Mickeys

Secret letters that could prove Dr Crippen’s innocence may explain the Government’s refusual to allow the executed killer’s exhumation, according to the family’s lawyer.

This waxwork model of Dr Crippen was photographed in 1913

Hawley Crippen was hanged at Pentonville Prison for the murder of his wife Belle 100 years ago.

Buried with him in his unconsecrated jail grave were letters from his mistress Ethel Le Neve, who was acquitted of being an accessory to his crime.

“Is there something in those letters that the authorities fear?” asked lawyer Giovanni di Stefano.

Mr di Stefano is asking the High Court for a judicial review of two recent legal decisions.

The Ministry of Justice has refused to let Crippen’s body be exhumed and repatriated to his native United States.

And the Criminal Cases Review Commission has turned down an application for an appeal against Crippen’s conviction.

Both organisations appear to argue that the man driving the two bids – second-cousin-three-times-removed James Crippen – is too remote a relative to have a genuine interest.

Mr di Stefano said: “The concept that a man executed 100 years ago cannot be exhumed and given a proper burial is frankly absurd.

“We are having to go to judicial review and that will be a waste of taxpayers’ money.”

The lawyer argues that recent forensic tests in the United States suggest that the body found in Crippen’s cellar was not that of his wife, but the remains of a man.

And he warns that the old practice of burying executed prisoners in unconsecrated ground could now constitute discrimination.

story from SkyNews

Today is Friday, March 5, the 64th day of 2010. There are 301 days left in the year.

Highlights in history on this date:

• 1496 – England’s King Henry VII commissions John and Sebastian Cabot to discover new lands.
• 1684 – Holy League of Linz is formed by Holy Roman Empire, Poland and Venice against the Turks.
• 1770 – Crowds and British troops clash in Boston, an incident that becomes known as the Boston Massacre and hastens American Revolutionary War.
• 1798 – French forces occupy Bern, Switzerland.
• 1867 – An abortive Fenian uprising against English rule takes place in Ireland.
• 1868 – US Senate is organised into a court of impeachment to decide charges against President Andrew Johnson.
• 1933 – The Nazi Party wins 44% of the vote in German parliamentary elections, enabling it to join with Nationalists to gain a slender majority in the Reichstag.
• 1939 – The Republican government of Spain flees to France after their forces are cornered by the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War.
• 1946 – Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivers his famous “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in United States.
• 1953 – Soviet dictator Josef Stalin dies. Some 2 000 people are crushed to death in the crowd during the funeral.
• 1960 – President Sukarno suspends Indonesia’s Parliament.
• 1962 – European extremists in Oran, Algeria, raid prison and kill several Muslim political prisoners.
• 1966 – British airliner hits Japan’s Mount Fuji, killing all 124 people aboard.
• 1970 – Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty goes into effect after 43 nations confirm ratification.
• 1974 – Ethiopia’s leader Haile Selassie, confronted by continued unrest, agrees to constitutional convention to create new system of elected democratic government.
• 1990 – South Africa sends troops to Ciskei homeland to suppress mob attacks on factories and shops after military coup there ousted authoritarian president.
• 1991 – Iraq hands over what it says are the last 35 prisoners from the Gulf War.
• 1993 – General Philippe Morillon of France, commander of the UN mission to Bosnia, goes to the city of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia, and the Serbs halt their attack on the besieged city.
• 1995 – Pierre-Claver Rwangabo, the governor of Rwanda’s southern province Butare, is assassinated in an ambush. The prime minister blames soldiers of the defeated Hutu-led government living in Zaire.
• 1996 – US President Bill Clinton sends sophisticated bomb-detection equipment and technical experts to Israel to help battle a deadly wave of terrorism.
• 1997 – Representatives of North Korea and South Korea meet for the first time in 25 years, for peace talks in New York.
• 1998 – Dozens of soldiers from an elite Colombian counterinsurgency battalion are killed in a surprise attack, one of the Colombian military’s worst defeats by leftist rebels.
• 1999 – International mediators say the strategic town of Brcko in Bosnia, held by Serbs since the start of the Bosnian war, should be transferred to joint Serb, Muslim and Croat control.
• 2000 – Thirty-five years after police beat and bloodied voting rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama, modern-day civil rights activists trace the same path with Bill Clinton – a white Southerner who credited that march for his rise to the presidency.
• 2001 – A stampede breaks out during the annual hajj pilgrimage in Medina, Saudi Arabia, killing 35 Muslims.
• 2002 – Boris Berezovsky, once one of Russia’s most powerful oligarchs, accuses the Russian Federal Security Services of perpetrating a series of bombings in Moscow in 1999 that was blamed on Chechen terrorists.
• 2003 – Foreign ministers of France and Russia threaten to veto a UN Security Council resolution by the United States, Britain and Spain that declares Iraq had missed its last chance to disarm peacefully.
• 2005 – A team of US and Ethiopian scientists discovers the fossilised remains of what they believe is humankind’s first walking ancestor, a hominid that lived in the wooded grasslands of the Horn of Africa nearly 4 million years ago.
• 2006 – At least 100 000 protesters demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra march to the Thai leader’s office after a boisterous rally accusing him of corruption and abuse of power.
• 2007 – The UN Development Programme says that it suspended its operations in North Korea because Pyongyang failed to meet conditions set by the agency’s board following US allegations that UN aid money was being diverted to Kim Jong Il’s regime.
• 2008 – Police shoot and kill a man armed with explosives who took 10 Australians hostage on a tourist bus in northern China.
• 2009 – In harsh critcism of his successors, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev likens Vladimir Putin’s United Russia Party to the worst of the communists he once led and helped bring down.

Thought For Today:
More tears have been shed over men’s lack of manners than their lack of morals – Helen Hathaway, American writer (1893-1932).

info from News24

Today is Monday, February 22, the 53rd day of 2010. There are 312 days left in the year.

