Today is Tuesday, November 17, the 321st day of 2015. There are 44 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1511 – England and Spain form defensive alliance against French.
1534 – British Parliament passes the Act of Supremacy, which declares King Henry VIII as head of the Church of England.
1558 – Elizabeth I becomes Queen of England after the death of Mary I.
1604 – Sir Walter Raleigh is tried for treason and is imprisoned in England.
1734 – Publisher of the New York Weekly Journal, John Peter Zenger, is arrested for libel. He is later acquitted, a decision regarded as a landmark for freedom of expression.
1800 – U.S. Congress holds its first session in Washington in the partially completed Capitol building.
1831 – Venezuela, Ecuador and New Grenada dissolve the Union of Colombia; New Grenada becomes an independent state.
1869 – Suez Canal opens in Egypt, linking Mediterranean and Red Seas.
1937 – Lord Halifax visits Adolf Hitler, attempting a peaceful settlement of the dispute over the majority German Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. This marks the start of Britain’s policy of appeasement.
1943 – The Soviet Union’s Red Army starts the first withdrawal of the summer offensive in Kiev, where several sections were abandoned in the face of Nazi counterattacks.
1954 – Gen. Gamal Abdel Nasser becomes head of state in Egypt.
1963 – Army in Iraq revolts and sets up new revolutionary government headed by Abdel Salam Arif.
1964 – Britain says it will ban arms exports to South Africa.
1969 – The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) between the United States and Russia begin in Helsinki, Finland.
1971 – Vemij Thanon Kittikachorn seizes power in Thailand, abolishes Parliament, dismisses cabinet and suspends nation’s constitution.
1972 – Former Argentine dictator Juan D. Peron returns to his homeland after 17 years of exile.
1973 – U.S. President Richard Nixon tells an Associated Press managing editors meeting in Florida that “people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.”
1977 – Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat formally accepts invitation to visit Israel, ignoring uproar among Arab nations and in his own government.
1988 – Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party scores solid victory in parliamentary elections.
1989 – Bloodless anti-Communist revolution is engineered by Vaclav Havel and fellow dissidents in Czechoslovakia.
1990 – President Mikhail Gorbachev reorganizes the executive branch of the Soviet government, giving the U.S.S.R.’s 15 constituent republics a larger role in decision-making by the central regime.
1992 – Italian police arrest 75 people in the largest Mafia crackdown since 1984.
1993 – South African leaders endorse a new constitution to end apartheid.
2005 – Rebels burning tires and sporadic explosions block thousands of Sri Lankans from voting in a tight election for a new president to shape peace efforts in the country bloodied by civil war and devastated by the 2004 tsunami.
2008 – Courts in military-ruled Myanmar sentence at least seven democracy activists to prison, continuing a crackdown that saw about 70 people jailed the previous week.
2012 – A speeding train crashes into a bus carrying Egyptian children to their kindergarten in central Egypt, killing at least 49 and prompting a wave of anger against the government in Cairo.
2014 — A new US.-Canada study finds a key polar bear population fell by nearly half in the past decade and researchers says shrinking ice from global warming is to blame.
Today’s Birthdays:
Joost van den Vondel, Dutch poet-dramatist (1587-1679); Bernard Montgomery, British field marshal (1887-1976); Rock Hudson, U.S. actor (1925-1985); Martin Scorsese, U.S. film director (1942–); Cyril Ramaphosa, South African politician (1952–); Danny DeVito, U.S. actor (1944–); Lorne Michaels, U.S. writer/producer (1944–); Rachel McAdams, Canadian actress (1978–).
Thought For Today:
The mind will ever be unstable that has only prejudices to rest on, and the current will run with destructive fury when there are no barriers to break its force — Mary Wollstonecraft, English author (1759-1797).
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