On January 30 1972, British troops shoot unarmed protesters in Northern Ireland, killing 13 civilians. It was to be known as the Bogside Massacre.
Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland (1972)
Wednesday 10 May 2017
Armstrong Sets Foot on the Moon (1969)
On July 21 1969, Neil Armstrong takes the first steps on the moon. As he put his left foot down first Armstrong declared: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.".
The Six-Day War Begins (1967)
Also known as the War of 1967, this war was fought between Israeli and the Arab Forces across large areas across the Middle-East. Tension between Israel and her Arab neighbours had been growing for several months. Egypt, known as the United Arab Republic at the time, Jordan and Syria were all involved in the conflict. By the end of the war Israel had taken control of the Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula (from Egypt), West Bank and Eastern Jerusalem (from Jordan) and the Golan Heights from Syria.
Donald Campbell Dies in Bluebird Crash (1967)
On 4th January 1967, Campbell was killed whilst attempting to set another water speed record in his 'Bluebird K7'. He had already set seven water speed records between 1955 and 1964 with speed increases from 216mph to 276.33mph. The accident happened on Coniston Water, Lancashire, England. The Bluebird surpassed 320mph but as she did so she gradually lifted from the water before somersaulting out of control. Campbell was killed instantly.
Coal Tip Buries Hundreds of Children in Aberfan (1966)
A colliery spoil heap collapses onto a school and homes in Aberfan, South Wales, killing 116 children and 28 adults.
Cold War 1990 China releases Tiananmen Square prisoners
The government of the People’s Republic of China announces that it is releasing 211 people arrested during the massive protests held in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in June 1989. Most observers viewed the prisoner release as an attempt by the communist government of China to dispel much of the terrible publicity it received for its brutal suppression of the 1989 protests.
In early 1989, peaceful protests (largely composed of students) were held in a number of Chinese cities, calling for greater democracy and less governmental control of the economy. In April, thousands of students marched through Beijing. By May, the number of protesters had grown to nearly 1 million. On June 3, the government responded with troops sent in to crush the protests. In the ensuing violence, thousands of protesters were killed and an unknown number were arrested. The brutal Chinese government crackdown shocked the world. In the United States, calls went up for economic sanctions against China to punish the dramatic human rights violations. The U.S. government responded by temporarily suspending arms sales to China.
Nearly one year later, on May 10, 1990, the Chinese government announced that it was releasing 211 people arrested during the Tiananmen Square crackdown. A brief government statement simply indicated, “Lawbreakers involved in the turmoil and counterrevolutionary rebellion last year have been given lenient treatment and released upon completion of investigations.” The statement also declared that over 400 other “law-breakers” were still being investigated while being held in custody. Western observers greeted the news with cautious optimism. In the United States, where the administration of President George Bush was considering the extension of most-favored-nation status to China, the release of the prisoners was hailed as a step in the right direction.
Berlin Wall Erected (1961)
Remembering the 1988 Lockerbie Bombing
On December 21, 1988, a suitcase bomb exploded aboard New York-bound Pan Am Flight 103, killing all 259 passengers and crewmembers, along with 11 people on the ground in Lockerbie, Scotland. Only one suspect, a Libyan intelligence agent, was ever convicted in connection with the attack, and much mystery still surrounds it.
Tensions between Libya and the United States had been mounting for years when, in March 1986, the two sides fired on each other in disputed waters off the Libyan coast. The following month, a bomb went off in a West Berlin disco popular with American servicemen, killing two U.S. soldiers and a Turkish woman and injuring more than 200 others. Having intercepted communications that purportedly implicated Libya’s government in the attack, the United States responded with air strikes. “We believe that this preemptive action … will not only diminish [Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi’s] capacity to export terror, it will provide him with incentives and reasons to alter his criminal behavior,” U.S. President Ronald Reagan said at the time.
Qaddafi, however, had not been scared into submission, prosecutors would later indicate. Instead, his agents in Malta allegedly concocted a bomb made of Semtex, a plastic explosive, and hid it inside a radio-cassette player. They then placed it in a suitcase and sent it unaccompanied on a December 21, 1988, flight to Frankfurt. From there, according to prosecutors, it went to London on the first leg of Pan Am Flight 103. At 6:25 p.m., a Pan Am Boeing 747 took off from London’s Heathrow Airport on the second leg of the journey to New York City. Just minutes after the plane off at 31,000 feet, the bomb detonated near the left wing. Power went out instantly and the plane began breaking apart, sending the crewmembers and passengers, including 35 Syracuse University students returning from a semester abroad, plummeting toward Earth. None survived.
