| 1298 | An army under Albert of Austria defeats forces led by Adolf of Nassua. | |
| 1625 | The Spanish army takes Breda, Spain, after nearly a year of siege. | |
| 1644 | Oliver Cromwell crushes the Royalists at the Battle of Marston Moor. | |
| 1747 | Marshall Saxe leads the French forces to victory over an Anglo-Dutch force under the Duke of Cumberland at the Battle of Lauffeld. | |
| 1776 | The Continental Congress resolves that the American colonies "are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States." | |
| 1822 | Denmark Vesey is executed in Charleston, South Carolina, for planning a massive slave revolt. | |
| 1858 | Czar Alexander II frees the serfs working on imperial lands. | |
| 1863 | The Union left flank holds at Little Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg. | |
| 1881 | Charles J. Guiteau fatally wounds President James A. Garfield in Washington, D.C. | |
| 1926 | Congress establishes the Army Air Corps. | |
| 1937 | American aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart disappears in the Central Pacific during an attempt to fly around the world. | |
| 1961 | Novelist Ernest Hemingway commits suicide at his home in Ketchum, Idaho. | |
| 1964 | President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act into law. | |
| 1967 | The U.S. launches Operation Buffalo in Vietnam. | |
| 1976 | North and South Vietnam are officially reunified. | |
| 1980 | President Jimmy Carter reinstates draft registration for males 18 years of age. |
They never give an inch of ground that they can keep; they keep all that they can get;If they pause, it is to gain time. If they offer terms, it is to break them.
they make no concessions that can redound to their own discredit; they assume all that makes for them;
if they pause it is to gain time;
if they offer terms it is to break them: they keep no faith with enemies:
if you relax in your exertions, they persevere the more: if you make new efforts, they redouble theirs.
While they give no quarter, you [the left] stand upon mere ceremony.This is the enemy, my dithering brethren. While we speculate (discuss), they act in practical interest.
While they are cutting your throat, or putting the gag in your mouth, you talk of nothing but liberality, freedom of inquiry, and douce humanité [sweet humanity].
Their object is to destroy you, your object is to spare them—to treat them according to your own fancied dignity.
They have sense and spirit enough to take all advantages that will further their cause ...
It is the difference between the efficient and the inefficient; and this again resolves itself into the difference between a speculative proposition and a practical interest.
Wingnut Swiss politician Alexander Müller is out of a party post as well as his private job after using Twitter to call for “Kristallnacht … this time for mosques.”
The Zurich man also faces a criminal investigation and police searched his home and confiscated his computer, according to media reports and his own blog.
The prosecutor’s office said Müller, 37, admitted tweeting in response to the May acquittal on hate-speech charges of a Muslim man who said it was "Sharia-compliant” for a man to beat his wife if she refused to have sex with him, the newspaper Tages Anzeiger (Daily News) and others said. Otherwise, Aziz Osmanoglu had said, the man might be unfaithful.
Cognitive
skills such as learning and memory diminish with age in everyone, and
the drop-off is steepest in Alzheimer’s disease. 
JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)’s decision to let Chief Investment Officer Ina Drew retire four days after the bank disclosed a $2 billion loss in her division allowed her to walk away with about $21.5 million in stock and options.
Drew, who resigned May 14, can keep $17.1 million in unvested restricted shares and about $4.4 million in options that she otherwise would have been required to forfeit if the New York-based bank had terminated her employment “with cause,” according to regulatory filings and estimates from consulting firm Meridian Compensation Partners LLC.
A 30-year JPMorgan veteran, Drew also had accumulated 661,000 unrestricted shares of common stock worth about $23.7 million based on the May 14 closing price, $9.7 million in deferred compensation and $2.6 million in pension pay as of Dec. 31, according to company filings. Altogether, Drew’s stock, pension and deferred pay come to about $57.5 million.
Hello,
Neatoramanauts! Howyadoin'? If you answer "busy" or better yet,
"craaazy busy" then welcome to modern life. You're
not alone. Most of Americans in the 21st century live in the perpetual
state of "busy"-ness.
,
is actually trap.It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.”
Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.
Scientists
have worked out the physics formula for the perfect soccer kick. Forget
Beckham, Bend it like Newton:University of Leicester physics students have published a paper which sets out the optimum way of kicking a football (soccer ball) in order to make it bend into the goal.
The ex-England captain's curling free-kicks became legendary, and even inspired the title of the 2002 film Bend It Like Beckham.
Now, four master's students at the University of Leicester's Department of Physics and Astronomy believe they have discovered a formula to explain how the football curves when a player puts spin on it.
France pulls the plug on the Minitel this weekend, a home-grown precursor of the Internet which brought on-line banking, travel reservations and even sex chats to millions a decade before the World Wide Web.
In a country where resistance to all things “Anglo-Saxon” runs deep, the Minitel evokes both pride at French technological prowess and regret that the country failed to capitalize on the commercial online network, launched in 1982.
By its peak in the late 1990s, some 25 million people in France were using Minitel’s 26,000 services, ranging from checking the weather to buying clothes and booking train tickets.
The Alpina Gstaad, the newest luxury hotel to open in this Swiss Alpine village in 100 years, will feature a Six Senses Spa.
Everyone
knows that, tall and tan and young and lovely, the girl from Ipanema goes
walking. But did you know the actual Girl from Ipanema that inspired the
Bossa
Nova hit
?"It's the oldest story in the world," says Norman Gimbel, who wrote the English lyrics. "The beautiful girl goes by, and men pop out of manholes and fall out of trees and are whistling and going nuts, and she just keeps going by. That's universal."
So reasoned composer Antônio Carlos Jobim and poet Vinícius de Moraes five decades ago. Stalled on a number for a musical called "Blimp," they sought inspiration at the Veloso, a seaside cafe in the Ipanema neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. There they remembered a local teenager, the 5-foot-8-inch, dark-haired, green-eyed Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto, whom they often saw walking to the beach or entering the bar to buy cigarettes for her mother. And so they penned a paean to a vision.
