#People's Liberation Army Astronaut Corps

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 5.15 (after 1930)

1932 – In an attempted coup d'état, the Prime Minister of Japan Inukai Tsuyoshi is assassinated. 1933 – All military aviation organizations within or under the control of the RLM of Germany were officially merged in a covert manner to form its Wehrmacht military's air arm, the Luftwaffe. 1934 – A self coup by prime minister Kārlis Ulmanis succeeded in Latvia, suspending its constitution and dissolving its Saeima. 1940 – USS Sailfish is recommissioned. It was originally the USS Squalus. 1940 – World War II: The Battle of the Netherlands: After fierce fighting, the poorly trained and equipped Dutch troops surrender to Germany, marking the beginning of five years of occupation. 1940 – Richard and Maurice McDonald open the first McDonald's restaurant. 1941 – First flight of the Gloster E.28/39 the first British and Allied jet aircraft. 1942 – World War II: In the United States, a bill creating the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) is signed into law. 1943 – Joseph Stalin dissolves the Comintern (or Third International). 1945 – World War II: The Battle of Poljana, the final skirmish in Europe is fought near Prevalje, Slovenia. 1948 – Following the expiration of The British Mandate for Palestine, the Kingdom of Egypt, Transjordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia invade Israel thus starting the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. 1957 – At Malden Island in the Pacific Ocean, Britain tests its first hydrogen bomb in Operation Grapple. 1963 – Project Mercury: The launch of the final Mercury mission, Mercury-Atlas 9 with astronaut Gordon Cooper on board. He becomes the first American to spend more than a day in space, and the last American to go into space alone. 1970 – President Richard Nixon appoints Anna Mae Hays and Elizabeth P. Hoisington the first female United States Army generals. 1972 – The Ryukyu Islands, under U.S. military governance since its conquest in 1945, reverts to Japanese control. 1974 – Ma'alot massacre: Members of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine attack and take hostages at an Israeli school; a total of 31 people are killed, including 22 schoolchildren. 1988 – Soviet–Afghan War: After more than eight years of fighting, the Soviet Army begins to withdraw 115,000 troops from Afghanistan. 1991 – Édith Cresson becomes France's first female Prime Minister. 1997 – The United States government acknowledges the existence of the "Secret War" in Laos and dedicates the Laos Memorial in honor of Hmong and other "Secret War" veterans. 1997 – The Space Shuttle Atlantis launches on STS-84 to dock with the Russian space station Mir. 2001 – A CSX EMD SD40-2 rolls out of a train yard in Walbridge, Ohio, with 47 freight cars, including some tank cars with flammable chemical, after its engineer fails to reboard it after setting a yard switch. It travels south driverless for 66 miles (106 km) until it was brought to a halt near Kenton. The incident became the inspiration for the 2010 film Unstoppable. 2004 – Arsenal F.C. go an entire league campaign unbeaten in the English Premier League, joining Preston North End F.C. with the right to claim the title "The Invincibles". 2008 – California becomes the second U.S. state after Massachusetts in 2004 to legalize same-sex marriage after the state's own Supreme Court rules a previous ban unconstitutional. 2010 – Jessica Watson becomes the youngest person to sail, non-stop and unassisted around the world solo. 2013 – An upsurge in violence in Iraq leaves more than 389 people dead over three days.

[spacenutspod]

China will launch the crewed Shenzhou-17 mission to the Tiangong Space Station on Thursday, Oct. 26, at 3:14 AM UTC. The Shenzhou spacecraft is already atop a Chang Zheng 2F (CZ-2F) rocket to carry all three crew members to the station over the following hours after liftoff. This will begin the handover from the Shenzhou-16 crew to the Shenzhou-17 crew. The Crew The crew for the mission, with commander Tang Hongbo, was announced on Oct. 25, just a day before the launch. Tang Hongbo will be joined by Operator Tang Shengjie and System Operator Jiang Xinlin, who will fly to space for the first time. The crew of Shenzhou-17. (Credit: CASC) Part of the mission will be “experimental station repair/maintenance,” performed during an EVA. The exact details of this operation are unknown at this point in time. Tang Hongbo Tang Hongbo. (Credit: CASC) Tang Hongbo (48) will be the commander of the Shenzhou-17 mission. This is his second spaceflight, after the Shenzhou-12 mission in 2021, where he served as a crew member. Tang Hongbo joined the astronaut corps of China in 2010 as a tier-one astronaut. He is a member and fighter pilot of the People’s Liberation Army and will be the first taikonaut to visit the Tiangong Station twice. He joined the PLA Air Force in September 1995, and quickly advanced to group commander in a fighter jet regiment. Initially, he was also part of the backup crew for Shenzhou 11 before flying on 12. He was part of the first EVA on the Tiangong Space Station, which he performed with Liui Boming in July 2021. His time in space so far was 92 days, 4 hours, and 11 minutes. Tang Shengjie Tang Shengjie. (Credit: CASC) Tang Shenghie (34) will join the mission as a crew member. He has been in the PLA Air Force since 2008 and served time as a fighter pilot there. He joined the astronaut corps of the People’s Liberation Army in 2020. His rang in the army is Lieutenant Colonel.  Shenzhou-17 will be his first spaceflight. He is one of two rookie members on this mission. Jiang Xinlin Jian Xinlin (35) will be the third member of the Shenzhou-17 crew. Like the other two, he is also a pilot for the PLA Air Force, and just like Tang Shengjie, he holds the title of Lieutenant Colonel. Jian Xinlin. (Credit: CASC) He joined the astronaut corps in the same year as Tang in 2020 and has been in the Air Force since 2006. Before his career as an Air Force pilot, he was trained to be a tank driver but later changed careers to the Air Force. The Shenzhou Spacecraft Shenzhou, which translates to “divinite boat,” will be the spacecraft for this mission. It will carry a crew of three to the Tiangong Space Station. Heavily inspired by the Russian Soyuz capsule, Shenzhou has completed several flights since its first flight in 1999.  It masses about 7,840 kilograms, depending on exact mission specifications, and is about 9.25 meters long and 2.8 meters in diameter. It features an internal volume of 14 cubic meters and is designed to always host up to three people for low-Earth orbit (LEO) travel. Its maximum time in space is the limiting factor for these rotations, and about 183 days. Like Soyuz, it consists of three modules. The orbital module can be converted into a habitation space during the time in space and often hosts several payloads and scientific instruments during the missions. The reentry module, placed in the middle of the two other modules, features a heatshield and other parts needed for reentry and is the only party of the Shenzhou spacecraft that will reach the Earth’s surface again. At the very end, there is the service module, which, similar to other spacecraft, hosts the life support, propulsion, and power supply. The Tiangong Space Station will be the destination for the spacecraft. The “palace in the sky” is designed to operate for up to 15 years and is floating in low-Earth orbit at an inclination of 41.58 degrees and an altitude of 389 kilometers. Chang Zheng 2F The rocket for this mission is the crew-certified Chang Zheng 2F, the main backbone of the Chinese crewed space program. So far, it has a 100% success rate and is mainly used to launch the Shenzhou spacecraft to LEO. Chang Zheng 2F inside its service structure. (Credit: CASC) A planet satellite captured the rocket on the pad about a week ago after it rolled out to the pad in preparation for the mission. A @planet satellite captured Shenzhou-17 on the pad at Jiuquan after rolling out earlier today. Crew and crowds can be seen gathering nearby the rocket as it's prepared to launch three humans to the Chinese Space Station later this month. More: https://t.co/4hXPnidLmX https://t.co/yxv6GFXMgo pic.twitter.com/axwZp5TNAq — Harry Stranger (@Harry__Stranger) October 19, 2023 The rocket stands 62 meters tall with a liftoff mass of 464,000 kilograms. It can lift 8,400 kilograms into LEO.  The four liquid-fueled boosters and the center core provide about 6,512 kN of thrust at liftoff as the YF-20B engines ignite. This will be the case for roughly 155 seconds before the boosters decouple, followed by the center core shortly after.  After this, the second stage of CZ-2F will burn for about 460 seconds before releasing the Shenzhou-17 spacecraft for the final stage of the flight to Tiangong. Shortly after docking, the handover between crews will begin, as the Shenzhou-17 crew will take over the station’s operation. The crew of Shenzhou-16 will then depart Tiangong and return to Earth in just days from now. (Lead image: Shenzhou-17 spacecraft atop CZ-2F. Credit: CASC) The post Shenzhou-17 Crew to Launch to Tiangong Space Station appeared first on NASASpaceFlight.com.

[moonwatchuniverse]

June 17, 2021... 7th manned Shenzhou spaceflight mission Using a LongMarch-2F launch vehicle, China launched the 7th manned Shenzhou spaceflight mission from the Jiuquan launch site in Gansu Province. After 7 hours, the crew of 3 People’s Liberation Army Taikonauts Corps pilot/mission specialists Tang Hongbo, Nie Haisheng and Liu Boming, sucessfully docked at the Tiangong “Heavenly Palace” space station. Commander Nie Haisheng making his third spaceflight mission. The Taikonauts wore the original 2003 spacesuit version of the large FIYTA Spacemaster mechanical chronograph. (Photo: GettyImages)

[botvik]

Astronaut

An astronaut (from the Ancient Greek ἄστρον (astron), meaning 'star', and ναύτης (nautes), meaning 'sailor') is a person trained, equipped, and deployed by a human spaceflight program to serve as a commander or crew member aboard a spacecraft. Although generally reserved for professional space travelers, the term is sometimes applied to anyone who travels into space, including scientists, politicians, journalists, and tourists.[1][2]

"Astronaut" technically applies to all human space travelers regardless of nationality or allegiance; however, astronauts fielded by Russia or the Soviet Union are typically known instead as cosmonauts (from the Russian "kosmos" (космос), meaning "space", also borrowed from Greek) in order to distinguish them from American or otherwise NATO-oriented space travellers.[3] Comparatively recent developments in crewed spaceflight made by China have led to the rise of the term taikonaut (from the Mandarin "tàikōng" (太空), meaning "space"), although its use is somewhat informal and its origin is unclear. In China, the People's Liberation Army Astronaut Corps astronauts and their foreign counterparts are all officially called hángtiānyuán (航天员, meaning "heaven navigator" or literally "heaven-sailing staff").

Since 1961, 600 astronauts have flown in space.[4] Until 2002, astronauts were sponsored and trained exclusively by governments, either by the military or by civilian space agencies. With the suborbital flight of the privately funded SpaceShipOne in 2004, a new category of astronaut was created: the commercial astronaut.

Definition

Alan Shepard

aboard

Freedom 7

(1961)

The criteria for what constitutes human spaceflight vary, with some focus on the point where the atmosphere becomes so thin that centrifugal force, rather than aerodynamic force, carries a significant portion of the weight of the flight object. The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) Sporting Code for astronautics recognizes only flights that exceed the Kármán line, at an altitude of 100 kilometers (62 mi).[5] In the United States, professional, military, and commercial astronauts who travel above an altitude of 50 miles (80 km)[6] are awarded astronaut wings.

As of 17 November 2016, 552 people from 36 countries have reached 100 km (62 mi) or more in altitude, of whom 549 reached low Earth orbit or beyond.[7] Of these, 24 people have traveled beyond low Earth orbit, either to lunar orbit, the lunar surface, or, in one case, a loop around the Moon.[note 1] Three of the 24—Jim Lovell, John Young and Eugene Cernan—did so twice.[8]

As of 17 November 2016, under the U.S. definition, 558 people qualify as having reached space, above 50 miles (80 km) altitude. Of eight X-15 pilots who exceeded 50 miles (80 km) in altitude, only one, Joseph A. Walker, exceeded 100 kilometers (about 62.1 miles) and he did it two times, becoming the first person in space twice.[7] Space travelers have spent over 41,790 man-days (114.5 man-years) in space, including over 100 astronaut-days of spacewalks.[9][10] As of 2016, the man with the longest cumulative time in space is Gennady Padalka, who has spent 879 days in space.[11] Peggy A. Whitson holds the record for the most time in space by a woman, 377 days.[12]

Terminology

See also:

Astronaut ranks and positions

In 1959, when both the United States and Soviet Union were planning, but had yet to launch humans into space, NASA Administrator T. Keith Glennan and his Deputy Administrator, Hugh Dryden, discussed whether spacecraft crew members should be called astronauts or cosmonauts. Dryden preferred "cosmonaut", on the grounds that flights would occur in and to the broader cosmos, while the "astro" prefix suggested flight specifically to the stars.[13] Most NASA Space Task Group members preferred "astronaut", which survived by common usage as the preferred American term.[14] When the Soviet Union launched the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin in 1961, they chose a term which anglicizes to "cosmonaut".[15][16]

Astronaut

The first sixteen NASA astronauts, February 1963. Back row:

White

,

McDivitt

,

Young

,

See

,

Conrad

,

Borman

,

Armstrong

,

Stafford

,

Lovell

. Front row:

Cooper

,

Grissom

,

Carpenter

,

Schirra

,

Glenn

,

Shepard

,

Slayton

.

A professional space traveler is called an astronaut.[17] The first known use of the term "astronaut" in the modern sense was by Neil R. Jones in his 1930 short story "The Death's Head Meteor". The word itself had been known earlier; for example, in Percy Greg's 1880 book Across the Zodiac, "astronaut" referred to a spacecraft. In Les Navigateurs de l'Infini (1925) by J.-H. Rosny aîné, the word astronautique (astronautic) was used. The word may have been inspired by "aeronaut", an older term for an air traveler first applied in 1784 to balloonists. An early use of "astronaut" in a non-fiction publication is Eric Frank Russell's poem "The Astronaut", appearing in the November 1934 Bulletin of the British Interplanetary Society.[18]

The first known formal use of the term astronautics in the scientific community was the establishment of the annual International Astronautical Congress in 1950, and the subsequent founding of the International Astronautical Federation the following year.[19]

NASA applies the term astronaut to any crew member aboard NASA spacecraft bound for Earth orbit or beyond. NASA also uses the term as a title for those selected to join its Astronaut Corps.[20] The European Space Agency similarly uses the term astronaut for members of its Astronaut Corps.[21]

Cosmonaut

The first eleven Soviet cosmonauts, July 1965. Back row, left to right:

Leonov

,

Titov

,

Bykovsky

,

Yegorov

,

Popovich

; front row:

Komarov

,

Gagarin

,

Tereshkova

,

Nikolayev

,

Feoktistov

,

Belyayev

.Main article:

Soviet space program

For a more comprehensive list, see

List of cosmonauts

.

By convention, an astronaut employed by the Russian Federal Space Agency (or its Soviet predecessor) is called a cosmonaut in English texts.[20] The word is an Anglicization of kosmonavt (Russian: космонавт Russian pronunciation: [kəsmɐˈnaft]).[22] Other countries of the former Eastern Bloc use variations of the Russian kosmonavt, such as the Polish: kosmonauta (although Polish also uses astronauta, and the two words are considered synonyms).[23]

Coinage of the term космонавт has been credited to Soviet aeronautics (or "cosmonautics") pioneer Mikhail Tikhonravov (1900–1974).[15][16] The first cosmonaut was Soviet Air Force pilot Yuri Gagarin, also the first person in space. He was part of the first six Russians, with German Titov, Yevgeny Khrunov, Andriyan Nikolayev, Pavel Popovich, and Grigoriy Nelyubov, who were given the title of pilot-cosmonaut in January 1961.[24] Valentina Tereshkova was the first female cosmonaut and the first and youngest woman to have flown in space with a solo mission on the Vostok 6 in 1963.[25] On 14 March 1995,[26] Norman Thagard became the first American to ride to space on board a Russian launch vehicle, and thus became the first "American cosmonaut".[27][28]

Taikonaut

The first Chinese taikonauts on a 2010 Somalia stamp.Main articles:

People's Liberation Army Astronaut Corps

and

China Manned Space Program

For a more comprehensive list, see

List of Chinese astronauts

.