Meanwhile, down below in the small town of Lockerbie, Scotland, residents found themselves directly in the path of falling plane debris. When the fuel-laden wings and a section of the main body crashed into one house, the subsequent explosion created a 155-foot-long crater and sent a fireball shooting up into the sky. One policeman reportedly compared it to the mushroom cloud from a miniature atomic bomb. The couple that owned the house died, as did nine neighbors ranging in age from 10 to 82. Homes up to 75 yards away lost their roofs, and those even further from the blast had their doors and windows shattered. Pieces of the plane came down elsewhere in Lockerbie as well, causing dozens of fires to break out.
Of the 270 victims that day, 189 were American. Their families soon began clamoring for answers, and some even testified before Congress. In May 1990, a presidential commission declared in a scathing report that the U.S. civil aviation security system was “seriously flawed” and had “failed to provide the proper level of protection for the traveling public.” This became obvious a few days later, when the father of a British victim successfully snuck a fake radio-cassette player bomb onto a flight from London to New York and then onto a second flight from New York to Boston. In an attempt to remedy these safety concerns, Congress passed a bill in October 1990 that, among other things, established training standards for airport security personnel and guidelines for notifying passengers of credible terrorist threats. President George H.W. Bush called it a “living memorial to those whose lives were so cruelly cut short.”
Much of the blame for the incident fell on Pan Am, which faced numerous lawsuits and a federal fine of $630,000 for violating security rules. It declared bankruptcy in early 1991 and ceased operating by the end of the year. Around the same time, U.S. and Scottish prosecutors charged Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah—both alleged Libyan intelligence agents—with executing the attack. Though Qaddafi at first refused to turn them over, a deal was eventually worked out in which they went on trial in the Netherlands under Scottish law. Only Megrahi was found guilty. He remained incarcerated from 2001 until 2009, when the Scottish authorities, believing he would die within a few months of prostate cancer, released him on compassionate grounds. Proclaiming his innocence to the end, Megrahi finally succumbed to the disease in May 2012.
As for Qaddafi, his regime accepted responsibility—but not guilt—for the attack in 2003 and agreed to pay $10 million to the family of each victim. (Due to a missed deadline, this was later reduced to $8 million.) In return, sanctions were dropped, and the United States restored full diplomatic relations. Just before Qaddafi’s death in 2011, his former justice minister told a Swedish newspaper that the Libyan leader had personally ordered the Lockerbie bombing. Yet even if true, certain facts remain unknown. Some investigators, for instance, reportedly believe that Iran played a role in retaliation for a July 1988 incident in which a U.S. warship mistakenly downed an Iran Air plane with 290 passengers aboard.
The Mysterious Disappearance of L’Oiseau Blanc
On May 8, 1927, French pilots Charles Nungesser and François Coli took off from Paris in a biplane named L'Oiseau Blanc, or the White Bird. The World War I veterans were aiming to become the first aviators to make a nonstop transatlantic flight to New York, but after last being spotted over Ireland, their plane vanished without a trace. Just two weeks later, Charles Lindbergh successfully crossed the Atlantic in a monoplane called the Spirit of St. Louis. He would go on to worldwide fame, but the fate of the men who nearly beat him to the honor remains a mystery to this day.
On the night of May 21, 1927, aviator Charles Lindbergh touched down at France’s Le Bourget Field, having completed history’s first nonstop flight between New York and Paris. Upon exiting the Spirit of St. Louis, the 25-year-old American was mobbed by a crowd of 150,000 people who hoisted him on their shoulders in celebration. He spent the next several days as the toast of Paris, yet for many French citizens, his triumph was bittersweet. Just two weeks before Lindbergh conquered the Atlantic, a pair of French pilots named Charles Nungesser and François Coli had vanished while trying to accomplish the same feat in the opposite direction. They had yet to be officially declared dead, but with each passing day, their chances of survival were dwindling. The delicateness of the situation was not lost on Lindbergh, who arranged a visit with Nungesser’s mother shortly after arriving in Paris. “You are a very brave young man,” she told him during the meeting. “I, too, have a brave son, who I have never ceased to believe is still fighting his way back to civilization.”
Charles Lindbergh’s 3,600-mile flight vaulted him to international fame, but it’s often forgotten that he was only one of more than a dozen pilots and navigators who were competing for the same honor. The great air race had kicked off in 1919, when a French-American hotel mogul named Raymond Orteig offered a $25,000 reward to the first aviator to make a nonstop flight between New York and Paris. British pilots John Alcock and Arthur Brown made a nonstop transatlantic flight from Newfoundland to Ireland that same year, but Orteig’s bounty remained unclaimed until the mid-1920s, when several different teams stepped up to the challenge.
The major competitors for the Orteig Prize were a veritable who’s who of early aviation. They included René Fonck, a celebrated fighter pilot who had been the Allies’ “aces of aces” during World War I, and Richard E. Byrd, an American who had won the Medal of Honor for flying a plane over the North Pole. Perhaps the most flamboyant contenders were Charles Nungesser and François Coli, a pair of Frenchmen who planned to make the crossing in a two-seater Levasseur PL.8 named L’Oiseau Blanc, or the White Bird. Nungesser had lived a swashbuckling life that included stints as a gaucho in Argentina and a Hollywood stunt pilot. Coli, meanwhile, had achieved several endurance flying records over the Mediterranean. Both men had also served as French fighter pilots during World War I, and they had the scars to prove it. Coli wore an eyepatch as a result of a crash that had left him partially blind, and Nungesser had survived 17 war wounds and endured so many surgeries that the New York Times described him as “part platinum.”
