Yes it really happened

[Laan Yaa Mo]

on this day

In 1587 Sir Francis Drake led a raid into Cadiz harbour and torched more than 20 Spanish ships being equipped for war with England, the “singeing of an individual of Spain’s beard”; in 1882 the electrically powered Electromote, a forerunner of the trolleybus, was tested by Ernst Werner von Siemens, its inventor, in Berlin; in 1916, after six days of fighting, a group of Irish nationalists surrendered to British forces in Dublin, bringing the Easter Rising to an end. In 1921 a treaty was signed that in 1922 established the Irish Free State, later becoming the Republic of Ireland; in 1945 French women voted in an election for the first time, in the first municipal election since the country’s liberation from German occupation. The right for women to vote had been signed into law on April 21, 1944; in 2011 Prince William married Kate Middleton at Westminster Abbey, London, in a service broadcast live to an estimated two billion viewers.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

on this day

In 1006 astronomers observed a celestial object brighter than Venus, visible during daytime for weeks. It was identified as supernova remnant SN 1006 by Nasa; in 1665 the diarist Samuel Pepys wrote about the plague in London: “Great fears of the Sickenesses here in the City, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us all.” The Great Plague took the lives of an estimated 100,000 people in the city; in 1859 Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities was published, running in weekly instalments until November 26, 1859; in 1945 Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party, died by suicide, aged 56, by gunshot after swallowing a cyanide pill in his bunker in Berlin. Eva Braun, his wife of one day, took her own life by cyanide poisoning, aged 33; in 1994 Roland Ratzenberger, the Austrian Formula One racing driver, was killed in an accident during qualifying for the San Marino Grand Prix. The next day three-time Formula One world champion Ayrton Senna was killed in an accident during the actual race.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

On this day

Wednesday May 01 2024, 12.01am, The Times

In 1851 the Great Exhibition (of the Works of Industry of all Nations) opened in Hyde Park, London, attended by 25,000 paying spectators. The exhibition continued until October 15, 1851; in 1884 construction began on a ten-storey office building in Chicago. The Home Insurance Building was the first structure to be called a skyscraper; in 1926 the Trades Union Congress called for a general strike, in support of a coal miners’ dispute. The first full day of action took place on May 4, and the strike ended on May 12; in 1979 the Jubilee Line opened on the London Underground, with about 38 million people using the line in its first year. It now carries 186 million people a year; in 1997 the UK general election took place, resulting in a landslide victory of a 179-seat majority for the Labour Party, led by Tony Blair. It was the Conservative Party’s worst defeat since 1906, and ended 18 years of Conservative government, which had been led by John Major since 1990; in 2004 the largest single territorial expansion of the European Union took place, when ten countries joined: Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, the Slovak Republic and Slovenia.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

on this day

In 1670 Charles II granted a royal charter to the Hudson Bay Company, headed by an individual’s cousin Prince Rupert, the first governor of the territory known as Rupert’s Land until 1870. Rupert did not visit Canada; in 1859 Jerome K (Klapka) Jerome, the author of the humorous travelogue Three Men in a Boat, was born. The three men were George Wingrave, Carl Hentschel and Jerome; in 1887 the Rev Hannibal Goodwin filed the first US patent for celluloid film, and made images of Bible stories for Sunday school. He contested an 1889 patent by George Eastman (Kodak), and that year was awarded his patent. Goodwin died on December 31, 1900; in 1936 Sergei Prokofiev conducted the premiere of Peter and the Wolf in Moscow. His symphonic fairytale for children was performed by the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra; in 1949 the playwright Arthur Miller was awarded a Pulitzer prize for Death of a Salesman. It opened in London on July 28, 1949, with the Times critic commenting that it was “beautifully produced . . . and meticulously well acted”; in 1952 the first commercial jet airliner, a BOAC de Havilland Comet, took off from London on its maiden flight to Johannesburg. Its special call-sign was Jet Speedbird.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