Highlights in history on this date:

• 1495 – French forces under King Charles VIII enter Naples in Italy.
• 1630 – English settlers in America discover how to make popcorn.
• 1759 – French abandon siege of Madras, India, on arrival of British fleet.
• 1819 – Spain cedes Florida to the United States.
• 1828 – Peace of Turkmanchai by which Persia cedes part of Armenia, including Yerevan, to Russia.
• 1848 – Revolt erupts in Paris due to failure of Louis Philippe’s reign.
• 1862 – American Jefferson Davis is inaugurated as Confederate President.
• 1879 – Frank Winfield Woolworth opens a 5-cent store in Utica, New York.
• 1924 – Calvin Coolidge delivers the first presidential radio broadcast from the White House.
• 1942 – Tribesmen in the Philippines wipe out a Japanese regiment during World War II.
• 1945 – US Third Army crosses Saar River south of Saarburg, Germany, in World War II.
• 1964 – Ghana becomes one-party Socialist state.
• 1966 – Uganda’s Prime Minister Milton Obote orders five Cabinet members arrested and assumes full power.
• 1972 – Qatar’s heir apparent, Khalifa bin Hamad Al Thani, overthrows oil state’s emir Sheik Ahmed in bloodless coup.
• 1975 – Military government of Ethiopia announces that 2 300 guerrillas have been killed in fighting in Eritrea.
• 1980 – In a stunning upset, the US Olympic hockey team defeats the Soviets at Lake Placid, New York, 4-to-3.
• 1986 – Philippines armed forces break with the government of President Ferdinand E Marcos, precipitating his downfall.
• 1990 – Last Stalin statue topples in Mongolian capital of Ulan Bator.
• 1991 – US President George Bush demands that Saddam Hussein begin unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait by noon of following day or risk ground war with allied forces.
• 1992 – Shi’ite militias in Lebanon agree not to fire rockets into Israel, ending a week of heavy fighting with Israeli troops.
• 1993 – Artillery duels between Israel’s militia and pro-Iranian guerrillas kill a UN peacekeeper and a villager in southern Lebanon.
• 1994 – US authorities say that the CIA’s former top Soviet spycatcher Aldrich Hazen Ames actually spied for the Soviet Union. He is later sentenced to life in prison.
• 1995 – France accuses five Americans of political and economic spying and orders them to leave the country.
• 1996 – Russia and the head of the International Monetary Fund reach a deal for a loan of more than $10bn.
• 1997 – Fleeing fighting, 30 000 refugees from Rwanda and Burundi leave their refugee camp in eastern Zaire.
• 1998 – Tamil separatist rebel gunboats attack a 12-ship convoy carrying soldiers to northern Sri Lanka, killing up to 80 people.
• 1999 – Fighting flares in Kosovo between ethnic Albanians and the Yugoslav army as the deadline for peace talks in France nears.
• 2000 – Space shuttle Endeavour and its crew of six return to Earth with more than a week’s worth of radar images that will be transformed into the finest maps of the planet.
• 2001 – In a landmark human-rights decision, the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia find three Bosnian Serb soldiers guilty of raping, torturing and enslaving Muslim women during the 1991-95 ethnic conflicts between the Serbs, Croats and Muslims in Bosnia.
• 2002 – Angolan officials say government troops killed Jonas Savimbi, leader of the rebel National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), in a gun battle between soldiers and rebel members.
• 2005 – Icelandic immigration authorities agree to grant the former American chess champion Bobby Fischer a special passport for foreigners that would allow him to travel to Western Europe.
• 2006 – Insurgents disguised as police trigger bombs inside one of Iraq’s most famous Shi’ite shrines, destroying its golden dome and triggering reprisal attacks on Sunni mosques.
• 2007 – The UN nuclear watchdog announces findings that Iran has expanded its uranium enrichment programme instead of complying with a UN Security Council ultimatum to freeze it, clearing the way for harsher sanctions against Tehran.
• 2008 – Turkish troops launch a ground incursion across the border into Iraq in pursuit of separatist Kurdish rebels, escalating Turkey’s conflict with the militants.
• 2009 – European leaders mount a united front against global economic crisis, proposing stricter market regulation and caps on executive salaries.

Thought For Today:
Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish – Anne Bradstreet, American poet (1612-1672).

info from News24

Today is Wednesday, February 17, the 48th day of 2010. There are 317 days left in the year.

Highlights in history on this date:

• 1568 – Turkey’s Sultan Selim II makes peace with Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II.
• 1801 – US House of Representatives breaks an electoral tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, electing Jefferson president.
• 1817 – A Street in Baltimore becomes the first to be lighted with gas from America’s first gas company.
• 1852 – Repressive measures are adopted in France, including press censorship in the aftermath of overthrow of the constitutional monarchy.
• 1897 – Britain rejects Austro-Russian proposal for blockade of Piraeus in Greece.
• 1904 – Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly is poorly received during its world premiere at La Scala.
• 1916 – British and French forces complete capture of Germany’s African colony of Cameroon during World War I.
• 1944 – US forces attack Japanese at Eniwetok Atoll in Pacific in World War II.
• 1947 – The Voice of America begins its radio broadcasts to the Soviet Union.
• 1964 – The US Supreme Court rules in Westberry v Sanders that congressional districts within each state have to be roughly equal in population.
• 1965 – US spacecraft Ranger 8 is launched from Cape Kennedy, Florida, and crashes on the Moon three days later after sending back more than 7 000 pictures.
• 1972 – US President Richard Nixon departs on his historic trip to China.
• 1990 – East Germany announces it will tear down a 180m section of the Berlin Wall near Brandenburg Gate, which will be first section with no official controls.
• 1991 – Amid the Gulf War, Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz arrives in Moscow for talks with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
• 1992 – UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali recommends deployment of 13 000 peacekeepers in Yugoslavia.
• 1993 – In a controversial move, the United Nations suspends most of its relief convoys in Bosnia, criticising all sides in the conflict for not letting convoys through. The convoys are resumed a week later.
• 1994 – Serb guns pull back from positions around Sarajevo, Bosnia, ahead of a Nato deadline.
• 1995 – Peru and Ecuador sign a peace treaty, ending a five-week border war that killed 78.
• 1996 – A magnitude-7 quake strikes eastern Indonesia, killing at least 53; world chess champion Garry Kasparov beats IBM supercomputer “Deep Blue”, winning a six-game match in Philadelphia.
• 1997 – Former copper trader Yasuo Hamanaka pleads guilty in a Tokyo court to fraud and forgery in trying to cover speculation that depressed world copper markets and lost his company $2.6bn.
• 1998 – American athletes compete in Iran for the first time since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
• 1999 – Three Kurds are shot and killed trying to enter the Israeli consulate in Berlin to protest what they believe was Israeli involvement in the arrest of Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan by Turkey.
• 2000 – A judge upholds the conviction of a man who cursed in front of children after falling out of a canoe, ruling that Michigan’s 102-year-old anti-swearing law is constitutional.
• 2001 – A bomb attack on a bus kills seven Serbs and injures dozens in northern Kosovo.
• 2002 – Maoist rebels kill 137 people in raids on a town and an airport in the northwest of Nepal. The attacks are the worst since November 2001, when the rebels broke a peace agreement and the government declared a state of emergency.
• 2003 – Twenty-one people are crushed to death and some 50 others are injured when a panic-stricken crowd tries to exit a nightclub in Chicago.
• 2005 – A court rules the previous year’s privatisation of Ukraine’s largest steel mill illegal, the first showdown between some of the nation’s biggest businessmen and the new government.
• 2006 – Up to 1 800 people are killed when a farming village in eastern Philippines is swallowed whole by a wall of mud and boulders in a landslide that sweeps down with terrifying speed from a mountainside.
• 2007 – Tens of thousands of people march through the northeastern Italian city of Vicenza under heavy police guard to protest a planned US military base expansion.
• 2008 – Kosovo declares independence from Serbia; Serbia immediately denounces the declaration as illegal.
• 2009 – US President Barack Obama signs a massive $787bn package to revive the country’s economy.