In Chinese, the term Yǔ háng yuán (宇航员, "cosmos navigating personnel") is used for astronauts and cosmonauts in general,[29][30] while hángtiān yuán (航天员, "navigating celestial-heaven personnel") is used for Chinese astronauts. Here, hángtiān (航天, literally "heaven-navigating", or spaceflight) is strictly[citation needed] defined as the navigation of outer space within the local star system, i.e. Solar System. The phrase tàikōng rén (太空人, "spaceman") is often used in Hong Kong and Taiwan.[31]

The term taikonaut is used by some English-language news media organizations for professional space travelers from China.[32] The word has featured in the Longman and Oxford English dictionaries, and the term became more common in 2003 when China sent its first astronaut Yang Liwei into space aboard the Shenzhou 5 spacecraft.[33] This is the term used by Xinhua News Agency in the English version of the Chinese People's Daily since the advent of the Chinese space program.[34] The origin of the term is unclear; as early as May 1998, Chiew Lee Yih (趙裡昱) from Malaysia, used it in newsgroups.[35][36]

Parastronaut

For its 2022 Astronaut Group, ESA envisions recruiting an astronaut with a physical disability, a category they called "parastronauts", with the intention but not guarantee of spaceflight.[37][38] The categories of disability considered for the program were individuals with lower limb deficiency (either through amputation or congenital), leg length difference, or a short stature (less than 130 centimetres or 4 feet 3 inches).[39]

Other terms

With the rise of space tourism, NASA and the Russian Federal Space Agency agreed to use the term "spaceflight participant" to distinguish those space travelers from professional astronauts on missions coordinated by those two agencies.

Finnish American

[after-skies-ananthology]

I'm an astronaut in the President's new space force, something isn't right

BLACK SKY WARS

the first part

approximately 5 years After Skies Event

You’ve probably read the description of a guy like me before. I graduated from the Air Force Academy top of my class. Got my choice of slots for undergrad pilot training. Ran track and field at the Academy. Boxed. 4.0 GPA. AM-490 course. Father was VCSAF. Uncle and grandpa were both MAJCOM commanders. President’s Hundred. Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. Long story short, after flying Strike Eagles and Raptors for seven years, I was selected to become an American astronaut. But before my training was over, things began to change.

About half a decade ago, a Homelander-controlled Congress passed the New Space National Security Act in the face of severe disapproval from the Department of the Air Force, the Alliancers, YPP, and FPML. The Space Corps created by the bill was from the outset designed to have a Marine Corps-like relationship with the Air Force. It would be formed over a five year period as a staggered merger between the Army’s SMDC, Air Force Space Command, and the Navy’s SPAWAR while eventually absorbing the Naval Satellite Operations Center, the U.S. Reconnaissance Office (which in turn pissed off the Alliancers even more), and NASA’s Astronaut Corps. This is where I come in.

It was no secret among my class of prospective astronauts that the final neutering of the nation’s storied space agency was just around the corner, creeping like a wild fox in a house of sleeping hens. The expectation was that we would be rolled into the Space Corps either after graduation from training or just before its completion. Even after the Homeland Party lost control of both houses to a coalition of its rivals, the constant inability of that coalition to agree on terms when it came to most issues meant that they would be no threat to the space service’s existence. The fact that, at the same time, the Homeland Party was able to secure the presidency cemented the inevitability of its ascendance. Our new commander-in-chief - “Mad” Frank Monterrey, the man famous for his fierce public championing of loathed defense projects like the F-35, ASAT development, absolute national missile defense, and countless others, had been a major investor in NASA’s 21st century rival. Expanded Resources and Aerospace Services, also known as ERAS. The company responsible for initial human moon basing efforts, hand in hand in “coopetition”  with the China National Space Administration.

The establishment of the Armstrong and Sea of Tranquility settlements was a source of renewed hope and lust for the future on the planet’s surface. Although things were certainly tense at times, and while both nations were most definitely not friends, the Sino-American rivalry was seen by most in the middle at the time as fundamentally different from the Cold War. Monterrey couldn’t have disagreed with this sentiment more. Although he hated them, and even campaigned on anti-Chinese sentiment, he understood what the initial partnership ERAS had created with the Chinese meant for the future of America in space.

     He also knew, when the time was right, that he would crush the proverbial throat of the Chinese space presence. As our class completed our required training, me and a few of my peers had been invited to a seminar held in wine country put on by the International Air Combat Study that would cover the future of space development and militarization. Attendees would include NASA officials, their Chinese and Japanese counterparts, senior officers and NCOs from the U.S. Air Force, Space Corps, and Navy, representatives of the People’s Liberation Army, and most significantly - the President of the United States. It would be here that President Monterrey would attempt to humiliate and infuriate the Chinese delegation by announcing the American policy primer on Astropolitik on the last day of the seminar.

In his closed door statement, with PLA officers watching on in steely anger, the President made clear that the United States viewed itself as the arbiter of space and would only be at peace with purely civilian developments and endeavors by foreign nations. The message was now clear, the United States would no longer accept or tolerate the militarization of space by any nation other than itself. “A Monroe Doctrine in orbit.” One headline called it that same evening. The anger felt by this announcement within China, and even in Japan which hadn’t expected such an announcement, was compounded by the events of the day before.

The chief executive of ERAS, and good friend of the President, had announced in an interview with Slice Weekly World the successful completion of humanity’s first asteroid mining operation. About an hour later, a different ERAS spokesperson would quietly confirm over email with a reporter that the company would begin to gradually limit its cooperation with the CNSA with the eventual goal of cutting them off completely. This would most assuredly put the future of the Sea of Tranquility into question. A month before, the Chinese had openly condemned being abruptly left out of the New America habitation project (the colonization of the Kordylewski Dust Satellites via the relocation of hollowed out/previously mined asteroids to Lagrange point 5). The entire situation, when taking Earthly geopolitics into account, was like throwing salt onto an open wound. In an acid shower.

The seminar was over. The damage, or progress made, was done. I stepped out of the back of my ride and into the hotel entrance where I was staying, giving the driver an extra tip before he left. The hotel was a nice one by government travel card standards. All rooms featured a view of one of the two courtyards, one sporting a fire pit, a picturesque grassy couple of acres in the back adjacent to the pool (presumably for weddings), a small creek further back from that with numerous sidewalks for strolls and even a bridge over the stream to a small park. Plenty of statues as well, the attempted style of which I couldn’t discern. Perhaps they were going for an ancient Greek, sophisticated style to everything but I don’t possess the class or taste to reliably provide an answer.

Behind the reception desk sat a young girl, likely in her early 20s. Raven hair, brown eyes. Some of the most doe-like I’ve ever seen. She was quite distracting, actually. Those porcelain legs of hers crossed and presented so minxily to those passing by her workspace didn’t help either. She looked up from her desktop monitor, saw me through her bespectacled gaze, smiled slightly and called out to me. “Mr. Connolley?” I looked behind and around me for a second, I knew she was talking to me but for some reason this little girl managed to slightly intimidate me. “M-Mr. Connolley? Right?” She asked again.

“Yes!” I responded happily. She smiled brighter now, comforting me somewhat, as if she melted my insides with her grin. My guard was down now, and I somehow detected hers was too as I smiled back. “Sorry I have real bad hearing sometimes, being around jet engines all the time can do that.”

“No problem sir! I apologize for calling you out like that.” She said sheepishly.

“Not at all gorgeous.“ I complimented her, the girl’s cheeks turning red. “...did you have something for me?” I asked.

“Yes sir, some of your friends wanted me to notify you that the briefing will be within the next hour in room 241.”

I looked at her, puzzled. “Briefing? Friends? What, was it Lt. Jacob or Lt. Giser? Why wouldn’t they just tell me?”

Now she was confused. “No sir, not those two, umm...“ The lovely girl fiddled with her post-it notes. “...A Sergeant Horace and a Petty Officer Gregory. Two women.” She stated to me.

“Two women? I don’t... Hmm, alright then. Thank you.”

She smiled again, “Of course, I hope all goes well.”

I turned as if to walk away, but caught myself and asked - “Mind if I know your name? Don’t mean to impose or anything, but I leave tomorrow and I’d regret never learning it considering how gorgeous you are.”

Now her face was completely flushed, and her smile now nervous. “… Poinsettia.” She said quietly at first, but then clearing her throat and stating it again. “Poinsettia.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Poinsettia? That’s definitely unique. But lovely all the same, as you are.”

She laughed. “Thank you. You can call me Setty though, that’s what my friends call me. My mom was a florist and loves Christmas, so to her it made sense. I always thought it was kind of a gyp though, my sister got a normal name like Constance.” I noticed the nervousness in her laugh as she said that.

I reassured her, “Well, I’d rather be talking to a Poinsettia than a Constance right now.”

She looked down, flattered. “Thank you.�� And looked back up. “Hope we see each other again.”

I responded back, “Maybe we will. Have a good night. Setty.” And let her be. 

A little bit later I had finally gotten out of my Blues and had a few drinks, and asked Jakey and Giser if they had heard about this ‘briefing’. They said they had, but were told it wasn’t until tomorrow. Also, the people who were going to be briefing them were two other females with completely different names. Zero warning. Zero explanation. Something bizarre was going on, which put me on edge for the rest of the hour. The both of them came with me to 241, just to be safe due to how weird it was. I knocked on the door. No answer. Knocked once more. No answer again. Just as we were about to turn to the left and back down the hall, a smokey but soothing feminine voice interrupted us from our right. “Lieutenant.” I looked. Two tall women in what seemed to be Class B uniforms, both in skirts, which was becoming a rare sight in the military these days. The one in front was Navy with Petty Officer 1st Class rank. The one behind her was wearing the new preliminary uniform of the Space Corps.

The Navy girl stuck her hand out, “I’m Petty Officer Gregory, this is Space Systems Sergeant Horace. We were sent by the Strike Division to brief you.“ I looked at her with a thousand yard stare for a minute.

She persisted. “This is about the transition. And other issues.”

She looked at Jakey and Giser. “You two don’t need to be here sirs. This is just for Lt. Connolley.”

They looked at each other, and looked at me. “We’ll see you Mike.” They said hesitantly.

“A-...alright.” I said back, uncomfortable.

The room wasn’t very well lit. Just a single lamp in the far left corner providing the space with orange tinted illumination. The redhead, Sergeant Horace, turned another one on near the table next to the bed. The Petty Officer motioned me to sit down as the Sergeant collected some vanilla folders. The Petty Officer kicked her heels off by the corner of the bed and sat down next to me.

She said to her companion, “Jess you mind stirring us up something?”

“Yes ma’am. Don’t mind if I do.” The Sergeant affirmed.

“Get the Lieutenant something as well.” She further instructed. “He’ll need it.”

I loosened my shoulders up a bit, staring at the documents enclosed on the table top. “Just what is this about exactly? If it’s about the transition, where are the Space Corps people I usually talk to? And why a ‘briefing’?” I demanded.

She rolled her eyes slightly and drew some breath in. “Look sir. Let me ask you this. Did your OIC over at the 50th give you any idea what this may be about?”

“No, not at all. He just said we had been invited to this seminar.” The Sergeant placed a drink in front of me along with the Sodaco can she used to make it.

“In case you need a chaser.” I became somewhat offended at that implication. She laughed, “Sorry sir, it’s not like I know if you’re a lightweight or not.” I groaned at her.

“He hasn’t told me jack shit.” I reiterated.

“I see. I knew he’d puss out of telling you.“ This just keeps getting more and more curious, I thought.

“Jess, you mind?” She pointed at the stacks of folders on the table.

“Mmhmm” the redhead replied.

She began to open them, carefully taking out what they wanted me to see and nothing more. Schematics, technical information, old Polaroid photographs, engineer’s notes, performance evaluations, all referencing Detachment 3 of the Air Force Flight Test Center. “Dreamland.” I said under my breath as my eyes were allowed to soak these images into my brain. All of them featuring a spade-like spacecraft (or what I assumed to be a spacecraft) and its mothership, which noticeably resembled the ill-fated XB-70 as if it were its forgotten love child from another continent. The former was referred to in these documents as the “Blackstar, Experimental Orbital Vehicle”, while the latter was labeled as “Brilliant Buzzard, SR-3”. I felt like a little kid who found his dad’s Playboys under the bed. I had to forcefully break my gaze from it in order to ask her, “Why are you showing me this, and why are you showing me this here of all places? Shouldn’t we be in a SCIF right now?”

She took one of the photos out of my hand. “Sir, if you even tried to think about this vehicle outside of this location without permission, you’d be halfway to Guantanamo before the neurons and synapses in your brain even knew what happened.”

The redhead piped in, “You’ve been under careful watch since you left Cape Canaveral. We’re both assigned to the Air Force Special Activities Center as its token Space Corpsmen. Same goes for certain people at the seminar, waiters and baristas you’ve interacted with, drivers...”

Petty Officer Gregory finished her sentence, “Cute hotel receptionists with long legs and funny names. This situation is under our control Sir.”

This was a startling implication to say the least. I felt like something was crawling beneath my skin.

She put her hand on my forearm to reassure me and said “It’s nothing to worry about sir. We don’t suspect you of anything. What we’re about to ask of you is of grave importance to the national security and power of the United States going forward.”

I asked  her, “Then just explain to me what the hell it is you want me to do. I take it you want me to fly this thing?”

She pulled back and took a swig of her mix as I spoke - “Essentially. You and the other two are getting rolled into the Corps sooner than the rest of your class for the mission you’ll be undertaking. I’m sure you’re already familiar with the upgraded, manned version of the Mystery already?” She asked.

I said, “Yes, the MS-1B. The OIC has been quite excited about what we’re going to be able to do with it once me and the guys are assigned to the Leopards.”

She cut me off before I could finish saying the name of the squadron. “Lt. Jacob and Lt. Giser will be going to the 54th, where they’ll be working with the B. You however, will be going to the 7th Orbital Operations Squadron in order to directly cooperate with the Special Projects Division in the employment of the XOV.”

She took another sip of her drink as her compatriot finished her sentence for her with the word - “Major.”

“Excuse me? I just made the list for Captain barely a few weeks ago.” I explained, the Sergeant shook her head and reiterated.

“And you’ll be a Major when you enter the Corps. Similarly, Jacob and Giser will be promoted early to Captain as well. Consider it a compensation bonus for all three of you, in light of the risk you’ll be undertaking when you’re up there.”

“Risk? I mean other than the usual considerations, what’s so uniquely risky about flying this thing.” I asked, unsettled again. Things were simply getting more and more bizarre.

“Nothing in particular”, the Petty Officer added, “It’s actually quite old, never went into full production, just a curious Blackbird replacement the Groom Lake people didn’t get much utility out of. They got tired of fucking around with it, so as one of our first hurrahs into orbit, our young service is going to get to decommission it. Under fire. That’s why we’re promoting you, as incentive to take on the mission. We weren’t considering it before the last couple of days, but due to exigent circumstances it was found to be the most prudent option to offer it to you.”

“What the fuck do you mean under fire? Are you talking about combat? We’ve only simulated space-to-space so far. Hell we’ve only simulated counterspace for that matter.” I was beginning to raise my voice.