on this day

In 1966 news was placed permanently on the front page of The Times for the first time, after a radical redesign; in 1968 the first heart transplant in the UK, the tenth in the world, was performed at the National Heart Hospital in London. The recipient survived for 45 days; in 1988 the White House confirmed that Nancy Reagan, the first lady, had used astrological advice to schedule President Ronald Reagan’s activities; in 1979 the general election was won by the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher, beating the Labour Party of prime minister James Callaghan. The Conservatives remained in power until 1997; in 2007 the British toddler Madeleine McCann, aged three, disappeared from her family’s holiday apartment in Praia da Luz in the Algarve, Portugal.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

on this day

Today

In 1989 Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North was convicted for his part in the Iran-Contra arms affair. Charges were dismissed in 1991 relating to problems in his trial; in 1994 the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestine Liberation Organisation chairman Yasser Arafat signed an agreement in Cairo on limited Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip; in 2000 independent candidate Ken Livingstone was elected mayor of London. He was elected for a second term in 2004, as the official Labour Party candidate; in 2017 the Duke of Edinburgh announced his intention to retire from royal duty in the autumn of that year. He undertook more than 22,000 solo engagements and gave more than 5,000 speeches; in 2022 the US Federal Reserve raised interest rates by half a percentage point for the first time since 2000 as it stepped up efforts to curb a 40-year-high inflationary surge (at 8.5 per cent). Policymakers agreed unanimously to lift the target for its benchmark federal funds rate to between 0.75 per cent and 1 per cent.

Tomorrow

In 1919 representatives from the national Red Cross societies of Britain, France, Italy, Japan and the US joined together in Paris to found the League of Red Cross Societies; in 1930 the Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi was arrested for violating the Salt Tax, imposed by the British, and imprisoned without trial. He was unconditionally released on January 26, 1931; in 1956 Heartbreak Hotel became Elvis Presley’s first No 1 on the US Billboard’s pop chart, where it remained for ten weeks, knocked down by Gogi Grant’s The Wayward Wind; in 1961 Commander Alan Shepard became the first American in space. He was launched into a suborbital flight from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in a Mercury 3 capsule attached to a Redstone rocket; in 1996 Beryl Burton, a racing cyclist from Yorkshire who won seven world titles, died aged 58 while out riding her bike delivering invites to her 59th birthday. In 1967 she beat the men’s 12-hour time-trial record, covering 277.25 miles — a women’s record that stood until 2018.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

The Chinese Exclusion Act was a United States federal law signed by President Chester A. Arthur on May 6, 1882, prohibiting all immigration of Chinese laborers for 10 years. The law made exceptions for merchants, teachers, students, travelers, and diplomats.[2] The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first major U.S. law ever implemented to prevent all members of a specific national group from immigrating to the United States, and therefore helped shape twentieth-century race-based immigration policy.[3][4]

Passage of the law was preceded by growing anti-Chinese sentiment and anti-Chinese violence, as well as various policies targeting Chinese migrants.[5] The act followed the Angell Treaty of 1880, a set of revisions to the U.S.–China Burlingame Treaty of 1868 that allowed the U.S. to suspend Chinese immigration. The act was initially intended to last for 10 years, but was renewed and strengthened in 1892 with the Geary Act and made permanent in 1902. These laws attempted to stop all Chinese immigration into the United States for ten years, with exceptions for diplomats, teachers, students, merchants, and travelers. They were widely evaded.[6]

In 1898 the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that the law did not prevent the children of Chinese immigrants born in the United States from acquiring birthright citizenship.

