Random News and Notes 13 November
On this date:
- 1474 – In the Swiss-Burgundian Wars, Swiss infantry shatters the army of Charles the Bold at Hericourt near Belfort, countering his march to Lorraine.
- 1775 – Continental Army Brigadier General Richard Montgomery takes Montreal, Canada, without opposition.
- 1851 – The London-to-Paris telegraph begins operation.
- 1860 – South Carolina’s legislature calls a special convention to discuss secession from the Union.
- 1861 – President Abraham Lincoln pays a late night visit to General George McClellan, who Lincoln had recently named general in chief of the Union army. In a calculated snub, the general retired to his chambers before speaking with the president. McClellan would be replaced in March of the next year.
- 1878 – New Mexico Governor Lew Wallace offers amnesty to many participants of the Lincoln County War, but not to gunfighter Billy the Kid.
- 1897 – The first metal dirigible is flown from Tempelhof Field in Berlin.
- 1907 – Paul Corno achieves the first helicopter flight.
- 1908 – The Ballinger-Pinchot scandal erupts when Colliers magazine accuses Secretary of the Interior Richard Ballinger of shady dealings in Alaskan coal lands.
- 1914 – The brassiere, invented by Caresse Crosby, is patented.
- 1927 – New York’s Holland Tunnel officially opens for traffic.
- 1940 – U.S. Supreme Court rules in Hansberry v. Lee that African Americans cannot be barred from white neighborhoods.
- 1941 – A German U-boat, the U-81 torpedoes Great Britain’s premier aircraft carrier, the HMS Ark Royal. The ship sinks the next day.
- 1942 – Lt. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower flies to Algeria to conclude an agreement with French Admiral Jean Darlan..
- 1945 – Charles de Gaulle is elected president of France.
- 1952 – Harvard’s Paul Zoll becomes the first man to use electric shock to treat cardiac arrest.
- 1953 – In an example of the lengths to which the “Red Scare” in America is going, Mrs. Thomas J. White of the Indiana Textbook Commission calls for the removal of references to the book Robin Hood from textbooks used by the state’s schools. Mrs. White claimed that there was “a communist directive in education now to stress the story of Robin Hood because he robbed the rich and gave it to the poor. That’s the communist line. It’s just a smearing of law and order and anything that disrupts law and order is their meat.”
- 1956 – The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously strikes down two Alabama laws requiring racial segregation on public buses.
- 1969 – Anti-war protesters stage a symbolic “March Against Death” in Washington, DC.
- 1970 – A powerful tropical cyclone strikes the Ganges Delta region of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), causing an estimated half-million deaths in a single night; the Bhola cyclone is regarded as the worst natural disaster of the 20th century.
- 1973 – 28-year-old Karen Silkwood is killed in a car accident near Crescent, Oklahoma, north of Oklahoma City. Silkwood worked as a technician at a plutonium plant operated by the Kerr-McGee Corporation, and had been critical of the plant’s health and safety procedures.
- 1979 – In the middle of a game at the Municipal Auditorium in Kansas City, Philadelphia 76ers center Darryl Dawkins leaps over Kansas City Kings forward Bill Robinzine and slam-dunks the basketball, shattering the glass backboard. It was the first time a backboard had been broken in that fashion, it not the last. Dawkins would break another just 22 days later. The league would install shatterproof backboards after that.
- 1982 – The Vietnam Veterans Memorial dedicated in Washington, DC.
- 1985 – Some 23,000 people die when the Nevado del Ruiz erupts, melting a glacier and causing a massive mudslide that buries Armero, Columbia.
- 1989 – Hans-Adam II becomes Prince of Liechtenstein (1989– ) upon the death of his father, Franz Joseph II.
- 1989 – Compact of Free Association: the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau—places US troops wrested from Japanese control in WWII—become sovereign nations, associated states of the United States.
- 2001 – US President George W. Bush signs an executive order allowing military tribunals against foreigners suspected of connections to planned or actual terrorist acts against the US.
- 2015 – A cell of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant commits a string of terrorist attacks across Paris, killing 131 and injuring over 400. It was the deadliest day in France since World War II, as well as the deadliest operation ISIL has carried out in Europe to date. The attack was a multi pronged effort that culminated in the taking of the Bataclan theater during a sold out concert.
We start today’s news at the Sports desk. The MLB MVP awards were handed out last night. Houston Astros designated hitter Yordan Alvarez and Chicago Cubs center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong took home the hardware. Both players earned every first-place vote from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. For the first time ever, the votes for both leagues Cy Young awardees and MVPs were unanimous.
This year is also the first time since 2001 that a player not named Judge or Ohtani has won the MVP.
This one seems a bit odd. The Navy just now got around to announcing they had relieved the commander of DDG 112, USS Michael Murphy, back in September. Commander Caitlin Cunningham was removed on 27 September over “a loss of confidence” in her ability to command the destroyer. The relief was announced just as the ship is returning from a nearly-year-long deployment to the Persian Gulf.
The Pearl Harbor-based vessel supported Operation Epic Fury, enforced an Iran blockade, launched Tomahawk strikes, and earned a Presidential Unit Citation for its combat role. Cmdr. David Nicolas now leads the crew.
Why is this odd? The Navy doesn’t typically keep these reliefs under wraps this way. They may not be – are not – all that forthcoming about the reasons for the firings, but they don’t hide them. If anything pops up about why, you’ll get looped in.
A quick note from Haiti. Haitian police and Salvadoran forces retook the Sylvio Cator stadium in Port-au-Prince from gangs and are establishing it as a new operational base. The Salvadoran troops discovered human skulls and other remains inside the stadium. The stadium, in the center of Port Au Prince, had been under the control of the gangs for nearly 3 years.
As part of the stadium operation, Salvadoran troops used armed robotic dogs to flush out the gang members.
If you are the least bit interested in the threat that is antifa you need to be following Andy Ngo. In his latest, Andy outed a senior marketing manager at Nike for being an antifa militant. Ngo revealed James Rehwald’s LinkedIn profile as a Nike Digital Media Marketing Specialist since 2021, alongside screenshots of his anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist content.
No word from Nike yet.
In Space news, SpaceX plans to launch another Starship today. Flight 15 has a launch window from 1735 to 1900 ET today. The mission profile is expected to launch 26 starlink sats, complete 14 orbits and return to Starbase Texas for recovery.
For the first time, SpaceX is attempting to recover both stages at Starbase. The Super Heavy booster will return to Tower for a catch attempt roughly 6.5 minutes after liftoff. Starship will return after approximately 14 orbits around Earth, followed by its first-ever tower catch attempt about 22.5 hours after launch on November 14.