the early-60s girl-group explosion, the Shangri-Las score their first and only #1 hit on this day in 1964 with the famously melodramatic epic "Leader Of The Pack."

From its sweet beginnings in a candy store—"He turned around and smiled at me/You get the picture?"—the romance described in "Leader Of The Pack" between the song's protagonist and her leather jacket-wearing, motorcycle-riding boyfriend, Jimmy, quickly progresses in the face of strong disapproval from her parents—"They told me he was bad/But I knew he was sad." It was a song, in other words, perfectly calibrated to appeal to the romantic fantasies of America's teenage girls—fantasies that blended wholesome innocence with hints of danger, rebellion and darkly handsome boyfriends.

But if "Leader Of The Pack" gave the impression that the Shangri-Las themselves were girls of the worldly-wise, gum-snapping, white lipstick-wearing variety, the truth was rather different. In fact, the Shangri-Las were a quartet of clean-cut high school classmates from Queens—two sets of sisters, in fact. And according to "Leader Of The Pack" co-writer and co-producer Ellie Greenwich, the Weiss and Ganser sisters were so inexperienced and so nervous about the subject matter of what eventually become their career-defining hit, that the recording session was fraught with difficulty, requiring "spoon-feeding, mothering, big-sistering and reprimanding" just to get the Shangri-Las through it.

For Ellie Greenwich and her then-husband/songwriting partner, Jeff Barry, "Leader Of The Pack" was their second #1 hit, following on the Dixie Cups' "Chapel Of Love," a song that spun a very different kind of teenage fantasy. Like their former colleagues Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Barry and Greenwich were responsible for many of the classic works associated with the peak of the girl-group era, including the Ronettes' "Be My Baby" and the Crystals' "And Then He Kissed Me" and "Da Doo Ron Ron" (all from 1963). They also wrote later #1 hits for Manfred Mann—"Doo Wah Diddy Diddy" (1964)—and Tommy James and the Shondells—"Hanky Panky" (1966)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8N_iTNdIcfs
_________________
Friends are like diamonds and diamonds are forever.

Together we stand - Divided we fall.

[Duke of Buckingham [TeaM]]

Nov 29, 1947:
U.N. votes for partition of Palestine

Despite strong Arab opposition, the United Nations votes for the partition of Palestine and the creation of an independent Jewish state.

The modern conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine dates back to the 1910s, when both groups laid claim to the British-controlled territory. The Jews were Zionists, recent emigrants from Europe and Russia who came to the ancient homeland of the Jews to establish a Jewish national state. The native Palestinian Arabs sought to stem Jewish immigration and set up a secular Palestinian state.

Beginning in 1929, Arabs and Jews openly fought in Palestine, and Britain attempted to limit Jewish immigration as a means of appeasing the Arabs. As a result of the Holocaust in Europe, many Jews illegally entered Palestine during World War II. Radical Jewish groups employed terrorism against British forces in Palestine, which they thought had betrayed the Zionist cause. At the end of World War II, in 1945, the United States took up the Zionist cause. Britain, unable to find a practical solution, referred the problem to the United Nations, which on November 29, 1947, voted to partition Palestine.

The Jews were to possess more than half of Palestine, though they made up less than half of Palestine's population. The Palestinian Arabs, aided by volunteers from other countries, fought the Zionist forces, but the Jews secured full control of their U.N.-allocated share of Palestine and also some Arab territory. On May 14, 1948, Britain withdrew with the expiration of its mandate, and the State of Israel was proclaimed by Jewish Agency Chairman David Ben-Gurion. The next day, forces from Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded.

The Israelis, though less well equipped, managed to fight off the Arabs and then seize key territories, such as Galilee, the Palestinian coast, and a strip of territory connecting the coastal region to the western section of Jerusalem. In 1949, U.N.-brokered cease-fires left the State of Israel in permanent control of those conquered areas. The departure of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs from Israel during the war left the country with a substantial Jewish majority.



Nov 29, 1775:
Congress creates Committee of Secret Correspondence

On this day in 1775, the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, establishes a Committee of Secret Correspondence. The committee's goal was to provide European nations with a Patriot interpretation of events in Britain's North American colonies, in the hope of soliciting aid for the American war effort.

The committee, consisting of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Harrison, John Dickinson, John Hay and Robert Morris, instructed Silas Deane to meet with French Foreign Minister Charles Gravier, Count de Vergennes, to stress America's need for military stores and assure the French that the colonies were moving toward "total separation" from Great Britain. Covert French aid began filtering into the colonies soon after the outbreak of hostilities in 1775. Deane, a Connecticut delegate to the Continental Congress, left for France on the secret mission on March 3, 1776.

Deane managed to negotiate for unofficial assistance from France, in the form of ships containing military supplies, and recruited the Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette to share his military expertise with the Continental Army's officer corps. However, it was not until after the arrival of the charming Benjamin Franklin in France in December 1776 and the American victory at the Battle of Saratoga in October 1777 that the French became convinced that it was worth backing the Americans in a formal treaty.

On February 6, 1778, the Treaties of Amity and Commerce and Alliance were signed, and in May 1778 the Continental Congress ratified them. One month later, war between Britain and France formally began when a British squadron fired on two French ships. During the American Revolution, French naval fleets proved critical in the defeat of the British, which was assured after the Battle of Yorktown in October 1781.



Nov 29, 1864:
Native Americans are massacred at Sand Creek, Colorado

On this day in 1864, peaceful Southern Cheyenne and Arapahoe Indians are massacred by a band of Colonel John Chivington's Colorado volunteers at Sand Creek, Colorado.

The causes of the Sand Creek massacre were rooted in the long conflict for control of the Great Plains of eastern Colorado. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 guaranteed ownership of the area north of the Arkansas River to the Nebraska border to the Cheyenne and Arapahoe. However, by the end of the decade, waves of Euro-American miners flooded across the region in search of gold in Colorado's Rocky Mountains, placing extreme pressure on the resources of the arid plains. By 1861, tensions between new settlers and Native Americans were rising. On February 8 of that year, a Cheyenne delegation, headed by Chief Black Kettle, along with some Arapahoe leaders, accepted a new settlement with the Federal government. The Native Americans ceded most of their land but secured a 600-square mile reservation and annuity payments. The delegation reasoned that continued hostilities would jeopardize their bargaining power. In the decentralized political world of the tribes, Black Kettle and his fellow delegates represented only part of the Cheyenne and Arapahoe tribes. Many did not accept this new agreement, called the Treaty of Fort Wise.

The new reservation and Federal payments proved unable to sustain the tribes. During the Civil War, tensions again rose and sporadic violence broke out between Anglos and Native Americans. In June 1864, John Evans, governor of the territory of Colorado, attempted to isolate recalcitrant Native Americans by inviting "friendly Indians" to camp near military forts and receive provisions and protection. He also called for volunteers to fill the military void left when most of the regular army troops in Colorado were sent to other areas during the Civil War. In August 1864, Evans met with Black Kettle and several other chiefs to forge a new peace, and all parties left satisfied. Black Kettle moved his band to Fort Lyon, Colorado, where the commanding officer encouraged him to hunt near Sand Creek. In what can only be considered an act of treachery, Chivington moved his troops to the plains, and on November 29, they attacked the unsuspecting Native Americans, scattering men, women, and children and hunting them down. The casualties reflect the one-sided nature of the fight. Nine of Chivington's men were killed; 148 of Black Kettle's followers were slaughtered, more than half of them women and children. The Colorado volunteers returned and killed the wounded, mutilated the bodies, and set fire to the village.

The atrocities committed by the soldiers were initially praised, but then condemned as the circumstances of the massacre emerged. Chivington resigned from the military and aborted his budding political career. Black Kettle survived and continued his peace efforts. In 1865, his followers accepted a new reservation in Indian Territory.



Nov 29, 2011:
Dr. Conrad Murray receives four-year sentence in Michael Jackson's death

On this day in 2011, Conrad Murray, the physician convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the 2009 death of singer Michael Jackson, is sentenced in a Los Angeles County courtroom to four years behind bars. The iconic pop star died at age 50 at his California home after suffering cardiac arrest while under the influence of propofol, a surgical anesthetic given to him by Murray as a sleep aid.

Jackson, who was born in 1958 in Gary, Indiana, rose to fame performing as a boy with his older brothers in a music group called the Jackson 5. With his 1982 solo album “Thriller,” Jackson achieved international superstardom. However, by the 1990s, he became known for increasingly eccentric and reclusive behavior, and his physical appearance was radically altered through multiple plastic surgeries. In 2005, amidst intense media coverage, Jackson was tried and acquitted on child molestation charges.

In March 2009, after a lengthy time away from the public spotlight, Jackson announced he would perform a series of comeback concerts in London starting in July. That spring, Murray, a cardiologist raised in Trinidad, was hired at a monthly salary of $150,000 to serve as Jackson’s personal physician while the singer rehearsed for his upcoming shows. Late in the morning on June 25, Jackson was found unconscious in bed in his mansion in the Holmby Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles by Murray, who tried unsuccessfully to revive him. The legendary entertainer was pronounced dead at 2:26 that afternoon at nearby Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center.