The law remained in force until the passage of the Magnuson Act in 1943, which repealed the exclusion and allowed 105 Chinese immigrants to enter the United States each year. Chinese immigration later increased with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which abolished direct racial barriers, and later by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the National Origins Formula - wiki

[Laan Yaa Mo]

on this day

In 1824 Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (Choral) had its premiere at the Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna, the composer’s first on-stage appearance in 12 years. Beethoven, who suffered from deafness, shared the stage with Michael Umlauf, who officially directed the performance. Caroline Unger, who sang the contralto, needed to turn Beethoven around at the end of the performance to face the audience so that he could take in five standing ovations; in 1940 Leo Amery attacked the prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s government in the House of Commons, paraphrasing Oliver Cromwell: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!” The Norway debate speech was influential in the downfall of the Chamberlain government on May 10, 1940; in 1999 Gordon Brown, during his tenure as chancellor, announced his decision to sell more than half of the UK’s gold reserves, leaving Britain with the lowest bullion holdings of any leading country. The announcement prompted a fall in the price of gold; in 2010 the complete Neanderthal genome had been sequenced, reported the National Human Genome Research Institute. Up to 2 per cent of the DNA in the genome of present-day humans outside of Africa originated in Neanderthals or their ancestors. In 2020 a study revealed that a lower Neanderthal heritage was carried in some populations in Africa, from migratory returns.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

on this day

In 1790 the Academy of Science in France was instructed to create a new system of weights and measures. On April 7, 1795 the metric system was adopted, defining six decimal units; in 1886 the pharmacist John Stith Pemberton, from Atlanta, Georgia, produced the syrup for Coca-Cola. He sold it at Jacobs’ Pharmacy for five cents a glass as a soda fountain drink; in 1961 the House of Commons refused to allow Tony Benn to take up the Bristol South-East seat he had retained in a by-election after inheriting a viscountcy; in 1968 the Kray twins, Reginald and Ronnie, were arrested during dawn raids in London. In 1969 they were jailed for life for the murders of George Cornell and Jack “The Hat” McVitie; in 1970 the Beatles released Let It Be, their final studio album. Sunday Times reviewer Derek Jewell described the album as “a last will and testament, from the blackly funereal packaging to the music itself, which sums up so much of what the Beatles as artists have been — unmatchably brilliant at their best, careless and self-indulgent at their least”.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

on this day

In 1943 General Alexander (later Earl Alexander of Tunis) announced the surrender of Italian and German forces in Tunisia; in 1973 tennis stars Bobby Riggs and Margaret Court faced off in the Mother’s Day Massacre in a challenge match. Riggs belittled women’s tennis, but had the court resurfaced to slow the game to his advantage. Court lost 6-2, 6-1. On September 20, 1973, Billie Jean individual took up the Battle of the Sexes challenge, beating Riggs 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 to a $100,000 prize. He had stated: “A woman’s place is in the kitchen and the bedroom — and not necessarily in that order”; in 1981 Pope John Paul II was shot and wounded in an assassination attempt by a Turkish gunman while he was entering St Peter’s Square, Vatican City; in 1989 student protesters began a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square, Beijing. Martial law was declared on May 20; in 2018 the actress Margot Kidder died at the age of 69. Kidder was best known for playing Lois Lane in four Superman films opposite Christopher Reeve.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

on this day

In 1796 the physician Edward Jenner scratched fluid from a cowpox blister into the skin of an eight-year-old boy, James Phipps, to prove that this could protect against smallpox. On July 1 he inoculated the boy again with matter from a human smallpox sore, and no smallpox developed; in 1904 the opening ceremony for the first Olympic Games to be held in the US took place in St Louis, Missouri. It was held in conjunction with the World’s Fair; in 1935 Magnus Hirschfeld, a German physician and sexologist who founded the World League for Sexual Reform and coined the term transsexual in 1923, died on his 67th birthday. His 1919-founded sex research institute (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) in Berlin was looted on May 6, 1933, by far-right students’ union members accompanied by a brass band. He died of a heart attack in Nice, France, while in exile from Germany; in 1940 Anthony Eden, the secretary of state for war, made a broadcast asking men between the ages of 17 and 65 to enrol in the new Local Defence Volunteers, better known as the Home Guard. During the Second World War, 1,206 members of this people’s army were killed on duty or died of wounds; in 1991 Winnie Mandela was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for complicity in the kidnapping and beating of four youths.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

