On this day

721 B.C.E. - The first ever recorded solar eclipse was seen from Babylon.

1702 - Anne Stuart, sister of Mary, succeeded to the throne of England, Scotland and Ireland on the death of William III of Orange.

1831 - The first bank robbery in America was reported, at The City Bank of New York City, which lost $245,000 in the heist.

1915 – Pluto is photographed for the first time but is not recognized as a planet.

1931 - Nevada legalized gambling in an attempt to lift the state out of the hard times of the Great Depression.

1932 – The Sydney Harbour Bridge is opened - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sydney...r_Quay.jpg

1982 - A group of Argentines landed at the British colony of the Falkland Islands and planted their nation's flag. The provocation led to war between Britain and Argentina.

2002 – Zimbabwe is suspended from the Commonwealth on charges of human rights abuses and of electoral fraud, following a turbulent presidential election.

2003 – United States President George W. Bush orders the start of war against Iraq.

2008 – GRB 080319B: A cosmic burst that is the farthest object visible to the naked eye is briefly observed.

(19-03-2011 12:45 )skully Wrote:  1915 – Pluto is photographed for the first time but is not recognized as a planet.

Now its not recognized as a planet because its too small.

(19-03-2011 12:45 )skully Wrote:  1931 - Nevada legalized gambling in an attempt to lift the state out of the hard times of the Great Depression.

Nevada is one of the few US states that does not have a local income tax. In fact, it was a condition of legalising gambling that state income tax would be prohibited by law as long as gambling is legal (imagine that - income tax made illegal!!).

If travelling overland it's easy to tell when you've reached Nevada because as soon as you cross the state line you'll find gambling anywhere and everywhere, and crossing from Utah at daybreak is a remarkable sight as after several hours of featureless desert you suddenly come across the neon lights of small casino towns.

For the first few decades Reno was the main centre of gambling, helped as well by Nevada's liberal rules on marriage and divorce, but since the 1980's Las Vegas has swept past it to become the gambling capital of the world. In 1950 the population of Las Vegas was only 24,000, growing by 1980 to 164,000 and today an astonishing 583,000 (compared to Reno's 230,000).

Over 40 million people visit Nevada each year to gamble, but if you do visit, make sure you don't fall foul of some strange laws which have never been repealed....(and these are all true).....


* In Reno benches may not be placed in the middle of the street.
* It is illegal to have a "house of ill fame" within 400 yards of a church or school.
* It is illegal to drive a camel down the highway.
* In Las Vegas it is illegal to pawn your own dentures.
* It is illegal to conceal a spray-painted shopping cart in your basement.
* In Nyala, a man is forbodden from buying drinks for more than three people other than himself at any one period during the day.
* In Reno, it is illegal to lie down on the sidewalk.
* In Elko, everyone walking the streets is required to wear a mask.
* Back in the old days, a man caught beating his wife was tied to a stake for eight hours a day with a sign that read 'Wife Beater' fastened to his chest.

1413 - King Henry IV of England died. It partly fulfilled a prophecy saying that he would die in Jerusalem, as he died in Westminster Abbey's Jerusalem Chamber.

1602 - The Dutch government founded the Dutch East India Company.

1616 – Sir Walter Raleigh is freed from the Tower of London after 13 years of imprisonment.

1815 - Napoleon Bonaparte entered Paris, returning from his exile on the island of Elba, and began his 100-day rule which ended disastrously.

1899 - Martha M. Place of Brooklyn, New York, became the first woman to be executed in the electric chair, she had murdered her stepdaughter.

1916 – Albert Einstein publishes his general theory of relativity.

1966 - The football World Cup (Jules Rimet trophy) was stolen whilst being exhibited at Central Hall in London.

1995 - A terrorist group released nerve gas on the Japanese underground subway system, resulting in the death of 12 people and the illness of 5,500 others.

1999 - British balloonist Brian Jones and Swiss physicist Bertrand Piccard became the first to fly a hot-air balloon non-stop around the world.

2003 - Prime Minister Tony Blair made a live televised address and confirmed that British troops were in action in Iraq. American missiles hit Baghdad at 5:35 a.m. signalling the start of the US led campaign to topple Saddam Hussein.

1556 - England's first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, was burnt at the stake as a heretic under the Catholic Queen Mary I.

1945 - British warplanes destroyed Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen, killing over 70 Nazis. The raid also killed civilians, including 86 schoolchildren, in Denmark's worst civilian disaster of the war.

1963 - The Alcatraz federal prison island in San Francisco Bay was emptied of its last inmates at the order of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

1965 – Ranger program: NASA launches Ranger 9 which is the last in a series of unmanned lunar space probes.

1969 - John Lennon and new wife Yoko Ono staged their 'Beds in Peace' at the Amsterdam Hilton.

1996 - British beef imports were banned in Europe.

1765 - The British Parliament passed the Stamp Act, which introduced a tax to be levied directly on its American colonies.

1888 - The English Football League was founded when 12 clubs met at a hotel in Fleet Street, London.

1935 - Persia was renamed Iran.

1942 - The BBC began broadcasting in Morse code to the French Resistance.

1945 – The Arab League is founded when a charter is adopted in Cairo, Egypt.

