Today is Saturday, November 21, the 325th day of 2015. There are 40 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1620 – The Mayflower ship, carrying the first permanent European settlers to New England, lands in what is now Provincetown, Massachusetts.
1783 – The first manned balloon flight sails over Paris for 25 minutes.
1806 – Napoleon Bonaparte of France issues Berlin Decrees, declaring blockade of Britain.
1877 – American Thomas A. Edison announces invention of the phonograph.
1922 – Rebecca L. Felton of Georgia is sworn in as the first woman to serve in the U.S. Senate.
1938 – Western border areas of Czechoslovakia are forcibly incorporated into German Reich.
1958 – A Soviet-East German commission meets in East Berlin to discuss the transfer to East German control of Soviet functions and end to the occupation status in Berlin.
1962 – China agrees to a ceasefire on India-China border.
1963 – Roman Catholic Vatican Council authorizes use of vernacular instead of Latin in the Sacraments.
1976 – Syrian army completes its final phase of occupation of Lebanon.
1977 – An estimated 3,000 people are believed to have perished in cyclone that strikes southeastern India, submerging entire villages in tidal waves.
1980 – A fire at the MGM Grand Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas kills 87 people.
1985 – Former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Jay Pollard is arrested and accused of spying for Israel. He pleads guilty and is sentenced to life in prison.
1987 – Riot police stand guard to prevent violence by rival supporters as presidential candidates in South Korea trade charges of corruption and cruelty.
1991 – The U.N. Security Council chooses Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt to be the new secretary-general.
1994 – NATO retaliates for repeated Serb attacks on a U.N. safe haven by bombing an airfield in a Serb-controlled section of Croatia.
1995 – Former Nazi Capt. Erich Priebke is extradited from Argentina to Italy to face charges in the massacre of 335 Italian civilians in Nazi-occupied Rome.
1997 – U.N. weapons inspectors return to Iraq a month after inspections were halted when the Iraqi government refused to let the teams include American members.
1998 – Italian officials release Kurdish separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan, the head of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the main Kurdish rebel group.
1999 – China successfully completes an unmanned spacecraft test, a breakthrough leading toward China eventually becoming the third country to put humans in space, after the United States and the former Soviet Union.
2001 – Maoist rebel leaders in Nepal withdraw from their four-month-old cease-fire with the government, and launch their worst-ever attacks, killing more than 200 people.
2005 – U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan warns that Sudan’s volatile Darfur region faces an increasing threat of complete lawlessness and anarchy, and says it is crucial that the government and rebels conclude a peace agreement by the end of the year.
2006 – Pierre Gemayel, an anti-Syrian politician and scion of Lebanon’s most prominent Christian family, is gunned down in a carefully orchestrated assassination that heightens tensions between the U.S.-backed government and the militant Hezbollah.
2011 – Thwarted internationally, the Obama administration cobbles together a new set of best-available sanctions against Iran that underline its limited capacity to force Tehran to halt its suspected nuclear weapons program.
2012 — Israel and the Hamas militant group agree to a cease-fire to end eight days of the fiercest fighting in nearly four years, promising to halt their air strikes and rocket attacks that have killed scores.
2013 — President Hamid Karzai urged tribal elders to approve a security pact with Washington that could keep thousands of U.S. troops in Afghanistan until 2024 but said he prefers his successor sign the document after elections next April.
2014 — Security forces in Togo use rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse thousands of demonstrators calling for term limits that would bar President Faure Gnassingbe from running for a third term next year. (backslash)
Today’s Birthdays:
Carlo Fragoni, Italian poet (1692-1768); Voltaire, French poet-philosopher (1694-1778); Bjork, Icelandic singer/actress (1965–); Goldie Hawn, U.S. actress (1945–).
Thought For Today:
Modesty is the only sure bait when you angle for praise — The fourth Earl of Chesterfield, English author (1694-1773).
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