Thought For Today:
The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease – Marianne Moore, American poet (1887-1972).

info from News24

Today is Wednesday, February 10, the 41st day of 2010. There are 324 days left in the year.

Highlights in history on this date:

• 1763 – France cedes Canada and India to England as Treaty of Paris is signed, ending French and Indian War.
• 1811 – Russians take Belgrade and capture Turkish army.
• 1817 – Britain, Prussia, Austria and Russia agree to first reduction of occupation forces in France.
• 1828 – Simon Bolivar, South American revolutionary, becomes ruler of Colombia.
• 1846 – British forces under Hugh Gough defeat Sikhs at Sobrahan, India.
• 1878 – By Convention of El Zanjou, ending Ten Years’ War, Spain promises reforms in Cuba.
• 1879 – Bulgaria’s first parliament opens in the town of Veliko Turnovo.
• 1933 – The first singing telegram is sung in the United States.
• 1939 – Japanese forces occupy Hainan Island, China.
• 1943 – Britain’s Eighth Army reaches Tunisian border in World War II.
• 1961 – United States relinquishes rights to many defence bases in West Indies.
• 1962 – The Soviet Union exchanges captured American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers for Rudolph Ivanovich Abel, a Soviet spy held by the United States.
• 1964 – Royal Australian Navy destroyer Voyager sinks after collision with HMAS Melbourne off Jervis Bay; more than 80 die.
• 1969 – United States, Britain and France reject East German restrictions on travel to West Berlin, and remind Soviets of their responsibility to ensure free access.
• 1974 – Iraq claims that 70 Iranians were killed or wounded in border clash between Iraqi and Iranian troops.
• 1991 – Peruvian health ministry announces that at least 51 people have died of cholera in epidemic along that country’s coast.
• 1993 – Six million people in Madagascar vote in elections that topple President Didier Ratsiraka after 17 years in office.
• 1994 – The worst of the Bosnian war is over for the battered city of Sarajevo, where a UN-brokered cease-fire goes into effect.
• 1995 – Mexican government troops raid the headquarters of the Zapatista rebels in the jungles of Chiapas state, but fail to catch leader Subcomandante Marcos.
• 1996 – A slab of mountainside crushes a highway tunnel, killing 20 people in vehicles on the Japanese island of Hokkaido.
• 1997 – Croats open fire on Muslims visiting a cemetery in the southern Bosnian city of Mostar, killing at least one and wounding 39 people.
• 1998 – Protestant leaders seek to exclude Sinn Fein from Northern Ireland peace talks after a killing blamed on Catholic guerrillas.
• 2000 – All 164 passengers held hostage on an Afghan airliner during a tense four-day journey across Central Asia and Europe, exit the plane in England.
• 2001 – Two dozen young anti-government demonstrators are injured and 100 arrested in clashes with riot police breaking up a Tehran rally. Incidents in Tehran and other cities come as Iran marks the 22nd anniversary of the Islamic revolution.
• 2002 – Israeli warplanes and helicopter gunships attack a Palestinian National Authority security compound and other targets in Gaza City, wounding more than 30 people.
• 2003 – French, German and Belgian representatives to Nato veto US-led plans to lend alliance assistance to Turkey, which sought help in preparing for a possible ballistic missile attack by Iraq, if the US launches a pre-emptive attack.
• 2004 – US-backed, anti-narcotics soldiers capture Nayibe Rojas, a female rebel commander who is believed to manage drug and financial operations for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or FARC, the nation’s largest guerrilla group. The army said Rojas is suspected of sending more than 600 tons of cocaine to the United States and Europe since 1994.
• 2005 – North Korea boasts publicly for the first time that it has nuclear weapons and says it will stay away from disarmament talks, dramatically raising the stakes in the two-year-old nuclear dispute despite softened rhetoric from the United States aimed at luring the communist nation back to the negotiating table.
• 2006 – The United States suspends Australia’s wheat-export monopoly from US government contracts and proposes an indefinite debarment for the monopoly’s cheating on the UN Oil-for-Food programme in Iraq.
• 2007 – General David Petraeus takes command of US and multinational troops in Iraq, succeeding General George W Casey Jr.
• 2008 – A US Army sniper accused of killing an unarmed Iraqi civilian and planting evidence on his body to cover it up is found guilty on all charges.
• 2009 – US and Russian communication satellites collide in the first-ever crash of its kind in orbit, shooting out a pair of massive debris clouds.

Thought For Today:
Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean – George Santayana, Spanish-born philosopher (1863-1952).

info from News24

In February 1990, ANC activist Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela walked out of the gates of Victor Verster prison a free man after being jailed for 27 years by the apartheid regime.

Nelson Mandela remembers 20 years of freedom.

There to meet him were members of the National Reception Committee, who helped Mandela as he took the first steps to his election four years later as SA’s first democratically elected president.

On Thursday this week, former members of the committee and family members gathered in Johannesburg to reminisce about that day, 20 years ago.

The gathering, arranged by his ex-wife Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and his daughter Zindzi, took place around a dining-table in a marquee on the grounds of Mandela’s Houghton home.

Father Smangaliso Mkhatshwa, a Catholic priest detained and tortured during the apartheid years, said the gathering had brought together the people who served on the reception committee.

Unbelievable

“I am a priest and I was responsible for Nelson’s security that day,” he laughed.

“We are meeting to reminisce. When you look back, the way this country has become normal is unbelievable. There were prophets of doom, but life has gone on and we have done exceptionally well, even though there is still lots to do.”

“He looks fine, jolly as ever. Age has taken its toll but he has not lost his sense of humour,” Mkhatshwa, who went on to become mayor of Pretoria, said when asked how Mandela was.

Among those attending the celebration were Mandela’s children and grandchildren, ANC comrades, former activists, and members of government past and present.

They included Cyril Ramaphosa, Dali Mpofu, Bulelani Ngcuka, Saki Macozoma, Valli Moosa, Trevor Manuel, Sydney Mufamadi, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Ahmed Kathrada, Frank Chikane, Murphy Morobe and Roseberry Sonto.