1960 - The first laser was patented by Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes.

1995 – Cosmonaut Valeriy Polyakov returns after setting a record for 438 days in space.

1997 - Comet Hale-Bopp made its closest approach to Earth in the skies over the northern hemisphere. The comet’s next pass is predicted for the year 4397.

1708 – James Francis Edward Stuart lands at the Firth of Forth.

1831 - London's first tramcars begin operating. They had been designed by a Mr Train from New York.

1903 – The Wright Brothers apply for a patent on their invention of one of the first successful airplanes.

1909 - British Lt. Ernest Shackleton found the magnetic South Pole.

1919 - Benito Mussolini founded his Fascist political movement in Italy. The name Fasci di Combattimento, came from the Italian peasant revolutionaries, or Fighting Bands, from the 19th century.

1956 - Pakistan became an independent republic within the British Commonwealth.

1966 - The first official meeting between the Catholic and Anglican churches for 400 years took place when Pope Paul VI and Dr Ramsey, the Archbishop of Canterbury met in Rome.

2001 – The Russian Mir space station is disposed of, breaking up in the atmosphere before falling into the southern Pacific Ocean near Fiji.

1603 - After a 44 year rule, Queen Elizabeth I of England died. The English and Scottish crowns were then united when James VI of Scotland became King James 1st of England.

1882 – Robert Koch announces the discovery of mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium responsible for tuberculosis.

1944 – World War II: In an event later dramatized in the movie The Great Escape, 76 prisoners begin breaking out of Stalag Luft III.

1958 - Elvis Presley was inducted into the U.S. Army.

1965 – NASA spacecraft Ranger 9, brings images of the Moon into ordinary homes before crash landing.

1981 - The 'Great Train Robber' Ronnie Biggs was rescued by Barbados police following his kidnapping.

1993 – Discovery of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9.

1999 - NATO launched airstrikes against Yugoslavia, marking the first time in its 50-year existence that it had ever attacked a sovereign country. The NATO offensive came in response to a new wave of ethnic cleansing launched by Serbian forces against the Kosovar Albanians.

2001 – Apple Inc. releases the first version of the Mac OS X operating system .

(24-03-2011 11:43 )skully Wrote:  1944 – World War II: In an event later dramatized in the movie The Great Escape, 76 prisoners begin breaking out of Stalag Luft III.

Although Hollywood somewhat sensationalised some of the events at Stalag Luft III, it did a more than reasonable job of portraying what a phenomenal project the escape had been. The "Carry On" actor Peter Butterworth was an inmate there, as was fellow actor Rupert Davies who went on to play "Maigret" on TV and future Cabinet Minister Peter Thomas.

The Germans took a full inventory after the escape, and could not believe the scale of the operation. 4,000 bed boards had gone missing, as well as the complete disappearance of 90 double bunk beds, 635 mattresses, 192 bed covers, 161 pillow cases, 52 20-man tables, 10 single tables, 34 chairs, 76 benches, 1,212 bed bolsters, 1,370 beading battens, 1219 knives, 478 spoons, 582 forks, 69 lamps, 246 water cans, 30 shovels, 1,000 feet (300 m) of electric wire, 600 feet (180 m) of rope, and 3424 towels. 1,700 blankets had been used, along with more than 1,400 Klim cans. The electric cable had been stolen after being left unattended by German workers; as they had not reported the theft, they were executed by the Gestapo. From then on each bed was supplied with only nine bed boards which were counted regularly by the guards.

Of the 76 men who escaped, only three made it to freedom (two Norwegians and a Dutchman). One of the main unforeseen problems was that the weather was the worst at that time of year for 30 years. The snow was up to five feet deep in the fields meaning that many of the men had no alternative but to break cover and travel on the roads where they were easily picked up. Of the 73 recaptured, seventeen were returned to the camp, six sent elsewhere and 50 executed, although they were shot in ones or twos, not in a mass execution as portrayed in the film.

Hitler originally wanted all the escapees to be shot, along with the Commandant, von Lindeiner, and all the guards on duty on the night. He was partly talked out of it, by among others Bormann and Keital, as they knew the war had turned against Germany and war crimes tribunals would be on the agenda when it was over, but the order to excute 50 of the captured POWs came directly from Hitler.

After the war, many of the Gestapo officers responsible for the executions were themselves sentenced to death but strangley Arthur Nebe, the man who was belived to have selected which of the POWs would be shot, took part in the 1944 failed plot against Hitler and as a result he was hanged by the Nazis.

The Commandant spent just two years in a British prison. Many prisioners testified that von Lindener had followed all the requirements of the Geneva Convention and had treated the inmates with as much decency and respect as he could in the circumstances. He was released in 1947 and died of natural causes in 1963 at the age of 82.

1306 - Robert the Bruce (eighth Earl of Carrick) was crowned King of Scotland at Scone Palace near Perth.

1655 – Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is discovered by Christiaan Huygens.

1807 - The Slave Trade Act received the royal assent, eventually bringing an end to the slave trade. British merchants transported nearly three million black Africans across the Atlantic between 1700 and the early 19th century.

1957 – The European Economic Community is established (West Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg).

1992 – Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev returns to Earth after a 10-month stay aboard the Mir space station.