She flattened her hand and gestured for me to calm down. “Well, yes and no.“ She said softly, beginning to sound a bit more raspy in her voice. She tossed a few photographs of a Chinese spaceplane my way. These were taken more recently, as I inferred that they must have been shot with a digital camera. However, they were still incredibly grainy. I could make out a small spaceplane in the middle of a flurry of space debris and large rocky objects. The craft resembled the MS-1A but it was too hard to tell.

Sergeant Horace interrupted my concentration, “That’s a PLA Shenlong about 30 hours ago.”

“What’s wrong with it? Did we shoot at it or something?” I asked.

“Yes,” PO Gregory informed me, “the 668th was directing a pair of F-15s out of California on a short notice ASAT mission.“

My mind began racing, were we trying to go to war already? “So... you guys shot at it? Why before the President announced his new policy?” I asked.

She shook her head again, implying my assumption was wrong. “We weren’t trying to shoot at it. We were shooting at something else entirely.” She tapped on an amorphous object barely visible in the background of one of the photos. I looked up from the enigma, my eyes meeting her piercing gaze as she spoke as if she were a cold-blooded python consuming a small mammal.

“Sir, let’s just cut to the chase - you’re going to take this promotion, you’re going to escort Jacob and Giser to New America, and you three are going to kill the sole survivor stuck on that Shenlong - and, you’re going to do it all before that ‘thing’ decides to kill you.”

I'm an astronaut in the President's new space force, something isn't right

[jefruelda]

Astronaut" technically applies to all human space travelers regardless of nationality or allegiance; however, astronauts fielded by Russia or the Soviet Union are typically known instead as cosmonauts (from the Russian "kosmos" (космос), meaning "space", also borrowed from Greek) in order to distinguish them from American or otherwise NATO-oriented space travellers.[3] Comparatively recent developments in manned spaceflight made by China have led to the rise of the term taikonaut (from the Mandarin "tàikōng" (太空), meaning "space"), although its use is somewhat informal and its origin is unclear. In China, the People's Liberation Army Astronaut Corps astronauts and their foreign counterparts are all officially called hángtiānyuán (航天员, meaning "heaven navigator" or literally "heaven-sailing staff"). From 1961 to late 2021, 600 astronauts flew in space.[4] Until 2002, astronauts were sponsored and trained exclusively by governments, either by the military or by civilian space agencies. With the suborbital flight of the privately funded SpaceShipOne in 2004, a new category of astronaut was created: the commercial astronaut.

[clothestop]

Women In History

I grew up believing that women had contributed nothing to the world until the 1960′s. So once I became a feminist I started collecting information on women in history, and here’s my collection so far, in no particular order. 

Lepa Svetozara Radić (1925–1943) was a partisan executed at the age of 17 for shooting at German soldiers during WW2. As her captors tied the noose around her neck, they offered her a way out of the gallows by revealing her comrades and leaders identities. She responded that she was not a traitor to her people and they would reveal themselves when they avenged her death. She was the youngest winner of the Order of the People’s Hero of Yugoslavia, awarded in 1951

23 year old Phyllis Latour Doyle was British spy who parachuted into occupied Normandy in 1944 on a reconnaissance mission in preparation for D-day. She relayed 135 secret messages before France was finally liberated. 

Catherine Leroy, War Photographer starting with the Vietnam war. She was taken a prisoner of war. When released she continued to be a war photographer until her death in 2006.

Lieutenant Pavlichenko was a Ukrainian sniper in WWII, with a total of 309 kills, including 36 enemy snipers. After being wounded, she toured the US to promote friendship between the two countries, and was called ‘fat’ by one of her interviewers, which she found rather amusing. 

Johanna Hannie “Jannetje” Schaft was born in Haarlem. She studied in Amsterdam had many Jewish friends. During WWII she aided many people who were hiding from the Germans and began working in resistance movements. She helped to assassinate two nazis. She was later captured and executed. Her last words were “I shoot better than you.”. 

Nancy wake was a resistance spy in WWII, and was so hated by the Germans that at one point she was their most wanted person with a price of 5 million francs on her head. During one of her missions, while parachuting into occupied France, her parachute became tangled in a tree. A french agent commented that he wished that all trees would bear such beautiful fruit, to which she replied “Don’t give me any of that French shit!”, and later that evening she killed a German sentry with her bare hands. 

After her husband was killed in WWII, Violette Szabo began working for the resistance. In her work, she helped to sabotage a railroad and passed along secret information. She was captured and executed at a concentration camp at age 23. 

Grace Hopper was a computer scientist who invented the first ever compiler. Her invention makes every single computer program you use possible. 

Mona Louise Parsons was a member of an informal resistance group in the Netherlands during WWII. After her resistance network was infiltrated, she was captured and was the first Canadian woman to be imprisoned by the Nazis. She was originally sentenced to death by firing squad, but the sentence was lowered to hard lard labor in a prison camp. She escaped. 

Simone Segouin was a Parisian rebel who killed an unknown number of Germans and captured 25 with the aid of her submachine gun. She was present at the liberation of Paris and was later awarded the ‘croix de guerre’. 

Mary Edwards Walker is the only woman to have ever won an American Medal of Honor. She earned it for her work as a surgeon during the Civil War. It was revoked in 1917, but she wore it until hear death two years later. It was restored posthumously. 

Italian neuroscientist won a Nobel Prize for her discovery of nerve growth factor. She died aged 103. 

EDIT

jinxedinks added: Her name was Rita Levi-Montalcini. She was jewish, and so from 1938 until the end of the fascist regime in Italy she was forbidden from working at university. She set up a makeshift lab in her bedroom and continued with her research throughout the war.  

A snapshot of the women of color in the woman’s army corps on Staten Island

This is an ongoing project of mine, and I’ll update this as much as I can (It’s not all WWII stuff, I’ve got separate folders for separate achievements). 

File this under: The History I Wish I’d Been Taught As A Little Girl

[ciathyzareposts]

Chief Gates Comes to Oakhurst: A Cop Drama

One day in late 1992, a trim older man with a rigid military bearing visited Sierra Online’s headquarters in Oakhurst, California. From his appearance, and from the way that Sierra’s head Ken Williams fawned over him, one might have assumed him to be just another wealthy member of the investment class, a group that Williams had been forced to spend a considerable amount of time wooing ever since he had taken his company public four years earlier. But that turned out not to be the case. As Williams began to introduce his guest to some of his employees, he described him as Sierra’s newest game designer, destined to make the fourth game in the Police Quest series. It seemed an unlikely role based on the new arrival’s appearance and age alone.

Yet ageism wasn’t sufficient to explain the effect he had on much of Sierra’s staff. Josh Mandel, a sometime stand-up comic who was now working for Sierra as a writer and designer, wanted nothing whatsoever to do with him: “I wasn’t glad he was there. I just wanted him to go away as soon as possible.” Gano Haine, who was hard at work designing the environmental-themed EcoQuest: Lost Secret of the Rainforest, reluctantly accepted the task of showing the newcomer some of Sierra’s development tools and processes. He listened politely enough, although it wasn’t clear how much he really understood. Then, much to her relief, the boss swept him away again.

The man who had prompted such discomfort and consternation was arguably the most politically polarizing figure in the United States at the time: Daryl F. Gates, the recently resigned head of the Los Angeles Police Department. Eighteen months before, four of his white police officers had brutally beaten a black man — an unarmed small-time lawbreaker named Rodney King — badly enough to break bones and teeth. A private citizen had captured the incident on videotape. One year later, after a true jury of their peers in affluent, white-bread Simi Valley had acquitted the officers despite the damning evidence of the tape, the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 had begun. Americans had watched in disbelief as the worst civil unrest since the infamously restive late 1960s played out on their television screens. The scene looked like a war zone in some less enlightened foreign country; this sort of thing just doesn’t happen here, its viewers had muttered to themselves. But it had happened. The final bill totaled 63 people killed, 2383 people injured, and more than $1 billion in property damage.

The same innocuous visage that was now to become Sierra’s newest game designer had loomed over all of the scenes of violence and destruction. Depending on whether you stood on his side of the cultural divide or the opposite one, the riots were either the living proof that “those people” would only respond to the “hard-nosed” tactics employed by Gates’s LAPD, or the inevitable outcome of decades of those same misguided tactics. The mainstream media hewed more to the latter narrative. When they weren’t showing the riots or the Rodney King tape, they played Gates’s other greatest hits constantly. There was the time he had said, in response to the out-sized numbers of black suspects who died while being apprehended in Los Angeles, that black people were more susceptible to dying in choke holds because their arteries didn’t open as fast as those of “normal people”; the time he had said that anyone who smoked a joint was a traitor against the country and ought to be “taken out and shot”; the time when he had dismissed the idea of employing homosexuals on the force by asking, “Who would want to work with one?”; the time when his officers had broken an innocent man’s nose, and he had responded to the man’s complaint by saying that he was “lucky that was all he had broken”; the time he had called the LAPD’s peers in Philadelphia “an inspiration to the nation” after they had literally launched an airborne bombing raid on a troublesome inner-city housing complex, killing six adults and five children and destroying 61 homes. As the mainstream media was reacting with shock and disgust to all of this and much more, right-wing radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh trotted out the exact same quotes, but greeted them with approbation rather than condemnation.

All of which begs the question of what the hell Gates was doing at Sierra Online, of all places. While they were like most for-profit corporations in avoiding overly overt political statements, Sierra hardly seemed a bastion of reactionary sentiment or what the right wing liked to call “family values.” Just after founding Sierra in 1980, Ken and Roberta Williams had pulled up stakes in Los Angeles and moved to rural Oakhurst more out of some vague hippie dream of getting back to the land than for any sound business reason. As was known by anyone who’d read Steven Levy’s all-too-revealing book Hackers, or seen a topless Roberta on the cover of a game called Softporn, Sierra back in those days had been a nexus of everything the law-and-order contingent despised: casual sex and hard drinking, a fair amount of toking and even the occasional bit of snorting. (Poor Richard Garriott of Ultima fame, who arrived in this den of inequity from a conservative neighborhood of Houston inhabited almost exclusively by straight-arrow astronauts like his dad, ran screaming from it all after just a few months; decades later, he still sounds slightly traumatized when he talks about his sojourn in California.)

It was true that a near-death experience in the mid-1980s and an IPO in 1988 had done much to change life at Sierra since those wild and woolly early days. Ken Williams now wore suits and kept his hair neatly trimmed. He no longer slammed down shots of tequila with his employees to celebrate the close of business on a Friday, nor made it his personal mission to get his nerdier charges laid; nor did he and Roberta still host bathing-suit-optional hot-tub parties at their house. But when it came to the important questions, Williams’s social politics still seemed diametrically opposed to the likes to Daryl Gates. For example, at a time when even the mainstream media still tended to dismiss concerns about the environment as obsessions of the Loony Left, he’d enthusiastically approved Gano Haines’s idea for a series of educational adventure games to teach children about just those issues. When a 15-year-old who already had the world all figured out wrote in to ask how Sierra could “give in to the doom-and-gloomers and whacko commie liberal environmentalists” who believed that “we can destroy a huge, God-created world like this,” Ken’s brother John Williams — Sierra’s marketing head — offered an unapologetic and cogent response: “As long as we get letters like this, we’ll keep making games like EcoQuest.”

So, what gave? Really, what was Daryl Gates doing here? And how had this figure that some of Ken Williams’s employees could barely stand to look at become connected with Police Quest, a slightly goofy and very erratic series of games, but basically a harmless one prior to this point? To understand how all of these trajectories came to meet that day in Oakhurst, we need to trace each back to its point of origin.

Daryl F. Gates

Perhaps the kindest thing we can say about Daryl Gates is that he was, like the young black men he and his officers killed, beat, and imprisoned by the thousands, a product of his environment. He was, the sufficiently committed apologist might say, merely a product of the institutional culture in which he was immersed throughout his adult life. Seen in this light, his greatest sin was his inability to rise above his circumstances, a failing which hardly sets him apart from the masses. One can only wish he had been able to extend to the aforementioned black men the same benefit of the doubt which other charitable souls might be willing to give to him.

Long before he himself became the head of the LAPD, Gates was the hand-picked protege of William Parker, the man who has gone down in history as the architect of the legacy Gates would eventually inherit. At the time Parker took control of it in 1950, the LAPD was widely regarded as the most corrupt single police force in the country, its officers for sale to absolutely anyone who could pay their price; they went so far as to shake down ordinary motorists for bribes at simple traffic stops. To his credit, Parker put a stop to all that. But to his great demerit, he replaced rank corruption on the individual level with an us-against-them form of esprit de corps — the “them” here being the people of color who were pouring into Los Angeles in ever greater numbers. Much of Parker’s approach was seemingly born of his experience of combat during World War II. He became the first but by no means the last LAPD chief to make comparisons between his police force and an army at war, without ever considering whether the metaphor was really appropriate.

Parker was such a cold fish that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who served as an LAPD officer during his tenure as chief, would later claim to have modeled the personality of the emotionless alien Spock on him. And yet, living as he did in the epicenter of the entertainment industry — albeit mostly patrolling the parts of Los Angeles that were never shown by Hollywood — Parker was surprisingly adept at manipulating the media to his advantage. Indeed, he became one of those hidden players who sometimes shape media narratives without anyone ever quite realizing that they’re doing so. He served as a consultant for the television show Dragnet, and through it created a pernicious cliché of the “ideal” cop that can still be seen, more than half a century later, on American television screens every evening: the cop as tough crusader who has to knock a few heads sometimes and bend or break the rules to get around the pansy lawyers, but who does it all for a noble cause, guided by an infallible moral compass that demands that he protect the “good people” of his city from the irredeemably bad ones by whatever means are necessary. Certainly Daryl Gates would later benefit greatly from this image; it’s not hard to believe that even Ken Williams, who fancied himself something of a savvy tough guy in his own right, was a little in awe of it when he tapped Gates to make a computer game.

But this wasn’t the only one of Chief Parker’s innovations that would come to the service of the man he liked to describe as the son he’d never had. Taking advantage of a city government desperate to see a cleaned-up LAPD, Parker drove home policies that made the city’s police force a veritable fiefdom unto itself, its chief effectively impossible to fire. The city council could only do so “for cause” — i.e., some explicit failure on the chief’s part. This sounded fair enough — until one realized that the chief got to write his own evaluation every year. Naturally, Parker and his successors got an “excellent” score every time, and thus the LAPD remained for decades virtually impervious to the wishes of the politicians and public it allegedly served.

The Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts burns, 1965.

As Parker’s tenure wore on, tension spiraled in the black areas of Los Angeles, the inevitable response to an utterly unaccountable LAPD’s ever more brutal approach to policing. It finally erupted in August of 1965 in the form of the Watts Riots, the great prelude to the riots of 1992: 34 deaths, $40 million in property damage in contemporary dollars. For Daryl Gates, who watched it all take place by Parker’s side, the Watts Riots became a formative crucible. “We had no idea how to deal with this,” he would later write. “We were constantly ducking bottles, rocks, knives, and Molotov cocktails. It was random chaos. We did not know how to handle guerrilla warfare.” Rather than asking himself how it had come to this in the first place and how such chaos might be prevented in the future, he asked how the LAPD could be prepared to go toe to toe with future rioters in what amounted to open warfare on city streets.

Chief Parker died the following year, but Gates’s star remained on the ascendant even without his patron. He came up with the idea of a hardcore elite force for dealing with full-on-combat situations, a sort of SEAL team of police. Of course, the new force would need an acronym that sounded every bit as cool as its Navy inspiration. He proposed SWAT, for “Special Weapons Attack Teams.” When his boss balked at such overtly militaristic language, he said that it could stand for “Special Weapons and Tactics” instead. “That’s fine,” said his boss.