The Los Angeles County coroner’s office ruled the performer’s death a homicide after lethal levels of the powerful sedative propofol, as well other drugs, were found in his system. In February 2010, Murray, who had given Jackson propofol as a sleep aid almost every night for two months prior to his death, was charged with involuntary manslaughter. He pleaded not guilty. During his trial, which began in September 2011, Murray was portrayed by the prosecution as an incompetent, greedy opportunist who recklessly gave Jackson propofol in an unmonitored setting (the drug typically is administered only in a hospital) and kept no records, among other serious medical errors. Prosecutors said Murray set aside sound medical judgment by relenting when Jackson, one of the world’s most famous men, regularly begged him for propofol in order to sleep. Additionally, Murray was accused of belatedly calling 911 after discovering Jackson had stopped breathing, and with lying to paramedics and emergency-room doctors. The defense argued that Jackson, who was plagued by insomnia, self-administered the fatal dose of the drug.

On November 7, after deliberating for less than two days, a Los Angeles County jury found Murray guilty. Three weeks later, on November 29, the trial judge sentenced the 58-year-old to a four-year jail term, the maximum punishment allowed under law. The judge, in announcing his decision, criticized Murray for his lack of remorse and refusal to accept responsibility for his role in Jackson’s death, and said the doctor became involved in “a cycle of horrible medicine” in his dealings with the pop star.



Nov 29, 1991:
Dust storm causes massive pileup in California

A massive car and truck collision in Coalinga, California, kills 17 people on this day in 1991. More than 100 vehicles were involved in the accident on Interstate 5, which was caused by a dust storm.

Interstate 5 runs north and south between Southern California and Northern California. On Saturday, November 29, there was considerable traffic on the highway as people were returning home after Thanksgiving. The area of the highway near Coalinga in the San Joaquin Valley is usually prime farmland. However, in 1991 many farmers had decided not to plant their fields because of severe drought conditions, leaving long stretches of dusty soil near the highway.

As the winds strengthened to nearly 40 miles per hour on November 29, dust swept over the highway, severely hampering visibility. Suddenly, a chain reaction of collisions developed over a mile-long stretch of the highway. One hundred and four vehicles, including 11 large trucks, were involved in the massive collision. It took hours for the rescuers to find all the victims in the continuing dust storm. Seventeen people lost their lives and 150 more suffered serious injuries. Meanwhile, thousands of people were trapped in their cars for the nearly an entire day until the highway could be cleared enough for traffic to pass.

The same stretch of highway was the scene of a similar, but smaller, incident in December 1978 when seven people died and 47 were injured in a large chain collision. Another storm in December 1977 caused residents to develop a flu-like respiratory infection, known as Valley Fever, from breathing in large quantities of dust.



Nov 29, 1975:
Silver Convention "earn" a #1 pop hit with "Fly, Robin, Fly"

The following scenario might sound familiar: A pair of German music producers cut a record with hired studio musicians and release it under the name of a fictitious group. The record becomes an international dance hit, and suddenly the world wants to see the "artists" behind it—live and in person. So, people are hired to play the role who, though they had nothing to do with creating the hit, look good on stage and are skilled dancers. When this scenario played out in 1989 and 1990 with the group Milli Vanilli, the eventual exposure of the deception caused an international uproar. But when it happened the first time around, in the mid-1970s, nobody seemed to care. In that first case, the group in question was Silver Convention—a disco trio portrayed by three attractive female singers who never sang a single note on the song "Fly, Robin, Fly," which became a #1 pop hit in the United States on this day in 1975.

The Silver Convention deception was born in Munich, Germany—a mid-70s hotbed of dance-music production whose most famous exports would be Queen of Disco Donna Summer and the super-producer Giorgio Moroder. But before that pair rose to fame in 1978, a pair named Silvester Levay and Michael Kunze went into a studio in early 1975 and created a European disco hit called "Save Me," using a trio of hired female background singers to lay down the vocals. Released under the name Silver Convention, "Save Me" was a big enough hit to lead to a contract for an entire album. Using the same hired talent, Levay and Kunze recorded the song "Fly, Robin, Fly" (originally intended to be called "Run, Rabbit, Run"), which, to their great surprise, crossed the Atlantic first to American dance clubs, and then to American pop radio.

As "Fly, Robin, Fly" flew up the charts in the fall of 1975, booking requests for live appearances began building up, forcing Levay and Kunze to come up with a group to front their creation. Unable to come to terms with their original hired singers, Levay and Kunze hired Penny McLean, Linda Thompson and Ramona Wolf to become Silver Convention.

While the parallels to the Milli Vanilli story are striking, the attractive performers put forward as Silver Convention not only looked the part in their sequined disco dresses, but they could also actually sing their hit in live performances—something the attractive gentlemen who comprised Milli Vanilli could not do. In fact, McLean, Thompson and Wolf are the actual voices on Silver Convention's only other American hit, "Get Up And Boogie," which climbed as high as #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer of 1976.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM72iWami9M
_________________
Friends are like diamonds and diamonds are forever.

Together we stand - Divided we fall.

[Duke of Buckingham [TeaM]]

Nov 30, 1886:
Folies Bergere stage first revue

Once a hall for operettas, pantomime, political meetings, and vaudeville, the Folies Bergère in Paris introduces an elaborate revue featuring women in sensational costumes. The highly popular "Place aux Jeunes" established the Folies as the premier nightspot in Paris. In the 1890s, the Folies followed the Parisian taste for striptease and quickly gained a reputation for its spectacular nude shows. The theater spared no expense, staging revues that featured as many as 40 sets, 1,000 costumes, and an off-stage crew of some 200 people.

The Folies Bergère dates back to 1869, when it opened as one of the first major music halls in Paris. It produced light opera and pantomimes with unknown singers and proved a resounding failure. Greater success came in the 1870s, when the Folies Bergère staged vaudeville. Among other performers, the early vaudeville shows featured acrobats, a snake charmer, a boxing kangaroo, trained elephants, the world's tallest man, and a Greek prince who was covered in tattoos allegedly as punishment for trying to seduce the Shah of Persia's daughter. The public was allowed to drink and socialize in the theater's indoor garden and promenade area, and the Folies Bergère became synonymous with the carnal temptations of the French capital. Famous paintings by Édouard Manet and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec were set in the Folies.

In 1886, the Folies Bergère went under new management, which, on November 30, staged the first revue-style music hall show. The "Place aux Jeunes," featuring scantily clad chorus girls, was a tremendous success. The Folies women gradually wore less and less as the 20th century approached, and the show's costumes and sets became more and more outrageous. Among the performers who got their start at the Folies Bergère were Yvette Guilbert, Maurice Chevalier, and Mistinguett. The African American dancer and singer Josephine Baker made her Folies debut in 1926, lowered from the ceiling in a flower-covered sphere that opened onstage to reveal her wearing a G-string ornamented with bananas.

The Folies Bergère remained a success throughout the 20th century and still can be seen in Paris today, although the theater now features many mainstream concerts and performances. Among other traditions that date back more than a century, the show's title always contains 13 letters and includes the word "Folie."



Nov 30, 1981:
The United States and U.S.S.R. open talks to reduce intermediate-range nuclear forces

Representatives from the United States and the Soviet Union open talks to reduce their intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) in Europe. The talks lasted until December 17, but ended inconclusively.
SALT I (1972) and SALT II (1979) reduced the number of strategic nuclear weapons held by the two superpowers, but left unresolved the issue of the growing number of non-strategic weapons-the so-called intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe. By 1976, the Soviets began to update their INF systems with better SS-20 missiles. America's NATO allies called for a U.S. response, and the United States threatened to deploy cruise and Pershing II missiles by 1983 if no agreement could be reached with the Soviets concerning INFs.
However, by 1981, the situation changed. No-nuke forces were gaining strength in western Europe and there was a growing fear that President Ronald Reagan's heated Cold War rhetoric would lead to a nuclear showdown with Europe as the battlefield. The United States and U.S.S.R. agreed to open talks on INFs in November 1981.
Prior to the talks, President Reagan announced the so-called "zero option" as the basis for the U.S. position at the negotiations. In this plan, the United States would cancel deployment of its new missiles in western Europe if the Soviets dismantled their INFs in eastern Europe. The proposal was greeted with some skepticism, even by some U.S. allies, who believed that it was a public relations ploy that would be completely unacceptable to the Soviets. The Soviets responded with a detailed proposal that essentially eliminated all of the INFs from Europe, including French and British missiles that had not been covered in Reagan's zero option plan. Of course, such a plan would also leave west Europe subject to the Soviets' superior conventional forces. Neither proposal seemed particularly realistic, and despite efforts by some of the U.S. and Soviet negotiators, no compromise could be reached. An INF treaty would not be signed until December 1987, when President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev finally hammered out a plan acceptable to both sides.



