Today is Tuesday, November 24, the 328th day of 2015. There are 37 days left in the year.
Highlights in history on this date:
1859 – British naturalist Charles Darwin publishes “On the Origin of Species,” explaining his theory of evolution.
1874 – Barbed wire is patented by American Joseph F. Glidden.
1936 – Germany and Japan sign anti-Comintern pact.
1942 – Germans suffer heavy losses in Battle of Stalingrad in Soviet Union in World War II.
1947 – A group of writers, producers and directors known as the “Hollywood 10” are cited for contempt by Congress for refusing to answer questions about alleged Communist influence in the movie industry.
1950 – U.N. forces launch an offensive on Korea’s western front in an effort to knock out the main Chinese Communist forces south of Manchuria.
1956 – The U.N. General Assembly presses Britain, France and Israel for withdrawal of their troops from Egypt. The United States joins the Soviet and Arab-Asian blocs in voting in favor of the withdrawals.
1963 – Lee Harvey Oswald, accused assassin of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, is shot to death by Jack Ruby in Dallas, Texas.
1964 – Belgian paratroopers, Congolese army and mercenaries recapture Stanleyville in the Congo from rebels.
1971 – Hijacker Dan Cooper parachutes from a Northwest Airlines 727 over Washington state with $200,000 in ransom. His fate remains unknown.
1974 – U.S. President Gerald Ford and Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev, meet in Vladivostok and reach tentative agreement to limit number of offensive strategic nuclear weapons.
1975 – Earthquake hits eastern Turkey, taking at least 574 lives, and government says total could reach more than 3,000.
1977 – Archaeologist says tomb uncovered near Salonika, Greece, is that of Macedon’s King Philip II, father of Alexander the Great.
1987 – The United States and the Soviet Union agree to scrap short and medium-range missiles in the first superpower treaty to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons.
1989 – Elias Hrawi is elected president of Lebanon following assassination of Rene Mouawad.
1992 – A Chinese airliner crashes into a mountain 25 kilometers (15 miles) from its destination in the southern city of Guilin, killing all 144 on board. The crash is the fifth in China in four months.
1993 – Two 11-year-old British boys are convicted in the murder of a Liverpool toddler.
1995 – Irish voters decide to legalize divorce, passing a referendum by narrow margin.
1997 – The Taliban rulers of Afghanistan agree to uproot the poppy crop, the source of half the world’s heroin supply.
2003 – The High Court in Glasgow, Scotland, rules that Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence agent convicted in 2001 for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, will serve 27 years in prison before becoming eligible for parole.
2007 – Australia’s Conservative Prime Minister John Howard suffers a humiliating defeat to the left-leaning opposition Labor Party head Kevin Rudd in elections.
2008 – A Muslim charity, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, and five of its former leaders are convicted by a federal jury in Dallas, Texas, of funneling millions of dollars to the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
2009 – President Barack Obama tries to calm India’s fears about Asian rival China, salving bruised feelings in the world’s largest democracy with an elaborate state visit for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
2013 – Iran strikes a landmark deal with the United States and five other world powers, agreeing to a temporary freeze of its nuclear program in the most significant agreement between Washington and Tehran in more than three decades of estrangement.
2014 – Russia tightens its control over Georgia’s breakaway province of Abkhazia with a new treaty envisaging close military and economic ties with the lush sliver of land along the Black Sea.
Today’s Birthdays:
Baruch Spinoza, Dutch philosopher (1632-1677); Abdel-Illah, crown prince of Iraq (1913-1958); William F. Buckley, U.S. magazine publisher and conservative thinker (1925-2008); Alfredo Kraus, Spanish tenor (1927-1999); Arthur Chaskalson, first chief justice of South African Constitutional Court (1931-2012); Billy Connolly, Scottish actor/comedian (1942–).
Thought For Today:
There is a great deal of difference in believing something still, and believing it again — W.H. Auden, British poet (1907-1973).
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