Gates and his SWAT team had their national coming-out party on December 6, 1969, when they launched an unprovoked attack upon a hideout of the Black Panthers, a well-armed militia composed of black nationalists which had been formed as a response to earlier police brutality. Logistically and practically, the raid was a bit of a fiasco. The attackers got discombobulated by an inaccurate map of the building and very nearly got themselves hemmed into a cul de sac and massacred. (“Oh, God, we were lucky,” said one of them later.) What was supposed to have been a blitzkrieg-style raid devolved into a long stalemate. The standoff was broken only when Gates managed to requisition a grenade launcher from the Marines at nearby Camp Pendleton and started lobbing explosives into the building; this finally prompted the Panthers to surrender. By some miracle, no one on either side got killed, but the Panthers were acquitted in court of most charges on the basis of self-defense.

Yet the practical ineffectuality of the operation mattered not at all to the political narrative that came to be attached to it. The conservative white Americans whom President Nixon loved to call “the silent majority” — recoiling from the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the hippie era, genuinely scared by the street violence of the last several years — applauded Gates’s determination to “get tough” with “those people.” For the first time, the names of Daryl Gates and his brainchild of SWAT entered the public discourse beyond Los Angeles.

In May of 1974, the same names made the news in a big way again when a SWAT team was called in to subdue the Symbionese Liberation Army, a radical militia with a virtually incomprehensible political philosophy, who had recently kidnapped and apparently converted to their cause the wealthy heiress Patty Hearst. After much lobbying on Gate’s part, his SWAT team got the green light to mount a full frontal assault on the group’s hideout. Gates and his officers continued to relish military comparisons. “Here in the heart of Los Angeles was a war zone,” he later wrote. “It was like something out of a World War II movie, where you’re taking the city from the enemy, house by house.” More than 9000 rounds of ammunition were fired by the two sides. But by now, the SWAT officers did appear to be getting better at their craft. Eight members of the militia were killed — albeit two of them unarmed women attempting to surrender — and the police officers received nary a scratch. Hearst herself proved not to be inside the hideout, but was arrested shortly after the battle.

The Patti Hearst saga marked the last gasp of a militant left wing in the United States; the hippies of the 1960s were settling down to become the Me Generation of the 1970s. Yet even as the streets were growing less turbulent, increasingly militaristic rhetoric was being applied to what had heretofore been thought of as civil society. In 1971, Nixon had declared a “war on drugs,” thus changing the tone of the discourse around policing and criminal justice markedly. Gates and SWAT were the perfect mascots for the new era. The year after the Symbionese shootout, ABC debuted a hit television series called simply S.W.A.T. Its theme song topped the charts; there were S.W.A.T. lunch boxes, action figures, board games, and jigsaw puzzles. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be like Daryl Gates and the LAPD — not least their fellow police officers in other cities: by July of 1975, there were 500 other SWAT teams in the United States. Gates embraced his new role of “America’s cop” with enthusiasm.

In light of his celebrity status in a city which worships celebrity, it was now inevitable that Gates would become the head of the LAPD just as soon as the post opened up. He took over in 1978; this gave him an even more powerful nationwide bully pulpit. In 1983, he applied some of his clout to the founding of a program called DARE in partnership with public schools around the country. The name stood for “Drug Abuse Resistance Education”; Gates really did have a knack for snappy acronyms. His heart was perhaps in the right place, but later studies, conducted only after the spending of hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars, would prove the program’s strident rhetoric and almost militaristic indoctrination techniques to be ineffective.

Meanwhile, in his day job as chief of police, Gates fostered an ever more toxic culture that viewed the streets as battlegrounds, that viewed an ass beating as the just reward of any black man who failed to treat a police officer with fawning subservience. In 1984, the Summer Olympics came to Los Angeles, and Gates used the occasion to convince the city council to let him buy armored personnel carriers — veritable tanks for the city streets — in the interest of “crowd control.” When the Olympics were over, he held onto them for the purpose of executing “no-knock” search warrants on suspected drug dens. During the first of these, conducted with great fanfare before an invited press in February of 1985, Gates himself rode along as an APC literally drove through the front door of a house after giving the occupants no warning whatsoever. Inside they found two shocked women and three children, with no substance more illicit than the bowls of ice cream they’d been eating. To top it all off, the driver lost control of the vehicle on a patch of ice whilst everyone was sheepishly leaving the scene, taking out a parked car.

Clearly Gates’s competence still tended not to entirely live up to his rhetoric, a discrepancy the Los Angeles Riots would eventually highlight all too plainly. But in the meantime, Gates was unapologetic about the spirit behind the raid: “It frightened even the hardcore pushers to imagine that at any moment a device was going to put a big hole in their place of business, and in would march SWAT, scattering flash-bangs and scaring the hell out of everyone.” This scene would indeed be played out many times over the remaining years of Gates’s chiefdom. But then along came Rodney King of all people to take the inadvertent role of his bête noire.

King was a rather-slow-witted janitor and sometime petty criminal with a bumbling reputation on the street. He’d recently done a year in prison after attempting to rob a convenience store with a tire iron; over the course of the crime, the owner of the store had somehow wound up disarming him, beating him over the head with his own weapon, and chasing him off the premises. He was still on parole for that conviction on the evening of March 3, 1991, when he was spotted by two LAPD officers speeding down the freeway. King had been drinking, and so, seeing their patrol car’s flashing lights in his rear-view mirror, he decided to make a run for it. He led what turned into a whole caravan of police cars on a merry chase until he found himself hopelessly hemmed in on a side street. The unarmed man then climbed out of his car and lay face down on the ground, as instructed. But then he stood up and tried to make a break for it on foot, despite being completely surrounded. Four of the 31 officers on the scene now proceeded to knock him down and beat him badly enough with their batons and boots to fracture his face and break one of his ankles. Their colleagues simply stood and watched at a distance.

Had not a plumber named George Holliday owned an apartment looking down on that section of street, the incident would doubtless have gone down in the LAPD’s logs as just another example of a black man “resisting arrest” and getting regrettably injured in the process. But Holliday was there, standing on his balcony — and he had a camcorder to record it all. When he sent his videotape to a local television station, its images of the officers taking big two-handed swings against King’s helpless body with their batons ignited a national firestorm. The local prosecutor had little choice but to bring the four officers up on charges.

The tactics of Daryl Gates now came under widespread negative scrutiny for the first time. Although he claimed to support the prosecution of the officers involved, he was nevertheless blamed for fostering the culture that had led to this incident, as well as the many others like it that had gone un-filmed. At long last, reporters started asking the black residents of Los Angeles directly about their experiences with the LAPD. A typical LAPD arrest, said one of them, “basically consisted of three or four cops handcuffing a person, and just literally beating him, often until unconscious… punching, beating, kicking.” A hastily assembled city commission produced pages and pages of descriptions of a police force run amok. “It is apparent,” the final report read, “that too many LAPD patrol officers view citizens with resentment and hostility.” In response, Gates promised to retire “soon.” Yet, as month after month went by and he showed no sign of fulfilling his promise, many began to suspect that he still had hopes of weathering the storm.

At any rate, he was still there on April 29, 1992. That was the day his four cops were acquitted in Simi Valley, a place LAPD officers referred to as “cop heaven”; huge numbers of them lived there. Within two hours after the verdict was announced, the Los Angeles Riots began in apocalyptic fashion, as a mob of black men pulled a white truck driver out of his cab and all but tore him limb from limb in the process of murdering him, all under the watchful eye of a helicopter that was hovering overhead and filming the carnage.

Tellingly, Gates happened to be speaking to an adoring audience of white patrons in the wealthy suburb of Brentwood at the very instant the riots began. As the violence continued, this foremost advocate of militaristic policing seemed bizarrely paralyzed. South Los Angeles burned, and the LAPD did virtually nothing about it. The most charitable explanation had it that Gates, spooked by the press coverage of the previous year, was terrified of how white police officers subduing black rioters would play on television. A less charitable one, hewed to by many black and liberal commentators, had it that Gates had decided that these parts of the city just weren’t worth saving — had decided to just let the rioters have their fun and burn it all down. But the problem, of course, was that in the meantime many innocent people of all colors were being killed and wounded and seeing their property go up in smoke. Finally, the mayor called in the National Guard to quell the rioting while Gates continued to sit on his hands.

Asked afterward how the LAPD — the very birthplace of SWAT — had allowed things to get so out of hand, Gates blamed it on a subordinate: “We had a lieutenant down there who just didn’t seem to know what to do, and he let us down.” Not only was this absurd, but it was hard to label as anything other than moral cowardice. It was especially rich coming from a man who had always preached an esprit de corps based on loyalty and honor. The situation was now truly untenable for him. Incompetence, cowardice, racism, brutality… whichever charge or charges you chose to apply, the man had to go. Gates resigned, for real this time, on June 28, 1992.

Yet he didn’t go away quietly. Gates appears to have modeled his post-public-service media strategy to a large extent on that of Oliver North, a locus of controversy for his role in President Ronald Reagan’s Iron-Contra scandal who had parlayed his dubious celebrity into the role of hero to the American right. Gates too gave a series of angry, unrepentant interviews, touted a recently published autobiography, and even went North one better when he won his own radio show which played in close proximity to that of Rush Limbaugh. And then, when Ken Williams came knocking, he welcomed that attention as well.

But why would Williams choose to cast his lot with such a controversial figure, one whose background and bearing were so different from his own? To begin to understand that, we need to look back to the origins of the adventure-game oddity known as Police Quest.

Ken Williams, it would seem, had always had a fascination with the boys in blue. One day in 1985, when he learned from his hairdresser that her husband was a California Highway Patrol officer on administrative leave for post-traumatic stress, his interest was piqued. He invited the cop in question, one Jim Walls, over to his house to play some racquetball and drink some beer. Before the evening was over, he had starting asking his guest whether he’d be interested in designing a game for Sierra. Walls had barely ever used a computer, and had certainly never played an adventure game on one, so he had only the vaguest idea what his new drinking buddy was talking about. But the only alternative, as he would later put it, was to “sit around and think” about the recent shootout that had nearly gotten him killed, so he agreed to give it a go.

The game which finally emerged from that conversation more than two years later shows the best and the worst of Sierra. On the one hand, it pushed a medium that was usually content to wallow in the same few fictional genres in a genuinely new direction. In a pair of articles he wrote for Computer Gaming World magazine, John Williams positioned Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel at the forefront of a new wave of “adult” software able to appeal to a whole new audience, noting how it evoked Joseph Wambaugh rather than J.R.R. Tolkien, Hill Street Blues rather than Star Wars. Conceptually, it was indeed a welcome antidote to a bad case of tunnel vision afflicting the entire computer-games industry.

In practical terms, however, it was somewhat less inspiring. The continual sin of Ken Williams and Sierra throughout the company’s existence was their failure to provide welcome fresh voices like that of Jim Walls with the support network that might have allowed them to make good games out of their well of experiences. Left to fend for himself, Walls, being the law-and-order kind of guy he was, devised the most pedantic adventure game of all time, one which played like an interactive adaptation of a police-academy procedure manual — so much so, in fact, that a number of police academies around the country would soon claim to be employing it as a training tool. The approach is simplicity itself: in every situation, if you do exactly what the rules of police procedure that are exhaustively described in the game’s documentation tell you to do, you get to live and go on to the next scene. If you don’t, you die. It may have worked as an adjunct to a police-academy course, but it’s less compelling as a piece of pure entertainment.

Although it’s an atypical Sierra adventure game in many respects, this first Police Quest nonetheless opens with what I’ve always considered to be the most indelibly Sierra moment of all. The manual has carefully explained — you did read it, right? — that you must walk all the way around your patrol car to check the tires and lights and so forth every time you’re about to drive somewhere. And sure enough, if you fail to do so before you get into your car for the first time, a tire blows out and you die as soon as you drive away. But if you do examine your vehicle, you find no evidence of a damaged tire, and you never have to deal with any blow-out once you start driving. The mask has fallen away to reveal what we always suspected: that the game actively wants to kill you, and is scheming constantly for a way to do so. There’s not even any pretension left of fidelity to a simulated world — just pure, naked malice. Robb Sherwin once memorably said that “Zork hates its player.” Well, Zork‘s got nothing on Police Quest.

Nevertheless, Police Quest struck a modest chord with Sierra’s fan base. While it didn’t become as big a hit as Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, John Williams’s other touted 1987 embodiment of a new wave of “adult” games, it sold well enough to mark the starting point of another of the long series that were the foundation of Sierra’s marketing strategy. Jim Walls designed two sequels over the next four years, improving at least somewhat at his craft in the process. (In between them, he also came up with Code-Name: Iceman, a rather confused attempt at a Tom Clancy-style techno-thriller that was a bridge too far even for most of Sierra’s loyal fans.)

But shortly after completing Police Quest 3: The Kindred, Walls left Sierra along with a number of other employees to join Tsunami Media, a new company formed right there in Oakhurst by Edmond Heinbockel, himself a former chief financial officer for Sierra. With Walls gone, but his Police Quest franchise still selling well enough to make another entry financially viable, the door was wide open — as Ken Williams saw it, anyway — for one Daryl F. Gates.

Daryl Gates (right) with Tammy Dargan, the real designer of the game that bears his name.

Williams began his courtship of the most controversial man in the United States by the old-fashioned expedient of writing him a letter. Gates, who claimed never even to have used a computer, much less played a game on one, was initially confused about what exactly Williams wanted from him. Presuming Williams was just one of his admirers, he sent a letter back asking for some free games for some youngsters who lived across the street from him. Williams obliged in calculated fashion, with the three extant Police Quest games. From that initial overture, he progressed to buttering Gates up over the telephone.

As the relationship moved toward the payoff stage, some of his employees tried desperately to dissuade him from getting Sierra into bed with such a figure. “I thought it’s one thing to seek controversy, but another thing to really divide people,” remembers Josh Mandel. Mandel showed his boss a New York Times article about Gates’s checkered history, only to be told that “our players don’t read the New York Times.” He suggested that Sierra court Joseph Wambaugh instead, another former LAPD officer whose novels presented a relatively more nuanced picture of crime and punishment in the City of Angels than did Gates’s incendiary rhetoric; Wambaugh was even a name whom John Williams had explicitly mentioned in the context of the first Police Quest game five years before. But that line of attack was also hopeless; Ken Williams wanted a true mass-media celebrity, not a mere author who hid behind his books. So, Gates made his uncomfortable visit to Oakhurst and the contract was signed. Police Quest would henceforward be known as Daryl F. Gates’ Police Quest. Naturally, the setting of the series would now become Los Angeles; the fictional town of Lytton, the more bucolic setting of the previous three games in the series, was to be abandoned along with almost everything else previously established by Jim Walls.

Inside the company, a stubborn core of dissenters took to calling the game Rodney King’s Quest. Corey Cole, co-designer of the Quest for Glory series, remembers himself and many others being “horrified” at the prospect of even working in the vicinity of Gates: “As far as we were concerned, his name was mud and tainted everything it touched.” As a designer, Corey felt most of all for Jim Walls. He believed Ken Williams was “robbing Walls of his creation”: “It would be like putting Donald Trump’s name on a new Quest for Glory in today’s terms.”

Nevertheless, as the boss’s pet project, Gates’s game went inexorably forward. It was to be given the full multimedia treatment, including voice acting and the extensive use of digitized scenes and actors on the screen in the place of hand-drawn graphics. Indeed, this would become the first Sierra game that could be called a full-blown full-motion-video adventure, placing it at the vanguard of the industry’s hottest new trend.