Also present were Sister Bernard Ncube, Hilda Ndude, Farieda Omar, photographer Alf Kumalo, and ex-prison warder Christo Brand, who befriended Mandela during his years of incarceration under the apartheid regime.

(continue reading…)

Today is Friday, February 5, the 36th day of 2010. There are 329 days left in the year.

Highlights in history on this date:

• 1679 – Peace of Nijmegen is declared between Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I and France’s King Louis XIV.
• 1782 – Spanish forces capture Minorca Island, off Spain, from British.
• 1792 – Tippoo of Mysore, India, who is defeated in war with British and Hyderabad, cedes half of Mysore to British.
• 1811 – British Regency Act is passed, whereby the Prince of Wales becomes Prince Regent during King George III’s temporary insanity.
• 1885 – Congo state is established as a personal possession of Belgium’s King Leopold II.
• 1887 – Verdi’s opera Otello premieres at La Scala, in Milan, Italy.
• 1917 – Mexico becomes a federated republic of 28 states; US Congress passes, over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, a law severely curtailing the immigration of Asians.
• 1958 – Gamel Abdel Nasser is formally nominated to become the first president of the new United Arab Republic.
• 1962 – France’s President Charles de Gaulle calls for independence for Algeria on basis of friendly cooperation with France.
• 1971 – US Apollo 14 astronauts land on Moon.
• 1976 – Earthquake in Guatemala takes almost 23 000 lives.
• 1989 – Algeria’s president proposes new national constitution, dropping references to socialism and opening door to multiparty system.
• 1990 – Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, addressing the party plenum, says the Communist Party must abandon its monopoly on power.
• 1991 – Iraq, under attack by the US and its allies, suspends fuel sales to its citizens.
• 1992 – UN declines deployment of 10 000-man UN peacekeeping force in Yugoslavia.
• 1993 – Up to 200 Somali youths hurl rocks at US forces and set tire barricades ablaze in the belief that American troops shot to death a Somali man.
• 1994 – A single mortar shell kills 68 people in a Sarajevo marketplace; White separatist Byron de la Beckwith is convicted in Jackson, Mississippi, for murdering civil rights leader Medgar Evers, three decades earlier.
• 1995 – Peru and Ecuador break off cease-fire talks and fighting flares again along their disputed jungle border.
• 1997 – Three Swiss banking giants announce they will contribute $71m to open a humanitarian fund for Holocaust victims.
• 1998 – More than 600 000 plantation workers in Sri Lanka go on strike for higher wages, crippling key sectors of the country’s economy. They return to work ten days later.
• 1999 – The 80-year-old President Nelson Mandela of South Africa delivers his last major address to Parliament.
• 2001 – Four men go on trial in New York in the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in Africa, which killed 224 people; Blast in Moscow subway injures at least nine.
• 2002 – Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel apologizes for his country’s role in the 1961 assassination of then-Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. He offers a $3.25m fund in Lumumba’s name to promote democracy in Congo.
• 2003 – North Korea announces its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon has resumed operations. North Korea in December 2002 declared its intention to reopen the facility, as part of a series of announced moves to resume its nuclear programs, which it had agreed to suspend in 1994.
• 2004 – Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army rebels attack a refugee camp in the north, killing 54 civilians and two soldiers. The shadowy rebel group, which has little contact with the outside world, has fought for 17 years to overthrow President Yoweri Museveni, but mostly attacks civilians to steal food and abduct children for use as fighters or concubines.
• 2005 – Nato helicopter gunships find the shattered wreckage of an Afghan airliner on a frigid mountain east of Kabul. Officials doubt any of the 104 people aboard could have survived.
• 2006 – A bomb explosion rips through a passenger bus, killing at least 13 people and wounding 20 others in a province of southwestern Pakistan wracked by growing tribal unrest.
• 2007 – Somalia’s government begins a weeklong meeting with elders, traditional chiefs and representatives of aid groups to try to reconcile Somalis after 16 years of conflict.
• 2008 – At least seven civilians, including four children, are killed during a military operation against al-Qaeda-linked militants on a southern Philippine island.
• 2009 – As US Navy ships looks on, Somali pirates speed away with $3.2m in ransom after releasing an arms-laden Ukrainian freighter – ending a four-month standoff that focused world attention on piracy off Somalia’s lawless coast.

Thought For Today:
Many excellent words are ruined by too definite a knowledge of their meaning. – Aline Kilmer, American poet (1888-1941).

info from News24

Mexico City – Investigators have found human remains, homes and tombs dating back more than 1 000 years in caves in northern Mexico, the Institute of Anthropology and History said on Tuesday.

“More than a dozen sites suggesting housing or funeral uses, some which are more than 1 000-years-old, were found inside shallow caves in the Sinforosa Canyon, in (the northern state of) Chihuahua,” a statement said.

The structures, made of earth and stone, had bedrooms, barns and stores, and some contained human remains wrapped in plant fibres, tied with cord and secured with wooden needles, it said.

The bodies had possibly been buried with offerings made of pottery, it added.

The area, in the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains, is home to the indigenous Tarahumara people, but the origin of the remains was unclear.

Investigators also found human remains – from two children, five adolescents and six adults – dating from the 16th or 17th centuries at the site, that are believed to belong to the now-extinct Tubare ethnic group.

taken from News24

Today is Friday, January 29, the 29th day of 2010. There are 336 days left in the year.

Highlights in history on this date:

