6 hours Ago By officebss
Welcome to Morning Open Thread , a daily post with a MOTley crew of hosts who choose the topic for the day's posting. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum. That’s a feature, not a bug.
Other than that, site rulz rule. Morning Open Thread is looking for contributors — either occasional, or weekly. If interested, please contact officebss or Ozarkblue for more information.
So grab your cuppa, and join in. ______________________________________________________ International Carrot Day : April 4, 2003 – founded to celebrate this root veggie, which originated in Central Asia, but has been part of people’s diets around the world for centuries; China produces 45% of the world’s carrots and turnips, while the U.S.
only produces 4%. International Day for Mine Awareness & Action : April 4, 2006 – The first International Day for Mine Awareness & Action is declared by the UN General Assembly to bolster continued efforts to eliminate landmines and other explosive hazards. School Librarian Day : April 4, 1985 – becomes part of National School Library Month, founded by the American Association of School Librarians.
Vitamin C Day : April 4, 1932 – C.G. King first isolates Vitamin C in a lab at University of Pennsylvania.
World Rat Day : April 4, 2002 - started by domesticated rat enthusiasts to dispel the negative myths about rats and show what wonderful pets and companion animals they are. April 4th is St. Isidore’s Feast Day, who is the patron saint of the Internet and computer users 503 BC – Agrippa Menenius Lanatus, consul of the Roman Republic, is awarded a triumph for his victory over the Sabines.
188 – Caracalla born, Roman Emperor, has his younger brother murdered; noted for building a giant bathhouse, his obsession with Alexander the Great, and massacres of his brother’s supporters and much of the population of Alexandria; assassinated by a disaffected soldier passed over for promotion. 1147 – The first known reference to Moscow, as the place where Prince Sviatoslav Olgovich met Prince Yuri Dolgoruky, who is considered the founder of Moscow. 1572 – William Strachey born, English author; his eye-witness report of 1609 Sea Venture shipwreck and 10-month sojourn on Bermuda believed to be the inspiration for the storm and shipwreck in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
1581 – Sir Francis Drake is knighted for completing a circumnavigation of the globe. Drake’s ship, The Golden Hinde 1648 – Grinling Gibbons born in Holland, notable British sculptor and wood carver; he created carvings for Windsor Castle, Hampton Court Palace, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Trinity College Oxford and Trinity College Cambridge.
1660 – The Declaration of Breda, a proclamation by Charles II promises a general pardon for crimes committed during the English Civil War and other concessions to all those who recognize him as the lawful king; this leads to Charles being proclaimed King. 1721 – Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford, becomes Britain’s first Prime Minister, serving for 20 years, the longest uninterrupted run of any British PM. 1768 – Philip Astley presents integrated entertainment with music, animals, acrobats and clowns, regarded as the first modern circus, at Astley’s Amphitheatre in London.
1785 – Bettina von Arnim born, German author, illustrator, and composer – and socialist activist who advocated for the oppressed Jewish community. 1796 – French zoologist Georges Cuvier delivers the first paleontological lecture. 1802 – Dorothea Dix born, American nurse, mental health and prison reform campaigner, and advocate for indigenous peoples’ rights.
She served as Superintendent of Army Nurses (1861-1865) for the Union Army during the American Civil War, pushing against opposition from male doctors for formal training and more opportunities for women nurses. Her efforts improved conditions and the treatment of patients in insane asylums and for prisoners, and helped make nursing into a profession in which women could earn their own living. 1812 – U.
S. President James Madison enacts a 90-day embargo on trade with the UK. 1814 – Napoleon abdicates for the first time and names his son Napoleon II as Emperor of the French.
1818 – The U.S. Congress adopts the flag of the United States with 13 red and white stripes for the original colonies and one star for each state.
1828 – Casparus van Wooden of Amsterdam patents chocolate milk powder. 1841 – William Henry Harrison dies of pneumonia, the first U.S.
President to die in office, and sets a record for the briefest administration. 1850 – Los Angeles California is incorporated as a city. The city was originally founded in 1781 by Spanish governor Felipe de Neve, as El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles, (The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels).
Los Angeles CA in 1850 1865 – U.S. Civil War: A day after Union forces capture Richmond, Virginia, U.
S. President Abraham Lincoln visits the Confederate capital. 1868 – Philippa Fawcett born, English mathematician and educator; her mother was suffragist Millicent Fawcett, president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (1897-1919), and her aunt, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, was the first English woman physician.