Of course, there had never been any real expectation that Gates would roll up his sleeves and design a computer game in the way that Jim Walls had; celebrity did have its privileges, after all. Daryl F. Gates’ Police Quest: Open Season thus wound up in the hands of Tammy Dargan, a Sierra producer who, based on an earlier job she’d had with the tabloid television show America’s Most Wanted, now got the chance to try her hand at design. Corey Cole ironically remembers her as one of the most stereotypically liberal of all Sierra’s employees: “She strenuously objected to the use of [the word] ‘native’ in Quest for Glory III, and globally changed it to ‘indigenous.’ We thought that ‘the indigenous flora’ was a rather awkward construction, so we changed some of those back. But she was also a professional and did the jobs assigned to her.”

In this case, doing so would entail writing the script for a game about the mean streets of Los Angeles essentially alone, then sending it to Gates via post for “suggestions.” The latter did become at least somewhat more engaged when the time came for “filming,” using his connections to get Sierra inside the LAPD’s headquarters and even into a popular “cop bar.” Gates himself also made it into the game proper: restored to his rightful status of chief of police, he looks on approvingly and proffers occasional bits of advice as you work through the case. The CD-ROM version tacked on some DARE propaganda and a video interview with Gates, giving him yet one more opportunity to respond to his critics.

Contrary to the expectations raised both by the previous games in the series and the reputation of Gates, the player doesn’t take the role of a uniformed cop at all, but rather that of a plain-clothes detective. Otherwise, though, the game is both predictable in theme and predictably dire. Really, what more could one expect from a first-time designer working in a culture that placed no particular priority on good design, making a game that no one there particularly wanted to be making?

So, the dialog rides its banality to new depths for a series already known for clunky writing, the voice acting is awful — apparently the budget didn’t stretch far enough to allow the sorts of good voice actors that had made such a difference in King’s Quest VI — and the puzzle design is nonsensical. The plot, which revolves around a series of brutal cop killings for maximum sensationalism, wobbles along on rails through its ever more gruesome crime scenes and red-herring suspects until the real killer suddenly appears out of the blue in response to pretty much nothing which you’ve done up to that point. And the worldview the whole thing reflects… oh, my. The previous Police Quest games had hardly been notable for their sociological subtlety — “These kinds of people are actually running around out there, even if we don’t want to think about it,” Jim Walls had said of its antagonists — but this fourth game takes its demonization of all that isn’t white, straight, and suburban to what would be a comical extreme if it wasn’t so hateful. A brutal street gang, the in-game police files helpfully tell us, is made up of “unwed mothers on public assistance,” and the cop killer turns out to be a transvestite; his “deviancy” constitutes the sum total of his motivation for killing, at least as far as we ever learn.

One of the grisly scenes with which Open Season is peppered, reflecting a black-and-white — in more ways than one! — worldview where the irredeemably bad, deviant people are always out to get the good, normal people. Lucky we have the likes of Daryl Gates to sort the one from the other, eh?

Visiting a rap record label, one of a number of places where Sierra’s pasty-white writers get to try out their urban lingo. It goes about as well as you might expect.

Sierra throws in a strip bar for the sake of gritty realism. Why is it that television (and now computer-game) cops always have to visit these places — strictly in order to pursue leads, of course.

But the actual game of Open Season is almost as irrelevant to any discussion of the project’s historical importance today as it was to Ken Williams at the time. This was a marketing exercise, pure and simple. Thus Daryl Gates spent much more time promoting the game than he ever had making it. Williams put on the full-court press in terms of promotion, publishing not one, not two, but three feature interviews with him in Sierra’s news magazine and booking further interviews with whoever would talk to him. The exchanges with scribes from the computing press, who had no training or motivation for asking tough questions, went about as predictably as the game’s plot. Gates dismissed the outrage over the Rodney King tape as “Monday morning quarterbacking,” and consciously or unconsciously evoked Richard Nixon’s silent majority in noting that the “good, ordinary, responsible, quiet citizens” — the same ones who saw the need to get tough on crime and prosecute a war on drugs — would undoubtedly enjoy the game. Meanwhile Sierra’s competitors weren’t quite sure what to make of it all. “Talk about hot properties,” wrote the editors of Origin Systems’s internal newsletter, seemingly uncertain whether to express anger or admiration for Sierra’s sheer chutzpah. “No confirmation yet as to whether the game will ship with its own special solid-steel joystick” — a dark reference to the batons with which Gates’s officers had beat Rodney King.

In the end, though, the game generated decidedly less controversy than Ken Williams had hoped for. The computer-gaming press just wasn’t politically engaged enough to do much more than shrug their shoulders at its implications. And by the time it was released it was November of 1993, and Gates was already becoming old news for the mainstream press as well. The president of the Los Angeles Urban League did provide an obligingly outraged quote, saying that Gates “embodies all that is bad in law enforcement—the problems of the macho, racist, brutal police experience that we’re working hard to put behind us. That anyone would hire him for a project like this proves that some companies will do anything for the almighty dollar.” But that was about as good as it got.

There’s certainly no reason to believe that Gates’s game sold any better than the run-of-the-mill Sierra adventure, or than any of the Police Quest games that had preceded it. If anything, the presence of Gates’s name on the box seems to have put off more fans than it attracted. Rather than a new beginning, Open Season proved the end of the line for Police Quest as an adventure series — albeit not for Sierra’s involvement with Gates himself. The product line was retooled in 1995 into Daryl F. Gates’ Police Quest: SWAT, a “tactical simulator” of police work that played suspiciously like any number of outright war simulators. In this form, it found a more receptive audience and continued for years. Tammy Dargan remained at the reinvented series’s head for much of its run. History hasn’t recorded whether her bleeding-heart liberal sympathies went into abeyance after her time with Gates or whether the series remained just a slightly distasteful job she had to do.

Gates, on the other hand, got dropped after the first SWAT game. His radio show had been cancelled after he had proved himself to be a stodgy bore on the air, without even the modicum of wit that marked the likes of a Rush Limbaugh. Having thus failed in his new career as a media provocateur, and deprived forevermore of his old position of authority, his time as a political lightning rod had just about run out. What then was the use of Sierra continuing to pay him?

Ken and Roberta Williams looking wholesome in 1993, their days in the hot tub behind them.

But then, Daryl Gates was never the most interesting person behind the games that bore his name. The hard-bitten old reactionary was always a predictable, easily known quantity, and therefore one with no real power to fascinate. Much more interesting was and is Ken Williams, this huge, mercurial personality who never designed a game himself but who lurked as an almost palpable presence in the background of every game Sierra ever released as an independent company. In short, Sierra was his baby, destined from the first to become his legacy more so than that of any member of his creative staff.

Said legacy is, like the man himself, a maze of contradictions resistant to easy judgments. Everything you can say about Ken Williams and Sierra, whether positive or negative, seems to come equipped with a “but” that points in the opposite direction. So, we can laud him for having the vision to say something like this, which accurately diagnosed the problem of an industry offering a nearly exclusive diet of games by and for young white men obsessed with Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings:

If you match the top-selling books, records, or films to the top-selling computer-entertainment titles, you’ll immediately notice differences. Where are the romance, horror, and non-fiction titles? Where’s military fiction? Where’s all the insider political stories? Music in computer games is infinitely better than what we had a few years back, but it doesn’t match what people are buying today. Where’s the country-western music? The rap? The reggae? The new age?

And yet Williams approached his self-assigned mission of broadening the market for computer games with a disconcerting mixture of crassness and sheer naivete. The former seemed somehow endemic to the man, no matter how hard he worked to conceal it behind high-flown rhetoric, while the latter signified a man who appeared never to have seriously thought about the nature of mass media before he started trying to make it for himself. “For a publisher to not publish a product which many customers want to buy is censorship,” he said at one point. No, it’s not, actually; it’s called curation, and is the right and perhaps the duty of every content publisher — not that there were lines of customers begging Sierra for a Daryl Gates-helmed Police Quest game anyway. With that game, Williams became, whatever else he was, a shameless wannabe exploiter of a bleeding wound at the heart of his nation — and he wasn’t even very good at it, as shown by the tepid reaction to his “controversial” game. His decision to make it reflects not just a moral failure but an intellectual misunderstanding of his audience so extreme as to border on the bizarre. Has anyone ever bought an adventure game strictly because it’s controversial?

So, if there’s a pattern to the history of Ken Williams and Sierra — and the two really are all but inseparable — it’s one of talking a good game, of being broadly right with the vision thing, but falling down in the details and execution. Another example from the horse’s mouth, describing the broad idea that supposedly led to Open Season:

The reason that I’m working with Chief Gates is that one of my goals has been to create a series of adventure games which accomplish reality through having been written by real experts. I have been calling this series of games the “Reality Role-Playing” series. I want to find the top cop, lawyer, airline pilot, fireman, race-car driver, politician, military hero, schoolteacher, white-water rafter, mountain climber, etc., and have them work with us on a simulation of their world. Chief Gates gives us the cop game. We are working with Emerson Fittipaldi to simulate racing, and expect to announce soon that Vincent Bugliosi, the lawyer who locked up Charles Manson, will be working with us to do a courtroom simulation. My goal is that products in the Reality Role-Playing series will be viewed as serious simulations of real-world events, not as games. If we do our jobs right, this will be the closest most of us will ever get to seeing the world through these people’s eyes.

The idea sounds magnificent, so much so that one can’t help but feel a twinge of regret that it never went any further than Open Season. Games excel at immersion, and their ability to let us walk a mile in someone else’s shoes — to become someone whose world we would otherwise never know — is still sadly underutilized.

I often — perhaps too often — use Sierra’s arch-rivals in adventure games LucasArts as my own baton with which to beat them, pointing out how much more thoughtful and polished the latter’s designs were. This remains true enough. Yet it’s also true that LucasArts had nothing like the ambition for adventure games which Ken Williams expresses here. LucasArts found what worked for them very early on — that thing being cartoon comedies — and rode that same horse relentlessly right up until the market for adventures in general went away. Tellingly, when they were asked to adapt Indiana Jones to an interactive medium, they responded not so much by adjusting their standard approach all that radically as by turning Indy himself into a cartoon character. Something tells me that Ken Williams would have taken a very different tack.

But then we get to the implementation of Williams’s ideas by Sierra in the form of Open Season, and the questions begin all over again. Was Daryl Gates truly, as one of the marketers’ puff pieces claimed, “the most knowledgeable authority on law enforcement alive?” Or was there some other motivation involved? I trust the answer is self-evident. (John Williams even admitted as much in another of the puff pieces: “[Ken] decided the whole controversy over Gates would ultimately help the game sell better.”) And then, why does the “reality role-playing” series have to focus only on those with prestige and power? If Williams truly does just want to share the lives of others with us and give us a shared basis for empathy and discussion, why not make a game about what it’s like to be a Rodney King?

Was it because Ken Williams was himself a racist and a bigot? That’s a major charge to level, and one that’s neither helpful nor warranted here — no, not even though he championed a distinctly racist and bigoted game, released under the banner of a thoroughly unpleasant man who had long made dog whistles to racism and bigotry his calling card. Despite all that, the story of Open Season‘s creation is more one of thoughtlessness than malice aforethought. It literally never occurred to Ken Williams that anyone living in South Los Angeles would ever think of buying a Sierra game; that territory was more foreign to him than that of Europe (where Sierra was in fact making an aggressive play at the time). Thus he felt free to exploit a community’s trauma with this distasteful product and this disingenuous narrative that it was created to engender “discussion.” For nothing actually to be found within Open Season is remotely conducive to civil discussion.

Williams stated just as he was beginning his courtship of Daryl Gates that, in a fast-moving industry, he had to choose whether to “lead, follow, or get out of the way. I don’t believe in following, and I’m not about to get out of the way. Therefore, if I am to lead then I have to know where I’m going.” And here we come to the big-picture thing again, the thing at which Williams tended to excel. His decision to work with Gates does indeed stand as a harbinger of where much of gaming was going. This time, though, it’s a sad harbinger rather than a happy one.

I believe that the last several centuries — and certainly the last several decades — have seen us all slowly learning to be kinder and more respectful to one another. It hasn’t been a linear progression by any means, and we still have one hell of a long way to go, but it’s hard to deny that it’s occurred. (Whatever the disappointments of the last several years, the fact remains that the United States elected a black man as president in 2008, and has finally accepted the right of gay people to marry even more recently. Both of these things were unthinkable in 1993.) In some cases, gaming has reflected this progress. But too often, large segments of gaming culture have chosen to side instead with the reactionaries and the bigots, as Sierra implicitly did here.

So, Ken Williams and Sierra somehow managed to encompass both the best and the worst of what seems destined to go down in history as the defining art form of the 21st century, and they did so long before that century began. Yes, that’s quite an achievement in its own right — but, as Open Season so painfully reminds us, not an unmixed one.

(Sources: the books Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing by Joe Domanick and Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces by Radley Balko; Computer Gaming World of August/September 1987, October 1987, and December 1993; Sierra’s news magazines of Summer 1991, Winter 1992, June 1993, Summer 1993, Holiday 1993, and Spring 1994; Electronic Games of October 1993; Origin Systems’s internal newsletter Point of Origin of February 26 1993. Online sources include an excellent and invaluable Vice article on Open Season and the information about the Rodney King beating and subsequent trial found on Famous American Trials. And my thanks go out yet again to Corey Cole, who took the time to answer some questions about this period of Sierra’s history from his perspective as a developer there.

