Today in History (August 15th):
1769: Birthdays: French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.
1771: Birthdays: Scottish novelist Walter Scott.
1859: Birthdays: Longtime Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey.
1875: Birthdays: British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.
1879: Birthdays: Actor Ethel Barrymore.
1885: Birthdays: Novelist Edna Ferber.
1898: Birthdays: Songwriter Charles Tobias (Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree).
1901: Birthdays: Composer Ned Washington.
1909: Birthdays: Bandleader Hugo Winterhalter.
1912: Birthdays: Chef Julia Child.
1914: A U.S. ship sailed from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, officially opening the Panama Canal.
1917: Birthdays: Activist Archbishop Oscar Romero.
1919: Birthdays: Actor Huntz Hall (Dead End Kids).
1923: Birthdays: Actor Rose Marie.
1924: Birthdays: Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly.
1925: Birthdays: Actor Mike Connors.
1935: Humorist Will Rogers and pilot Wiley Post were killed when their plane crashed in Alaska. Birthdays: Actor Jim Dale; Civil rights leader Vernon Jordan Jr.
1938: Birthdays: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
1944: Birthdays: Journalist Linda Ellerbee.
1945: Birthdays: Football Hall of Fame member and players’ union leader Gene Upshaw.
1946: Birthdays: Songwriter Jimmy Webb.
1947: India and Pakistan won independence from Great Britain.
1950: Birthdays: Britain’s Princess Anne.
1954: Birthdays: Swedish writer Stieg Larsson (the Millennium Trilogy).
1962: Birthdays: Chef Tom Colicchio.
1964: Birthdays: Actor Debi Mazar.
1968: Birthdays: Actor Debra Messing.
1969: The Woodstock Music and Arts Festival opened on Max Yasgur’s farm near Bethel, N.Y., drawing an estimated 400,000 people for three days of music.
1972: Birthdays: Actor Ben Affleck.
1985: South African President P.W. Botha, rejecting Western pleas to abolish apartheid, declared, I am not prepared to lead white South Africans and other minority groups on a road to abdication and suicide.
1987: More than 13.5 inches of rain drenched the Chicago area, causing more than $100 million in damage.
1989: Birthdays: Pop singer Joe Jonas.
1991: The United Nations allowed Iraq to sell up to $1.6 billion worth of oil to obtain money for food and medicine.
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1993: Pope John Paul II conducted mass for up to 400,000 people at the World Youth Day festival south of Denver.
1995: The Justice Department agreed to pay $3.1 million to white separatist Randall Weaver, whose wife and teenage son were killed by FBI sharpshooters during a standoff at his Idaho cabin three years earlier.
1998: A bomb blast in Omagh, Northern Ireland, killed 29 people and injured more than 300 others. It was the worst attack in 29 years of paramilitary violence in Ulster.
2003: Libya admitted responsibility for the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, that claimed 270 lives and agreed to pay reparations that reports say could total $2.7 billion.
2004: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez survived a referendum to oust him.
2007: An 8.0-magnitude earthquake struck 90 miles southeast of Lima, Peru, killing an estimated 500 people and injuring hundreds more. Recovery workers in China found five bodies at the site of a collapsed river bridge, raising the death toll to 34.
2008: A Gallup tracking poll indicated the two presumptive U.S. presidential nominees were tied in voter preferences. The survey said more voters appeared undecided or planning to vote for another candidate. Support for Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., dropped slightly to 44 percent, while Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., held steady at 44 percent. About two dozen Shiite Pilgrim worshippers were killed in three attacks in Iraq as they made their way toward Karbala to celebrate the birthday of ninth-century imam Muhammad al-Mahdi. Nepal elected a Maoist candidate, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, to be its next prime minister, defeating a man who held the post three times.
2009: A week after Typhoon Morakot hit Taiwan, rescue crews were unable to reach 1,300 people trapped in remote mountain villages. The death toll topped 500. Taiwan was the hardest hit of the countries in Morakot’s path where rain-soaked mountainsides gave way, taking houses with them. Days before the Afghan presidential election, a car bomb exploded outside NATO headquarters near the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, killing seven people and wounding 90. A Taliban spokesman, claiming responsibility, said the terrorists hoped to kill Americans and disrupt the voting.
2010: China’s economy moved past Japan’s in the second quarter of 2010 to become the second largest in the world, trailing only the United States.
2011: Google, the Internet search giant, agreed to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, a move that would open access to cellphone and tablet markets and provide another major competitive step against main rival Apple.
Quotes
“A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.” – John Stuart Mill, philosopher and economist (1806-1873)
“I shall persevere in spite of everything, and find my own way through it all, and swallow my tears.” – Anne Frank
“I’m a practicing heterosexual, but bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night.” – Woody Allen
“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” – Arthur Conan Doyle
“We are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land.” – Wendell Berry, farmer and author (b. 1934)
Edna Ferber (1885-1968) US writer:
“A closed mind is a dying mind.”
“A woman can look both moral and exciting… if she also looks as if it was quite a struggle.”
“Being an old maid is like death by drowning, a really delightful sensation after you cease to struggle.”
“Big doesn’t necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren’t better than violets.”
“Christmas isn’t a season. It’s a feeling.”
“I am not belittling the brave pioneer men but the sunbonnet as well as the sombrero has helped to settle this glorious land of ours.”
“Life can’t defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death.”
Vocabulary