| 363 | Roman Emperor Julian dies, ending the Pagan Revival. | |
| 1743 | English King George defeats the French at Dettingen, Bavaria. | |
| 1833 | Prudence Crandall, a white woman, is arrested for conducting an academy for black women in Canterbury, Conn. | |
| 1862 | Confederates break through the Union lines at the Battle of Gaines' Mill–the third engagement of the Seven Days' campaign. | |
| 1864 | General Sherman is repulsed by Confederates at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. | |
| 1871 | The yen becomes the new form of currency in Japan. | |
| 1905 | The crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin mutinies. | |
| 1918 | Two German pilots are saved by parachutes for the first time. | |
| 1923 | Yugoslav Premier Nikola Pachitch is wounded by Serb attackers in Belgrade. | |
| 1924 | Democrats offer Mrs. Leroy Springs the vice presidential nomination, the first woman considered for the job. | |
| 1927 | The U.S. Marines adopt the English bulldog as their mascot. | |
| 1929 | Scientists at Bell Laboratories in New York reveal a system for transmitting television pictures. | |
| 1942 | The Allied convoy PQ-17 leaves Iceland for Murmansk and Archangel. | |
| 1944 | Allied forces capture the port city of Cherbourg, France. | |
| 1950 | The UN Security Council calls on members for troops to aid South Korea. | |
| 1963 | Henry Cabot Lodge is appointed U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam. | |
| 1973 | President Richard Nixon vetoes a Senate ban on the Cambodia bombing. | |
| 1985 | The U.S. House of Representatives votes to limit the use of combat troops in Nicaragua. |
... if you can avoid it
... the defendants in the case – Dominick Carollo, Steven Goldberg and Peter Grimm – worked for GE Capital, the finance arm of General Electric. along with virtually every major bank and finance company on wall street – not just GE, but J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Wachovia and more – these three wall street wiseguys spent the past decade taking part in a breathtakingly broad scheme to skim billions of dollars from the coffers of cities and small towns across America. The banks achieved this gigantic rip-off by secretly colluding to rig the public bids on municipal bonds, a business worth $3.7 trillion. by conspiring to lower the interest rates that towns earn on these investments, the banks systematically stole from schools, hospitals, libraries and nursing homes – from "virtually every state, district and territory in the united states," according to one settlement. And they did it so cleverly that the victims never even knew they were being cheated. no thumbs were broken, and nobody ended up in a landfill in New Jersey, but money disappeared, lots and lots of it, and its manner of disappearance had a familiar name: organized crime.- More
The Supreme Court today struck down most of Arizona's controversial law aimed at cracking down on illegal immigrants.The parts of the law that were reversed are those that:
The court left standing only the "check your papers" part of the law that requires state and local police to perform roadside immigration checks of people they've stopped or detained if a "reasonable suspicion" exists that they are in the country illegally.
The court indicated, however, that even that section could face further legal challenges.
Make it a state crime for illegal immigrants not to possess their federal registration cards;Justice Kagan did not take part in the ruling.
Make it a crime for illegal imigrants to work, apply for work or solicit work;
Allow state and local police to arrest illegal immigrants without a warrant when probable cause exists that they committed "any public offense that makes the person removable from the United States."
Rather than focusing on the law's potential to create racial discrimination, the U.S. government challenged the law in court based on the concept of federal supremacy. Immigration regulation, the federal government argued, should be in the hands of the federal government, not the states.More as it develops. Get ready.
According to the National Journal’s Influence Alley, at the very same time the American Health Insurance Plans (AHIP)—the health insurance industry super lobby—was cutting a deal with the White House leading to its stated support of the proposed Obamacare legislation, they were secretly funneling huge amounts money to the Chamber of Commerce to be spent on advertising designed to convince the public that the legislation should be defeated.The brilliant Rahm Emanuel sure did a great job of bargaining, didn't he? If there is a next time with health care reform, he needs to stay far away from it and the public option has to be there so that consumers get some competition. If that industry can't show any appreciation, there's no reason to show mercy in the future.
How much money?
A stunning $102.4 million spent over just 15 months.
For most Europeans, almost nothing is more prized than their four to six weeks of guaranteed annual vacation leave. But it was not clear just how sacrosanct that time off was until Thursday, when Europe’s highest court ruled that workers who happened to get sick on vacation were legally entitled to take another vacation.
“The purpose of entitlement to paid annual leave is to enable the worker to rest and enjoy a period of relaxation and leisure,” the Court of Justice of the European Union, based in Luxembourg, ruled in a case involving department store workers in Spain. “The purpose of entitlement to sick leave is different, since it enables a worker to recover from an illness that has caused him to be unfit for work.”
During my yearly physical examination, my doctor asked me about my physical activity level.
One couple's losses and hard lessons
You
know what they say -don’t complain about getting old because it beats
NOT getting old! But there are some advantages. While some mental
capabilities diminish, others get better. And the wisdom of age comes in
handy in social situations.For a 2010 study, researchers at the University of Michigan presented “Dear Abby” letters to 200 people and asked what advice they would give. Subjects in their 60s were better than younger ones at imagining different points of view, thinking of multiple resolutions and suggesting compromises.And what’s even better, people over 50 tend to be happier. Read a roundup of recent research on aging at Smithsonian.
