 Deaths
which occurred on a November 27:
2001 Ulf Strömberg [photo >], 42, by burglars
in Taloqan, Afghanistan. He was a cameraman for Sweden's
TV4. Two young masked men armed with Kalashnikov rifles break into
the house where a group of Swedish journalists is staying and take cameras,
computers, a satellite telephone and money from journalists working for
the newspaper Aftonbladet.The
bandits then move to the next room, where Strömberg was sleeping,
knock on the door, which Strömberg opens and immediately closes.
They shoot him through the door.
— TV4:s medarbetare, nyhetsfotograf Ulf Strömberg,
42, har skjutits ihjäl vid ett rånöverfall i Afghanistan. Han sköts i
bröstet och avled kort därefter av skadorna på väg till sjukhus i staden
Taloqan i norra Afghanistan sent i på måndagskvällen. — MORE
(på svenska)
2001 Evison Matafale, 32, in police custody in Lilongwe, Malawi,
“for seditious letters to the president”. The cause of death
is given as “severe pneumonia”. The police had detained Matafale,
a reggae musician, a few days earlier while he was recovering from a
bout of malaria, and then severel beaten him.
2001 Ten Indian soldiers and eight islamic guerrillas of a group
that ambushed the Indian army patrol in Hari Buddha, a village in the
district of Poonch some 5 km from the ceasefire line dividing Kashmir
between Indian and Pakistani forces.
 2000
Damilola Taylor, 10 [< photo], stabbed in the
leg with a broken bottle and left to bleed to death by indifferent passers-by,
on his way home from Oliver Goldsmith Primary School, in the North Peckham
area of south east London.
Four teen-agers would be charged on 26
Jun 2001 with murdering Damilola, a crime that provoked nationwide soul-searching
about the safety of Britain's inner cities. Damilola Taylor bled to death
from stab wounds in the stairwell of a run-down housing project near
his south London home as he tried to reach help. The youths charged —
a 14-year-old, two 15-year-olds and a 16-year-old — were taken into
custody. All four boys, who have not been identified, had previously
been interviewed by police and had criminal antecedents.
No possible motive for the attack
has been reported. One of the youths is of African origin, one
is of mixed race and two are of Mediterranean origin.
Damilola had come to Britain from Nigeria
three months earlier with his family so his sister could seek treatment
for severe epilepsy. He had complained about being teased at school for
his African accent. While many Britons initially said he was a victim
of bullying, others blamed the dilapidated living conditions that many
immigrants endure in Britain's inner cities. Damilola lived with his
family in a crime-ridden project. Damilola was stabbed in his left leg
either by a shard of glass or a knife as he walked home. The schoolboy
left a 100-meter-long trail of blood before collapsing in the concrete
stairwell, five minutes from his front door. Witnesses reported seeing
several youths running from the scene. After Damilola's death attracted
nationwide publicity, police and politicians canvassed his neighborhood,
trying to convince often reluctant residents to cooperate with detectives.
The four suspects had been identified as early as December 2000, but
police needed to gather more evidence before bringing charges. They
would be brought to trial in February 2002 and acquitted for lack of
sufficient evidence, the last two, brothers both 16 by then, on 25 April
2002. The defense claimed that Damilola had fallen on a broken bottle.
1998 Gloria Fuertes, escritora española.
1994 Carlos Lleras Restrepo, presidente
de la República española.
1989: 107 persons as a bomb blamed by police on drug traffickers
destroys a Colombian jetliner.
1989 Carlos Arias Navarro, presidente
del Gobierno español.
1985 Fernand Paul Braudel, historiador
francés.
1983: 185 in crash of Colombian Avianca Airlines Boeing 747 near
Madrid's Barajas airport.
1983 Federico Carlos Sáinz de Robles y Correa,
escritor español.
1984 Percy Norris deputy high commissioner of India, shot dead
1978 George Moscone, and Harvey
Milk, Mayor and City Supervisor of San Francisco,
shot by ex-Supervisor
At approximately 11:00, former
City Supervisor Dan White enters San Francisco City Hall through
an open basement window to avoid the building's metal detectors,
walks into the office of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone,
and shoots him to death. In the ensuing commotion, White escapes
down the corridors to the city supervisors's offices at the
other end of the building, asks to speak to Supervisor Harvey
Milk, 48, in private for a few minutes, and then shoots him
to death as well. Dan White, an ex-policeman and ex-fireman,
was elected as supervisor in the heavily conservative Irish-Catholic
working-class neighborhood known as District 8. White promised
to restore traditional values to San Francisco city government
and rid the city of radicals and social deviates. To White,
Democrat George Moscone, San Francisco's liberal mayor, and
Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly homosexual politician
to be elected to an important local office in the US, were two
such individuals.