on this day

In 1796 the physician Edward Jenner scratched fluid from a cowpox blister into the skin of an eight-year-old boy, James Phipps, to prove that this could protect against smallpox. On July 1 he inoculated the boy again with matter from a human smallpox sore, and no smallpox developed; in 1904 the opening ceremony for the first Olympic Games to be held in the US took place in St Louis, Missouri. It was held in conjunction with the World’s Fair; in 1935 Magnus Hirschfeld, a German physician and sexologist who founded the World League for Sexual Reform and coined the term transsexual in 1923, died on his 67th birthday. His 1919-founded sex research institute (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) in Berlin was looted on May 6, 1933, by far-right students’ union members accompanied by a brass band. He died of a heart attack in Nice, France, while in exile from Germany; in 1940 Anthony Eden, the secretary of state for war, made a broadcast asking men between the ages of 17 and 65 to enrol in the new Local Defence Volunteers, better known as the Home Guard. During the Second World War, 1,206 members of this people’s army were killed on duty or died of wounds; in 1991 Winnie Mandela was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for complicity in the kidnapping and beating of four youths.

This makes a more interesting post.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

on this day

In 1567 Mary, Queen of Scots, married James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh; in 1921 the British Legion was formed from the merger of four First World War ex-servicemen’s support groups. Of 1.75 million war veterans with a disability, half were permanently disabled; in 1928 the Australian Inland Mission Aerial Medical Service (Royal Flying Doctor Service) was inaugurated; in 1936 the pioneering aviator Amy Johnson arrived in England after a record-breaking flight to and from South Africa; in 1989 the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev began a highly publicised visit to Beijing, China. At the time mass protests were being held against the Communist Party of China led by students calling for comparable reforms to the glasnost policies Gorbachev had introduced in the USSR.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

on this day

In 1763 the first meeting of the distinguished writer Samuel Johnson and his future biographer James Bowell took place, unexpectedly, in a mutual friend’s home. Boswell began recording in his diaries what would become The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791); in 1943 the RAF’s 617 Squadron, the Dambusters, made raids on three dams in the Ruhr valley of Germany, dropping the bouncing bombs developed by the scientist Barnes Wallis; in 1969 the Russian spacecraft Venera 5 spent 53 minutes obtaining atmospheric data on Venus, before succumbing to the planet’s high temperatures and pressure; in 1975 Junko Tabei, of Japan, became the first woman to reach the summit of Everest.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

on this day

In 1749 Edward Jenner, the English physician, was born. His pioneering work with smallpox vaccinations lay the foundation for modern immunology. The last remaining smallpox virus specimens are held in two laboratories, in Siberia and the US; in 1792, 24 merchants meeting in Wall Street founded the New York stock exchange; in 1916 the Summer Time Act was passed, with clocks advanced in the UK for one hour from May 21 until October 1. The idea of daylight saving time had first been mentioned by Benjamin Franklin in 1784; in 1990 the World Health Organisation removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. The anniversary is marked by the International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia; in 2014 a new species of titanosaur was announced. One of the largest creatures to have walked the Earth, the juvenile herbivore (Patagotitan mayorum) weighed 76 tonnes.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

In 1498 Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese explorer, arrived at Calicut, India, becoming the first European to open a sea-based trade route to India; in 1608 Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra was entered in the Stationers’ Register; in 1895 the American Supreme Court ruled that a national income tax passed by Congress in 1894 was unconstitutional; in 1913 the first RHS Chelsea Flower Show opened — called the Great Spring Show, it was a three-day event and was attended by Queen Alexandra with two of her children. The only gold medal to be awarded before the First World War was for a rock garden; in 1977 the original Orient Express started its final direct journey from Paris to Istanbul.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

on this day

In 1840 William Hobson, appointed Britain’s consul to New Zealand in 1839, proclaimed British sovereignty over all of New Zealand; in 1958 it was announced that subscriber trunk dialling would be introduced, enabling phone calls to be made without an operator’s help. On December 5, 1958, Queen Elizabeth II inaugurated the service by making a two-minute call from Bristol to Edinburgh; in 1966 the US boxer Cassius Clay (later Mohammed Ali) retained his world heavyweight championship title when he beat the UK’s Henry Cooper in the sixth round of a bout in London (Muhammad Ali obituary, June 4, 2016); in 1999 the romantic comedy Notting Hill, starring Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts, was released in UK cinemas; in 2015 the Islamic State group entered the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, a Unesco world heritage site. Many of the monuments in the city, which stands at the crossroads of several civilisations and was described as a “symbol of openness and tolerance” by Unesco, were destroyed by the extremists.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

