Interesting Facts

19-Apr-2009

On This Day

1587 – Francis Drake sank the Spanish fleet in Cádiz harbour.

1775 – The Battle of Lexington and Concord began, which started the American Revolution against the British.

1839 – The Treaty of London established Belgium as a kingdom.

1961 – The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba ended.

1984 – Advance Australia Fair was chosen as Australia's national anthem, and green and gold as the national colours.

1987 – The Simpsons premiered as a short cartoon on The Tracey Ullman Show.

1989 – Daphne du Maurier, British novelist died.

1992 – Benny Hill, and Frankie Howard died. They were both English comic actors.

1995 – A bomb in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA, killed 168 people.

1999 – The German Bundestag returned to Berlin.

2005 – Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected Pope Benedict XVI on the second day of the Papal conclave.

18-Apr-2009

On This Day

1506 – The cornerstone of the current St. Peter's Basilica was laid.

1909 – Joan of Arc was beatified in Rome.

1783 – Fighting ceased in the American Revolution, eight years since it began.

1924 – Simon & Schuster published the first crossword puzzle book.

1945 – Over 1,000 allied bombers attacked the small island of Heligoland, Germany.

1955 - Albert Einstein died.

1980 – The Republic of Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) came into being. Canaan Banana was the country's first President.

1983 – A suicide bomber destroyed the United States embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 63 people.

1996 – At least 106 civilians were killed when the Israel Defense Forces shelled the UN compound at Quana, Lebanon, where more than 800 civilians had taken refuge.

17-Apr-2009

On This Day

1397 – Geoffrey Chaucer recited the Canterbury Tales for the first time at the court of Richard II. (And it's been torturing British schoolchildren ever since.)

1521 – Martin Luther spoke to the assembly at the Diet of Worms, refusing to recant his teachings.

1961 – A group of CIA financed and trained Cuban refugees landed at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba with the aim of ousting Fidel Castro.

1984 - WPC (Woman Police Constable) Yvonne Fletcher was shot and killed outside the Libyan embassy in central London.

1986 - British journalist John McCarthy was kidnapped, by the militant group Islamic Jihad, in Beirut. He spent more than five years in captivity.

1986 - Three bodies of murdered hostages, were found on the streets of Beirut. They were Leigh Douglas, Philip Padfield from the UK and an American, Peter Kilburn.

1986 – The 335 Years' War (1651–1986) between the Netherlands and the Isles of Scilly officially ended. It was both one of the world's longest wars and the war with the fewest casualties.

1999 - Dozens of people were hurt in a bomb blast in Brixton, south London.

According to research by climate consultants ICF International and anti-virus firm McAfee, email spam uses more than 33bn kilowatt-hours of energy every year.

(This is enough to power more than 2.4m homes, and amounts to emissions of more than 17 million tons of CO2. Not just that, but searching for legitimate e-mails and deleting spam uses 80% of the energy, so of the 131kg of CO2 created by the average business user 22% of it is related to spam. According to the same report spam filtering would reduce unwanted spam by 75%, the equivalent to taking 2.3 million cars off the road. I've never heard of wanted spam.)

15-Apr-2009

On This Day

1945 - British troops liberated the German concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen.

1989 - 96 Liverpool fans died in a crush at the Leppings Lane end of Hillsborough Football Stadium at the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest on 15 April, 1989. This year there will be a Memorial Service to mark the anniversary of what came to be known as the Hillsborough disaster, it will be held at Anfield.