Nov 30, 1994:
Achille Lauro sinks near Somalia

The Achille Lauro cruise ship catches fire and sinks to the bottom of the sea near Somalia on this day in 1994. The large luxury liner had a checkered history that included deaths and terrorism prior to its sinking.

The construction of the Willem Ruys by the Royal Rotterdam Lloyd Line took more than 10 years. The completed ship, which weighed in at 24,000 gross tons and was launched in 1947, was used to carry passengers and cargo back and forth from the Netherlands to the East Indies. In the 1960s, it was primarily used to carry immigrants to Australia. In 1965, the StarLauro company bought the ship to add it to its cruise line.

In 1971, the ship, re-named Achille Lauro, rammed an Italian fishing boat in the Mediterranean Sea, killing one person. Ten years later, a fire on board the ship killed two people. The most infamous incident in the history of the Achille Lauro, though, occurred in 1985, when it was hijacked by Palestinian terrorists who shot and killed an American passenger, Leon Klinghoffer.

In 1994, the Achille Lauro was carrying 1,000 passengers near the Horn of Africa when a fire broke out on board. The lifeboats were launched as the fire caused the huge ship to list to the port side. A tug boat was sent to bring it back to shore, but as the tug was trying to connect to the ship, there was a huge explosion. Two people died and the Achille Lauro sank to the bottom of the ocean.

The survivors in the lifeboats were picked up by the USS Gettysburg. The Achille Lauro's two sister ships, the Lakonia and the Angelina Lauro, also fell victim to on-board fires.



Nov 30, 1954:
Meteorite strikes Alabama woman

The first modern instance of a meteorite striking a human being occurs at Sylacauga, Alabama, when a meteorite crashes through the roof of a house and into a living room, bounces off a radio, and strikes a woman on the hip. The victim, Mrs. Elizabeth Hodges, was sleeping on a couch at the time of impact. The space rock was a sulfide meteorite weighing 8.5 pounds and measuring seven inches in length. Mrs. Hodges was not permanently injured but suffered a nasty bruise along her hip and leg.

Ancient Chinese records tell of people being injured or killed by falling meteorites, but the Sylacauga meteorite was the first modern record of this type of human injury. In 1911, a dog in Egypt was killed by the Nakhla meteorite.



Nov 30, 1939:
USSR attacks Finland

On this day in 1939, the Red Army crosses the Soviet-Finnish border with 465,000 men and 1,000 aircraft. Helsinki was bombed, and 61 Finns were killed in an air raid that steeled the Finns for resistance, not capitulation.

The overwhelming forces arrayed against Finland convinced most Western nations, as well as the Soviets themselves, that the invasion of Finland would be a cakewalk. The Soviet soldiers even wore summer uniforms, despite the onset of the Scandinavian winter; it was simply assumed that no outdoor activity, such as fighting, would be taking place. But the Helsinki raid had produced many casualties-and many photographs, including those of mothers holding dead babies, and preteen girls crippled by the bombing. Those photos were hung up everywhere to spur on Finn resistance. Although that resistance consisted of only small numbers of trained soldiers-on skis and bicycles!--fighting it out in the forests, and partisans throwing Molotov cocktails into the turrets of Soviet tanks, the refusal to submit made headlines around the world.

President Roosevelt quickly extended $10 million in credit to Finland, while also noting that the Finns were the only people to pay back their World War I war debt to the United States in full. But by the time the Soviets had a chance to regroup, and send in massive reinforcements, the Finnish resistance was spent. By March 1940, negotiations with the Soviets began, and Finland soon lost the Karelian Isthmus, the land bridge that gave access to Leningrad, which the Soviets wanted to control.



Nov 30, 1974:
Elton John's Greatest Hits hits #1

On November 30, 1974, Elton John's Greatest Hits began a 10-week run atop the Billboard 200 pop album chart on its way to selling more than 24 million copies worldwide.

Elton John was born and raised as Reginald Dwight in suburban London, and if you'd rearranged his DNA or his childhood environment just a bit, he might have become an RAF fighter pilot instead of one of the biggest pop stars of all time. His father, Stanley, wanted young Reginald to follow his footsteps into the British military, but his mother Shirley Dwight's Elvis Presley records sparked his interest in rock and roll, and her uncritical devotion made it possible for the bespectacled boy to pursue his dream of rock stardom without discouragement. And he displayed remarkable tenacity in pursuing that dream, even to the point of ruining his vision by wearing a pair of Buddy Holly-style eyeglasses until his eyes adjusted to their strong prescription.

An accomplished pianist with a gift for composing original melodies, Reg Dwight toured extensively with a band called Bluesology while still a teenager in the mid-1960s, but his path toward stardom really began when he landed a 9-to-5 songwriting job at DJM Records in 1967 and was paired with a lyricist named Bernie Taupin. Taking the stage-name Elton John in 1969, Dwight began recording original material written with Taupin while still turning out bland, commercial ballads by the hundreds as part of his day job. His debut album, Empty Sky (1969) failed to catch on in the UK and was not released in the United States until years later, but his follow-up, Elton John (1970), was a breakthrough smash thanks to "Your Song," his first top-20 hit on both sides of the Atlantic.

Over the next four years, John would produce new material at a rate that is utterly astonishing by today's standards. Prior to the November 1974 release of Elton John's Greatest Hits, he released six full-length studio albums—Tumbleweed Connection (1970), Madman Across the Water (1971), Honky Château (1972), Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player (1973), Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973) and Caribou (1974)—and scored 14 American top 40 hits, 10 of which were included on the greatest-hits album that reached #1 on this day in 1974.

Over the subsequent decades of his phenomenal career, Elton John would release two further volumes of greatest hits, sell tens of millions of albums worldwide and establish an American chart record that may never be equaled by placing at least one hit on the Billboard Top 40 in each of 30 consecutive years from 1970 through 1999.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STnoSnWOLwA
_________________
Friends are like diamonds and diamonds are forever.

Together we stand - Divided we fall.

[Duke of Buckingham [TeaM]]

Dec 1, 1990:
Chunnel makes breakthrough

Shortly after 11 a.m. on December 1, 1990, 132 feet below the English Channel, workers drill an opening the size of a car through a wall of rock. This was no ordinary hole--it connected the two ends of an underwater tunnel linking Great Britain with the European mainland for the first time in more than 8,000 years.

The Channel Tunnel, or "Chunnel," was not a new idea. It had been suggested to Napoleon Bonaparte, in fact, as early as 1802. It wasn't until the late 20th century, though, that the necessary technology was developed. In 1986, Britain and France signed a treaty authorizing the construction of a tunnel running between Folkestone, England, and Calais, France.

Over the next four years, nearly 13,000 workers dug 95 miles of tunnels at an average depth of 150 feet (45 meters) below sea level. Eight million cubic meters of soil were removed, at a rate of some 2,400 tons per hour. The completed Chunnel would have three interconnected tubes, including one rail track in each direction and one service tunnel. The price? A whopping $15 billion.

After workers drilled that final hole on December 1, 1990, they exchanged French and British flags and toasted each other with champagne. Final construction took four more years, and the Channel Tunnel finally opened for passenger service on May 6, 1994, with Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and France's President Francois Mitterrand on hand in Calais for the inaugural run. A company called Eurotunnel won the 55-year concession to operate the Chunnel, which is the crucial stretch of the Eurostar high-speed rail link between London and Paris. The regular shuttle train through the tunnel runs 31 miles in total--23 of those underwater--and takes 20 minutes, with an additional 15-minute loop to turn the train around. The Chunnel is the second-longest rail tunnel in the world, after the Seikan Tunnel in Japan.




Dec 1, 1862:
Lincoln gives State of the Union address

On this day in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln addresses the U.S. Congress and speaks some of his most memorable words as he discusses the Northern war effort.

Lincoln used the address to present a moderate message concerning his policy towards slavery. Just 10 weeks before, he had issued his Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that slaves in territories still in rebellion as of January 1, 1863, would be free. The measure was not welcomed by everyone in the North--it met with considerable resistance from conservative Democrats who did not want to fight a war to free slaves.

The November 1862 elections were widely interpreted as a condemnation of the emancipation plan. The Democrats won the New York governorship and 34 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, though the Republicans gained five Senate seats and maintained control of most state legislatures. Lincoln used the State of the Union address to present a more moderate position on emancipation. He mentioned gradual, compensated emancipation of slaves, which many moderates and conservatives desired, but he also asserted that the slaves liberated thus far by Union armies would remain forever free.

Lincoln's closing paragraph was a statement on the trials of the time: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present...fellow citizens, we cannot escape history...The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union...In giving freedom to the slave, we ensure freedom to the free--honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth."



Dec 1, 1959:
Antarctica made a military-free continent

Twelve nations, including the United States and the Soviet Union, sign the Antarctica Treaty, which bans military activity and weapons testing on that continent. It was the first arms control agreement signed in the Cold War period.