In 1890, Philippa became the first woman to make the top score on the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos exams, 13% higher than the highest-placed man, but she didn’t receive the title of senior wrangler, because only men were ranked. Women were listed separately without titles, having only been allowed to take the Tripos since 1881, when Charlotte Angas Scott was unofficially eighth. On the 1890 women’s list, Fawcett is only described as “above the senior wrangler.
” No woman was officially awarded the first position until Ruth Hendry in 1992. After Fawcett won the Marion Kennedy scholarship, she conducted research in fluid dynamics. She was a college lecturer in Mathematics at Newnham College for 10 years, then left Cambridge to train mathematics teachers at the Normal School in Johannesburg, and also set up schools in South Africa.
In 1905, she returned to take a position in the administration of education for London County Council, where she developed secondary schools. Denied a Cambridge degree because she was a woman, she became a “steamboat lady,” one of the women of Girton, Newnham and Somerville Colleges who were refused degrees they would have been given by Cambridge and Oxford if they were men. So they traveled to Ireland, where the University of Dublin gave them ad eundem degrees (earned degrees for work done at another college) at Trinity College Dublin, after Trinity began admitting women in 1904.
Trinity gave about 720 women ad eundem degrees between 1904 and 1907. 1869 – Mary Colter born, American architect, best known for designing the Desert View Watchtower at the Grand Canyon in Arizona in 1932. Desert View Watchtower — interior of the tower 1871 – Mary Florence Potts patents the ‘Mrs.
Potts’ pressing iron, which has a detachable handle so several iron bodies can be heated and rotated. 1872 – Mary Coffin Ware Dennett born, pacifist, advocate for women’s rights, suffrage, birth control, and sex education; she published Birth Control Laws , which reviewed the laws and argued for free dissemination of information. Ware continued to mail sex education pamphlets labeled obscene in 1922, leading to her arrest and conviction in 1929 – but a national protest, in addition to the case made by the ACLU, led to reversal of her conviction in 1930 by the federal Court of Appeals.
Ware published an account of the case in Who’s Obscene? 1873 – The Kennel Club is founded in Great Britain, the first official registry of purebred dogs in the world. 1887 – Susanna M. Salter of Argonia, Kansas, became the first woman in the U.
S. elected as mayor, and the first woman elected to any political office in the U.S.
In 1887, her name was put on the ballot by a group of men who were against women entering politics, expecting her to be soundly defeated, to discourage women from running for office. The ballot was not made public before election day, so she didn’t even know her name was on it until the polls opened. When she agreed to serve if elected, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union abandoned the candidate they had been supporting and voted for Salter.
The local Republican Party also voted for her, so she was elected by a two-thirds majority. 1887 – William Cumming Rose born, American biochemist, researched amino acids, and determined the importance of eight essential amino acids in human nutrition. 1896 – Robert E.
Sherwood born, American playwright and screenwriter; known for Abe Lincoln in Illinois and The Best Years of Our Lives. 1902 – Cecil Rhodes, British financier, mining magnate and Prime Minister of the Cape Colony (1890-1896) in South Africa, leaves ₤6 million ($10 million USD) in his will for scholarships to Oxford University for citizens of the British Commonwealth, United States and Germany, known as the Rhodes Scholarship. Among the Rhodes scholars who have gone on to distinguished careers are: former U.
S. President Bill Clinton; astronomer Edwin Hubble; Australian pharmacologist Howard Florey, co-recipient with Alexander Fleming and Ernst Chain of the 1945 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering penicillin; American politician James Fulbright, who founded his own scholarship program; Zambian human- and civil- rights activist Lucy Banda-Sichone; South African Anti-Apartheid lawyer Bram Fischer; American author and feminist social critic Naomi Wolf; and American political commentator and MSNBC television host Rachel Maddow. 1902 – Louise Lévêque de Vilmorin born, French novelist, poet and journalist; she was awarded the 1949 Renée Vivien prize for women poets; her most notable novel was Madame de .
. . 1913 – Muddy Waters born, American singer-songwriter and guitarist.
x x YouTube Video 1914 – Marguerite Duras born, French novelist, screenwriter, playwright and director. 1921 – Orunamamu born as Marybeth Washington in the U.S.
, American-Canadian storyteller. She worked as a school teacher, then after her retirement, became a professional storyteller and griot (West African word for a bard-historian/storyteller- praise singer); she was the subject of two documentaries, and mentioned in numerous books and articles. She was a regular participant in the Calgary Spoken Word Festival.