• 1676 – Theodore III becomes Czar of Russia on death of his father Alexis.
• 1801 – France and Spain issue ultimatum to Portugal to break allegiance to Britain.
• 1819 – Sir Stamford Raffles lands on Singapore and concludes a treaty with a local ruler to set up a British trading post.
• 1820 – Britain’s King George III dies insane at Windsor Castle, ending a reign that saw both the American and French revolutions.
• 1845 – Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Raven is first published, in the New York Evening Mirror.
• 1850 – Henry Clay introduces in the US Senate a compromise bill on slavery that includes the admission of California into the Union as a free state.
• 1900 – The American League, consisting of eight baseball teams, is organised in Philadelphia.
• 1916 – Germans stage first Zeppelin raid on Paris in World War I.
• 1919 – Czechoslovak forces defeat Poles at Galicia, Poland.
• 1936 – The first members of US baseball Hall of Fame, including Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth, are named in Cooperstown, New York.
• 1942 – Ecuador and Peru sign Rio de Janeiro protocol, ending their war over a large swath of Amazon Jungle. The treaty establishes the present-day border, which is still disputed.
• 1947 – United States abandons its mediation role in China.
• 1949 – Britain grants de facto recognition to new state of Israel.
• 1950 – First series of riots occur in Johannesburg, provoked by South Africa’s racial apartheid policy.
• 1959 – The Danish passenger ship Hans Hedtoft, sailing along Greenland’s coast, hits an iceberg and sinks, killing 95 people.
• 1963 – Britain is refused entry into European Common Market by French veto.
• 1973 – United States, Soviet Union and 17 other nations agree to meet in Vienna to try to reach an accord on cutting strength of armed forces in Europe.
• 1989 – Syrian and Iranian foreign ministers reach agreement on peace formula to end fighting between their Shi’ite surrogates in Lebanon.
• 1990 – Ousted East German Communist Party leader Erich Honecker is arrested and ordered to stand trial for high treason; former Exxon Valdez skipper Joseph Hazelwood goes on trial in Anchorage, Alaska, on charges stemming from the worst US oil spill disaster. He is later acquitted.
• 1991 – South African political rivals Mangosuthu Buthelezi and Nelson Mandela meet for first time in 30 years and call for cease-fire between their supporters.
• 1992 – Russian President Boris Yeltsin unveils a nuclear weapons reduction plan.
• 1993 – French Marines enter Zaire’s capital. Dozens of civilians, soldiers and foreigners die in the bloodshed.
• 1994 – Ulrike Maier, a 10-year downhill veteran with two world titles, dies after breaking her neck in a freak crash during a World Cup race.
• 1995 – Two Peruvian helicopters are shot down, killing seven people as Ecuadorean officials accuse Peru of mounting a massive offensive along a disputed border; the San Francisco 49ers become the first team in US National Football League history to win five Super Bowl titles, beating the San Diego Chargers 49-26.
• 1996 – La Fenice, the 204-year-old opera house, burns down in Venice, Italy.
• 1998 – British Prime Minister Tony Blair announces a new inquiry into the 1972 “Bloody Sunday” violence, in which British troops killed Catholic protesters.
• 2000 – In Egypt, a 32-year-old housewife is the first woman to file for divorce under a new law that doesn’t require women to prove physical or psychological harm.
• 2002 – In a direct defiance to South Africa’s patent laws, Doctors Without Borders, an international humanitarian organisation, begins importing a cheap, genetic version of patented Aids drugs into South Africa.
• 2003 – US President George W Bush announces an initiative to spend $15bn over five years for Aids treatment and prevention in 12 African countries and two Caribbean nations.
• 2005 – Tsunami-battered nations end a conference in Thailand without resolving differences about which one of them should host a warning centre to help prevent future disasters and instead stick with plans to have smaller facilities in individual countries.
• 2007 – A Palestinian suicide bomber attacks a bakery in Eilat, a normally tranquil, southern Israeli resort town, killing three people and himself.
• 2008 – Gunmen hold more than 30 people hostage inside a Venezuelan bank for more than a day. They flee January 30 in an ambulance, but eventually surrender and free their last five captives.
• 2009 – Zimbabwe’s government admits defeat in a fight against dizzying inflation, allowing business to be done in US dollars and bank notes of neighbouring countries.

Thought For Today:
Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted – Hesketh Pearson, British biographer (1887-1964).

info from News24

Today is Wednesday, January 27, the 27th day of 2010. There are 338 days left in the year.

Highlights in history on this date:

• 1340 – Edward III of England declares himself king of France, a claim that leads to the Hundred Years’ War. The kings of England call themselves kings of France until 1801.
• 1695 – Mustafa II succeeds as Sultan of Turkey on death of Ahmad II.
• 1822 – Greek independence is formally proclaimed.
• 1865 – Treaty between Spain and Peru virtually recognises Peru’s independence.
• 1880 – Thomas Edison receives a patent for his electric incandescent lamp.
• 1888 – The National Geographic Society is incorporated in the United States.
• 1914 – Haiti’s President Oreste abdicates during revolt, and US Marines land to preserve order.
• 1943 – US bombers stage first all-out US air raid on Germany in World War II, a daylight attack on Wilhelmshaven; Germany begins civil conscription of women.
• 1944 – The German and Finnish siege of Leningrad, now St Petersburg, is lifted. At least 650 000 people died during the 872-day siege.
• 1945 – Soviet troops liberate the Nazi concentration camps Auschwitz and Birkenau in Poland.
• 1951 – An era of US atomic testing in the Nevada desert begins as an Air Force plane drops a one-kiloton bomb on Frenchman Flats.
• 1964 – France establishes diplomatic relations with China.
• 1967 – Three US Apollo astronauts die in flash fire aboard space capsule; United States, Soviet Union and 60 other nations sign treaty to limit military activities in outer space.
• 1973 – Accords are signed in Paris, providing for the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, leading to the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975.
• 1977 – The Vatican reaffirms the Roman Catholic Church’s ban on female priests.
• 1981 – Indonesia’s Tampo Mas II passenger ship catches fire and sinks in Java Sea, killing 580 people.
• 1991 – President Mohammed Siad Barre of Somalia flees the capital, Mogadishu, as a coalition of rebels seize power. The country plunges into virtual anarchy.
• 1991 – Allied aircraft bomb Iraq’s second city, Basra.
• 1992 – Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s government survives no-confidence motions in parliament.
• 1993 – Police in New Delhi lob tear gas shells to disperse rioting mobs of Hindus and Muslims who attack a mosque and a temple and burn down dozens of shops.
• 1994 – Terrorists strike three times in Northern Ireland, killing the first two victims of the new year and wounding two others.
• 1995 – Burmese soldiers win a key battle against one of the world’s oldest insurgencies, capturing the base of Burma’s largest Karen rebel army in the Burmese jungle.
• 1996 – Niger’s first democratically elected president, Mahamane Ousmane, is ousted in a coup and army Col. Barre Mainassara Ibrahim takes over as head of state.
• 1997 – The people of Chechnya go to the polls to elect Aslan Maskhadov for president, only months after Russian forces turned most of the capital to rubble.
• 1998 – Bowing to the wish of the pope, the Catholic Church in Germany stops issuing certificates allowing abortion.
• 1999 – Eamon Collins, a former Irish Republican Army intelligence officer and author of an expose of life inside the Irish Republican Army, is found dead near the Northern Ireland town of Newry.
• 2000 – Human rights officials announce that they have unearthed the remains of 50 people at a clandestine cemetery in Zacualpa, a village 64km northwest of Guatemala City. The victims, including two children, were apparent casualties of Guatemala’s 36-year civil war.
• 2001 – Police fire tear gas and warning shots as thousands of rock-throwing students in Jakarta storm the gates of Indonesia’s Parliament in the largest protest yet against the country’s president.
• 2002 – Munitions at an army base in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, explode, sending fireballs and shrapnel into the air forcing hundreds of area residents to flee. As many as 600 people drown in a canal that blocked their way to safety.
• 2003 – UN weapons inspectors report that although the Iraqi government had given inspectors access to suspected weapons sites, it had not provided sufficient information about its weapons programs and stockpiles. This report is seen as bolstering the US case for military action to disarm Iraq.
• 2005 – A court sentences Peru’s former spy chief Vladimiro Montesinos to eight years in prison for paying tabloids hundreds of thousands of dollars to run smear campaigns against opponents of ex-President Alberto Fujimori.
• 2006 – Bolivian President Evo Morales cuts his salary in half and orders that no Cabinet minister collect a higher wage than his own, with the savings being used to hire more public school teachers.
• 2007 – Suspected Muslim separatists ambush police patrols and torch a school in southern Thailand a day after killing a police sergeant and setting fire to a government school.
• 2008 – Guyana deploys security forces in villages and forests surrounding Lusignan, where on Jan. 26 rampaging gunmen killed 11 people, including five children.
• 2009 – A cruise ship carrying 300 passengers that became lodged in thick ice in the St Lawrence River near Montreal for more than 30 hours is freed with the help of an ice breaking vessel.

