| 858 | Benedict III ends his reign as Catholic Pope. | |
| 1492 | Christopher Columbus signs a contract with Spain to find a western route to the Indies. | |
| 1524 | Present-day New York Harbor is discovered by Giovanni da Verrazzano. | |
| 1535 | Antonio Mendoza is appointed first viceroy of New Spain. | |
| 1758 | Frances Williams, the first African-American to graduate from a college in the western hemisphere, publishes a collection of Latin poems. | |
| 1808 | Bayonne Decree by Napoleon Bonaparte of France orders seizure of U.S. ships. | |
| 1824 | Russia abandons all North American claims south of 54′ 40′. | |
| 1861 | Virginia becomes the eighth state to secede from the Union. | |
| 1864 | General Ulysses Grant bans the trading of prisoners. | |
| 1865 | Mary Surratt is arrested as a conspirator in the Lincoln assassination. | |
| 1875 | The game “snooker” is invented by Sir Neville Chamberlain. | |
| 1895 | China and Japan sign peace treaty of Shimonoseki. | |
| 1929 | Baseball player Babe Ruth and Claire Hodgson, a former member of the Ziegfeld Follies, get married. | |
| 1946 | The last French troops leave Syria. | |
| 1947 | Jackie Robinson bunts for his first major league hit. | |
| 1961 | Some 1,400 Cuban exiles attack the Bay of Pigs in an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. | |
| 1964 | Jerrie Mock becomes first woman to fly solo around the world. | |
| 1969 | Sirhan Sirhan is convicted of assassinating Senator Robert F. Kennedy. | |
| 1970 | Apollo 13–originally scheduled to land on the moon–lands back safely on Earth after an accident. | |
| 1975 | Khmer Rouge forces capture the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh. | |
| 1983 | In Warsaw, police rout 1,000 Solidarity supporters. |
Remember General Smedley Butler's assertion that "War is a racket" well ...A tank collector in the United Kingdom was in for a surprise when he and his mechanic opened one of his tank's diesel fuel tanks. Inside were gold bars totaling approximately $2.4 million dollars...
Mead found the tank, an ex-Iraqi Army Type 69, on sale on eBay and traded it for an Abbot self-propelled howitzer and a British Army truck...
The gold is thought to be Kuwaiti in origin—Iraqi forces engaged in widescale looting of the country after the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
People, especially the younger generations, don't write in cursive anymore (cursive handwriting isn't even being taught in some schools). That much is known.Sassoon’s analysis of how we’re taught to hold pens makes a much stronger case for the role of the ballpoint in the decline of cursive. She explains that the type of pen grip taught in contemporary grade school is the same grip that’s been used for generations, long before everyone wrote with ballpoints. However, writing with ballpoints and other modern pens requires that they be placed at a greater, more upright angle to the paper—a position that’s generally uncomfortable with a traditional pen hold. Even before computer keyboards turned so many people into carpal-tunnel sufferers, the ballpoint pen was already straining hands and wrists.Read more over at this article by Josh Giesbrecht at The Atlantic.
“Iroh has turned out to be a valuable member of the Avondale Police family,” according to a Facebook post on Feb. 15. “His skill set is so extensive that we have cross trained him in many areas.”This week, Iroh was promoted from mascot to police officer. Get the whole story of Iroh and the cops who love him at AZ Family.