Unlike most of the Orteig Prize challengers, the French duo planned to begin their crossing in Paris and end in New York. With Nungesser serving as pilot and Coli as navigator, they would fly their open cockpit biplane over England, Ireland and the Atlantic before buzzing Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. They would then finish in grand style by making a water landing in New York near the Statue of Liberty or Battery Park. The white-painted L’Oiseau Blanc had been modified to carry over 1,000 gallons of fuel—enough for over 40 hours in the air—and it was outfitted with a watertight bottom and detachable landing gear that would allow the pilots to cut down on weight. As a good luck charm, Nungesser had the plane emblazoned with his World War I flying emblem: a black heart with a skull and crossbones.
Early on May 8, 1927, Nungesser and Coli climbed into the cockpit of L’Oiseau Blanc at Paris’s Le Bourget Field. The threat of foul weather in the Atlantic had deterred Lindbergh and some of the other Orteig competitors from taking off so early in the month, but the French daredevils were willing to gamble in the hope of winning the race. Nungesser got a last-minute injection of caffeine to ensure he was perked up for takeoff, and Coli received a tearful goodbye kiss from his wife. At 5:17 a.m., as a sea of spectators looked on, L’Oiseau Blanc chugged down the runway and took to the sky. “The crowd stood spellbound, hats in hands, as the beautiful machine disappeared into the mists of early day,” the New York Times wrote.
After jettisoning their landing gear, Nungesser and Coli sped west to the French coast and crossed the English Channel. They were last sighted over southern Ireland around 10:30 a.m., at which point they flew off into the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. L’Oiseau Blanc was not outfitted with a radio, so for the next day, the world could only wait in anticipation for it to reappear over North America. By the afternoon of May 9, thousands of people had gathered in Manhattan to wait for the plane to make its triumphant landing. When the appointed time came and went with no sign of Nungesser and Coli, search planes were dispatched to scout for them along the American coast. Back in France, one newspaper jumped the gun and published an evening edition that read “THE ATLANTIC IS CONQUERED,” but it wasn’t long before telegraph messages confirmed the gloomy reality: L’Oiseau Blanc was missing in action.
Over the next several days, Nungesser and Coli became the subject of an international rescue operation. Ships and aircraft from the United States, Canada and France scoured the North American coastline in search of a sign that the plane had ditched in the sea. Floyd Bennett, an American Orteig Prize competitor who had been injured when his plane crashed on takeoff, even came out of the hospital to lead an airborne search. Yet by the time Charles Lindbergh finally made his transatlantic crossing in late May, there was still no sign of the French pilots. In his autobiography, Lindbergh would later write that Nungesser and Coli had simply vanished “like midnight ghosts.”
In the ninety years since its final flight, the fate of L’Oiseau Blanc has remained one of the most tantalizing mysteries in aviation. It’s possible that the flimsy aircraft was forced down in the Atlantic and lost in a storm, but many modern researchers maintain that Nungesser and Coli successfully crossed the ocean and reached the North American coast. Several witnesses in Maine and Newfoundland claimed to have either seen or heard the plane buzz overhead in May 1927, and a few reported hearing it crash. That same year, reports surfaced of white-colored airplane wreckage being recovered off New York. Among the many theories still in circulation is that Nungesser and Coli were knocked off their intended route by a squall before running out of fuel and crash landing somewhere along the East Coast. It has even been suggested that the fliers were mistakenly shot down by Prohibition-era rumrunners or U.S. Coast Guard forces.
The theory that L’Oiseau Blanc conquered the Atlantic is certainly provocative, since it would mean that Nungesser and Coli successfully flew between mainland Europe and North America before Charles Lindbergh. The full extent of their journey may never be known for sure, but even in the 1920s, their attempt was hailed as a remarkable example of heroism in the name of technological progress. One notable monument to the pilots was erected in 1928 at Paris’s Le Bourget Field—the spot were Lindbergh finished his flight and where Nungesser and Coli began theirs. “In honor of those who tried,” reads its inscription, “and of the one who succeeded.”
Beatlemania Arrives (1964)
Martin Luther King Delivers His "I have a dream" speech (1963)
Cuban Missile Crisis (1962)
The Cuban Missle Crisis was a confrontation between the Soviet Union, Cuba and the United States in October 1962, during the Cold War. On 28th October 1962, the confrontation ended and the world stepped back from nuclear war . Along with General U Thant, John F Kennedy reached an agreement with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev.
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