Thought For Today:
As men we are all equal in the presence of death. – Publilius Syrus, Roman mimographer (100 BC)

info from News24

Today is Monday, January 25, the 25th day of 2010. There are 340 days left in the year.

Highlights in history on this date:

• 1533 – England’s King Henry VIII secretly marries his second wife, Anne Boleyn, who later gives birth to Elizabeth I.
• 1579 – Union of Utrecht is signed by Holland, Zealand, Utrecht, Celderland, Friesland, Croningen and Overyssel, marking foundation of Dutch Republic.
• 1802 – France’s Napoleon Bonaparte becomes president of the Italian Republic.
• 1831 – Polish Diet proclaims independence of Poland, dethrones Nicholas, and deposes the Romanovs.
• 1890 – The United Mine Workers of America is founded; writer Nellie Bly completes her trip around the world in 72 days.
• 1915 – The inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, inaugurates US transcontinental telephone service.
• 1942 – Thailand, allied to Japan, declares war on Britain and the United States.
• 1944 – Battle for Cassino begins in Italy in World War II.
• 1952 – Crisis arises between France and Germany over administration of the Saar region.
• 1959 – Britain signs trade pact with East Germany; American Airlines opens the jet age in the United States with the first scheduled transcontinental flight of a Boeing 707.
• 1961 – US President John F Kennedy holds the first presidential news conference carried live on radio and television.
• 1962 – African heads of state of Monrovia Group, which includes Liberia, Togo, Nigeria and Cameroon, issue charter for Pan-African co-operation.
• 1971 – Charles Manson and three female followers are convicted in Los Angeles of murder and conspiracy in the 1969 slayings of seven people, including actress Sharon Tate.
• 1975 – Sheik Mujibur Rahman abolishes parliamentary rule in Bangladesh and assumes absolute powers as president.
• 1981 – The 52 Americans held hostage by Iran for 444 days return home.
• 1989 – Cambodia’s Premier Hun Sen rejects proposal for international peacekeeping force in his country.
• 1991 – Leaders of rival Yugoslav republics of Serbia and Croatia meet in effort to defuse tensions there.
• 1992 – Russian President Boris Yeltsin says Russia will stop targeting US cities with nuclear missiles.
• 1993 – Two French UN peacekeepers are killed and three wounded as Serb-Croat clashes rage on in southern Croatia.
• 1994 – Without admitting guilt, Michael Jackson settles a lawsuit that said he molested a young boy. Terms of the settlement leave the boy “very happy”, the youngster’s attorney said.
• 1995 – Jews from around the world return to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazis’ biggest death complex, where 1.5 million people were killed before it was liberated 50 years ago.
• 1996 – The leading Nicaraguan presidential candidate, Arnoldo Aleman, narrowly escapes an assassination attempt that kills a bodyguard.
• 1997 – A cyclone sweeps across the island nation of Madagascar, spawning floods that leave 100 people missing and thousands homeless.
• 1998 – The pope holds a sermon on the virtues of democracy in Havana, Cuba, with dictator Fidel Castro in the audience.
• 1999 – An earthquake devastates a coffee-growing region in Colombia, killing at least 940 people and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless.
• 2000 – Former Tehran Mayor Gholamhossein Karbaschimayor is pardoned by Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Karbaschi, who ran afoul of the hard-line leadership, was serving a two-year jail term for embezzlement. The pardon is seen as part of a campaign to project a more moderate image.
• 2001 – Israel and the Palestinians have made good progress in drawing the borders of a future Palestinian state, negotiators announce as both sides prepare to resume talks in an Egyptian resort following a time out called by Israel despite a tight deadline.
• 2002 – India successfully test-fires an intermediate-range ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. The test is denounced as a provocation by Pakistan, which has been locked in a border standoff with India for more than a month.
• 2005 – Outspoken former communist-era government spokesperson Jerzy Urban is convicted of libel and fined for insulting the Polish-born Pope John Paul II in his satirical magazine. The result shows the Polish “justice system is overly influenced by religion”, says Urban.
• 2006 – Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians crowd polling stations in their first parliamentary elections in a decade. The vote results in a stunning victory for Islamic radicals when Hamas emerges as the winner.
• 2007 – Russian President Vladimir Putin offers to build four new nuclear reactors for energy starved India, cementing his country’s traditional role as India’s main nuclear benefactor.
• 2008 – A car bomb rips through eastern Beirut, killing Lebanon’s top anti-terrorism investigator who was probing assassinations of prominent anti-Syrian figures. Three others died in the blast.
• 2009 – Sri Lankan government captures rebels’ last major stronghold of Mullaittivu, Sri Lanka.

Thought For Today:
If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: ‘It seemed a good idea at the time’ – Dame Rebecca West, Irish-born author and journalist (1892-1983).

info from News24

Today is Wednesday, January 20, the 20th day of 2010. There are 345 days left in the year.