Since the 1800s a number of nations, including Great Britain, Australia, Chile, and Norway, laid claim to parts of Antarctica. These competing claims led to diplomatic disputes and even armed clashes. In 1948, Argentine military forces fired on British troops in an area claimed by both nations. Incidents of that sort, together with evidence that the Soviet Union was becoming more interested in Antarctica, spurred the United States to propose that the continent be made a trustee of the United Nations. This idea was rejected when none of the other nations with interests on the continent would agree to cede their claims of sovereignty to an international organization.

By the 1950s, some officials in the United States began to press for a more active U.S. role in Antarctica, believing that the continent might have military potential as an area for nuclear tests. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, however, took a different approach. U.S. diplomats, working with their Soviet counterparts, hammered out a treaty that set aside Antarctica as a military-free zone and postponed settling territorial claims for future debate. There could be no military presence on the continent, and no testing of weapons of any sort, including nuclear weapons. Scientific ventures were allowed, and scientists would not be prohibited from traveling through any of the areas claimed by various nations. A dozen nations signed the document. Since the treaty did not directly tamper with issues of territorial sovereignty in Antarctica, the signers included all nations with territorial claims on the continent. As such, the treaty marked a small but significant first step toward U.S.-Soviet arms control and political cooperation. The treaty went into effect in June 1961, and set the standard for the basic policies that continue to govern Antarctica.



Dec 1, 1958:
Students die in Chicago school fire

A fire at a grade school in Chicago kills 90 students on this day in 1958.

The Our Lady of Angels School was operated by the Sisters of Charity in Chicago. In 1958, there were well over 1,200 students enrolled at the school, which occupied a large, old building. Unfortunately, little in the way of fire prevention was done before December 1958. The building did not have any sprinklers and no regular preparatory drills were conducted. When a small fire broke out in a pile of trash in the basement, it led to disaster.

The fire probably began about 2:30 p.m. and, within minutes, teachers on the first floor smelled it. These teachers led their classes outside, but did not sound a general alarm. The school's janitor discovered the fire at 2:42 and shouted for the alarm to be rung. However, he was either not heard or the alarm system did not operate properly, and the students in classrooms on the second floor were completely unaware of the rapidly spreading flames beneath them.

It took only a few more minutes for the fire to reach the second floor. Panic ensued. Some students jumped out windows to escape. Although firefighters who were arriving on the scene tried to catch them, some were injured. Firefighters also tried to get ladders up to the windows. One quick-thinking nun had her students crawl under the smoke and roll down the stairs, where they were rescued. Other classes remained in their rooms, praying for help.

When the fire was finally extinguished several hours later, the authorities found that 90 students and 3 nuns had been killed in the fire.
[IMG]http://www.dean-team.com/photos/chicago_homes_for_sale_by_deans_team/images/392832/425x340.aspx[/IMG]


Dec 1, 1934:
Sergey Kirov murdered

Sergey Kirov, a leader of the Russian Revolution and a high-ranking member of the Politburo, is shot to death at his Leningrad office by Communist Party member Leonid Nikolayev, likely at the instigation of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

Whatever Stalin's precise role in the assassination of his political rival Kirov, he used the murder as a pretext for eliminating many of his opponents in the Communist Party, the government, the armed forces, and the intelligentsia. Kirov's assassination served as the basis for seven separate trials and the arrest and execution of hundreds of notable figures in Soviet political, military, and cultural life. Each trial contradicted the others in fundamental details, and different individuals were found guilty of organizing the murder of Kirov by different means and for varying political motives.

The Kirov assassination trials marked the beginning of Stalin's massive four-year purge of Soviet society, in which millions of people were imprisoned, exiled, or killed.



Dec 1, 1945:
Bette Midler is born in Honolulu, Hawaii

By the time she appeared as the final guest of Johnny Carson's 30-year career on The Tonight Show and brought tears to the unflappable host's eyes with an emotional performance of "One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)," she was an established star of stage and screen—a Tony winner, an Oscar nominee, a Grammy winner and a multimillion-selling recording artist. It would be difficult, however, to imagine a more unorthodox path to mainstream stardom than the one followed by Bette Midler—"The Divine Miss M"—who was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on this day in 1945.

Equal parts Judy Garland and Ethel Merman, Bette Midler early on set her sights on making it in New York City. Arriving in New York in 1965, Midler soon tried out for the national touring company of Fiddler On The Roof only to land the role of Tzeitel (and the job of singing "Matchmaker" eight times a week) in the Broadway production instead. After several years of singing in various Manhattan nightclubs on the side, she got what would prove to be the most important gig of her career, singing poolside nightly at the fabled Continental Baths, a gay bathhouse/cabaret in the basement of the Ansonia building on West 72nd Street in Manhattan. It was there, in collaboration with a young pianist named Barry Manilow, that she fully developed her "Divine Miss M" stage persona—a brash, campy interpreter of numbers ranging from "Chattanooga Choo Choo" and "Leader Of The Pack" to "Superstar" and "Delta Dawn." It was at the Continental Baths that Atlantic Records chief Ahmet Ertegun discovered Midler and signed her to record the album that made her a star: The Divine Miss M (1972). That album, which made an unlikely pop hit out of "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" (Billboard #8, June 1973), earned Midler the Best New Artist award at the 1973 Grammy Awards.

Though she would remain a beloved favorite of a significant fan base over the next decade or so, her only pop hit during that period was the theme song from the 1979 movie The Rose. In 1986, however, her flagging Hollywood career was revived by a comic turn in Paul Mazursky's Down And Out In Beverly Hills. Two years later, she would earn a Record of the Year Grammy and her first and only #1 pop hit with "Wing Beneath My Wings," from the 1988 movie Beaches, in which Midler co-starred alongside Barbara Hershey.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR6okRuOLc8
_________________
Friends are like diamonds and diamonds are forever.

Together we stand - Divided we fall.

[Duke of Buckingham [TeaM]]

Dec 2, 2001:
Enron files for bankruptcy

On this day in 2001, the Enron Corporation files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in a New York court, sparking one of the largest corporate scandals in U.S. history.

An energy-trading company based in Houston, Texas, Enron was formed in 1985 as the merger of two gas companies, Houston Natural Gas and Internorth. Under chairman and CEO Kenneth Lay, Enron rose as high as number seven on Fortune magazine's list of the top 500 U.S. companies. In 2000, the company employed 21,000 people and posted revenue of $111 billion. Over the next year, however, Enron's stock price began a dramatic slide, dropping from $90.75 in August 2000 to $0.26 by closing on November 30, 2001.

As prices fell, Lay sold large amounts of his Enron stock, while simultaneously encouraging Enron employees to buy more shares and assuring them that the company was on the rebound. Employees saw their retirement savings accounts wiped out as Enron's stock price continued to plummet. After another energy company, Dynegy, canceled a planned $8.4 billion buy-out in late November, Enron filed for bankruptcy. By the end of the year, Enron's collapse had cost investors billions of dollars, wiped out some 5,600 jobs and liquidated almost $2.1 billion in pension plans.

Over the next several years, the name "Enron" became synonymous with large-scale corporate fraud and corruption, as an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Justice Department revealed that Enron had inflated its earnings by hiding debts and losses in subsidiary partnerships. The government subsequently accused Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling, who served as Enron's CEO from February to August 2001, of conspiring to cover up their company's financial weaknesses from investors. The investigation also brought down accounting giant Arthur Anderson, whose auditors were found guilty of deliberately destroying documents incriminating to Enron.

In July 2004, a Houston court indicted Skilling on 35 counts including fraud, conspiracy and insider trading. Lay was charged with 11 similar crimes. The trial began on January 30, 2006, in Houston. A number of former Enron employees appeared on the stand, including Andrew Fastow, Enron's ex-CFO, who early on pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy and agreed to testify against his former bosses. Over the course of the trial, the defiant Skilling--who unloaded almost $60 million worth of Enron stock shortly after his resignation but refused to admit he knew of the company's impending collapse--emerged as the figure many identified most personally with the scandal. In May 2006, Skilling was convicted of 19 of 35 counts, while Lay was found guilty on 10 counts of fraud and conspiracy. When Lay died from heart disease just two months later, a Houston judge vacated the counts against him. That October, the 52-year-old Skilling was sentenced to more than 24 years in prison.



Dec 2, 1777:
Philadelphia nurse overhears British plans to attack Washington

Legend has it that on the night of December 2, 1777, Philadelphia housewife and nurse Lydia Darragh single-handedly saves the lives of General George Washington and his Continental Army when she overhears the British planning a surprise attack on Washington's army for the following day.

During the occupation of Philadelphia, British General William Howe stationed his headquarters across the street from the Darragh home, and when Howe's headquarters proved too small to hold meetings, he commandeered a large upstairs room in the Darraghs' house. Although uncorroborated, family legend holds that Mrs. Darragh would eavesdrop and take notes on the British meetings from an adjoining room and would conceal the notes by sewing them into her coat before passing them onto American troops stationed outside the city.

