Parihaka

2002: Dozens killed in Bali nightclub explosion
Reports from the Indonesian holiday island of Bali say more than 50 people have been killed in two explosions.
At least 10 foreigners died and more than 120 people were injured - including tourists from Australia, the US, Britain and Europe.

One of the bombs exploded at a nightclub in Kuta Beach, the island's main tourist resort.

Another smaller explosion occurred in nearby Denpasar, Bali's capital, close to the United States Honorary Consulate.


It was horrendous - total carnage


Richard Poore, witness


Local police say bomb squad officers are investigating, although the cause of the explosions has not been confirmed.

The explosion in Kuta occurred at about 2330 local time when the bars would have been packed with tourists.

Witnesses say the blast destroyed the Sari Club and the resulting fire then engulfed a neighbouring bar, Paddy's Irish Club.

Other buildings and several cars were also damaged in the blast and ensuing fire.

One witness, Richard Poore, a cameraman for a New Zealand TV company, said the force of the explosion was so strong it severely damaged his hotel nearly 1km away.

"The windows of the hotel blew out, the upper floors have lost their ceilings and dropped in and there was an incredible amount of smoke in the sky."

Mr Poore explained that his "first instinct was to run up the road with a camera" to film the scenes of devastation.

"I have just never seen anything like it. It was horrendous. Total carnage," he said.

The US embassy in Jakarta has issued a series of warnings in recent weeks that its nationals could be targeted by Islamic militants linked to the al-Qaeda terror group.

The embassy itself closed for several days last month after intelligence reports indicated militant groups were planning car bomb attacks.

Indonesian officials have in the past denied that militants linked to al-Qaeda are active in the country.

Known as the Island of the Gods, Bali is a popular holiday resort - 1.5 million tourists visited in 2001.

Parihaka

There has been a direct bomb attack on the British Government at the Conservative party conference in Brighton.
At least two people have been killed and many others seriously injured, including two senior Cabinet ministers.

The blast tore apart the Brighton Grand Hotel where members of the Cabinet have been staying for the Conservative party conference.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her husband Dennis narrowly escaped injury.

The IRA has issued a statement claiming it had placed a 100lb bomb in the hotel.

The statement read: "Today we were unlucky, but remember, we only have to be lucky once; you will have to be lucky always. Give Ireland peace and there will be no war."

The dead have not yet been named. Among the injured were Trade and Industry Secretary Norman Tebbit, his wife Margaret and Government Chief Whip, John Wakeham.

Pulled from the rubble

Firemen used BBC arc lights after cables were cut to rescue Mr Tebbit from the rubble, in a painstaking operation that took several hours.

Breakfast television showed pictures of the rescue and a conscious Mr Tebbit, clearly in pain, being stretchered to safety. His wife suffered neck injuries.

The bomb went off at 0254 local time, ripping open the front of the hotel on the top floors and sending masonry crashing down on guests sleeping below.

Fireman say many lives were probably saved because the well-constructed Victorian hotel remained standing, despite the central section of eight floors collapsing into the basement.

At Mrs Thatcher's insistence the conference opened on schedule at 0930. In her redrafted speech to the party she declared:

"This attack has failed. All attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail."

The Queen was said to be "very shocked" by the bombing. Opposition Leader Neil Kinnock expressed his "horror and outrage".

Meanwhile security in the seaside town has been massively increased as rescue workers continue to search for people trapped in the rubble.

Detectives are now beginning a major investigation into who was behind the bombing and how such a major breach in security occurred.

Parihaka

Hell of a day, 12 October.....

lemontree

15 October 1542, birthday of Akbar the Great. This Mugal Emperor of India was the first one to establish a secular rule, much before anyone else in the sub-continent.
The current Indian President Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam shares his birthday with the legendary emperor, and it is ironical that a muslim rules over the largest democracy - a fullfilment of the principles on which Akbar the Great based his administration.

__________________

Cheers!...on the rocks!!

Parihaka

The United Nations Organisation has been formally inaugurated during a short ceremony at the US State Department in Washington.
A total of 29 countries ratified the United Nations Charter that was signed by 50 nations on 26 June in San Francisco. US Secretary of State James Byrnes signed the protocol and proclaimed the charter was "now a part of the law of nations".