Highlights in history on this date:

• 1265 – England’s Parliament meets for first time.
• 1503 – Casa Contratacion Board of Trade is formed in Spain to deal with affairs in America.
• 1839 – Chile wins Battle of Yungay against Peru-Bolivian Federation, resulting in dissolution of that union.
• 1841 – The island of Hong Kong is ceded to Great Britain.
• 1887 – New Zealand annexes Kermadec Islands in Pacific; US Senate approves leasing Pearl Harbor in Hawaii as naval base.
• 1921 – The new Parliament in Ankara declares that the country will be called Turkey, and vests executive power in a council led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
• 1936 – Britain’s King George V dies and is succeeded by Edward VIII.
• 1942 – Nazi officials hold the notorious Wannsee conference, during which they arrive at their “final solution” that calls for exterminating Europe’s Jews.
• 1957 – South Africa denies port facilities to Indian vessels in retaliation for Indian sanctions against South Africa.
• 1958 – Soviet Union threatens Greece with economic sanctions if it agrees to the installation of Nato missile bases on Greek territory.
• 1964 – British forces quell mutinies of Tanganyika Rifles and troops in Uganda and Kenya.
• 1968 – President Aref’s regime in Iraq is deposed, and new government is formed under Gen. Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr.
• 1986 – A bloodless military coup ousts Lesotho’s authoritarian Prime Minister Leabua Jonathan; the United States observes the first federal holiday in honour of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
• 1987 – Anglican Church envoy Terry Waite disappears in Beirut, Lebanon, while attempting to negotiate the release of Western hostages. He is freed in November 1991.
• 1989 – George HW Bush is sworn in as the 41st president of the United States.
• 1990 – Soviet troops storm Azerbaijani capital of Baku, leaving dozens dead and wounded, as President Mikhail Gorbachev defends action on national television.
• 1991 – In Moscow, hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens protest bloody crackdown on Lithuania and demand resignation of President Mikhail Gorbachev.
• 1992 – Two former East German border guards are convicted in last killing at Berlin Wall.
• 1993 – Bill Clinton is inaugurated as president of the United States, taking over from George HW Bush.
• 1994 – Hours after a truce is proclaimed in Kabul, Afghanistan, forces loyal to the president fire rockets at the prime ministers’ forces.
• 1995 – The Bosnian government and rebel Serbs exchange nearly 100 prisoners in a move instilling hope in a fragile truce.
• 1996 – Lebanese man is arrested in the fire that killed 10 immigrants at a shelter in Luebeck, Germany.
• 1997 – Bill Clinton begins his second term as US president.
• 1998 – Dr James Robl at the University of Massachusetts and Dr Steven Stice of Advanced Cell Technology Inc announce that they have successfully cloned two identical, genetically engineered calves.
• 1999 – Riots between Christians and Muslims enter a third day on the Indonesian island of Ambon – 22 people die, 100 are badly injured and more than 30 houses are burned.
• 2001 – Civil rights leader, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, appears in public in Chicago for the first time since acknowledging he fathered a child in an extramarital affair. Protesting Filipinos force President Joseph Estrada to step down and Vice President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is sworn in as the Philippines’ new president.
• 2002 – The government and Colombia’s largest guerrilla group reach an agreement on a timetable for cease-fire talks aimed at ending the country’s long-running civil war.
• 2003 – Former Serbian President Milan Milutinovic surrenders to the UN International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, the Netherlands, to face charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in a 1999 crackdown on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
• 2004 – Israeli warplanes strike Hezbollah guerrilla bases in southern Lebanon, threatening to re-ignite another Arab-Israeli front that has been mostly calm for years. Israel says it was retaliating for a Hezbollah attack that killed one Israeli soldier and wounded another a day earlier.
• 2006 – Japan halts all imports of US beef because of mad cow fears threatening millions of dollars in American exports and sending officials scrambling to repair delicate trade relations.
• 2007 – Mexico extradites Osiel Cardenas, a purported drug cartel boss believed to be running his gang from jail, and three other alleged major traffickers to the United States, an unprecedented move welcomed by Washington.
• 2008 – A Turkish court again blocks access to the popular video-sharing Web site YouTube because of clips allegedly insulting the country’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. It is illegal in Turkey to insult the revered figure.
• 2009 – Barack Hussein Obama becomes the 44th president – and first black chief executive – of the United States.

Thought For Today:
America is a land of wonders, in which everything is in constant motion and every change seems an improvement – Alexis de Tocqueville, French author (1805-1859).

info from News24

Today is Monday, January 11, the 11th day of 2010. There are 354 days left in the year.

Highlights in history on this date:

• 49 BC – Roman emperor Julius Caesar crosses the Rubicon river and moves his troops into an offensive position in the war against Pompeii.
• 1569 – First lottery in England is drawn in St Paul’s Cathedral under the patronage of Queen Elizabeth I.
• 1814 – Joachim Murat, King of Naples, deserts Napoleon Bonaparte and joins Allies.
• 1866 – Ship “London” is wrecked en route to Australia. Some 231 people die.
• 1919 – Romania annexes Transylvania.
• 1923 – France and Belgium occupy the Ruhr valley after the German government fails to keep up its World War I reparation payments.
• 1935 – Aviator Amelia Earhart begins a trip from Honolulu to Oakland, California, becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Pacific Ocean.
• 1939 – Abu Dhabi Ruler Sheik Shakhbout signs emirate’s first oil agreement, with a British-led consortium.
• 1942 – Japan declares war against the Netherlands, the same day that Japanese forces invade the Dutch East Indies.
• 1943 – Britain and United States relinquish extraterritorial rights in China.
• 1945 – Truce is declared in Greek civil war.
• 1962 – Avalanche buries village in the Peruvian Andes, and 3 000 people are reported killed.
• 1964 – US Surgeon General Luther Terry issues the first government report saying smoking may be hazardous to one’s health.
• 1970 – In Nigeria, 32-month-old secessionist Biafran regime collapses under onslaughts by Nigerian military.
• 1972 – New state of Bangladesh is recognized by East Germany.
• 1973 – Owners of American League baseball teams vote to adopt the designated-hitter rule on a trial basis.
• 1976 – President Rodriguez Lara of Ecuador is ousted in a coup.
• 1977 – France sets off an international uproar by releasing Abu Daoud, a Palestinian suspected of involvement in the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
• 1986 – L Douglas Wilder becomes Lt Governor of Virginia, making him the first African-American sworn in as a Southern state official since the American Civil War.
• 1990 – About 250 000 people demonstrate in favour of independence in Lithuanian capital as Mikhail Gorbachev arrives there to persuade the local Communist Party to retract its decision to break with national party.
• 1991 – Hundreds of uniformed Lithuanian nationalists keep all-night vigil in republic’s parliament, saying they are defending it from possible attack by the Soviet army.
• 1993 – The UN Security Council meets to warn Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that he is violating Gulf War cease-fire terms by his unauthorized seizure of weapons in Kuwaiti territory.
• 1995 – An Intercontinental Aviation DC-9 with at least 52 people aboard crashes near Cartagena, Colombia, with only one survivor.
• 1996 – A military court in Peru sentences American Lori Berenson to life in prison without parole for her involvement with a pro-Cuban guerrilla group.
• 1997 – Burundian soldiers shoot and kill 126 Hutu refugees trying to break out of a holding camp in northeastern Burundi.
• 1998 – An armed gang attacks two villages outside Algiers, Algeria, slaughtering 120 people.
• 1999 – Haiti’s President Rene Preval dissolves Parliament after a 22-month impasse with no working government. He appoints a premier and a Cabinet by decree.
• 2001 – General Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator, enters the Santiago military hospital to undergo neurological and mental tests ordered by a judge seeking to try him on human rights charges; the US Army acknowledges that soldiers killed an “unknown number” of South Korean refugees early in the Korean War at No Gun Ri.
• 2002 – The first 20 Taliban and al-Qaeda detainees from the US campaign in Afghanistan arrive at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba for possible questioning and trial.
• 2003 – The Indian government and the Naga faction, one of the longest-running separatist insurgent groups in Asia, agreed that a five-year cease-fire will become permanent and there will be no more fighting.
• 2004 – Hardliners throw Iran’s legislative elections into crisis by disqualifying hundreds of liberal candidates, including more than 80 sitting lawmakers who are allied with the reformist President Mohammad Khatami.
• 2005 – An anti-corruption judge places Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo’s sister under house arrest for masterminding the mass falsification of petition signatures to register his political party.
• 2006 – Peru’s President Alejandro Toledo issues a sharp rebuke to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez for openly supporting a nationalist former military officer running in Lima’s upcoming presidential elections.
• 2007 – Bangladesh’s President Iajuddin Ahmed declares a state of emergency, steps down as interim leader of Bangladesh’s caretaker government and postpones the Jan.22 elections following violent protests by a key political alliance that said it would boycott the vote.
• 2008 – Eleven US soldiers are convicted and five officers disciplined in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.
• 2009 – Lawmakers, Muslim groups and the Pakistani public criticise Prince Harry after a British newspaper publishes video footage of him using offensive and racist language.