The four Police Quest adventure games are available for digital purchase at GOG.com.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/chief-gates-comes-to-oakhurst-a-cop-drama-2/

[spacenutspod]

The week of Oct. 23 through Oct 30 is a big one for low-Earth orbit (LEO) with all but one flight headed to already existing constellations. This includes two Falcon 9 launches on opposite sides of the country and two different launches planned out of China, one involving humans. Two Chinese launches start the week, with the first being a Chang Zheng 2D preparing for its flight from LC-3 at Xichang Satellite Launch Center. Then, a Chang Zheng 2F/G will launch out of LC-90 at the China Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, before a Falcon 9 launches another Starlink payload on the other side of the world out of Space Launch Complex (SLC) 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS). Finally, ending the week is another Falcon 9 Starlink launch out of SLC-4E at Vandenberg Spaceforce Base (VSFB).  Chang Zheng 2D – Yaogan 39 Group 04 China is preparing to launch more military reconnaissance satellites into LEO on Monday, Oct. 23, at 20:01 UTC out of LC-3 at the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China. While not much information is known about the payload, it is believed that Yaogan 39-04A, 39-04B, and 39-04C reconnaissance satellites are in the payload bay. These satellites will become the 135th, 136th, and 137th Yaogan class satellites launched by China. The Yaogan satellites are believed to be ELINT capable, which means that they use electronic sensors to gather intelligence by locating the radar of ground systems. This capability can give a strategic advantage to military endeavors like jamming any type of electrical signal.  The satellites will be launched using a Chang Zheng 2D, which is one of China’s workhorse rockets. This will be its 10th flight of 2023 and its 83rd total launch since its maiden flight on Aug. 2, 1922. Chang Zheng 2F/G – Shenzhou 17 China won’t stop with only one launch this week. Next up on the list is the Chang Zheng 2F/G taking three taikonauts to the Tiangong space station in LEO. The launch is scheduled for 11:14 PM EDT on Oct. 25 (03:14 UTC on Oct. 26) out of LC-90 at the China Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center and will be China’s 12th crewed mission and 17th Shenzhou mission. A @planet satellite captured Shenzhou-17 on the pad at Jiuquan after rolling out earlier today. Crew and crowds can be seen gathering nearby the rocket as it's prepared to launch three humans to the Chinese Space Station later this month. More: https://t.co/4hXPnidLmX https://t.co/yxv6GFXMgo pic.twitter.com/axwZp5TNAq — Harry Stranger (@Harry__Stranger) October 19, 2023 The Tiangong space station is a three-module, 340-cubic-meter space station first launched on Apr. 29, 2021, and is operated by the China Manned Space Agency. The station can hold up to six crew members at a time and houses 23 pressurized experimental racks and 52 exposed experimental racks. China plans to gain information on how humans react in a weightless environment for long periods of time, and multiple technologies like rendezvous maneuvers in orbit and regenerative life support using Tiangong.  Shenzhou 17 will continue to expand the lifespan of Tiangong’s already two-and-a-half years in orbit by bringing a new crew up to work on the space station for six months. The crew of this mission will likely be unknown until the day before launch when the People’s Liberation Army Astronaut Corps will announce the Commander, Operator, and System Operator.  Falcon 9 – Starlink 6-25 The first Falcon 9 launch of this week is taking place on Oct. 28 at 7:13 PM EDT (23:13 UTC). This will take a batch of 23 Starlink v2-mini satellites to LEO. Launching from SLC-40 at CCSFS in Florida, the Falcon 9 will take this Starlink mission for a ride on an unknown booster at this time. To a p h r e s h Falcon 9 and @ESA_Euclid telescope – out girl scouts This mission marks the first standalone partnership flight between @esa and @SpaceX – well done to all! Off on a journey to see the unseen! – @NASASpaceflight pic.twitter.com/gOs4Qgp6Fw — Max Evans (@_mgde_) July 1, 2023 This launch is going to fly on a southeastern trajectory inclined at a 43-degree angle to the equator. This should place the payload into a 284 by 293-kilometer LEO. Then the Starlink v2-mini will use its Hall-effect thrusters to reach a stable circular orbit at 530 kilometers. The booster will plan to land on one of SpaceX’s autonomous spaceport drone ships, Just Read The Instructions, which will be downrange in the Atlantic Ocean. If everything goes right, this will be Falcon 9’s 224th total landing. About 50 kilometers further downrange, the fairing halves will splash down and be recovered. This will be Falcon 9’s 49th Starlink mission this year and will also be the 268th mission of Falcon 9’s operational life.  Falcon 9 – Starlink Group 7-6 With SpaceX’s goal of launching 100 times this year, in the coming weeks SpaceX will be launching many Starlink missions. This week’s second Starlink mission is taking place at 11:16 PM PDT on Oct. 28 (06:16 UTC on Oct. 29). Like all Group 7 missions, this launch will take place from SLC-4E from VSFB. This Falcon 9 will take 22 more Starlink v2-mini satellites to LEO — the most satellites launched on a Group 7 mission.  An unknown Falcon 9 Booster will take these 22 Starlink satellites on a southeastern trajectory inclined at a 53-degree angle to the equator. The second stage of Falcon 9 will then take the satellites to an initial deploy orbit of 286 by 296 kilometers. In the coming months, the satellites will raise their orbits to the operational 530-kilometer circular orbit. The booster will then complete its mission by returning to SpaceX’s drone ship stationed on the West Coast, Of Course I Still Love You. This ship will be stationed 631 kilometers downrange in the Pacific Ocean. The fairings will also be recovered around 681 kilometers downrange. Starlink is hitting a massive milestone with this flight. While there are around 4,400 operational Starlink satellites, this launch should put the number of active Starlink satellites in orbit over 5,000 to exactly 5,011. The leftover 600 just need to raise their orbit to 530 kilometers to become operational.  (Lead image: Falcon 9 launches heaviest payload yet of 23 Starlink v2 mini satellites. Credit: Julia Bergeron for NSF) The post Launch Roundup: SpaceX surpass 5,000 active Starlink satellites; China to send taikonauts to space station appeared first on NASASpaceFlight.com.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 3.16

934 – Meng Zhixiang declares himself emperor and establishes Later Shu as a new state independent of Later Tang. 1190 – Massacre of Jews at Clifford's Tower, York. 1244 – Over 200 Cathars who refuse to recant are burnt to death after the Fall of Montségur. 1621 – Samoset, a Mohegan, visits the settlers of Plymouth Colony and greets them, "Welcome, Englishmen! My name is Samoset." 1660 – The Long Parliament of England is dissolved so as to prepare for the new Convention Parliament. 1792 – King Gustav III of Sweden is shot; he dies on March 29. 1802 – The Army Corps of Engineers is established to found and operate the United States Military Academy at West Point. 1815 – Prince Willem proclaims himself King of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, the first constitutional monarch in the Netherlands. 1872 – The Wanderers F.C. win the first FA Cup, the oldest football competition in the world, beating Royal Engineers A.F.C. 1–0 at The Oval in Kennington, London. 1898 – In Melbourne, the representatives of five colonies adopt a constitution, which would become the basis of the Commonwealth of Australia. 1916 – The 7th and 10th US cavalry regiments under John J. Pershing cross the US–Mexico border to join the hunt for Pancho Villa. 1918 – Finnish Civil War: Battle of Länkipohja is infamous for its bloody aftermath as the Whites execute 70–100 capitulated Reds. 1924 – In accordance with the Treaty of Rome, Fiume becomes annexed as part of Italy. 1926 – History of Rocketry: Robert Goddard launches the first liquid-fueled rocket, at Auburn, Massachusetts. 1935 – Adolf Hitler orders Germany to rearm herself in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Conscription is reintroduced to form the Wehrmacht. 1936 – Warmer-than-normal temperatures rapidly melt snow and ice on the upper Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, leading to a major flood in Pittsburgh. 1939 – From Prague Castle, Hitler proclaims Bohemia and Moravia a German protectorate. 1941 – Operation Appearance takes place to re-establish British Somaliland. 1945 – World War II: The Battle of Iwo Jima ends, but small pockets of Japanese resistance persist. 1945 – Ninety percent of Würzburg, Germany is destroyed in only 20 minutes by British bombers, resulting in at least 4,000 deaths. 1962 – Flying Tiger Line Flight 739 disappears in the western Pacific Ocean with all 107 aboard missing and presumed dead. 1966 – Launch of Gemini 8 with astronauts Neil Armstrong and David Scott. It would perform the first docking of two spacecraft in orbit. 1968 – Vietnam War: My Lai Massacre occurs; between 347 and 500 Vietnamese villagers are killed by American troops. 1969 – A Viasa McDonnell Douglas DC-9 crashes in Maracaibo, Venezuela, killing 155. 1977 – Assassination of Kamal Jumblatt, the main leader of the anti-government forces in the Lebanese Civil War. 1978 – Former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro is kidnapped; he is later murdered by his captors 1978 – A Balkan Bulgarian Airlines Tupolev Tu-134 crashes near Gabare, Bulgaria, killing 73. 1978 – Supertanker Amoco Cadiz splits in two after running aground on the Portsall Rocks, three miles off the coast of Brittany, resulting in the largest oil spill in history at that time. 1979 – Sino-Vietnamese War: The People's Liberation Army crosses the border back into China, ending the war. 1984 – William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Lebanon, is kidnapped by Hezbollah; he later dies in captivity. 1985 – Associated Press newsman Terry Anderson is taken hostage in Beirut; he not released until December 1991. 1988 – Iran–Contra affair: Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and Vice Admiral John Poindexter are indicted on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States. 1988 – Halabja chemical attack: The Kurdish town of Halabja in Iraq is attacked with a mix of poison gas and nerve agents on the orders of Saddam Hussein, killing 5,000 people and injuring about 10,000 people. 1988 – The Troubles: Ulster loyalist militant Michael Stone attacks a Provisional IRA funeral in Belfast with pistols and grenades. Three persons, one of them a member of PIRA are killed, and more than 60 others are wounded. 1995 – Mississippi formally ratifies the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, becoming the last state to approve the abolition of slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment was officially ratified in 1865. 2001 – A series of bomb blasts in the city of Shijiazhuang, China kill 108 people and injure 38 others, the biggest mass murder in China in decades. 2003 – American activist Rachel Corrie is killed in Rafah by being run over by an Israel Defense Forces bulldozer while trying to obstruct the demolition of a home. 2005 – Israel officially hands over Jericho to Palestinian control. 2014 – Crimea votes in a controversial referendum to secede from Ukraine to join Russia. 2016 – A bomb detonates in a bus carrying government employees in Peshawar, Pakistan, killing 15 and injuring at least 30. 2016 – Two suicide bombers detonate their explosives at a mosque during morning prayer on the outskirts of Maiduguri, Nigeria, killing 24 and injuring 18. 2020 – The Dow Jones Industrial Average falls by 2,997.10, the single largest point drop in history and the second-largest percentage drop ever at 12.93%, an even greater crash than Black Monday (1929). This follows the U.S. Federal Reserve announcing that it will cut its target interest rate to 0–0.25%. 2021 – Atlanta spa shootings: Eight people are killed and one is injured in a trio of shootings at spas in and near Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. A suspect is arrested the same day. 2022 – A 7.4-magnitude earthquake occurs off the coast of Fukushima, Japan, killing 4 people and injuring 225.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 5.15

221 – Liu Bei, Chinese warlord, proclaims himself emperor of Shu Han, the successor of the Han dynasty. 392 – Emperor Valentinian II is assassinated while advancing into Gaul against the Frankish usurper Arbogast. He is found hanging in his residence at Vienne. 589 – King Authari marries Theodelinda, daughter of the Bavarian duke Garibald I. A Catholic, she has great influence among the Lombard nobility. 756 – Abd al-Rahman I, the founder of the Arab dynasty that ruled the greater part of Iberia for nearly three centuries, becomes emir of Cordova, Spain. 1252 – Pope Innocent IV issues the papal bull ad extirpanda, which authorizes, but also limits, the torture of heretics in the Medieval Inquisition. 1525 – Insurgent peasants led by Anabaptist pastor Thomas Müntzer were defeated at the Battle of Frankenhausen, ending the German Peasants' War in the Holy Roman Empire. 1536 – Anne Boleyn, Queen of England, stands trial in London on charges of treason, adultery and incest; she is condemned to death by a specially-selected jury. 1602 – Cape Cod discovered by English navigator Bartholomew Gosnold. 1618 – Johannes Kepler confirms his previously rejected discovery of the third law of planetary motion (he first discovered it on March 8 but soon rejected the idea after some initial calculations were made). 1648 – The Peace of Münster is ratified, by which Spain acknowledges Dutch sovereignty. 1791 – French Revolution: Maximilien Robespierre proposes the Self-denying Ordinance. 1817 – Opening of the first private mental health hospital in the United States, the Asylum for the Relief of Persons Deprived of the Use of Their Reason (now Friends Hospital, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). 1836 – Francis Baily observes "Baily's beads" during an annular eclipse. 1849 – The Sicilian revolution of 1848 is finally extinguished. 1850 – The Arana–Southern Treaty is ratified, ending "the existing differences" between Great Britain and Argentina. 1851 – The first Australian gold rush is proclaimed, although the discovery had been made three months earlier. 1864 – American Civil War: Battle of New Market, Virginia: Students from the Virginia Military Institute fight alongside the Confederate army to force Union General Franz Sigel out of the Shenandoah Valley. 1891 – Pope Leo XIII defends workers' rights and property rights in the encyclical Rerum novarum, the beginning of modern Catholic social teaching. 1905 – Las Vegas founded in Nevada. 1911 – In Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States, the United States Supreme Court declares Standard Oil to be an "unreasonable" monopoly under the Sherman Antitrust Act and orders the company to be broken up. 1911 – More than 300 Chinese immigrants are killed in the Torreón massacre when the forces of the Mexican Revolution led by Emilio Madero take the city of Torreón from the Federales. 1918 – The Finnish Civil War was ended, when the Whites took over Fort Ino, a Russian coastal artillery base on the Karelian Isthmus, from the Russian troops. 1919 – The Winnipeg general strike begins. By 11:00, almost the whole working population of Winnipeg had walked off the job. 1919 – Greek occupation of Smyrna. During the occupation, the Greek army kills or wounds 350 Turks; those responsible are punished by Greek commander Aristides Stergiades. 1929 – A fire at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio kills 123. 1932 – In an attempted coup d'état, the Prime Minister of Japan Inukai Tsuyoshi is assassinated. 1933 – All military aviation organizations within or under the control of the RLM of Germany were officially merged in a covert manner to form its Wehrmacht military's air arm, the Luftwaffe. 1940 – USS Sailfish is recommissioned. It was originally the USS Squalus. 1940 – World War II: After fierce fighting, the poorly trained and equipped Dutch troops surrender to Germany, marking the beginning of five years of occupation. 1940 – Richard and Maurice McDonald open the first McDonald's restaurant. 1941 – First flight of the Gloster E.28/39 the first British and Allied jet aircraft. 1941 – Joe DiMaggio begins a 56-game hitting streak. 1942 – World War II: In the United States, a bill creating the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) is signed into law. 1943 – Joseph Stalin dissolves the Comintern (or Third International). 1945 – World War II: The Battle of Poljana, the final skirmish in Europe is fought near Prevalje, Slovenia. 1948 – Following the expiration of The British Mandate for Palestine, the Kingdom of Egypt, Transjordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia invade Israel thus starting the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. 1957 – At Malden Island in the Pacific Ocean, Britain tests its first hydrogen bomb in Operation Grapple. 1963 – Project Mercury: The launch of the final Mercury mission, Mercury-Atlas 9 with astronaut Gordon Cooper on board. He becomes the first American to spend more than a day in space, and the last American to go into space alone. 1970 – President Richard Nixon appoints Anna Mae Hays and Elizabeth P. Hoisington the first female United States Army generals. 1972 – The Ryukyu Islands, under U.S. military governance since its conquest in 1945, reverts to Japanese control. 1974 – Ma'alot massacre: Members of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine attack and take hostages at an Israeli school; a total of 31 people are killed, including 22 schoolchildren. 1988 – Soviet–Afghan War: After more than eight years of fighting, the Soviet Army begins to withdraw 115,000 troops from Afghanistan. 1991 – Édith Cresson becomes France's first female Prime Minister. 1997 – The United States government acknowledges the existence of the "Secret War" in Laos and dedicates the Laos Memorial in honor of Hmong and other "Secret War" veterans. 1997 – The Space Shuttle Atlantis launches on STS-84 to dock with the Russian space station Mir. 2004 – Arsenal F.C. go an entire league campaign unbeaten in the English Premier League, joining Preston North End F.C with the right to claim the title "The Invincibles". 2008 – California becomes the second U.S. state after Massachusetts in 2004 to legalize same-sex marriage after the state's own Supreme Court rules a previous ban unconstitutional. 2010 – Jessica Watson becomes the youngest person to sail, non-stop and unassisted around the world solo. 2013 – An upsurge in violence in Iraq leaves more than 389 people dead over three days.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 4.7