He said it was a historic day for peace-loving nations of the world. But he warned peace was not based on documents but depended on the will of people to maintain it.

He added the USA would do its best to promote international co-operation.

Global security

The world security organisation aims to "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war" and maintain international peace and security.

The UN Charter upholds human rights and proposes that nations should work together to overcome social, economic, humanitarian and cultural challenges.

The name "United Nations" was coined by US President Franklin D Roosevelt, and was first used in the Declaration by United Nations of 1 January 1942 when representatives of 26 nations pledged to continue fighting together against the Axis Powers.

Further proposals for an international security organisation were discussed in August 1944 at Dumbarton Oaks, in the District of Columbia, USA. The final charter was then signed in June in San Francisco and ratified today.

The UN's predecessor, the League of Nations, was established after the 1914-18 World War. It aimed to prevent another global conflict, but it failed to prevent the devastating world war that has just ended.

Much of the league's structure and many of its aims have been adopted by its successor.

The organisation will consist of six organs:


a General Assembly of all members;
a Security Council with five permanent members - China, France, Russia, the UK and the US - and six temporary members;
an Economic and Social Council;
a Trusteeship Council to supervise administration of colonies, former mandates of the League of Nations and territories taken from defeated nations;
an International Court of Justice to be based at The Hague in the Netherlands;
a Secretariat.
A Military Staff Committee will be charged with security and may take control of weapons such as the atomic bomb.

The permanent headquarters of the UNO will be in the US although it has been revealed that France, the UK and the Netherlands voted against this decision.

No ostentatious entertaining

A preparatory commission will gather in London next month to prepare for the UNO's first General Assembly meeting in the British capital early next year expected to bring 2,000 people to the city.

Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin will lead the British delegation.

Colonel GR Codrington, who is leading the event's organisers at the Foreign Office, told the Times newspaper there would be "no ostentatious entertaining" and that visitors would be given emergency ration cards.

Bomb damage has restricted the amount of hotel rooms available and members of the public have responded to an appeal to take guests into their homes during the conference.

Dreadnought

CNN) -- Rosa Parks, whose act of civil disobedience in 1955 inspired the modern civil rights movement, died Monday in Detroit, Michigan. She was 92.

Parks' moment in history began in December 1955 when she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama.

Her arrest triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system by blacks that was organized by a 26-year-old Baptist minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (See video on an activist's life and times -- 2:52)

The boycott led to a court ruling desegregating public transportation in Montgomery, but it wasn't until the 1964 Civil Rights Act that all public accommodations nationwide were desegregated.

Facing regular threats and having lost her department store job because of her activism, Parks moved from Alabama to Detroit in 1957. She later joined the staff of U.S. Rep. John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat.

Conyers, who first met Parks during the early days of the civil rights struggle, recalled Monday that she worked on his original congressional staff when he first was elected to the House of Representatives in 1964.

"I think that she, as the mother of the new civil rights movement, has left an impact not just on the nation, but on the world," he told CNN in a telephone interview. "She was a real apostle of the nonviolence movement."

He remembered her as someone who never raised her voice -- an eloquent voice of the civil rights movement.

"You treated her with deference because she was so quiet, so serene -- just a very special person," he said, adding that "there was only one" Rosa Parks.

Gregory Reed, a longtime friend and attorney, said Parks died between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. of natural causes. He called Parks "a lady of great courage."

Parks co-founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development to help young people pursue educational opportunities, get them registered to vote and work toward racial peace.

"As long as there is unemployment, war, crime and all things that go to the infliction of man's inhumanity to man, regardless -- there is much to be done, and people need to work together," she once said.

Even into her 80s, she was active on the lecture circuit, speaking at civil rights groups and accepting awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999.

"This medal is encouragement for all of us to continue until all have rights," she said at the June 1999 ceremony for the latter medal.

Parks was the subject of the documentary "Mighty Times: The Legacy of Rosa Parks," which received a 2002 Oscar nomination for best documentary short.

In April, Parks and rap duo OutKast settled a lawsuit over the use of her name on a CD released in 1998. (Full story)

Bus boycott
She was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee, Alabama, on February 4, 1913. Her marriage to Raymond Parks lasted from 1932 until his death in 1977.