On the evening of December 2, 1777, Darragh overheard the British commanders planning a surprise attack on Washington's army at Whitemarsh, Pennsylvania, for December 4 and 5. Using a cover story that she needed to buy flour from a nearby mill just outside the British line, Darragh passed the information to American Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Craig the following day.

The British marched towards Whitemarsh on the evening of December 4, 1777, and were surprised to find General Washington and the Continental Army waiting for them. After three inconclusive days of skirmishing, General Howe chose to return his troops to Philadelphia.

It is said that members of the Central Intelligence Agency still tell the story of Lydia Darragh, one of the first spies in American history.



Dec 2, 2002:
Toyota's first hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles arrive in California

On this day in 2002, Toyota delivers its first two "market-ready" hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles (FCHVs, in the company's shorthand) to researchers at the University of California at Irvine and the University of California at Davis. Since 1997, Toyota had been providing research money to UC scientists and engineers who studied the problems associated with "advanced transportation systems" like fuel-cell vehicles. With their new fleet of FCHVs, the researchers finally had a chance to test out their theories.

Unlike the Toyota Prius, which has a gas-electric hybrid engine, FCHVs use a hydrogen fuel-cell system that generates electricity by combining hydrogen with oxygen. That electricity powers the car's motor and charges its batteries. As a result, the vehicle creates no environmentally unfriendly byproducts: its only emission is water vapor.

The early FCHVs had a cruising range of 180 miles and a top speed of 96 miles per hour. Toyota later revamped the vehicle somewhat, improving its range and making it 25 percent more efficient. In September 2007, company engineers in Japan drove an FCHV 347 miles from the Osaka Prefectural Government Office to the Mega Web amusement center in Tokyo with the air-conditioner on and without refueling. Later that year, they took the FCHV on an even longer test drive, from Fairbanks, Alaska to Vancouver, British Columbia--a distance of 2,300 miles. They chose that route for two reasons: because it would demonstrate the FCHV's hardiness in the face of cold weather and rough roads and because mobile refueling of hydrogen-powered vehicles is allowed on Canadian highways but not on American ones.

In January 2009, Toyota announced that its fuel-cell car would go on the market in 2015. However, since it turns out that California's influential Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) mandate gives more credits to fuel-cell vehicles than to plug-in hybrid vehicles, the company has since revised its timeline: In May 2009, a Toyota spokesman declared that people might be able to buy the cars in 2014 or even sooner. Toyota and other FCHV proponents then turned their energy to the next challenge: providing fuel for the cars by creating a hydrogen-refueling infrastructure in California and across the country.



Dec 2, 1961:
Castro declares himself a Marxist-Leninist

Following a year of severely strained relations between the United States and Cuba, Cuban leader Fidel Castro openly declares that he is a Marxist-Leninist. The announcement sealed the bitter Cold War animosity between the two nations.

Castro came to power in 1959 after leading a successful revolution against the dictatorial regime of Fulgencio Batista. Almost from the start, the United States worried that Castro was too leftist in his politics. He implemented agrarian reform, expropriated foreign oil company holdings, and eventually seized all foreign-owned property in Cuba. He also established close diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and the Russians were soon providing economic and military aid. By January 1961, the United States had severed diplomatic relations with Cuba. In April, the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion took place, wherein hundreds of rebels, armed and trained by the United States, attempted a landing in Cuba with the intent of overthrowing the Castro government. The attack ended in a dismal military defeat for the rebels and an embarrassing diplomatic setback for the United States.

In December 1961, Castro made clear what most U.S. officials already believed. In a televised address on December 2, Castro declared, "I am a Marxist-Leninist and shall be one until the end of my life." He went on to state that, "Marxism or scientific socialism has become the revolutionary movement of the working class." He also noted that communism would be the dominant force in Cuban politics: "There cannot be three or four movements." Some questioned Castro's dedication to the communist cause, believing that his announcement was simply a stunt to get more Soviet assistance. Castro, however, never deviated from his declared principles, and went on to become one of the world's longest-ruling heads of state. In late July 2006, an unwell Fidel Castro temporarily ceded power to his younger brother Raul. Fidel Castro officially stepped down in February 2008.



Dec 2, 1959:
Dam collapses in France, killing 412

The Malpasset Dam in France collapses on this day in 1959 and the resulting flood kills more than 400 people. The city of Frejus, dating back to Caesar's time, was devastated by the massive flood.

Frejus was built by Roman Emperor Caesar as a port city on the French Riviera. Over the years, the city center moved a few miles inland near the Reyran River. The river ran through a narrow gorge miles from the city and, in the 1950s, it was decided to build a dam to control the river's flow.

In late November 1959, a week-long rain storm stalled over the French Riviera. It was the middle of the night on December 2 when the rock beneath the Malpasset Dam gave way under the weight and pressure of the water. The entire dam collapsed and the water rushed down the gorge with tremendous power. Miles away, windows and doors were blown out of homes by the water. Some victims were buried in mud, while others are believed to have been swept out to sea.

Rescue and relief efforts were extremely difficult as all access roads were destroyed. Even when help arrived, the mud was so thick that it took days of work to dig out the bodies. The best estimate is that approximately 412 people perished.
http://www.macaudailytimes.com.mo/thumbnail.php?file=images/dec09-images/History_900954581.jpg&size=article_medium


Dec 2, 1804:
Napoleon crowned emperor

In Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte is crowned Napoleon I, the first Frenchman to hold the title of emperor in a thousand years. Pope Pius VII handed Napoleon the crown that the 35-year-old conqueror of Europe placed on his own head.

The Corsican-born Napoleon, one of the greatest military strategists in history, rapidly rose in the ranks of the French Revolutionary Army during the late 1790s. By 1799, France was at war with most of Europe, and Napoleon returned home from his Egyptian campaign to take over the reigns of the French government and save his nation from collapse. After becoming first consul in February 1800, he reorganized his armies and defeated Austria. In 1802, he established the Napoleonic Code, a new system of French law, and in 1804 he established the French empire. By 1807, Napoleon's empire stretched from the River Elbe in the north, down through Italy in the south, and from the Pyrenees to the Dalmatian coast.

Beginning in 1812, Napoleon began to encounter the first significant defeats of his military career, suffering through a disastrous invasion of Russia, losing Spain to the Duke of Wellington in the Peninsula War, and enduring total defeat against an allied force by 1814. Exiled to the island of Elba, he escaped to France in early 1815 and raised a new Grand Army that enjoyed temporary success before its crushing defeat at Waterloo against an allied force under Wellington on June 18, 1815.

Napoleon was subsequently exiled to the island of Saint Helena off the coast of Africa, where he lived under house arrest with a few followers. In May 1821, he died, most likely of stomach cancer. He was only 51 years old. In 1840, his body was returned to Paris, and a magnificent funeral was held. Napoleon's body was conveyed through the Arc de Triomphe and entombed under the dome of the Invalides.



Dec 2, 1972:
The Temptations earn their final #1 hit with "Papa Was A Rolling Stone"

On December 2, 1972, the Temptations earn the last of their four chart-topping hits when "Papa Was A Rollin' Stone" reaches #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Over the course of their storied career, the Temptations placed 38 hit records in the pop top 40—not just more than any other Motown Records artist, but more than any American pop group ever. Beyond their quantitative achievements, the Temptations also embodied the original Motown ideal that the records mattered more than the people who made them—for good and for ill. Various intrigues, upsets and tragedies saw the Temptations' lineup change almost annually during their heyday, but the turmoil went largely unnoticed by the record-buying public. Indeed, in an era when pop groups were coming to be known as much for the personalities of their individual members as for their music, the Temptations—a group in which all five members sometimes sang lead—remained essentially unknowable other than through their incredible records.

Formed in Detroit, Michigan, in the early 1960s when members of two vocal groups called The Distants and The Primes came together as "The Elgins," The Temptations took on the name under which they became famous shortly after signing with Berry Gordy's fledgling Motown Records in 1961. Even as personnel shifted due to internal politics and the untimely death of one original member, Paul Williams, by suicide in 1973, the Temptations kept churning out hits well past the era when Motown first became famous for creating "The Sound of Young America." Indeed, The Temptations were alone among the stars that emerged from "Hitsville U.S.A." in successfully navigating the transition from the mid 1960s to the early 1970s, evolving from the glorious love poetry of producer-songwriter Smokey Robinson on early hits like "The Way You Do The Things You Do" (1964) and "My Girl" (1965), to the funk-fueled social commentary of producer Norman Whitfield and songwriting partner Barrett Strong on later hits like "Ball Of Confusion (That's What The World Is Today)" (1970) and "Papa Was A Rolling Stone," which became their final chart-topper on this day in 1972.

The Temptations were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, but the deaths in quick succession of members David Ruffin, Eddie Kendricks and Melvin Franklin in 1991, 1992 and 1995, respectively, leaves Otis Williams as the sole surviving member of the original Temptations lineup. Williams continues to perform the group's hits to this day with a new group of Temptations.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s3SNHIH0bs
_________________
Friends are like diamonds and diamonds are forever.

Together we stand - Divided we fall.