Before becoming mayor, Moscone
served as a California state senator, and was instrumental in
securing the passage of the state's homosexual rights bill,
which protected the privacy of two consenting adults. As mayor,
Moscone proposed liberal initiatives and sought to redress the
grievances of Black police officers who had been passed over
for promotions on account of their race. On the eleven-member
board of supervisors, White sat alongside Supervisor Harvey
Milk, elected from the predominantly gay area of San Francisco
known as "The Castro." In the fall of 1978, White resigned as
supervisor, fed up with the liberal mayor and his supporters
on the board. The other five conservatives on the board, fearing
a liberal majority, begged White to take back his resignation.
When Mayor Moscone refused to entertain the possibility, White
went into a rage, murdering Moscone and Milk on 27 November.
At the trial of Dan White, White's attorney employed the so-called
"twinkie defense," arguing that too much junk food affected
White's reasoning abilities. The prosecution never introduced
White's politics or homophobia into the trial, and the jury
found White guilty of voluntary manslaughter. White's light
sentence of seven years outraged many San Franciscans, and on
21 May 1979, demonstrations at City Hall on the eve of what
would have been Milk's forty-ninth birthday erupted into riots.
Dan White was paroled from Soledad Prison on 06 January 1985,
after serving only five years and one month in prison for the
murders of two men. He committed suicide in October of the same
year.
White, who storms into San Francisco's government offices with
a .38 revolver, had reportedly been angry about Moscone's decision
not to reappoint him to the city board. Firing upon the mayor
first, White then reloaded his pistol and turned his gun on
his rival Milk, who was one of the nation's first openly gay
politicians and a much-admired activist in San Francisco. Future
California Senator and then-Supervisor Dianne Feinstein, who
was the first to find Milk's body, found herself addressing
a stunned crowd at City Hall. "As president of the Board of
Supervisors, it's my duty to make this announcement: Both Mayor
Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed.
The suspect is supervisor Dan White." White, who was caught
soon after the murders, pleaded a "diminished capacity" defense,
claiming that copious amounts of junk food, combined with distress
over the loss of his job, caused him to suffer mental problems.
The so-called "Twinkie Defense" appeared to be successful, and,
in 1979, White was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter rather
than murder. Public outrage was so widespread that California
revoked the diminished capacity defense in subsequent cases.
Following the murders, both riots
and peaceful candlelight demonstrations took place as the city
of San Francisco publicly mourned the loss of two of its most
cherished and respected civic leaders. Time has not diminished
the impact of the loss: in 1998, more than 6000 people marched
through the streets of San Francisco to remind residents not
to forget the atrocity. For his crime, White received a five-year
prison sentence. After his release, he was unable to resume
a normal life, and he took his own life in 1986. |
1975 Ross McWhirter Guinness Book of Records keeper, murdered
1971 Francisco Javier Sánchez Cantón,
historiador de arte español.
1958 Lucy Elizabeth Kemp-Welch, British painter specialized in
horses, born on 20 June 1869. — LINKS
1953 Eugene O'Neill, playwright,
in Boston
Born on 16 October 1888, O'Neil
was one the most influential American artists of the twentieth
century. When, on 03 November 1916, nhe experimental Playwrights'
Theater opened its first New York season, one of the three
short plays it featured was the one-act Bound East for Cardiff,
by then unknown O'Neill.
O'Neill, who wrote more than
twenty full-length plays over the course of the next two decades,
is credited with transforming American theater into a literary
medium which, in its artistry, rivaled the best in US fiction
and painting. He won four Pulitzer Prizes for his plays and
remains the only US playwright to have received the Nobel Prize
in Literature. The Swedish Academy awarded the 1936 Nobel Prize
in Literature to O'Neill “for the power, honesty and deep-felt
emotions of his dramatic works, which embody an original concept
of tragedy”— MORE
O'NEILL ONLINE: Beyond
the Horizon, The
Hairy Ape
|
1950 In Korea, east of the Chosin River, Chinese forces annihilate
an American task force.
1945 Josep María Sert i Badía,
pintor catalán.
1942 The French fleet in Toulon is scuttled to keep it from Germany
(and not to give it to the British)..
