Today is Thursday, November 26, the 330th day of 2015. There are 35 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1095 – Pope Urban urges the faithful to wrest the Holy Land from the Muslims, heralding start of Crusades.
1580 – Peace of Fleix ends Seventh War of Religion in France.
1648 – Pope Innocent X condemns Peace of Westphalia, which ended 30 Years War one month earlier.
1716 – A lion is first exhibited in America.
1764 – Jesuit order is suppressed in France.
1789 – A day of Thanksgiving is set aside by U.S. President George Washington to observe the adoption of America’s Constitution.
1812 – French army meets disaster in retreating across Russia’s Beresina River.
1825 – The first U.S. college social fraternity, Kappa Alpha, is formed at Union College in Schenectady, New York.
1857 – First Australian Parliament opens in Melbourne.
1896 – Russia discloses plan to seize Constantinople if Britain intervenes in Crete.
1922 – King Tutankhamen’s tomb is opened in Egypt.
1939 – Soviet Union attacks Finland leading to 105-day Winter War.
1940 – Half-million Jews of Warsaw, Poland, are ordered to live within a walled ghetto.
1942 – The film “Casablanca,” starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, has its world premiere at the Hollywood Theater in New York.
1943 – The HMT Rohna, a British transport ship carrying U.S. soldiers, is hit by a German missile off Algeria; 1,138 men are killed, including 1,015 American troops.
1949 – India adopts constitution as federal republic within British Commonwealth.
1950 – China enters the Korean conflict, launching a counteroffensive against soldiers from the United Nations, the United States and South Korea.
1965 – France launches its first satellite, sending a 41-kilogram (92-pound) capsule into orbit.
1967 – Death toll is put at 250 in floods in central Portugal.
1970 – A Bolivian painter, disguised as a priest, tries to kill Pope Paul VI in Manila, Philippines, but pontiff escapes injury.
1975 – A federal jury in Sacramento, California, finds Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a follower of Charles Manson, guilty of trying to assassinate U.S. President Gerald Ford.
1986 – Iranian missile slams into crowded residential district of Baghdad, Iraq, killing 48 civilians and wounding 52.
1987 – Powerful typhoon whips across Philippines, killing 270 people and damaging or destroying 14,000 homes.
1990 – Five permanent members of U.N. Security Council agree on peace plan for Cambodia.
1991 – UNICEF says fighting and crop failures in southern Sudan have forced unprecedented exodus of 200,000 people.
1994 – A major offensive by the Russian-backed opposition fails to wrest Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, from its government.
1997 – Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein invites foreign experts to live in his “presidential palaces” to prove that he has nothing to hide. The palaces remain closed to weapons inspectors.
2000 – Florida certifies George W. Bush as the winner of the state’s electoral votes for the U.S. presidential election. U.S. Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore challenges the decision.
2001 – Former French intelligence chief General Paul Aussaressess says in testimony that the orders he issued to torture and kill prisoners during the Algerian independence war were justifiable acts of duty.
2008 – Teams of heavily armed gunmen storm luxury hotels, a popular tourist attraction and a crowded train station in Mumbai, India, killing at least 172 people and wounding 239 others after a 60-hour rampage.
2012 – The United States claims “enormous” strides in reducing greenhouse emissions at the opening of U.N. climate talks despite failing to join other industrialized nations in committing to binding cuts.
2013 – U.S. bombers fly across new Chinese air defense zone in defiance of Beijing’s claims to disputed islands in the East China sea.
2014 — U.S. forces take part in a rescue mission that freed eight hostages in a remote corner of Yemen, but a Yemeni official says that it did not liberate five others who were moved elsewhere by their al-Qaida captors days before the raid.
Today’s Birthdays:
Eugene Ionesco, Romanian-born French dramatist (1909-1994); Bruce Paltrow, U.S. director/producer (1943-2002); Tina Turner, U.S. pop singer (1939–); Illona Staller (La Cicciolina), porn star and Italian member of Parliament (1951–).
Thought For Today:
Love your neighbors, but don’t pull down the fence — Chinese proverb.
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