Thought for Today:
If you are ruled by mind you are a king; if by body, a slave – Cato, Roman statesman and historian (234 BC-149 BC)

info from New24

Today is Tuesday, January 5, the 5th day of 2010. There are 360 days left in the year.

Highlights in history on this date:

• 1492 – King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella ride victoriously into Granada after their armies defeat Boabdil, the last Muslim ruler of Spain, completing the Christian reconquest of Spain.
• 1540 – England’s King Henry VIII weds fourth wife, Anne of Cleves. The marriage ends six months later when she agrees to an annulment.
• 1810 – Turkey agrees to Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and Kuban with the enactment of the Treaty of Constantinople.
• 1818 – Dominions of Holkar in India are annexed with Rajput states and come under British protection.
• 1838 – Samuel Morse first publicly demonstrates his telegraph, in Morristown, New Jersey.
• 1839 – British forces capture Aden, Yemen.
• 1912 – New Mexico becomes 47th US state.
• 1925 – Top South Korean opposition leader Kim Dae-jung, a three-time presidential candidate, is born.
• 1941 – US President Franklin D Roosevelt defines American goal of “Four Freedoms” – freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.
• 1942 – The Pan American Airways Pacific Clipper arrives in New York after making the first round-the-world trip by a commercial airplane.
• 1950 – Britain recognises the Communist government of China.
• 1963 – Iran’s Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi launches his “white revolution”, including redistributing land to peasants and giving women the vote.
• 1972 – Washington indicates that a US naval task force dispatched during recent war between India and Pakistan marks start of regular American naval operations in Indian Ocean.
• 1989 – Soviet Union calls downing of two Libyan aircraft by the United States “absolutely unfounded”
• 1990 – Polish Communist leaders vote to disband their party and form a new leftist party under a different name.
• 1992 – Georgian President Zviad Gamsakhurdia and his supporters shoot their way out of their stronghold and speed away.
• 1994 – The Mexican government flies tons of food to San Cristobal De Las Casas in Chiapas state, where Indian rebels are staging an uprising; figure skater Nancy Kerrigan is clubbed on the leg by an assailant in Detroit. Four men, including the ex-husband of Kerrigan’s skating rival, Tonya Harding, are sentenced to prison.
• 1995 – Iran’s air force commander and 11 other officers are killed in a plane crash in central Iran.
• 1996 – Rebels raiding a village in northern India shoot and kill 15 Hindu men after pulling them from their beds and separating them from Muslims.
• 1997 – After a week of torrential rain in southeastern Brazil, at least 67 people are killed and more than 32 000 are left homeless.
• 1998 – Fifty-one people die in a train crash in Karna, India.
• 1999 – Rebels fight their way into the capital of Sierra Leone, past a Nigerian-led intervention force, and burn government buildings.
• 2000 – Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin meets Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in the Holy Land.
• 2001 – The Palestinians oppose drafting a “declaration of principles” that would be based on US President Bill Clinton’s peace proposals, saying they “will not accept any kind of pressure” that would short-circuit their legitimate rights.
• 2002 – US Special Forces and allied Afghan fighters return empty-handed from a four-day manhunt aimed at extracting Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar from his alleged mountain hideout in southern Afghanistan.
• 2003 – The Tamil Tigers rebel group and the Sri Lankan government hold a round of peace talks, making modest progress toward reconciliation after a 19-year-old civil war, but reaching no significant breakthroughs.
• 2004 – Ugandan church leaders tell American supporters of gay bishop Gene Robinson they are not welcome at the consecration of the new leader of Uganda’s Anglicans, Bishop Henry Orombi.
• 2005 – A baby boy is declared China’s 1.3 billionth citizen in a blaze of publicity to promote the government’s controversial “one child” birth limits.
• 2006 – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez threatens to seize control of coffee-producing companies, or even nationalize them, if they refuse to sell the product at government-controlled prices.
• 2007 – Bahraini authorities revoke the citizenship of athlete Mushir Salem Jawher for competing in the Tiberias Marathon in Israel, saying Jawher broke the laws of Bahrain which does not recognize the Jewish state.
• 2008 – Mikhail Saakashvili is elected to a second term as Georgia’s president. Thousands of opposition protesters denounce the election as fraudulent.
• 2009 – The Indian navy has agrees to buy eight reconnaissance and anti-submarine planes from Boeing Co. in a $2.1bn deal that signals the developing nation’s drive to upgrade its military hardware, Chicago-based Boeing announces.

Thought for Today:
There may be Peace without Joy, and Joy without Peace, but the two combined make Happiness – John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, Scottish author (1875-1940).

info from News24