Hello there, Headliners! Today’s birthday belongs to R&B singer Hank Ballard. Among the Headlines Du Jour of yesteryear:
- 326 – The old St. Peter’s Basilica is consecrated.
- 1210 – Pope Innocent III excommunicates Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV.
- 1302 – Pope Boniface VIII issues the Papal bull Unam sanctam (One Faith).
- 1626 – St. Peter’s Basilica is consecrated.
- 1865 – Mark Twain‘s short story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County is published in the New York Saturday Press.
- 1883 – American and Canadian railroads institute five standard continental time zones, ending the confusion of thousands of local times.
- 1926 – George Bernard Shaw refuses to accept the money for his Nobel Prize, saying, “I can forgive Alfred Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.”
- 1928 – Release of the animated short Steamboat Willie, the first fully synchronized sound cartoon, directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, featuring the third appearances of cartoon characters Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse. This is considered by the Disney corporation to be Mickey’s birthday.
- 1961 – United States President John F. Kennedy sends 18,000 military advisors to South Vietnam.
- 1963 – The first push-button telephone goes into service.
- 1978 – In Jonestown, Guyana, Jim Jones led his Peoples Temple to a mass murder-suicide that claimed 918 lives in all, 909 of them in Jonestown itself, including over 270 children. Congressman Leo J. Ryan is murdered by members of the Peoples Temple hours earlier.
- 1988 – War on Drugs: U.S. President Ronald Reagan signs a bill into law allowing the death penalty for drug traffickers.
- 2003 – In the United Kingdom, the Local Government Act 2003, repealing controversial anti-gay amendment Section 28, becomes effective.
- 2003 – The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court rules 4 to 3 in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health
that the state’s ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional and gives
the state legislature 180 days to change the law making Massachusetts
the first state in the United States to grant marriage rights to
same-sex couples.
Here is today’s Headlines Du Jour:
TODAY IN RELIGION:
IN LGBT NEWS:
FREE THE WEED!!!
GET THE FRACK OUT OF HERE:
MORE SHOOTOUTS AT THE OK CORRAL:
ANOTHER EXCITING EPISODE OF COPS GONE WILD:
ANTI-SOCIAL NETWORKS:
IN INNER SPACE:
IN OUTER SPACE:
VIDEOS DU JOUR:
Headlines Du Jour is a leisure-time activity of Not Now Silly, home of the
Steam-Powered Word-0-Matic, and your rest stop on the Information
Highway. Use our valuable bandwidth to post your news comments in
today’s open thread.
.