451 – Attila the Hun sacks the town of Metz and attacks other cities in Gaul. 529 – First draft of the Corpus Juris Civilis (a fundamental work in jurisprudence) is issued by Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I. 611 – Maya king Uneh Chan of Calakmul sacks rival city-state Palenque in southern Mexico. 1141 – Empress Matilda becomes the first female ruler of England, adopting the title 'Lady of the English'. 1348 – Charles University is founded in Prague. 1521 – Ferdinand Magellan arrives at Cebu. 1541 – Francis Xavier leaves Lisbon on a mission to the Portuguese East Indies. 1724 – Premiere performance of Johann Sebastian Bach's St John Passion, BWV 245, at St. Nicholas Church, Leipzig. 1767 – End of Burmese–Siamese War (1765–67). 1776 – Captain John Barry and the USS Lexington captures the Edward. 1788 – American pioneers to the Northwest Territory establish Marietta, Ohio as the first permanent American settlement in the Northwest Territory. 1789 – Selim III became Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and Caliph of Islam. 1798 – The Mississippi Territory is organized from disputed territory claimed by both the United States and Spain. It is expanded in 1804 and again in 1812. 1805 – Lewis and Clark Expedition: The Corps of Discovery breaks camp among the Mandan tribe and resumes its journey West along the Missouri River. 1805 – German composer Ludwig van Beethoven premiered his Third Symphony, at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna. 1827 – John Walker, an English chemist, sells the first friction match that he had invented the previous year. 1829 – Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, commences translation of the Book of Mormon, with Oliver Cowdery as his scribe. 1831 – Emperor Pedro I of Brazil resigns. He goes to his native Portugal to become King Pedro IV. 1862 – American Civil War: The Union's Army of the Tennessee and the Army of the Ohio defeat the Confederate Army of Mississippi near Shiloh, Tennessee. 1868 – Thomas D'Arcy McGee, one of the Canadian Fathers of Confederation, is assassinated by a Fenian activist. 1890 – Completion of the first Lake Biwa Canal. 1906 – Mount Vesuvius erupts and devastates Naples. 1906 – The Algeciras Conference gives France and Spain control over Morocco. 1922 – The United States Secretary of the Interior leases federal petroleum reserves to private oil companies on excessively generous terms. 1927 – The first long-distance public television broadcast (from Washington, D.C., to New York City, displaying the image of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover). 1933 – Prohibition in the United States is repealed for beer of no more than 3.2% alcohol by weight, eight months before the ratification of the XXI amendment. (Now celebrated as National Beer Day in the United States.) 1940 – Booker T. Washington becomes the first African American to be depicted on a United States postage stamp. 1943 – The Holocaust in Ukraine: In Terebovlia, Germans order 1,100 Jews to undress and march through the city to the nearby village of Plebanivka, where they are shot and buried in ditches. 1943 – Ioannis Rallis becomes collaborationist Prime Minister of Greece during the Axis Occupation. 1945 – World War II: The battleship Yamato, one of the two largest ever constructed, is sunk by American aircraft during Operation Ten-Go. 1945 – World War II: Visoko is liberated by the 7th, 9th, and 17th Krajina brigades from the Tenth division of Yugoslav Partisan forces. 1948 – The World Health Organization is established by the United Nations. 1949 – The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific opened on Broadway; it would run for 1,925 performances and win ten Tony Awards. 1954 – United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower gives his "domino theory" speech during a news conference. 1955 – Winston Churchill resigns as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom amid indications of failing health. 1964 – IBM announces the System/360. 1964 – A bulldozer kills Rev. Bruce W. Klunder, a civil rights activist, during a school segregation protest in Cleveland, Ohio, sparking a riot. 1965 – Representatives of the National Congress of American Indians testify before members of the US Senate against the termination of the Colville tribe in Washington DC. 1968 – Motor racing world champion Jim Clark is killed in an accident during a Formula Two race at Hockenheim. 1969 – The Internet's symbolic birth date: Publication of RFC 1. 1971 – President Richard Nixon announces his decision to quicken the pace of Vietnamization. 1972 – Communist forces overran the South Vietnamese town of Loc Ninh. 1976 – Member of Parliament and suspected spy John Stonehouse resigns from the Labour Party (UK) after being arrested for faking his own death. 1977 – German Federal prosecutor Siegfried Buback and his driver are shot by two Red Army Faction members while waiting at a red light. 1978 – Development of the neutron bomb is canceled by President Jimmy Carter. 1980 – During the Iran hostage crisis, the United States severs relations with Iran. 1983 – During STS-6, astronauts Story Musgrave and Don Peterson perform the first Space Shuttle spacewalk. 1989 – Soviet submarine Komsomolets sinks in the Barents Sea off the coast of Norway killing 42 sailors. 1990 – Iran–Contra affair: John Poindexter is found guilty of five charges for his part in the scandal (the conviction is later reversed on appeal). 1990 – A fire breaks out on the passenger ferry Scandinavian Star, killing 159 people. 1994 – Rwandan genocide: Massacres of Tutsis begin in Kigali, Rwanda. 1994 – Auburn Calloway attempts to destroy Federal Express Flight 705 in order to allow his family to benefit from his life insurance policy. 1995 – First Chechen War: Russian paramilitary troops begin a massacre of civilians in Samashki, Chechnya. 1999 – The World Trade Organization rules in favor of the United States in its long-running trade dispute with the European Union over bananas. 2001 – Mars Odyssey is launched. 2003 – U.S. troops capture Baghdad; Saddam Hussein's regime falls two days later. 2009 – Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori is sentenced to 25 years in prison for ordering killings and kidnappings by security forces. 2009 – Mass protests begin across Moldova under the belief that results from the parliamentary election are fraudulent. 2011 – The Israel Defense Forces use their Iron Dome missile system to successfully intercept a BM-21 Grad launched from Gaza, marking the first short-range missile intercept ever. 2017 – A man deliberately drives a hijacked truck into a crowd of people in Stockholm, Sweden, killing five people and injuring fifteen others.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 5.15

495 BC – A newly constructed temple in honour of the god Mercury was dedicated in ancient Rome on the Circus Maximus, between the Aventine and Palatine hills. To spite the senate and the consuls, the people awarded the dedication to a senior military officer, Marcus Laetorius. 221 – Liu Bei, Chinese warlord, proclaims himself emperor of Shu Han, the successor of the Han dynasty. 392 – Emperor Valentinian II is assassinated while advancing into Gaul against the Frankish usurper Arbogast. He is found hanging in his residence at Vienne. 589 – King Authari marries Theodelinda, daughter of the Bavarian duke Garibald I. A Catholic, she has great influence among the Lombard nobility. 908 – The three-year-old Constantine VII, the son of Emperor Leo VI the Wise, is crowned as co-emperor of the Byzantine Empire by Patriarch Euthymius I at Constantinople. 1252 – Pope Innocent IV issues the papal bull ad extirpanda, which authorizes, but also limits, the torture of heretics in the Medieval Inquisition. 1525 – Insurgent peasants led by Anabaptist pastor Thomas Müntzer were defeated at the Battle of Frankenhausen, ending the German Peasants' War in the Holy Roman Empire. 1536 – Anne Boleyn, Queen of England, stands trial in London on charges of treason, adultery and incest; she is condemned to death by a specially-selected jury. 1567 – Mary, Queen of Scots marries James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, her third husband. 1618 – Johannes Kepler confirms his previously rejected discovery of the third law of planetary motion (he first discovered it on March 8 but soon rejected the idea after some initial calculations were made). 1648 – The Treaty of Westphalia is signed. 1718 – James Puckle, a London lawyer, patents the world's first machine gun. 1730 – Robert Walpole effectively became the first Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. 1776 – American Revolution: The Fifth Virginia Convention instructs its Continental Congress delegation to propose a resolution of independence from Great Britain, paving the way for the United States Declaration of Independence. 1791 – French Revolution: Maximilien Robespierre proposes the Self-denying Ordinance. 1792 – War of the First Coalition: France declares war on Kingdom of Sardinia. 1793 – Diego Marín Aguilera flies a glider for "about 360 meters", at a height of 5–6 meters, during one of the first attempted manned flights. 1796 – War of the First Coalition: Napoleon enters Milan in triumph. 1800 – King George III of the United Kingdom survives an assassination attempt by James Hadfield, who is later acquitted by reason of insanity. 1817 – Opening of the first private mental health hospital in the United States, the Asylum for the Relief of Persons Deprived of the Use of Their Reason (now Friends Hospital, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). 1836 – Francis Baily observes "Baily's beads" during an annular eclipse. 1848 – Serfdom is abolished in the Habsburg Galicia, as a result of the 1848 revolutions. The rest of monarchy followed later in the year. 1849 – Troops of the Two Sicilies take Palermo and crush the republican government of Sicily. 1850 – The Bloody Island massacre takes place in Lake County, California, in which a large number of Pomo Indians are slaughtered by a regiment of the United States Cavalry. 1850 – The Arana–Southern Treaty is ratified, ending "the existing differences" between Great Britain and Argentina. 1851 – The first Australian gold rush is proclaimed, although the discovery had been made three months earlier. 1858 – Opening of the present Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London. 1862 – President Abraham Lincoln signs a bill into law creating the United States Bureau of Agriculture. It is later renamed the United States Department of Agriculture. 1864 – American Civil War: Battle of New Market, Virginia: Students from the Virginia Military Institute fight alongside the Confederate army to force Union General Franz Sigel out of the Shenandoah Valley. 1867 – Canadian Bank of Commerce opens for business in Toronto, Ontario. The bank would later merge with Imperial Bank of Canada to become what is CIBC in 1961. 1869 – Women's suffrage: In New York, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton form the National Woman Suffrage Association. 1891 – Pope Leo XIII defends workers' rights and property rights in the encyclical Rerum novarum, the beginning of modern Catholic social teaching. 1904 – Russo-Japanese War: The Russian minelayer Amur lays a minefield about 15 miles off Port Arthur and sinks Japan's battleships Hatsuse, 15,000 tons, with 496 crew and Yashima. 1905 – Las Vegas is founded when 110 acres (0.45 km2), in what later would become downtown, are auctioned off. 1911 – In Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States, the United States Supreme Court declares Standard Oil to be an "unreasonable" monopoly under the Sherman Antitrust Act and orders the company to be broken up. 1911 – More than 300 Chinese immigrants are killed in the Torreón massacre when the forces of the Mexican Revolution led by Emilio Madero take the city of Torreón from the Federales. 1919 – The Winnipeg general strike begins. By 11:00, almost the whole working population of Winnipeg had walked off the job. 1919 – Greek occupation of Smyrna. During the occupation, the Greek army kills or wounds 350 Turks; those responsible are punished by Greek commander Aristides Stergiades. 1925 – Al-Insaniyyah, the first Arabic communist newspaper, is founded. 1928 – Walt Disney character Mickey Mouse premieres in his first cartoon, "Plane Crazy". 1929 – A fire at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio kills 123. 1932 – In an attempted coup d'état, the Prime Minister of Japan Inukai Tsuyoshi is assassinated. 1933 – All military aviation organizations within or under the control of the RLM of Germany were officially merged in a covert manner to form its Wehrmacht military's air arm, the Luftwaffe. 1934 – Kārlis Ulmanis establishes an authoritarian government in Latvia. 1940 – USS Sailfish is recommissioned. It was originally the USS Squalus. 1940 – World War II: After fierce fighting, the poorly trained and equipped Dutch troops surrender to Germany, marking the beginning of five years of occupation. 1940 – McDonald's opens its first restaurant in San Bernardino, California. 1941 – First flight of the Gloster E.28/39 the first British and Allied jet aircraft. 1941 – Joe DiMaggio begins a 56-game hitting streak. 1942 – World War II: In the United States, a bill creating the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) is signed into law. 1943 – Joseph Stalin dissolves the Comintern (or Third International). 1945 – World War II: The Battle of Poljana, the final skirmish in Europe is fought near Prevalje, Slovenia. 1948 – Following the expiration of The British Mandate for Palestine, the Kingdom of Egypt, Transjordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia invade Israel thus starting the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. 1957 – At Malden Island in the Pacific Ocean, Britain tests its first hydrogen bomb in Operation Grapple. 1958 – The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 3. 1960 – The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 4. 1963 – Project Mercury: The launch of the final Mercury mission, Mercury-Atlas 9 with astronaut Gordon Cooper on board. He becomes the first American to spend more than a day in space, and the last American to go into space alone. 1966 – After a policy dispute, Prime Minister Nguyễn Cao Kỳ of South Vietnam's ruling junta launches a military attack on the forces of General Tôn Thất Đính, forcing him to abandon his command. 1969 – People's Park: California Governor Ronald Reagan has an impromptu student park owned by the University of California at Berkeley fenced off from student anti-war protestors, sparking a riot. 1970 – President Richard Nixon appoints Anna Mae Hays and Elizabeth P. Hoisington the first female United States Army generals. 1970 – Philip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green are killed at Jackson State University by police during student protests. 1972 – The Ryukyu Islands, under U.S. military governance since its conquest in 1945, reverts to Japanese control. 1972 – In Laurel, Maryland, Arthur Bremer shoots and paralyzes Alabama Governor George Wallace while he is campaigning to become President. 1974 – Ma'alot massacre: Members of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine attack and take hostages at an Israeli school; a total of 31 people are killed, including 22 schoolchildren. 1976 – Aeroflot Flight 1802 crashes in Viktorovka, Chernihiv Raion, killing all 52 people on board. 1987 – The Soviet Union launches the Polyus prototype orbital weapons platform. It fails to reach orbit. 1988 – Soviet–Afghan War: After more than eight years of fighting, the Soviet Army begins to withdraw 115,000 troops from Afghanistan. 1991 – Édith Cresson becomes France's first female premier. 1997 – The United States government acknowledges the existence of the "Secret War" in Laos and dedicates the Laos Memorial in honor of Hmong and other "Secret War" veterans. 2004 – Arsenal F.C. go an entire league campaign unbeaten in the English Premier League, joining Preston North End F.C with the right to claim the title The Invincibles 2008 – California becomes the second U.S. state after Massachusetts in 2004 to legalize same-sex marriage after the state's own Supreme Court rules a previous ban unconstitutional. 2010 – Jessica Watson becomes the youngest person to sail, non-stop and unassisted around the world solo. 2013 – An upsurge in violence in Iraq leaves more than 389 people dead over three days.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 3.16