[Duke of Buckingham [TeaM]]

Dec 3, 1947:
A Streetcar Named Desire opens on Broadway

On this day in 1947, Marlon Brando's famous cry of "STELLA!" first booms across a Broadway stage, electrifying the audience at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre during the first-ever performance of Tennessee Williams' play A Streetcar Named Desire.

The 23-year-old Brando played the rough, working-class Polish-American Stanley Kowalski, whose violent clash with Blanche DuBois (played on Broadway by Jessica Tandy), a Southern belle with a dark past, is at the center of Williams' famous drama. Blanche comes to stay with her sister Stella (Kim Hunter), Stanley's wife, at their home in the French Quarter of New Orleans; she and Stanley immediately despise each other. In the climactic scene, Stanley rapes Blanche, causing her to lose her fragile grip on sanity; the play ends with her being led away in a straitjacket.

Streetcar, produced by Irene Mayer Selznick and directed by Elia Kazan, shocked mid-century audiences with its frank depiction of sexuality and brutality onstage. When the curtain went down on opening night, there was a moment of stunned silence before the crowd erupted into a round of applause that lasted 30 minutes. On December 17, the cast left New York to go on the road. The show would run for more than 800 performances, turning the charismatic Brando into an overnight star. Tandy won a Tony Award for her performance, and Williams was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

In 1951, Kazan made Streetcar into a movie. Brando, Hunter and Karl Malden (as Stanley's friend and Blanche's love interest) reprised their roles. The role of Blanche went to Vivien Leigh, the scenery-chewing star of Gone with the Wind. Controversy flared when the Catholic Legion of Decency threatened to condemn the film unless the explicitly sexual scenes--including the climactic rape--were removed. When Williams, who wrote the screenplay, refused to take out the rape, the Legion insisted that Stanley be punished onscreen. As a result, the movie (but not the play) ends with Stella leaving Stanley.

A Streetcar Named Desire earned 12 Oscar nominations, including acting nods for each of its four leads. The movie won for Best Art Direction, and Leigh, Hunter and Malden all took home awards; Brando lost to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen.



Dec 3, 1776:
Washington arrives at the banks of the Delaware

In a letter dated December 3, 1776, General George Washington writes to Congress from his headquarters in Trenton, New Jersey, to report that he had transported much of the Continental Army's stores and baggage across the Delaware River to Pennsylvania.

In his letter Washington wrote, Immediately on my arrival here, I ordered the removal of all the military and other stores and baggage over the Delaware, a great quantity are already got over, and as soon as the boats come up from Philadelphia, we shall load them, by which means I hope to have every thing secured this night and tomorrow if we are not disturbed.

Washington then made the critical strategic move of confiscating and burning all the boats along the Delaware to prevent British troops from pursuing his beleaguered forces across the river. The British strategy of chasing Washington across New Jersey, rather than capturing his entire army in Manhattan, seemed to be a stroke of genius. As New Jersey was devastated at the hands of British forces and Washington's men cowered in Pennsylvania, even staunch Patriots, including Thomas Jefferson, considered surrender to the crown.

Also on this day, General Washington received a letter dated November 30 from his second-in-command, General Charles Lee, reporting that he was about to cross into New York near Peekskill on this day in 1776. In an apt reflection of the state of the American fortunes, the British captured General Lee nine days later in New Jersey. Richard Stockton, a leading New Jersey patriot and signer of the Declaration of Independence, was also in British custody and was forced to swear an oath of allegiance to the British king along with thousands of his New Jersey neighbors.



Dec 3, 1979:
Last AMC Pacer rolls off assembly line

On December 3, 1979, the last Pacer rolls off the assembly line at the American Motors Corporation (AMC) factory in Kenosha, Wisconsin. When the car first came on the market in 1975, it was a sensation, hailed as the car of the future. "When you buy any other car," ads said, "all you end up with is today's car. When you get a Pacer, you get a piece of tomorrow." By 1979, however, sales had faded considerably. Today, polls and experts agree: the Pacer was one of the worst cars of all time.

By the end of the 1960s, AMC was the only surviving independent automaker in the United States. The only way to assure AMC's future, company officials decided, was to embrace what they called a "Philosophy of Difference." That is, they built only cars that offered buyers something brand-new. (During the 1960s, the company had tried to compete directly with cars produced by the Big Three--General Motors, Ford and Chrysler--and had nearly gone bankrupt as a result.) They also decided to build cars that would meet the stringent federal safety and pollution standards that they imagined would be in place in 1980.

Thus, the Pacer: an "economy car" that was, despite its designs on the small-car market, amazingly heavy (thanks to those crash-protection standards) and terribly fuel-inefficient. Most peculiarly, the Pacer was nearly half as wide (77 inches) as it was long (171.5 inches, on a 100-inch wheelbase). In theory, this meant that four adults and their cargo could travel in comfort; in practice, it meant that the car was goofy-looking and impossible to park. Contributing to the overall goofiness were the car's enormous windows--more than one reviewer compared the Pacer to a fishbowl. Also, to make it easier for passengers to load packages into the back and drivers to climb in on the curb side, the left-hand door was shorter than the right one. (As a result, parallel parkers in Great Britain typically needed to crawl over the passenger seat to get out, because the driver's-side door was so big that it would get caught on the curb.) The short, squat car was also woefully underpowered.

Despite (or perhaps because of) its bad reputation, the Pacer has also earned a spot in pop-culture history. A 1976 Pacer--robin's-egg blue, with flames painted on the front fenders--starred in the 1992 film "Wayne's World" and in the accompanying video for the old Queen song "Bohemian Rhapsody." More recently, the rapper Eminem featured a late-model Pacer in the music video for his 2000 hit "The Real Slim Shady."



Dec 3, 1989:
Bush and Gorbachev suggest Cold War is coming to an end

Meeting off the coast of Malta, President George Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev issue statements strongly suggesting that the long-standing animosities at the core of the Cold War might be coming to an end. Commentators in both the United States and Russia went farther and declared that the Cold War was over.

The talks were part of the first-ever summit held between the two leaders. Bush and his advisers were cautiously optimistic about the summit, eager to follow up on the steps toward arms control taken by the preceding Reagan administration. Gorbachev was quite vocal about his desire for better relations with the United States so that he could pursue his domestic reform agenda and was more effusive in his declarations that the talks marked an important first step toward ending the Cold War. The Russian leader stated, "The characteristics of the Cold War should be abandoned." He went on to suggest that, "The arms race, mistrust, psychological and ideological struggle, all those should be things of the past." Bush was somewhat more restrained in his statement: "With reform underway in the Soviet Union, we stand at the threshold of a brand-new era of U.S.-Soviet relations. It is within our grasp to contribute each in our own way to overcoming the division of Europe and ending the military confrontation there."

Despite the positive spin of the rhetoric, though, little of substance was accomplished during the summit. Both sides agreed to work toward a treaty dealing with long-range nuclear weapons and conventional arms in 1990. Gorbachev and Bush also agreed that another summit would take place in June 1990, in Washington, D.C.



Dec 3, 1984:
Explosion kills 2,000 at pesticide plant

An explosion at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, on this day in 1984, leads to the worst industrial accident in history. At least 2,000 people died and another 200,000 were injured when toxic gas enveloped the city.

Bhopal was a city of nearly a million people in India's Madhya Pradesh region between New Dehli and Bombay. The Union Carbide pesticide plant was located in Jai Prakash Nagar, a particularly poor area of the impoverished city. Later, some critics charged that these factors were part of the reason that the plant had outdated equipment, lax management and grossly inadequate maintenance and safety procedures.

On Sunday, December 2, the 100 workers on the late shift were in the process of making the pesticide Sevin. This involved mixing carbon tetrachloride, methyl isocyanate (MIC) and alpha-napthol. Over the next 12 hours, a series of astonishing errors led to disaster.

The MIC at the plant was stored in three partially buried 15,000-gallon tanks. When there was a problem with one of the tanks, nitrogen was forced in to extract the MIC. However, on this day, the process was not working correctly and both MIC and nitrogen were leaking. At about 11:00 p.m., the gauges began to indicate a dangerous level of pressure in the tanks, but the workers thought the instruments were malfunctioning and took no measures to alleviate the problem. By 11:30, the workers in the vicinity of the tanks were having a physical reaction to the leak, a feeling that many were familiar with because it happened with some frequency. Even then, Shakil Qureshi, the supervisor, decided to wait until after a tea break to look into the situation. By then, it was too late, and panic ensued as an explosion rocked the plant at approximately 12:15 a.m.

Firefighters attempted in vain to use a curtain of water to stop the gas from escaping the plant. The gas simply flowed over the top of the water. A piece of equipment called a vent gas scrubber, intended to prevent toxic gas from spreading, completely failed to operate. In the midst of the chaos, the drivers of the emergency buses ran away instead of driving the workers to safety. Even worse, the plant failed to inform local authorities immediately, later claiming that the phones weren't working.

