Random News and Notes 14 November

On this date:

• 1812 – As Napoleon Bonaparte’s army retreats form Moscow, temperatures drop to 20 degrees below zero.
• 1832 – New York City’s New York and Harlem company premiered the nation’s first horse-drawn street car. Making its debut on Bowery and Fourth Avenue in Manhattan, between Prince and 14th Street, it marked New York’s first-ever mass transit offering. 
• 1851 – Call me Ishmael. Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick is published in New York.

• 1882 – Billy Clairborne, a survivor of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, loses his life in a shoot-out with Buckskin Frank Leslie.
• 1908 – Albert Einstein presents his quantum theory of light.
• 1910 – Lieutenant Eugene Ely, U.S. Navy, becomes the first man to take off in an airplane from the deck of a ship. He flew from the ship Birmingham at Hampton Roads to Norfolk.
• 1914 – In Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman Empire, the religious leader Sheikh-ul-Islam declares an Islamic holy war on behalf of the Ottoman government, urging his Muslim followers to take up arms against Britain, France, Russia, Serbia and Montenegro in World War I.
• 1921 – The Cherokee Indians ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review their claim to 1 million acres of land in Texas.
• 1922 – The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) begins the first daily radio broadcasts from Marconi House.
• 1930 – Right-wing militarists in Japan attempt to assassinate Premier Hamagushi.
• 1935 – Manuel Luis Quezon is sworn in as the first Filipino president, as the Commonwealth of the Philippines is inaugurated.
• 1940 – German bombers devastate Coventry in Great Britain, killing 1,000 in the worst air raid of the war.

• 1941 – Suspicion, a romantic thriller starring Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, makes its debut.
• 1951 – The United States and Yugoslavia sign a military aid pact. The action was part of the U.S. policy to drive a deeper wedge between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.
• 1951 – French paratroopers capture Hoa Binh, Vietnam.
• 1960 – President Dwight Eisenhower orders U.S. naval units into the Caribbean after Guatemala and Nicaragua charge Castro with starting uprisings.
• 1960 – New Orleans integrates two all-white schools.
• 1961 – President Kennedy increases the number of American advisors in Vietnam from 1,000 to 16,000.
• 1963 – Greece frees hundreds who were jailed in the Communist uprising of 1944-1950.
• 1963 – Iceland gets a new island when a volcano pushes its way up out of the sea five miles off the southern coast.
• 1965 – The U.S. First Cavalry Division battles with the North Vietnamese Army in the Ia Drang Valley, the first ground combat for American troops.

• 1968 – Yale University announces its plan to go co-ed.
• 1969 – The United States launches Apollo 12, the second mission to the Moon, from Cape Kennedy.
• 1970 – A chartered jet carrying most of the Marshall University football team clips a stand of trees and crashes into a hillside just two miles from the Tri-State Airport in Kenova, West Virginia, killing everyone onboard.
• 1979 – US President Jimmy Carter freezes all Iranian assets in the United States in response to Iranian militants holding more than 50 Americans hostage.
• 1982 – Lech Walesa, leader of Poland’s outlawed Solidarity movement, is released by communist authorities after 11 months confinement; he would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 and be elected Poland’s president in 1990.

• 1984 – The Space Shuttle Discovery‘s crew rescues a second satellite.
• 1990 – Poland and the Federal Republic of Germany sign a treaty officially making the Oder-Neisse line the border between their countries.
• 2001 – Northern Alliance fighters take control of Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul.

We start the news with a story out of Peoria Illinois where a suspicious package was found at an ethanol plant. The package at the BioUrja Renewables facility in Peoria, turned out to be a bomb, leading to evacuations for thousands within a one-mile radius along the Illinois River. The threat started around 1 p.m. Friday, with the device neutralized by 9:12 p.m., but police continued searching the large site into Saturday.

Peoria mayor Rita Ali and Police Chief Brad Dixon stressed the credible danger, while the FBI and ATF joined the ongoing investigation with no suspects named. We’ll be following this one and will update as needed. Stay tuned. And keep your head on a swivel.

Yesterday afternoon, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered a rare nationwide ground stop across the United States due to a telecommunications outage that overloaded older air traffic control equipment. The halt lasted more than four hours before lifting at 8:15 p.m. ET, resulting in over 7,000 canceled flights and widespread travel disruptions that are continuing into the weekend.

This is the 3rd ever nationwide groundstop. The first was 9/11 and the second was an hour long stop in 2023 when the NOTAMS system went offline briefly. If you are traveling in the next few days be prepared for delays and cancellations as this mess unwinds.

In yet another WTF story, a tanker hit a cruise ship yesterday. The Atlantic Asphalt tanker appears to have lost steering before she slammed into the docked American Heritage river cruise ship in New Orleans around 12:30 p.m., just as it was starting to disembark 180 to 190 passengers and crew. Videos captured the luxury paddlewheeler capsizing and taking on water, but swift action by the U.S. Coast Guard, New Orleans Fire Department, Harbor Police, and bystanders ensured all were accounted for with no fatalities.

Mayor Helena Moreno called it “a miracle on the Mississippi,” as 32 people received treatment for minor injuries like bumps and bruises; President Trump and Governor Landry praised the responders’ quick work. The NTSB is investigating the cause of the allision. (Allision is the correct term, not collision. Allision involves a moving vessel hitting a stationary object or structure – like a moored ship – collision involves two or more moving vessels striking one another. And now, you learned something today.)

There is a sad note to pass along. No, not a celeb death or any death really. CVN-65, USS Enterprise, the world’s first nuclear aircraft carrier just finished the final leg of her journey to the breaker’s yard. The decommissioned USS Enterprise, after an 11-day tow from Virginia at under 8 miles per hour, reached the MARS recycling yard on the Mobile River. The Big E will be dismantled and recycled over the next few years — the first commercial dismantling of a nuclear supercarrier. Her eight reactors were defueled years ago; the reactor compartments are the biggest engineering challenge of the job.

She’s taking the same spot at the MARS yard that the SS United States just left on Monday.

In some better news, the Air Force’s new stealth bomber, the B21 Raider, just completed it’s first weapons release test. The execution of the test was built on thousands of hours of virtual modeling within the B-21’s digital twin environment. This allowed the B-21 Combined Test Force to accelerate weapons integration and predict and refine the weapon’s trajectory with unparalleled precision before the aircraft ever left the ground.

The project is apparently on schedule to have airframes accepted and fully operational by Q2 2027.