934 – Meng Zhixiang declares himself emperor and establishes Later Shu as a new state independent of Later Tang. 1190 – Massacre of Jews at Clifford's Tower, York. 1244 – Over 200 Cathars who refuse to recant burn to death after the Fall of Montségur. 1621 – Samoset, a Mohegan, visited the settlers of Plymouth Colony and greets them, "Welcome, Englishmen! My name is Samoset." 1660 – The Long Parliament of England is dissolved so as to prepare for the new Convention Parliament. 1792 – King Gustav III of Sweden is shot; he dies on March 29. 1802 – The Army Corps of Engineers is established to found and operate the United States Military Academy at West Point. 1815 – Prince Willem proclaims himself King of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, the first constitutional monarch in the Netherlands. 1872 – The Wanderers F.C. won the first FA Cup, the oldest football competition in the world, beating Royal Engineers A.F.C. 1–0 at The Oval in Kennington, London. 1898 – In Melbourne the representatives of five colonies adopted a constitution, which would become the basis of the Commonwealth of Australia. 1916 – The 7th and 10th US cavalry regiments under John J. Pershing cross the US–Mexico border to join the hunt for Pancho Villa. 1918 – Finnish Civil War: Battle of Länkipohja is infamous for its bloody aftermath as the Whites executed 70–100 capitulated Reds. 1924 – In accordance with the Treaty of Rome, Fiume becomes annexed as part of Italy. 1926 – History of Rocketry: Robert Goddard launches the first liquid-fueled rocket, at Auburn, Massachusetts. 1935 – Adolf Hitler orders Germany to rearm herself in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Conscription is reintroduced to form the Wehrmacht. 1936 – Warmer-than-normal temperatures rapidly melt snow and ice on the upper Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, leading to a major flood in Pittsburgh. 1939 – From Prague Castle, Hitler proclaims Bohemia and Moravia a German protectorate. 1945 – World War II: The Battle of Iwo Jima ended, but small pockets of Japanese resistance persisted. 1945 – Ninety percent of Würzburg, Germany is destroyed in only 20 minutes by British bombers, resulting in at least 4,000 deaths. 1962 – Flying Tiger Line Flight 739 disappears in the western Pacific Ocean with all 107 aboard missing and presumed dead. 1966 – Launch of Gemini 8 with astronauts Neil Armstrong and David Scott. It would perform the first docking of two spacecraft in orbit. 1968 – Vietnam War: My Lai Massacre occurs; between 347 and 500 Vietnamese villagers are killed by American troops. 1969 – A Viasa McDonnell Douglas DC-9 crashes in Maracaibo, Venezuela, killing 155. 1977 – Assassination of Kamal Jumblatt, the main leader of the anti-government forces in the Lebanese Civil War. 1978 – Former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro is kidnapped; he is later murdered by his captors. 1978 – A Balkan Bulgarian Airlines Tupolev Tu-134 crashes near Gabare, Bulgaria, killing 73. 1978 – Supertanker Amoco Cadiz splits in two after running aground on the Portsall Rocks, three miles off the coast of Brittany, resulting in the largest oil spill in history at that time. 1979 – Sino-Vietnamese War: The People's Liberation Army crosses the border back into China, ends the war. 1984 – William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Lebanon, is kidnapped by Hezbollah; he later dies in captivity. 1985 – Associated Press newsman Terry Anderson is taken hostage in Beirut; he not released until December 1991. 1988 – Iran–Contra affair: Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and Vice Admiral John Poindexter are indicted on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States.[21] 1988 – Halabja chemical attack: The Kurdish town of Halabja in Iraq is attacked with a mix of poison gas and nerve agents on the orders of Saddam Hussein, killing 5,000 people and injuring about 10,000 people. 1988 – The Troubles: Ulster loyalist militant Michael Stone attacks a Provisional IRA funeral in Belfast with pistols and grenades. Three persons, one of them a member of PIRA are killed, and more than 60 others are wounded. 1995 – Mississippi formally ratifies the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, becoming the last state to approve the abolition of slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment was officially ratified in 1865. 2001 – A series of bomb blasts in the city of Shijiazhuang, China kill 108 people and injure 38 others, the biggest mass murder in China in decades. 2003 – American activist Rachel Corrie is killed in Rafah by being run over by an Israel Defense Forces bulldozer while trying to obstruct the demolition of a home. 2005 – Israel officially hands over Jericho to Palestinian control. 2014 – Crimea votes in a controversial referendum to secede from Ukraine to join Russia. 2016 – A bomb detonates in a bus carrying government employees in Peshawar, Pakistan, killing 15 and injuring at least 30. 2016 – Two suicide bombers detonate their explosives at a mosque during morning prayer on the outskirts of Maiduguri, Nigeria, killing 24 and injuring 18. 2020 – The Dow Jones Industrial Average falls by 2,997.10, the single largest point drop in history and the second-largest percentage drop ever at 12.93%, an even greater crash than Black Monday (1929). This follows the U.S. Federal Reserve announcing that it will cut its target interest rate to 0–0.25%. 2021 – Atlanta spa shootings: Eight people are killed and one is injured in a trio of shootings at spas in and near Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. A suspect was arrested the same day.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 7.11

472 – After being besieged in Rome by his own generals, Western Roman Emperor Anthemius is captured in St. Peter's Basilica and put to death. 813 – Byzantine emperor Michael I, under threat by conspiracies, abdicates in favor of his general Leo the Armenian, and becomes a monk (under the name Athanasius). 911 – Signing of the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte between Charles the Simple and Rollo of Normandy. 1174 – Baldwin IV, 13, becomes King of Jerusalem, with Raymond III, Count of Tripoli as regent and William of Tyre as chancellor. 1302 – Battle of the Golden Spurs (Guldensporenslag in Dutch): A coalition around the Flemish cities defeats the king of France's royal army. 1346 – Charles IV, Count of Luxembourg and King of Bohemia, is elected King of the Romans. 1405 – Ming admiral Zheng He sets sail to explore the world for the first time. 1410 – Ottoman Interregnum: Süleyman Çelebi defeats his brother Musa Çelebi outside the Ottoman capital, Edirne. 1476 – Giuliano della Rovere is appointed bishop of Coutances. 1576 – While exploring the North Atlantic Ocean in an attempt to find the Northwest Passage, Martin Frobisher sights Greenland, mistaking it for the hypothesized (but non-existent) island of "Frisland". 1616 – Samuel de Champlain returns to Quebec. 1735 – Mathematical calculations suggest that it is on this day that dwarf planet Pluto moved inside the orbit of Neptune for the last time before 1979. 1789 – Jacques Necker is dismissed as France's Finance Minister sparking the Storming of the Bastille. 1796 – The United States takes possession of Detroit from Great Britain under terms of the Jay Treaty. 1798 – The United States Marine Corps is re-established; they had been disbanded after the American Revolutionary War. 1801 – French astronomer Jean-Louis Pons makes his first comet discovery. In the next 27 years he discovers another 36 comets, more than any other person in history. 1804 – A duel occurs in which the Vice President of the United States Aaron Burr mortally wounds former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton. 1833 – Noongar Australian aboriginal warrior Yagan, wanted for the murder of white colonists in Western Australia, is killed. 1848 – Waterloo railway station in London opens. 1864 – American Civil War: Battle of Fort Stevens; Confederate forces attempt to invade Washington, D.C. 1882 – The British Mediterranean Fleet begins the Bombardment of Alexandria in Egypt as part of the Anglo-Egyptian War. 1889 – Tijuana, Mexico, is founded. 1893 – The first cultured pearl is obtained by Kōkichi Mikimoto. 1893 – A revolution led by the liberal general and politician José Santos Zelaya takes over state power in Nicaragua. 1897 – Salomon August Andrée leaves Spitsbergen to attempt to reach the North Pole by balloon. 1899 – Fiat founded by Giovanni Agnelli in Turin, Italy. 1906 – Murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette in the United States, inspiration for Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. 1914 – Babe Ruth makes his debut in Major League Baseball. 1914 – USS Nevada (BB-36) is launched. 1919 – The eight-hour day and free Sunday become law for workers in the Netherlands. 1920 – In the East Prussian plebiscite the local populace decides to remain with Weimar Germany. 1921 – A truce in the Irish War of Independence comes into effect. 1921 – The Red Army captures Mongolia from the White Army and establishes the Mongolian People's Republic. 1921 – Former president of the United States William Howard Taft is sworn in as 10th chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, becoming the only person ever to hold both offices. 1922 – The Hollywood Bowl opens. 1924 – Eric Liddell won the gold medal in 400m at the 1924 Paris Olympics, after refusing to run in the heats for 100m, his favoured distance, on the Sunday. 1934 – Engelbert Zaschka of Germany flies his large human-powered aircraft, the Zaschka Human-Power Aircraft, about 20 meters at Berlin Tempelhof Airport without assisted take-off. 1936 – The Triborough Bridge in New York City is opened to traffic. 1940 – World War II: Vichy France regime is formally established. Philippe Pétain becomes Chief of the French State. 1941 – The Northern Rhodesian Labour Party holds its first congress in Nkana. 1943 – Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army within the Reichskommissariat Ukraine (Volhynia) peak. 1943 – World War II: Allied invasion of Sicily: German and Italian troops launch a counter-attack on Allied forces in Sicily. 1947 – The Exodus 1947 heads to Palestine from France. 1950 – Pakistan joins the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank. 1957 – Prince Karim Husseini Aga Khan IV inherits the office of Imamat as the 49th Imam of Shia Imami Ismai'li worldwide, after the death of Sir Sultan Mahommed Shah Aga Khan III. 1960 – France legislates for the independence of Dahomey (later Benin), Upper Volta (later Burkina) and Niger. 1960 – Congo Crisis: The State of Katanga breaks away from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 1960 – To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is first published, in the United States. 1962 – First transatlantic satellite television transmission. 1962 – Project Apollo: At a press conference, NASA announces lunar orbit rendezvous as the means to land astronauts on the Moon, and return them to Earth. 1971 – Copper mines in Chile are nationalized. 1972 – The first game of the World Chess Championship 1972 between challenger Bobby Fischer and defending champion Boris Spassky starts. 1973 – Varig Flight 820 crashes near Paris, France on approach to Orly Airport, killing 123 of the 134 on board. In response, the FAA bans smoking in airplane lavatories. 1977 – Martin Luther King Jr., assassinated in 1968, is awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 1978 – Los Alfaques disaster: A truck carrying liquid gas crashes and explodes at a coastal campsite in Tarragona, Spain killing 216 tourists. 1979 – America's first space station, Skylab, is destroyed as it re-enters the Earth's atmosphere over the Indian Ocean. 1983 – A TAME airline Boeing 737-200 crashes near Cuenca, Ecuador, killing all 119 passengers and crew on board. 1990 – Oka Crisis: First Nations land dispute in Quebec, Canada begins. 1991 – Nigeria Airways Flight 2120 crashes in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia killing all 261 passengers and crew on board. 1995 – Yugoslav Wars: Srebrenica massacre begins; lasts until 22 July. 2006 – Mumbai train bombings: Two hundred nine people are killed in a series of bomb attacks in Mumbai, India. 2010 – The Islamist militia group Al-Shabaab carried out multiple suicide bombings in Kampala, Uganda, killing 74 people and injuring 85 others. 2011 – Ninety-eight containers of explosives self-detonate killing 13 people in Zygi, Cyprus. 2015 – Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán escapes from the maximum security prison in Altiplano, in Mexico. It's his second escape.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 7.11

472 – After being besieged in Rome by his own generals, Western Roman Emperor Anthemius is captured in St. Peter's Basilica and put to death. 813 – Byzantine emperor Michael I, under threat by conspiracies, abdicates in favor of his general Leo the Armenian, and becomes a monk (under the name Athanasius). 911 – Signing of the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte between Charles the Simple and Rollo of Normandy. 1174 – Baldwin IV, 13, becomes King of Jerusalem, with Raymond III, Count of Tripoli as regent and William of Tyre as chancellor. 1302 – Battle of the Golden Spurs (Guldensporenslag in Dutch): A coalition around the Flemish cities defeats the king of France's royal army. 1346 – Charles IV, Count of Luxembourg and King of Bohemia, is elected King of the Romans. 1405 – Ming admiral Zheng He sets sail to explore the world for the first time. 1476 – Giuliano della Rovere is appointed bishop of Coutances. 1576 – While exploring the North Atlantic Ocean in an attempt to find the Northwest Passage, Martin Frobisher sights Greenland, mistaking it for the hypothesized (but non-existent) island of "Frisland". 1616 – Samuel de Champlain returns to Quebec. 1735 – Mathematical calculations suggest that it is on this day that dwarf planet Pluto moved inside the orbit of Neptune for the last time before 1979. 1789 – Jacques Necker is dismissed as France's Finance Minister sparking the Storming of the Bastille. 1796 – The United States takes possession of Detroit from Great Britain under terms of the Jay Treaty. 1798 – The United States Marine Corps is re-established; they had been disbanded after the American Revolutionary War. 1801 – French astronomer Jean-Louis Pons makes his first comet discovery. In the next 27 years he discovers another 36 comets, more than any other person in history. 1804 – A duel occurs in which the Vice President of the United States Aaron Burr mortally wounds former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton. 1833 – Noongar Australian aboriginal warrior Yagan, wanted for the murder of white colonists in Western Australia, is killed. 1848 – Waterloo railway station in London opens. 1864 – American Civil War: Battle of Fort Stevens; Confederate forces attempt to invade Washington, D.C. 1882 – The British Mediterranean Fleet begins the Bombardment of Alexandria in Egypt as part of the Anglo-Egyptian War. 1889 – Tijuana, Mexico, is founded. 1893 – The first cultured pearl is obtained by Kōkichi Mikimoto. 1893 – A revolution led by the liberal general and politician José Santos Zelaya takes over state power in Nicaragua. 1895 – Brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière demonstrate movie film technology to scientists. 1897 – Salomon August Andrée leaves Spitsbergen to attempt to reach the North Pole by balloon. He later crashes and dies. 1899 – Fiat founded by Giovanni Agnelli in Turin, Italy. 1906 – Murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette in the United States, inspiration for Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. 1914 – Babe Ruth makes his debut in Major League Baseball. 1914 – USS Nevada (BB-36) is launched. 1919 – The eight-hour day and free Sunday become law for workers in the Netherlands. 1920 – In the East Prussian plebiscite the local populace decides to remain with Weimar Germany. 1921 – A truce in the Irish War of Independence comes into effect. 1921 – The Red Army captures Mongolia from the White Army and establishes the Mongolian People's Republic. 1921 – Former president of the United States William Howard Taft is sworn in as 10th chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, becoming the only person ever to hold both offices. 1922 – The Hollywood Bowl opens. 1924 – Eric Liddell won the gold medal in 400m at the 1924 Paris Olympics, after refusing to run in the heats for 100m, his favoured distance, on the Sunday. 1934 – Engelbert Zaschka of Germany flies his large human-powered aircraft, the Zaschka Human-Power Aircraft, about 20 meters at Berlin Tempelhof Airport without assisted take-off. 1936 – The Triborough Bridge in New York City is opened to traffic. 1940 – World War II: Vichy France regime is formally established. Philippe Pétain becomes Chief of the French State. 1941 – The Northern Rhodesian Labour Party holds its first congress in Nkana. 1943 – Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army within the Reichskommissariat Ukraine (Volhynia) peak. 1943 – World War II: Allied invasion of Sicily: German and Italian troops launch a counter-attack on Allied forces in Sicily. 1947 – The Exodus 1947 heads to Palestine from France. 1950 – Pakistan joins the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank. 1957 – Prince Karim Husseini Aga Khan IV inherits the office of Imamat as the 49th Imam of Shia Imami Ismai'li worldwide, after the death of Sir Sultan Mahommed Shah Aga Khan III. 1960 – France legislates for the independence of Dahomey (later Benin), Upper Volta (later Burkina) and Niger. 1960 – Congo Crisis: The State of Katanga breaks away from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 1960 – To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is first published, in the United States. 1962 – First transatlantic satellite television transmission. 1962 – Project Apollo: At a press conference, NASA announces lunar orbit rendezvous as the means to land astronauts on the Moon, and return them to Earth. 1971 – Copper mines in Chile are nationalized. 1972 – The first game of the World Chess Championship 1972 between challenger Bobby Fischer and defending champion Boris Spassky starts. 1973 – Varig Flight 820 crashes near Paris, France on approach to Orly Airport, killing 123 of the 134 on board. In response, the FAA bans smoking in airplane lavatories. 1977 – Martin Luther King, Jr. is posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 1978 – Los Alfaques disaster: A truck carrying liquid gas crashes and explodes at a coastal campsite in Tarragona, Spain killing 216 tourists. 1979 – America's first space station, Skylab, is destroyed as it re-enters the Earth's atmosphere over the Indian Ocean. 1983 – A TAME airline Boeing 737-200 crashes near Cuenca, Ecuador, killing all 119 passengers and crew on board. 1990 – Oka Crisis: First Nations land dispute in Quebec, Canada begins. 1991 – Nigeria Airways Flight 2120 crashes in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia killing all 261 passengers and crew on board. 1995 – Yugoslav Wars: Srebrenica massacre begins; lasts until 22 July. 2006 – Mumbai train bombings: Two hundred nine people are killed in a series of bomb attacks in Mumbai, India. 2010 – The Islamist militia group Al-Shabaab carried out multiple suicide bombings in Kampala, Uganda, killing 74 people and injuring 85 others. 2011 – Ninety-eight containers of explosives self-detonate killing 13 people in Zygi, Cyprus.