Orunamamu lived to be 93 years old. 1922 – Elmer Bernstein born, American composer and conductor. 1925 – The Schutzstaffel (SS) is founded in Germany.
1928 – Maya Angelou born, American poet, memoirist and civil rights activist; known for her memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. In 2000, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Clinton. In 2010, President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
1931 – Dame Catherine Tizard born; first woman elected as mayor of Auckland City, NZ (1983-1990) and the first woman appointed as Governor-General of New Zealand (1990-1996); the 100 th anniversary of New Zealand Women’s Suffrage was celebrated during her term of office; while in office, she ended the practice of New Zealanders bowing to the Governor-General, saying, “No New Zealander should have to bow to another.” She also ended the practice of members of staff ceasing to clean whenever the Governor-General entered the room. 1932 – Johanna Reiss born, Dutch writer based in New York City; noted for her memoir, A Hidden Life, and her young adult novels, The Upstairs Room, and The Journey Back, based on the three years she spent as a young Jewish girl in hiding from the Nazis during WWII, and her return years later to visit the farming family that had sheltered her.
1939 – Faisal II was crowned as King of Iraq a month before his fourth birthday. His uncle Abd al-llah was appointed as regent until 1953. Faisal was the last Iraqi king; he was deposed during the July 14 Revolution, a coup d’état by the Iraqi Army, and executed along with many members of his family, ending the Hashemite monarchy.
The Kingdom of Iraq then became the Republic of Iraq. 1939 – Glenn Miller records “Moonlight Serenade.” 1939 – Hugh Masekela born, South African musician.
He went into exile after the 1961 Sharpeville Massacre which left 69 people dead, and 180 seriously wounded. After studying at London’s Guildhall School, he moved to New York, where he composed and recorded many new songs, including “Grazing in the Grass” which won the 1968 Grammy for Best Contemporary Pop Performance – Instrumental. He went on to win two more Grammys, in 1989 for the musical Sarafina!, and in 2012 for his album Jabulani.
Masekela returned to South Africa in the 1990s, and has been one of South Africa’s most celebrated musicians. He died on January 23, 2018, from prostate cancer. x x YouTube Video 1944 – Mary Kenny born, Irish author, broadcaster, playwright, journalist and founding member of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement.
She was Woman’s Editor of The Irish Press in the 1970s. In 1971, she travelled with Nell McCafferty, June Levine and other Irish feminists on the “Contraceptive Train” from Dublin to Belfast to buy condoms, which were illegal at that time in the Republic of Ireland. Later that year she became Features Editor of The Evening Standard in London.
1949 – Twelve nations sign the North Atlantic Treaty creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. 1949 – Shing-Tung Yau born in China, naturalized American mathematician, awarded the Fields Medal for his mathematical research in 1982. 1953 – Chen Yi born, Chinese violinist and composer of contemporary classical music; noted for her composition, Si Ji (Four Seasons).
x x YouTube Video 1956 – UN Security Council Resolution 113 calls on Israel and Palestinians to fully cooperate with the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO). 1958 – The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) peace symbol, also called the nuclear disarmament symbol, is displayed in public for the first time in London; the symbol was designed for the British-based CND by Gerald Holtom. 1960 – France agrees to grant independence to the Mali Federation, a union of Senegal and French Sudan.
1960 – Elvis Presley records “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” 1964 – The Beatles occupy the top five positions on the Billboard Hot 100 pop chart with “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Twist and Shout,” “She Loves You,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “Please Please Me” 1967 – Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” speech in New York City’s Riverside Church. 1968 – Martin Luther King Jr.
is assassinated by James Earl Ray at a motel in Memphis, Tennessee. 1968 – NASA launches Apollo 6. 1969 – Dr.
Denton Cooley implants the first temporary artificial heart. 1971 – The musical Follies opens on Broadway. 1973 – The World Trade Center in New York is officially dedicated.
1975 – Microsoft is founded as a partnership between Bill Gates and Paul Allen in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Allen left Microsoft in 1982 during a serious illness, but didn’t officially resign until 2000. 1979 – Deposed Prime Minister of Pakistan and head of the Pakistan’s People’s Party Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is executed, after a highly controversial trial in which he was accused of authorizing an assassination attempt on political opponent Ahmed Raza Khan Kasuri, which resulted in the death of Kasuri’s father. The original judge handling the case found the evidence “contradictory and incomplete” but he was replaced by a five judge panel.