People living in the vicinity of the plant were close enough to hear the alarms but ignored them on December 3 because alarms at the plant were so frequent. The cold weather that evening kept the gas close to the ground as it silently swept through Bhopal. Anyone who was already weak or frail was affected most seriously. Exposure to the gas caused vomiting and difficulty breathing. When the gas hit the train station, stampedes resulted as people tried to outrun it. Victims flooded the area hospitals, which were not prepared for the onslaught. The best and most effective treatment was a simple wet cloth over the face, but virtually none of the medical personnel dispensed this information.

An exact casualty count was impossible to determine in the aftermath of this disaster but most estimates place the death toll at over 2,000. An estimated 200,000 people were affected in some way by exposure to the gas. Some were blinded; others experienced serious sleep or digestion problems following the disaster. About 10-20 percent of those exposed were still suffering serious problems, such as memory loss and nerve damage, a year later.

When Union Carbide officials arrived in India following the Bhopal disaster, they were arrested. None were convicted, despite evidence suggesting that management was substantially negligent in the management of the plant.



Dec 3, 1979:
Eleven people killed in a stampede outside Who concert in Cincinnati, Ohio

The general-admission ticketing policy for rock concerts at Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum in the 1970s was known as "festival seating." That term and that ticketing policy would become infamous in the wake of one of the deadliest rock-concert incidents in history. Eleven people, including three high-school students, were killed on this day in 1979, when a crowd of general-admission ticket-holders to a Cincinnati Who concert surged forward in an attempt to enter Riverfront Coliseum and secure prime unreserved seats inside.

Festival seating had already been eliminated at many similar venues in the United States by 1979, yet the system remained in place at Riverfront Coliseum despite a dangerous incident at a Led Zeppelin show two years earlier. That day, 60 would-be concertgoers were arrested, and dozens more injured, when the crowd outside the venue surged up against the Coliseum's locked glass doors.

In the early evening hours of December 3, 1979, those same doors stood locked before a restless and growing crowd of Who fans. That evening's concert was scheduled to begin at 8:00 pm, but ticket-holders had begun to gather outside the Coliseum shortly after noon, and by 3:00 pm, police had been called in to maintain order as the crowd swelled into the thousands. By 7:00 pm, an estimated 8,000 ticket-holders were jostling for position in a plaza at the Coliseum's west gate, and the crowd began to press forward. When a police lieutenant on the scene tried to convince the show's promoters to open the locked glass doors at the west gate entrance, he was told that there were not enough ticket-takers on duty inside, and that union rules prevented them from recruiting ushers to perform that duty. At approximately 7:20, the crowd surged forward powerfully as one set of glass doors shattered and the others were thrown open.

With Coliseum security nowhere in sight, the police on hand were aware almost immediately that the situation had the potential for disaster, yet they were physically unable to slow the stream of people flowing through the plaza for at least the next 15 minutes. At approximately 7:45 pm, they began to work their way into the crowd, where they found the first of what would eventually turn out to be 11 concert-goers lying on the ground, dead from asphyxiation.

Afraid of how the crowd might react to a cancellation, Cincinnati fire officials instructed the promoters to go on with the show, and the members of the Who were not told what had happened until after completing their final encore hours later.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, the City of Cincinnati banned festival seating at its concert venues. That ban was overturned, however, 24 years later, and improved crowd-control procedures have thus far prevented a reoccurrence of any such incident.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRvzjs5xWz0
_________________
Friends are like diamonds and diamonds are forever.

Together we stand - Divided we fall.

[Duke of Buckingham [TeaM]]

Dec 4, 1991:
Hostage Terry Anderson freed in Lebanon

On this day in 1991, Islamic militants in Lebanon release kidnapped American journalist Terry Anderson after 2,454 days in captivity.

As chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press, Anderson covered the long-running civil war in Lebanon (1975-1990). On March 16, 1985, he was kidnapped on a west Beirut street while leaving a tennis court. His captors took him to the southern suburbs of the city, where he was held prisoner in an underground dungeon for the next six-and-a-half years.

Anderson was one of 92 foreigners (including 17 Americans) abducted during Lebanon's bitter civil war. The kidnappings were linked to Hezbollah, or the Party of God, a militant Shiite Muslim organization formed in 1982 in reaction to Israel's military presence in Lebanon. They seized several Americans, including Anderson, soon after Kuwaiti courts jailed 17 Shiites found guilty of bombing the American and French embassies there in 1983. Hezbollah in Lebanon received financial and spiritual support from Iran, where prominent leaders praised the bombers and kidnappers for performing their duty to Islam.

U.S. relations with Iran--and with Syria, the other major foreign influence in Lebanon--showed signs of improving by 1990, when the civil war drew to a close, aided by Syria's intervention on behalf of the Lebanese army. Eager to win favor from the U.S. in order to promote its own economic goals, Iran used its influence in Lebanon to engineer the release of nearly all the hostages over the course of 1991.

Anderson returned to the U.S. and was reunited with his family, including his daughter Suleme, born three months after his capture. In 1999, he sued the Iranian government for $100 million, accusing it of sponsoring his kidnappers; he received a multi-million dollar settlement.



Dec 4, 1945:
Senate approves U.S. participation in United Nations

In an overwhelming vote of 65 to 7, the U.S. Senate approves full U.S. participation in the United Nations. The United Nations had officially came into existence on October 24, 1945, when its charter was ratified by China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, the United States and a majority of other signatories. Senate approval meant the U.S. could join most of the world's nations in the international organization, which aimed to arbitrate differences between countries and stem military aggression.

In approving U.S. participation in the United Nations, the Senate argued fiercely on a number of issues. Some senators proposed a resolution designed to force the president to receive congressional consent before approving U.S. troops for any U.N. peacekeeping forces. This resolution was defeated. The Senate also defeated a proposal by Senator Robert Taft that the United States urge its U.N. representatives to seek "immediate action" on arms control and possible prohibition of weapons such as atomic bombs.

The Senate action marked a tremendous change in the U.S. attitude toward international organizations. In the post-World War I period, the Senate acted to block U.S. participation in the newly established League of Nations. With the horrors of World War II as a backdrop, however, the Senate and the American people seemed willing to place some degree of trust in an even more powerful organization, the United Nations.

The United Nations provided a forum for some of the most dramatic episodes in Cold War history. In 1950, the Security Council, prodded by the United States and with the Russian delegation absent, approved a peacekeeping force for Korea. This was the first time a UN peacekeeping force was committed to an armed conflict. The U.N. also allowed world leaders to observe each other as never before, as in the 1961 incident when Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev presented an unforgettable spectacle by taking off one of his shoes and pounding his table with it for emphasis during a U.N. debate.



Dec 4, 1969:
Police kill two members of the Black Panther Party

Black Panthers Fred Hampton, 21, and Mark Clark, 22, are gunned down by 14 police officers as they lie sleeping in their Chicago, Illinois, apartment. About a hundred bullets had been fired in what police described as a fierce gun battle with members of the Black Panther Party. However, ballistics experts later determined that only one of those bullets came from the Panthers' side. In addition, the "bullet holes" in the front door of the apartment, which police pointed to as evidence that the Panthers had been shooting from within the apartment, were actually nail holes created by police in an attempt to cover up the attack. Four other Black Panthers were wounded in the raid, as well as two police officers.

The raid, which had been led by Cook County State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan, was only one of many attempts by the government to weaken the Black Power movement. Under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI had been battling civil rights activists and other minority leaders for years with their Cointelpro program, whose purpose, according to one FBI document, was to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership and supporters." Although the FBI was not responsible for leading this particular raid, a federal grand jury indicated that the bureau played a significant role in the events leading up to the raid; Hanrahan had utilized information provided by FBI informant William O'Neal, who was third in command of the Chicago Panthers, to plan his attack.

There was also a conscious effort by the FBI to use "aggressive and imaginary tactics" to prevent the "rise of a 'messiah' who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement." They apparently considered Fred Hampton, an outspoken, charismatic activist who was chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, to be such a potential leader. Hampton became involved in the civil rights struggle at a very early age: At 15, he organized a chapter of the NAACP at his high school, and he became chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party when he was 20. Many other leaders of the Panthers, such as Huey Newton, Assata Shakur, and Bobby Seale, spent time in jail on charges based on little or no evidence.

Although most media coverage of the Black Panthers focused on their violent rhetoric and the fact that they carried arms, the Panthers were involved in many nonviolent community-organizing activities. They provided food and medical care to the needy, preached political empowerment, crusaded against police brutality, and started a school. As Fred Hampton himself said shortly before his death, "There have been many attacks made upon the Black Panther Party, so we feel it's best to be an armed propaganda unit. But the basic thing is to educate." Unfortunately for Hampton and the other Panthers targeted by the FBI, being armed did not help to protect against governmental repression. In fact, it may have even made matters worse by aiding the FBI in legitimizing their aggressive tactics.

Despite the evidence provided by ballistics experts showing that police had fired 99 percent of the bullets and had falsified the report on the incident, the first federal grand jury did not indict anyone involved in the raid. Furthermore, even though a subsequent grand jury did indict all the police officers involved, the charges were dismissed.