It turns out that managing emotions is a skill in itself, one that takes many of us decades to master.
He found in a box of random parts, hidden inside anther lens this gem. A circa 1908 ( possibly earlier) 35mm lens. Still functioning, mostly brass, and not nearly as much dust or fungus as one would think after sitting in a box for over a hundred years. This lens is a piece of motion picture history, and at this point rare beyond words. So i say to him, "Wow... what do you have in mind?" he smiles, and says, ( in the thickest russian accent you can imagine) " i can make this fit EF you know..." my eye twinkled, and then 6 nail biting hours later,he had it finished. My Russian Lens technician is a mad scientist and he took what sounded like an angle grinder to the lens to make its clear the flange distance and the mirror....... This lens' value is unclear. its sort of on loan. It's the only lens of its kind on a 5D... or any digital for that matter.
Sir Paul on Arctic: 'Let it be'
'Magnetic emulsions' clean up oil
Clipperton
Island is an abandoned atoll in the Pacific Ocean, 1,000 kilometers
from the coast of Mexico. Its history is one of being passed from nation
to nation as its value was explored and judged inadequate. Around 1910,
Mexico sent 13 soldiers to guard the island. They were joined by their
wives and some servants, and soon children were born. Another island
resident was a reclusive lighthouse keeper named Victoriano Álvarez.
Then in 1914, supply ships stopped coming. Malnutrition set in, and the
men were the first to die. After an escape attempt cost three men their
lives, only two soldiers remained, along with the women and children.
And the lighthouse keeper.Just then, Álvarez the hitherto-unassuming lighthouse-keeper abruptly arrived at the destroyed settlement, collected the weapons, and threw them into the deep waters of the lagoon. Saving one rifle for himself, he announced to the women and children that he was now the king of the island. With that, he began a campaign of enslaving the women for whatever purposes he desired. One mother-daughter pair who refused to obey him were raped and shot to death. The rest were given regular beatings at the minimum.Two years later, in 1917, an American ship found the survivors: three women and eight malnourished children. They were taken to Mexico to be reunited with relatives who had given up all hope. The survivors told the story of what happened on the island, but the crew of the rescue ship kept the details secret for seventeen years, lest the women face legal consequences. But you can read the whole thing at Damn Interesting.
Although most mtDNA lineages observed in contemporary Icelanders can be traced to neighboring populations in the British Isles and Scandinavia, one may have a more distant origin. This lineage belongs to haplogroup C1, one of a handful that was involved in the settlement of the Americas around 14,000 years ago. Contrary to an initial assumption that this lineage was a recent arrival, preliminary genealogical analyses revealed that the C1 lineage was present in the Icelandic mtDNA pool at least 300 years ago. This raised the intriguing possibility that the Icelandic C1 lineage could be traced to Viking voyages to the Americas that commenced in the 10th century...
If the Greenland and ancient European hypotheses are rejected, what we have is a woman who entered the Icelandic society from an extinct lineage of Native Americans, probably from the northeast (or perhaps her Greenland Norse mother was of this line). What the Norse would have termed Markland. It is tempting to point to the Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. Perhaps the Europeans had enslaved a native woman, and taken her back to their homeland when they decamped? But more likely to me is the probability that the Norse brought back more than lumber from Markland, since their voyages spanned centuries.
Finally, does this explain Björk? I doubt it...
The treasure was inside a large block of clay. It contains 30,000 to 50,000 silver and gold Celtic coins dating from the 1st Century BC. The coins—which could have been buried to prevent Roman troops from getting them during Julius Caesar’s invasion of the British Islands—come from Armorica. They have been buried for more than 2,000 years. According to numismatic experts, each coin is worth 100 to 200 British Pounds ($156 to $311).The treasure is now on display at the Jersey Heritage Museum, where the curator will surely use it to fill a kiddie pool and dive in like Scrooge McDuck!
The team of NASA and university scientists using laser light from LRO’s laser altimeter examined the floor of Shackleton crater. They found the crater’s floor is brighter than those of other nearby craters, which is consistent with the presence of small amounts of ice. … The spacecraft mapped Shackleton crater with unprecedented detail, using a laser to illuminate the crater’s interior and measure its albedo or natural reflectance. The laser light measures to a depth comparable to its wavelength, or about a micron. That represents a millionth of a meter, or less than one ten-thousandth of an inch. The team also used the instrument to map the relief of the crater’s terrain based on the time it took for laser light to bounce back from the moon’s surface. The longer it took, the lower the terrain’s elevation. … The crater, named after the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, is two miles deep and more than 12 miles wide. Like several craters at the moon’s south pole, the small tilt of the lunar spin axis means Shackleton crater’s interior is permanently dark and therefore extremely cold.
In a jam: Are British strawberries under threat?
Scotland's protected pearl mussels stolen
DNA could hold key to the Queen of Sheba mystery