1940 Nicolae Iorga and some
60 other former officials massacred by Romanian fascists
Two months after General Ion Antonescu
seized power in Romania and forced King Carol II to abdicate,
Astonescu's Iron Guard massacres over sixty aides of the exiled
king, including Nicolae Iorga, a former minister and acclaimed
historian. The extreme rightist movement known as the Iron Guard
was founded by Corneliu Codreanu during the 1920s, imitating
Germany's Nazi Party in both ideology and methods during the
1930s. In 1938, King Carol II managed to establish a stronger
dictatorship in Romania, and took steps to suppress the activities
of the Iron Guard, as well as its leftist antithesis, the Romanian
Communist Party. However, after the Munich Pact of 1938 was
signed, seen as an abandonment of Romania by its Western allies
from World War I, followed by the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939,
which ceded portions of Romania to the USS.R., the country
fell into violent turmoil.
General Ion Antonescu emerged
from the chaos victorious and established a dictatorship with
Hitler's approval, killing, exiling, or imprisoning most of
his former political opposition. However, Romanian resistance
against the Iron Guard and Nazi occupation persisted during
the war, and in August of 1944, a massive revolt toppled Antonescu's
government in the Romanian capital of Bucharest, allowing the
Soviet “liberators” to capture the city without firing
a shot. In 1945, Romanian Communists came to power with the
backing of the Soviet Union. |
1934 Baby Face Nelson shot by FBI agents
1925 Roger de la Fresnaye, French Cubist-Fauvist painter born
on 11 July 1885. — LINKS
1909 Luis A. Martínez, escritor y político
ecuatoriano, considerado predecesor remoto de la novela social de su
país. Nació el 25 Jun 1869.
1904 Paul
Tannery, mathematician
1900 Anton Seitz, German artist born on 23 January 1829.
1894 Charles Burton Barber, British artist born in 1845.
1889 Nicolaas Riegen, Dutch artist born on 31 May 1827.
1870 El general Juan Prim y Prats, asesinado
a la salida del Congreso español.
1862 Armand Julien Pallière, French artist born in 1784.
1887 US Deputy Marshall Frank Dalton, brother of the three famous
outlaws, is killed in the line of duty near Fort Smith, Ark.
1868 Chief Black Kettle and
102 other peaceful Cheyennes, mostly women and children, massacred
by Custer.
Without bothering to identify
the village or do any reconnaissance, Lieutenant Colonel George
Armstrong Custer leads his 7th Cavalry in
an early morning attack on a band of peaceful Cheyenne living
with Chief Black Kettle by the Washita River.
Custer had been convicted of desertion
and mistreatment of soldiers earlier that year in a military
court. The government had suspended Custer from rank and command
for one year. Ten months into his punishment, in September 1868,
General Philip Sheridan reinstated Custer to lead a campaign
against Cheyenne Indians who had been making raids in Kansas
and Oklahoma that summer. Sheridan was frustrated by the inability
of his other officers to find and engage the enemy, and despite
his poor record and unpopularity with the men of the 7th Cavalry,
Custer was a good fighter. Sheridan determined that a campaign
in winter might prove more effective, since the Indians could
be caught off guard while in their permanent camps.
On November 26, Custer located
a large village of Cheyenne encamped near the Washita River,
just outside of present-day Cheyenne, Oklahoma. Custer did not
attempt to identify which group of Cheyenne was in the village,
or to make even a cursory reconnaissance of the situation. Had
he done so, Custer would have discovered that they were peaceful
people and the village was on reservation soil, where the commander
of Fort Cobb had guaranteed them safety. There was even a white
flag flying from one of the main dwellings, indicating that
the tribe was actively avoiding conflict.
Having surrounded the village
the night before, at dawn Custer called for the regimental band
to play "Garry Owen," which signaled for four columns of soldiers
to charge into the sleeping village. Outnumbered and caught
unaware, scores of Cheyenne were killed in the first 15 minutes
of the "battle," though a small number of the warriors managed
to escape to the trees and return fire. Within a few hours,
the village was destroyed — the soldiers had killed 103 Cheyenne,
including the peaceful Black Kettle and many women and children.
Hailed as the first substantial American victory in the Indian
wars, the Battle of the Washita helped to restore Custer's reputation
and succeeded in persuading many Cheyenne to move to the reservation.
However, Custer's habit of boldly charging Indian encampments
of unknown strength would eventually lead him to his well-deserved
death at Little Bighorn. |
1852 Ada
Lovelace, mathematician
1836 Antoine Charles Horace “Charlot” Vernet, French
painter born on 14 August 1758. — LINKS
— 23
prints at Fine Arts Museums of SF —
1833 Philip Reinagle, English painter born in 1749. — LINKS
— Cupid
Inspiring the Plants with Love (1797)
1811 Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, político
español, fallece en Puerto de Vega (Asturias).