Parks' father, James McCauley, was a carpenter, and her mother, Leona Edwards McCauley, a teacher.

Before her arrest in 1955, Parks was active in the voter registration movement and with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, where she also worked as a secretary in 1943.

At the time of her arrest, Parks was 42 and on her way home from work as a seamstress.

She took a seat in the front of the black section of a city bus in Montgomery. The bus filled up and the bus driver demanded that she move so a white male passenger could have her seat.

"The driver wanted us to stand up, the four of us. We didn't move at the beginning, but he says, 'Let me have these seats.' And the other three people moved, but I didn't," she once said.

When Parks refused to give up her seat, a police officer arrested her.

As the officer took her away, she recalled that she asked, "Why do you push us around?"

The officer's response: "I don't know, but the law's the law, and you're under arrest."

She added, "I only knew that, as I was being arrested, that it was the very last time that I would ever ride in humiliation of this kind."

Four days later, Parks was convicted of disorderly conduct and fined $14.

That same day, a group of blacks founded the Montgomery Improvement Association and named King, the young pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, as its leader, and the bus boycott began.

For the next 381 days, blacks -- who according to Time magazine had comprised two-thirds of Montgomery bus riders -- boycotted public transportation to protest Parks' arrest and in turn the city's Jim Crow segregation laws.

Black people walked, rode taxis and used carpools in an effort that severely damaged the transit company's finances.

The mass movement marked one of the largest and most successful challenges of segregation and helped catapult King to the forefront of the civil rights movement.

The boycott ended on November 13, 1956, after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that Montgomery's segregated bus service was unconstitutional.

Parks' act of defiance came one year after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision that led to the end of racial segregation in public schools. (Full story)

U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, a Democrat, told CNN Monday he watched the 1955-56 Montgomery drama unfold as a teenager and it inspired him to get active in the civil rights movement.

"It was so unbelievable that this woman -- this one woman -- had the courage to take a seat and refuse to get up and give it up to a white gentleman. By sitting down, she was standing up for all Americans," he said.

Hawg166

Sorry guys I got to this thread way late but did anyone remember that October 21, 1805 was the day Nelson fell at Trafalgar ? Perhaps the naval battle with the greatest consequences in history.

__________________
"Now we shall have ourselves a pell mell battle!" ......The Immortal Memory, Admiral Nelson

Dreadnought

Hmm remember the story just didnt recall the date. Have to remember for next time.

THL

I Love this thread, but I always forget to go look for stuff from different days. I did this morning.

Nov 1 is NOT a good day to be a composer:

1672 Heinrich Schutz, composer, dies at 87
1711 Christian Demelius, composer, dies at 68
1750 Giuseppe Sammartini, composer, dies at 55
1768 Pierre van Maldere, composer, dies at 39
1788 Johann Samuel Schroeter, composer, dies
1810 Georg Anton Kreusser, composer, dies at 64
1817 Giovanni Calisto Andrea Zanotti, composer, dies at 79
1825 Rodrigo Ferreira da Costa, composer, dies at 49
1844 August Ferdinand Haeser, composer, dies at 45
1895 Aleksander Zarzycki, composer, dies at 61
1942 Hugo Distler, composer, dies at 34
1962 Winter Haynes Watts, composer, dies at 78
1975 Philip James, composer, dies at 85
1982 Leighton Lucas, composer, dies at 79

Also died this day:

1947 the racehorse, Man-O-War
1950 Griselio Torresola, attempted to assassinate President Truman, shot dead
1986 Paul Frees, animation voice (Bullwinkle), dies at 66
1999 Walter Payton, football great, dies at 45

Misc on this day:

1783 Continental Army dissolved; George Washington's "Farewell Address"
1800 1st president to live in white house (John Adams)
1848 1st U.S. woman's medical school opens (Boston)
1914 German-British fleet battle at Coronel, Chile
1938 Seabiscuit beats War Admiral in a match race at Pimlico
1939 1st jet plane, Heinkel He 178, demonstrated to German Air Ministry
1977 President Carter raises minimum wages of $2.30 to $3.35 for Jan 1 1981
1979 Tanker Burmah Agate off Galveston Bay, Texas, spills 10.7 m gallons of oil, in US's worst oil spill disaster
1990 Sandra Miller awarded $100 for Mike Tyson fondling her breasts