on this day

In 1939 Germany and Italy signed the Pact of Friendship and Alliance (known as the Pact of Steel) before the start of the Second World War. The pact created the Axis powers, which from September 27, 1940, included Japan; in 1969 the lunar module of Apollo 10 came within about nine miles of the moon’s surface. Colonel Thomas Stafford and Commander Eugene Cernan were on a test mission ahead of the lunar landing that took place on July 21, 1969 (Eugene Cernan obituary, January 18, 2017); in 1970 the Cricket Council agreed to a “formal request from Her Majesty’s government to withdraw the invitation to the South African touring team”. Instead, five matches were played against a Rest of the World team captained by Garfield Sobers. Ray Illingworth captained the England team; in 2014 there was a coup d’etat in Thailand after a six-month political crisis. The prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra was replaced by a junta that imposed martial law and curfews; in 2017 a suicide bomb explosion at Manchester Arena caused 23 deaths, including the perpetrator, as fans were leaving a concert by the American singer Ariana Grande.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

on this day

In 1819 Queen Victoria was born. Her reign lasted from June 20, 1837, until her death on January 22, 1901. She was buried at Windsor beside Prince Albert. They had nine children, born between 1840 and 1857; in 1877 Bertie, the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) arranged for the socialite Lillie Langtry to be seated next to him at a dinner party (with her husband at the far end of the table) — she was the prince’s mistress until she became pregnant by another lover in 1880, but they remained friends; in 1956 the first Eurovision Song Contest was held, in Lugano, Switzerland. Seven countries took part, with Lys Assia from Switzerland winning with her song Refrain. The other participating countries were Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands; in 1975, 80 journalists, including nine Britons, became the first westerners to fly out of Saigon in South Vietnam after communist forces had taken control of the city on April 29. Between April 29 and 30, US forces evacuated more than 7,000 people during Operation Frequent Wind; in 1982 HMS Antelope sank in San Carlos Water during the Falklands conflict after coming under Argentine air attack the previous day. One 500lb bomb lodged in the ship’s engine room detonated while being defused, breaking the back of the Type 21 frigate. Two Royal Navy servicemen lost their lives.

[Laan Yaa Mo]

Today

In 1659 Richard Cromwell, the third son of Oliver and Elizabeth Cromwell, stood down as lord protector of England, as a result of financial and constitutional difficulties; in 1961 President John F Kennedy gave a speech to Congress, broadcast on TV and radio, calling for funds to get an American on the moon by the end of the decade. “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth,” he said; in 1994 the Camelot consortium won the first contract to run the UK’s first national lottery, which started in November 1994; in 2018 a referendum took place in Ireland on whether to allow abortion for women up to 12 weeks’ pregnant. Voters opted to repeal the eighth amendment of the constitution by a margin of 66.4 per cent.

Tomorrow

In 735 the Venerable Bede, the theologian and historian, died. His bones have been in Durham Cathedral since 1022; in 1647 Achsah Young became the first-recorded person to be executed in the 13 American colonies for witchcraft. She had emigrated from Windsor in Berkshire, England, to Windsor, Connecticut, in the 1630s. On February 6, 2017, Windsor town council exonerated her; in 1919 Madam CJ Walker, probably the first female self-made African-American millionaire, died aged 51. Her Wonderful Hair Grower was targeted at African-American women and she built a substantial property portfolio. She was the first of her sharecropper family born into freedom, and was known to say: “I got my start by giving myself a start”; in 1999 Manchester United football club won the Uefa Champions League title against Bayern Munich. The victory capped a treble for the team after they had won the Premier League and FA Cup.