Survivors of the attack and relatives of Hampton and Clark filed a lawsuit against Hampton and other officials, which was finally settled in 1983.



Dec 4, 2009:
Amanda Knox convicted of murder in Italy

On this day in 2009, 22-year-old American exchange student Amanda Knox is convicted of murdering her British roommate, Meredith Kercher, in 2007 in Perugia, Italy. Knox received a 26-year prison sentence, while her 25-year-old Italian ex-boyfriend, Raffaelle Sollecito, who also was convicted in the slaying, was sentenced to 25 years behind bars. The sensational, high-profile case raised questions in the United States about whether Knox, who always maintained her innocence, received a fair trial. Then, in October 2011, in a decision that made international headlines, an Italian court reversed the murder convictions of both Knox and Sollecito and they were freed from prison.

On November 2, 2007, 21-year-old Kercher of Coulsdon, England, was found fatally stabbed in the bedroom of the home she shared with Knox and two other women in Perugia, the capital city of the Umbria region in central Italy. Investigators said the British exchange student had been slain the previous night. After questioning by police, Knox, a Seattle native and University of Washington student doing her junior year abroad in Italy, was arrested. She denied any wrongdoing, saying she was at computer science student Sollecito’s house the night the killing occurred. Police claimed Knox later gave them conflicting statements about her whereabouts at the time of the crime, and said she also accused her boss at a bar where she worked, who turned out to have a solid alibi, of Kercher’s murder. The American student, who was first questioned without an attorney or professional interpreter, said police coerced her into making the accusation as well as other incriminating statements. (The false accusation would later result in an extra year tacked on to Knox’s prison sentence.)

During the nearly yearlong trial that followed in 2009, Italian prosecutors charged that Knox, along with Sollecito and a third person, Rudy Guede, an Ivory Coast native, had viciously attacked Kercher in a sex game gone wrong. (Guede was convicted for his role in Kercher’s death in a separate, fast-track trial in 2008. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison, which was reduced to 16 years on appeal.) The prosecution’s main evidence against Knox included tiny traces of her DNA and that of Kercher’s on a knife discovered at Sollecito’s home. Traces of Knox’s DNA were also found on a bra clasp belonging to Kercher. Knox’s attorneys argued the bra clasp was found over a month after the murder at a contaminated crime scene, and that the knife blade couldn’t have made the wounds on the victim.

The case received extensive media coverage in the U.S. and Europe, where the attractive Knox was dubbed “Angel Face” and “Foxy Knoxy” by the tabloids. In the Italian and British press, Knox was painted as a promiscuous party girl. However, in America, she was often portrayed in the media as an innocent abroad, a young woman who had worked several jobs to earn money to study in Perugia, where she had been railroaded by an overzealous prosecutor.

Knox and Sollecito appealed their convictions, and at their subsequent trial court-appointed experts testified the original DNA evidence was unreliable and did not definitively link the young American and her former boyfriend to the crime. On October 3, 2011, a court in Perugia acquitted the two defendants of murder. The 24-year-old Knox, who been jailed in Italy since her 2007 arrest, flew home to the U.S. the following day.



Dec 4, 1872:
The mystery of the Mary Celeste

The Dei Gratia, a small British brig under Captain David Morehouse, spots the Mary Celeste, an American vessel, sailing erratically but at full sail near the Azores Islands in the Atlantic Ocean. The ship was seaworthy, its stores and supplies were untouched, but not a soul was onboard.

On November 7, the brigantine Mary Celeste sailed from New York harbor for Genoa, Italy, carrying Captain Benjamin S. Briggs, his wife and two-year-old daughter, a crew of eight, and a cargo of some 1,700 barrels of crude alcohol. After the Dei Gratia sighted the vessel on December 4, Captain Morehouse and his men boarded the ship to find it abandoned, with its sails slightly damaged, several feet of water in the hold, and the lifeboat and navigational instruments missing. However, the ship was in good order, the cargo intact, and reserves of food and water remained on board.

The last entry in the captain's log shows that the Mary Celeste had been nine days and 500 miles away from where the ship was found by the Dei Gratia. Apparently, the Mary Celeste had been drifting toward Genoa on her intended course for 11 days with no one at the wheel to guide her. Captain Briggs, his family, and the crew of the vessel were never found, and the reason for the abandonment of the Mary Celeste has never been determined.



Dec 4, 1992:
Bush orders U.S. troops to Somalia

President George H. Bush orders 28,000 U.S. troops to Somalia, a war-torn East African nation where rival warlords were preventing the distribution of humanitarian aid to thousands of starving Somalis. In a military mission he described as "God's work," Bush said that America must act to save more than a million Somali lives, but reassured Americans that "this operation is not open-ended" and that "we will not stay one day longer than is absolutely necessary." Unfortunately, America's humanitarian troops became embroiled in Somalia's political conflict, and the controversial mission stretched on for 15 months before being abruptly called off by President Bill Clinton in 1993.

In 1992, clan-based civil-war fighting and one of the worst African droughts of the century created famine conditions that threatened one-fourth of Somalia's population with starvation. In August 1992, the United Nations began a peacekeeping mission to the country to ensure the distribution of food and medical aid, but it was largely unsuccessful. With U.N. troops unable to control Somalia's warring factions, security deteriorating, and thousands of tons of food stranded in portside warehouses, President Bush ordered a large U.S. military force to the area on December 4, 1992. Five days later, the first U.S. Marines landed in the first phase of "Operation Restore Hope."

With the aid of U.S. military troops and forces from other nations, the U.N. succeeded in distributing desperately needed food to many starving Somalis. However, with factional fighting continuing unabated, and the U.N. without an effective agenda to resolve the political strife, there seemed no clear end in sight to Operation Restore Hope when President Bill Clinton took office in January 1993.

Like his predecessor, Clinton was anxious to bring the Americans home, and in May the mission was formally handed back to the United Nations. By June 1993, only 4,200 U.S. troops remained. However, on June 5, 24 Pakistani U.N. peacekeepers inspecting a weapons storage site were ambushed and massacred by Somalia soldiers under the warlord General Mohammed Aidid. U.S. and U.N. forces subsequently began an extensive search for the elusive strongman, and in August, 400 elite U.S. troops from Delta Force and the U.S. Rangers arrived on a mission to capture Aidid. Two months later, on October 3-4, 18 of these soldiers were killed and 84 wounded during a disastrous assault on Mogadishu's Olympia Hotel in search of Aidid. The bloody battle, which lasted 17 hours, was the most violent U.S. combat firefight since Vietnam. As many as 1,000 Somalis were killed.

Three days later, with Aidid still at large, President Clinton cut his losses and ordered a total U.S. withdrawal. On March 25, 1994, the last U.S. troops left Somalia, leaving 20,000 U.N. troops behind to facilitate "nation-building" in the divided country. The U.N. troops departed in 1995 and political strife and clan-based fighting continued in Somalia into the 21st century.



Dec 4, 1956:
The "Million Dollar Quartet" convenes at Sun Studios in Memphis, Tennessee

The modest storefront recording studio at 760 Union Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee, played an outsize role in rock-and-roll history. And of the many historic moments that occurred there, none is more famous than the impromptu jam session by four young rock-and-roll giants that took place on this day in 1956—a session enshrined in rock-and-roll legend as the one-and-only gathering of the "Million Dollar Quartet."

The studio at 760 Union was run by Sam Phillips, the legendary producer whose Sun Records had launched Elvis Presley on his path toward stardom two years earlier with the release of his first single, "It's Alright Mama" (1954). Phillips' decision to sell Presley's contract to RCA Victor in 1955 for only $35,000 is easy to question in retrospect, but it provided Sun Records with the operating capital it needed in order to record and promote the parade of future stars who had descended on Memphis hoping to follow in Elvis' footsteps.

Among those stars was Carl Perkins, the rockabilly legend who was in the studio on December 4, 1956, to record a follow-up to his smash hit from earlier that year: "Blue Suede Shoes." Hanging out in the booth was Perkins' good friend Johnny Cash, already a star in his own right after his breakthrough hits, "Folsom Prison Blues" (1955) and "I Walk The Line" (1956). And playing piano for a $15 session fee was the brash, wild, but not-yet-famous Jerry Lee Lewis, whose career-making Sun single "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" was set for release just a few weeks later. Four songs into Perkins' session, all work came to an end with the arrival of an unexpected drop-in guest: Elvis Presley himself.

While recording engineer Jack Clement ran a tape that would not be discovered for more than 20 years, Sam Phillips—ever the promoter—had the presence of mind to summon a photographer from the local paper to capture images of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins gathered around a piano singing the kind of music they'd all grown up on: gospel. The caption under the photo that ran in the next day's Memphis Press-Scimitar was "Million Dollar Quartet." The label quickly caught on among rock-and-roll fans who would not actually get the chance to hear the recording made on this day in 1956 until 1981, when the first portions of the lost tapes were discovered and released.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBNvJUPpzCw
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