Today is Monday, November 16, the 320th day of 2015. There are 45 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1532 – In Peru, Spanish explorer Francisco Pizarro takes Inca emperor Atahuallpa prisoner at a feast in his honor and slaughters thousands of his followers.
1632 – King Gustavus II of Sweden, ‘the Lion of the North’, is killed while defeating Holy Roman Empire troops at the Battle of Luetzen, now in Germany.
1848 – A liberal insurrection breaks out in Rome, eventually forcing the pope to flee.
1864 – Union General William Sherman and his 62,000 troops begin the celebrated “March to the Sea” in Georgia, from Atlanta to Savannah on the Atlantic coast, a crushing defeat to the Confederates in the American Civil War.
1933 -The United States and the Soviet Union establish diplomatic relations.
1941 – Nazi Germany launches second failed assault on Moscow in World War II.
1949 – Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlevi, the Shah of Iran, begins a monthlong state visit to the United States to discuss military and economic plans with U.S. President Harry Truman.
1959 – The Rogers and Hammerstein musical “The Sound of Music” opens on Broadway in New York.
1970 – Pakistani officials say at least a quarter of a million people have perished in a typhoon and tidal wave that struck the Bay of Bengal.
1983 – Syrian-backed rebel forces overrun PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s last military stronghold in Lebanon, the Beddawi refugee camp on the northern outskirts of Tripoli.
1988 – Estonian Parliament declares the tiny Baltic republic “sovereign” with right to veto Soviet laws.
1989 – The heart of an Israeli soldier who was ambushed and killed by Arabs in the occupied territories is transplanted into the chest of a dying Palestinian man.
1991 – Boris Yeltsin issues a series of decrees that effectively transfer control of his republic’s economy from the Soviet central government to the Russian Federation.
1993 – United Nations officially abandons search for Somali warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid.
1995 – An international war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, indicts two Bosnian Serb leaders — Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic — in the killings of Muslims in Srebrenica.
1996 – A building housing Russian military personnel and their families near Chechnya collapses after an explosion, killing and trapping 13 people.
1997 – Citing medical reasons, China frees its most well-known democracy advocate, Wei Jingsheng, and puts him on a plane to the United States.
1998 – Judges at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, pass down their first convictions for crimes against Bosnian Serbs. A Bosnian Croat and two Muslims are convicted for murdering, torturing and raping Serb prisoners in 1992.
1999 – The United Nations says it failed to help save thousands of Bosnian Muslims from mass murder by Serbs in 1995 because of errors and misjudgment. Over 2,500 bodies have been found and experts predict thousands more will be discovered.
2005 – Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan urges citizens to be calm and reasonable, after a Kurdish demonstrator is seriously injured from gunfire — the latest casualty in weeklong clashes between angry Kurds and security officials.
2006 – Pakistan says it has successfully test-fired a new version of its nuclear-capable medium-range missile, a show of power a day after peace talks with India.
2010 – A rare pink diamond smashes the world record for a jewel at auction in Geneva, selling for more than $46 million to a well-known gem dealer.
2011 – President Barack Obama says he will send military aircraft and up to 2,500 Marines to northern Australia for a training hub to help allies and protect American interests across Asia, signaling U.S. determination to counter a rising China.
2013 – Forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad have seized the momentum in the country’s civil war in recent weeks, capturing one rebel stronghold after another.
2014 — The White House confirms the death of a U.S. aid worker Peter Kassig, a former soldier who tried to help wounded Syrians caught up in a civil war but ended up dying at the hands of Islamic State militants. SOLASS
Today’s Birthdays:
Tiberius, second Roman emperor (42 B.C.-A.D. 37); Paul Hindemith, German composer (1895-1963); George S. Kaufman, U.S. playwright (1889-1961); Jose Saramago, Portuguese writer (1922–2010); Diana Krall, Canadian jazz singer (1964–).
Thought For Today:
Whom God would sorely vex, He endows with abundant good sense — Yiddish proverb.
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