__________________
"To dream of the person you would like to be is to waste the person you are."-Sholem Asch

"I always turn to the sports page first, which records people's accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man's failures."-Earl Warren

"I didn't intend for this to take on a political tone. I'm just here for the drugs."-Nancy Reagan, when asked a political question at a "Just Say No" rally

"He no play-a da game, he no make-a da rules."-Earl Butz, on the Pope's attitude toward birth control

Dreadnought

The race horse Man O War was raised on a farm about 15 mins from my home even had the same street named after him

THL

I am surprised no one grabbed at this one (no pun intended) .

Being awarded $100,000 is a settlement, but $100? Doesn't that just make one a "working girl"?

TopHatter

I had seriously considered making a comment but decided it would be better to hold the male moral high ground when it came to make boobie remarks

As a female, you are held to no such standard for said subject

__________________
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.
~John Quincy Adams

Parihaka

Sorry, I was late on this one

Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India, has been killed by assassins in New Delhi.
Mrs Gandhi was thought to have been walking through her gardens this morning when she was shot. She was taken to the All India Medical Hospital where she underwent an emergency operation to remove the bullets but died an hour and a half later.

Initial reports suggest the two attackers were guards at her home who were then shot by other security officers.

No exact motive is known but it is believed the pair were Sikh extremists acting in retaliation for the storming of the Sikh holy shrine of the Golden Temple in Amritsar June.

Mrs Gandhi had been receiving death threats since the attack on the temple in which 1,000 people died.

The night before her death she told a political rally: "I don't mind if my life goes in the service of the nation. If I die today, every drop of my blood will invigorate the nation."

Security throughout the country has been stepped up. Roads to the hospital and the home of the prime minister have been sealed off and borders around Delhi have been closed.


If I die today, every drop of my blood will invigorate the nation


Indira Gandhi


The Indian cabinet has started an emergency meeting to choose a successor.

India's High Commissioner, Prakash Mehrotra, said: "Democracy is very deep rooted in our country and the country is prepared to face any situation. A meeting is being called in Delhi, it is usual that the number two man in the cabinet takes charge for the time being,"

Mrs Gandhi first became prime minister in 1966 and again in 1980 and was praised for her battle against famine in rural areas.

Stan Orme from the Anglo Indian Parliamentary Association said: "It is a very terrible thing. She was a very impressive person, very strong-willed. It is a real tragedy."

THL

November 3rd:

1883 U.S. Supreme Court decides Native Americans can't be Americans
1941 Hirohiti's accord on Yamamoto's attack plan on Pearl Harbor fails
1944 German troops in Vlissingen surrenders
1944 US 28th Infantry division occupies Schmidt Hurtgenwald

Parihaka

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has been assassinated.
Mr Rabin was shot three times at close range in the stomach and chest by an assailant as he left a peace rally in Tel Aviv earlier on Saturday.

He was taken to hospital in Tel Aviv where he later died.

The gunman, named as Yigal Amir, was rapidly overpowered and arrested.

He is believed to be one of the founders of an illegal Jewish settlement on the West Bank and a member of an extreme right-wing organisation.

The rally at which Mr Rabin was shot was attended by about 100,000 Israelis who back the Rabin government's peace initiatives with the Palestinians.


I hope that all of us will have the ability to overcome the tragedy and continue the peace process in all of the Middle East


Yasser Arafat, PLO chairman


Security was tight but police allowed right-wing groups, who oppose any peace deal, to protest nearby.

Israel TV said Yigal Amir, 27, had confessed to shooting the prime minister and had told investigators that he did not regret his actions.

Leaders from around the world are expected to attend Mr Rabin's funeral which takes place on Monday.

US President Bill Clinton said Yitzhak Rabin had given his life in the pursuit of peace.

The chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Yasser Arafat, expressed condolences on behalf of the Palestinians.

"I hope that all of us - the Israelis and the Palestinians - will have the ability to overcome the tragedy and continue the peace process in all of the Middle East," Mr Arafat said.

Israel's foreign minister, Shimon Peres, has been appointed as acting prime minister after an emergency cabinet meeting.