The 706-page official transcript of the trial released publicly did not contain the objections or inconsistencies in the evidence pointed out by Bhutto’s defence. Bhutto was declared not guilty of murder, but was sentenced to death in a close split decision. There were suspicions voiced by former U.
S. Attorney General Ramsay Clark and others that the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency was at least tacitly complicit in the coup d’état that overthrew Bhutto, because of his left-wing ideas and his efforts to improve relations between Pakistan and the USSR/Communist Bloc. 1981 – Henry Cisneros is elected mayor of San Antonio Texas, the first Latino elected as mayor of a major U.S.
city. 1983 – NASA Space Shuttle Challenger makes its maiden voyage into space. 1984 – President Ronald Reagan calls for an international ban on chemical weapons.
1996 – Comet Hyakutake is imaged by USA Orbiter Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous. 2000 – Pink releases her debut album Can’t Take Me Home. 2006 – An Iraq tribunal charges Saddam Hussein, and six others, with genocide and crimes against humanity stemming from a 1980s crackdown against the Kurds.
2013 – Over 400 fast food workers from McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King and KFC in New York City staged a one-day strike, calling for $15-an-hour wages, and the right to unionize without intimidation. Burger King employees Roslynn Russell and Tabitha Verges spoke out. Russell: “I go to work every day, I do my job, and I just can’t survive out here.
I’m basically working my butt off and still having to rely on food stamps.” Verges: “It’s hard to find another job. This is why I’m still stuck at Burger King for the past four years.
If it was easy to find another job, I wouldn’t be out here right now fighting for $15 an hour and a union.” 2015 – Italian navy and coast guard vessels rescue 1,500 migrants in five separate incidents in the Mediterranean. Three of the five ships sent SOS signals after encountering difficulties off the Libyan coast.
Italy had rescued 170,000 migrants in the Mediterranean in 2014. 2016 – California and New York implemented plans to slowly raise their minimum wages to $15 an hour. California’s Democratic Governor Jerry Brown signed a new law calling for yearly hikes starting in 2017 to push the state’s minimum from $10 an hour, already the highest state minimum in the nation, to $15 by 2022.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, also a Democrat, officially signed New York’s bill into law to make his state’s minimum wage $15 an hour by 2022. New York’s state budget calls for gradually hiking the minimum wage from $9 to $15, starting in New York City in 2019. 2018 – Facebook revealed that data of up to 87 million people – 37 million more than previously reported – may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, which was hired by the Trump campaign to create targeted political ads.
Cambridge Analytica violated campaign funding laws against coordination between political action committees and a candidate’s own campaign. The much larger number of Facebook users affected was buried at the end of a recently published blogpost by Facebook’s chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, which also provided updates on the changes Facebook was making to better protect user information. Mark Zuckerberg, during a conference call shortly after the post was published, said: “We didn’t take a broad enough view on what our responsibility was and that was a huge mistake.
That was my mistake.” Zuckerberg’s latest mea culpa came one week before he was due to face questioning by the House Energy and Commerce Committee over the data scandal. In July 2019, Facebook was fined $5 billion by the federal Trade Commission.
2021 – UN Women released a report predicting that before the end of 2021, over 435 million women and girls will be pushed into extreme poverty, living on USD $1.90 or less a day. In the aftermath of the pandemic, the risk of poverty will be higher for women than men, since they get lower wages and do more informal work that provides little to no protection against economic shocks.
2022 – Women across Ukraine are under threat of rape as a weapon of war. Growing evidence of sexual violence has emerged from areas retaken from retreating Russian forces. Photographer Mikhail Palinchak took a photograph on a highway 20km outside the capital, Kyiv, in which the bodies of one man and three women were piled under a blanket.
Palinchak said the women were naked, and their bodies had been partially burned. The harrowing image adds to a mounting body of evidence that summary executions, rape, and torture have been used against civilians in areas under Russian control since the Kremlin launched its invasion of Ukraine in February. 2023 – NASA has named the first woman and first African-American astronauts for the Artemis II mission, the first crewed mission to the moon in over 50 years.
Christina Koch, an engineer who holds the record for the longest continuous spaceflight by a woman, was named as a mission specialist, along with Victor Glover, a US Navy aviator, selected as the mission’s pilot. They will be part of a four-person team for the mission, scheduled to take place by April 2026..
