THIS DAY (29TH OCTOBER) IN HISTORY 1618 > Sir Walter Raleigh, English scholar, poet and historian, is executed for treason. After the death of Queen Elizabeth, Raleighs enemies had spread rumours that he opposed the accession of King James. 1783 > Jean-Baptiste Le Rond dAlembert (66), philosopher, mathematician, dies. He co-compiled the Encyclopedia with Denis Diderot. 1897 > Joseph G. Goebbels, German Nazi Propaganda Minister, is born. He died of suicide in Hitler’s bunker. 1923 > The Republic of Turkey is proclaimed under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Turkey established secular government under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. He introduced the policy known as Kemalism, which bars any mixing of religious and public life. The country was predominantly Sunni Muslim. 1929 > The DJIA dropped 11.7%. Black Tuesday was the worst day of the market crash as panicked survivors dumped 16 million shares on the market. Clerical workers stayed up all night to find that $30 billion in paper value had been wiped out in one day. Prices collapsed amid panic selling and thousands of investors were wiped out as Americas Great Depression began. On Wall street prices plunged $14 million. By mid- November $30 billion of the $80 billion worth of stocks listed in September were been wiped out. Stocks continued to slide until 1932, but the fear caused by the crash made Americans unwilling to buy or invest and the economy slowly worsened into the Great Depression. 1945 > The first ball-point pen was sold by Gimbells department store in New York for a price of $12. It was patented 57 years earlier. 1954 > In Egypt Colonel Nasser disbands the Muslim Brotherhood. 1957 > Hand grenade explodes in Israels Knesset (Parliament). 1958 > Boris Pasternak refuses the Nobel prize for literature. Pasternaks novel “Dr. Zhivago” was on the best seller list in the west. 1958 > Dr. F. Mason Sones becomes the 1st doctor to perform a coronary angiogram. 1964 > Thieves made off with the 565-carat Star of India and the 100-carat DeLong ruby along with other gems and jewels from the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The Star and most of the other gems were recovered; three men were convicted of stealing them. 1965 > Mehdi Ben Barka, a leading opposition figure to Morocco’s King Hassan II, disappears in front of the famous Left Bank Lipp Cafe. His body has never been found. 1969 > Researchers sent the first inter-node message between two sites on ARPAnet. The first e-mail message crossed the ARPAnet as a team under Professor Leonard Kleinrock of University of California communicated with a team under Douglas Englebart at Stanford. The US Department of Defense’s Advanced Research and Projects Agency (ARPANET) launched a self-healing computer network with TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol) 1972 > Charles A. Tuller, his 2 sons and William White Graham hijacked an Eastern Airlines jet from Houston and flew to Cuba 4 days after an abortive bank robbery in Arlington. The robbery left 2 people dead in Arlington and a ticket agent dead in Houston. This was the second-to-last successful hijacking from the United States to Cuba before the signing of an anti-hijacking agreement between the two countries in February, 1973. 1979 > On the 50th anniversary of the great stock market crash, anti-nuclear protesters tried but failed to shut down the New York Stock Exchange. 1990 > The UN Security Council voted to hold Saddam Hussein’s regime liable for human rights abuses and war damages during its occupation of Kuwait. 1994 > Francisco Martin Duran of Colorado Springs, fired more than two dozen shots from a semi-automatic rifle at the White House while standing on Pennsylvania Avenue; Duran was later convicted of trying to assassinate President Clinton and was sentenced to 40 years in prison. 1995 > Palestinians burn American and Israeli flags and swear revenge for the assassination of Dr. Fathi Shakaki, the leader of the radical Islamic Jihad and a top architect of terror attacks against Israel. Shakaki was gunned down three days earlier in Malta, reportedly by Israeli intelligence. 1996 > James Edward Day, retired US postmaster general, dies. He launched the ZIP Code system. 1997 > The UN put new sanctions on the Angola UNITA rebels under Jonas Savimbi for not adhering to the 1994 Lusaka Protocol. 1997 > Anton LaVey (67), founder of the Church of Satan, dies. His daughter, Karla LaVey, and companion, Blanche Barton, promised to carry on his work. 1997 > South Africa’s Nelson Mandela arrives in Libya to bestow the Order of Good Hope on Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. 1997 > Swiss banks release findings of an additional $12.4 million in unclaimed funds from WW II. 2006 > A Nigerian ADC Airliner carrying 104 people, including the man regarded as a spiritual leader of Nigerias Sunni Muslims, Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammadu Maccido, crashed in a storm after taking off from the airport in Abuja. Most of those on board were feared dead. 9 people survived. The Nigerian pilot of the plane did not heed air traffic controllers advice to not depart in stormy weather. 2007 > In a special Internet announcement in Arabic, picked up DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources, Osama bin Laden’s followers announced the launching of Electronic Jihad. On Sunday, Nov. 11, al Qaeda’s electronic experts will start attacking Western, Jewish, Israeli, Muslim apostate and Shiite Web sites. 2008 > Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and a coalition of human-rights groups founded the Global Network Initiative to create guidelines for technology companies in internet-restricting countries. GNI was founded upon its Principles of Freedom of Expression and Privacy. 2008 > Nigerian President, Umaru YarAdua, drops 20 government ministers out of a total of 44 in a cabinet shake-up. 2009 > A US District judge in San Jose awarded Facebook $711 million in damages in an anti-spam case filed against online marketer Sanford Wallace, known as the “Spam King.” Wallace filed for bankruptcy in June. 2010 > Morocco’s communications ministry said it has suspended the operations of the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television news channel in Rabat and withdrawn the accreditations of its staff. A government official who declined to be named said the authorities took exception to the way Al-Jazeera handles the issues of Islamists and Western Sahara.
Posted on: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 20:02:17 +0000