1796 Karl-Sébastien von Bemmel, German artist born on 01
April 1743.
1754 Abraham
de Moivre, mathematician.
1680 Athanasius Kircher, in Rome, German Jesuit born on 02 May
1601 in Thuringia, “the last Renaissance man” and/or “the
first Postmodernist”. Amazing. —
MORE ON KIRCHER.
1673 Anthonie Stevers, Stevaerts Palamedes, Dutch artist born
in 1601.
1670 Jacob van Loo, Flemish artist born in 1614.
1654 Pieter Meulener (or Meulenaer, Molenaer), Dutch artist born
on 18 February 1602.
1382 Philip van Artevelde and
others at the battle of Rosebeke
The French nobility, led by Olivier
de Clisson, crush the Flemish rebels. — Olivier de Clisson
écrase les insurgés flamands à Rosebeke, près d'Ypres. Les tisserands
de Gand et des autres villes de Flandre étaient en révolte contre
leur comte depuis plusieurs décennies en raison de la guerre
de Cent Ans qui mettait en péril leur fructueux commerce avec
l'Angleterre. Le chef des insurgés, Philip van Artevelde, trouve
la mort dans le combat. Le roi de France Charles VI restitue
son vassal, Louis II de Male, dans ses droits légitimes sur
le comté de Flandre avant que celui-ci ne tombe dans l'héritage
du duc de Bourgogne puis des Habsbourg. |
0511 Clovis, king of the Franks, his kingdom is divided
between his four sons. — Clovis meurt en ouvrant la voie à plusieurs
dynasties de rois mérovingiens qui dureront, cahin-caha, deux siècles
et demi. — Décès de Clovis. On l'inhume dans la basilique des Saints-Apôtres
à Paris. Sa femme Clotilde se retire dans un monastère à Tours. Son royaume
est divisé entre ses quatre fils, Thierry, Childebert, Clodomir et Clotaire.
— 8 -BC- Quintus
Horatius Flaccus (Horace), 57, Latin poet and satirist
His Satires are 10 poems
written in hexameter verse and published in 35 BC. The Satires
drew on Greek roots, stating Horace's rejection of public life
firmly and aiming at wisdom through serenity. He discusses ethical
questions: the race for wealth and position, the folly of extremes,
the desirability of mutual forbearance, and the evils of ambition.
In his 17 Epodes mockery
is almost fierce, the metre being that traditionally used for
personal attacks and ridicule, though Horace attacks social
abuses, not individuals. Horace published his Epodes and a second
book of eight Satires in 30-29 BC
Horace published three books of
Odes, 88 short poems, in 23 BC. Horace, in the Odes,
represented himself as heir to earlier Greek lyric poets but
displayed a sensitive, economical mastery of words all his own,
about love, wine, nature, of friends, of moderation.
He also wrote epistles (Book
I was published 20-19 BC) — literary "letters" that were more
mature and profound versions of the Satires — abandoning
"frivolous" lyric poetry for a more moralistic kind of verse.
In three further epistles (much longer than any in the first
book), relating to poetic activities, Horace abandoned all
satirical elements for a sensible, gently ironical stance,
praising moderation. Two epistles make up a second book,
and the third, the Epistle to the Pisos, was also
known, at least subsequently, as the Ars poetica. These last
three epistles embody literary criticism in a loose, conversational
frame. The Epistle to Florus (Book II, Epistle 2)
explains why Horace abandoned lyric poetry for "philosophy."
The best poems, Horace says, edify as well as delight; the
secret of good writing is wisdom (implying goodness); the
poet needs teaching and training to give of his best. The
"Epistle to Florus" may have been written in 19 BC, the Ars
poetica (consisting of nearly 30 maxims for young poets'
guidance) in c. 19-18 BC, and Book I's last epistle, dedicated
to Augustus,in 17-15 BC. In the last epistle contemporary
poetry is asserted against Rome's earlier literary background.
In 17 BC Horace composed in
a lyric metre the Carmen saeculare for ancient ceremonies
called the Secular Games, which Augustus had revived to provide
a religious sanction for his moral reforms of the previous
year. Horace next completed a fourth book of 15 Odes, mainly
of a more serious and political character than their predecessors.
The latest of these poems belongs to 13 BC.
— - Mort du poète Horace à Rome. Il a dans sa jeunesse servi
comme officier dans l'armée de Brutus.. Il deviendra pourtant
plus tard favori de l'Empereur Auguste.. Son ami. Virgile
le présente à Mécène., grand protecteur des artistes, dont
il devient le protégé. Les Odes d'Horace. restent à jamais
immortelles, mais ce poète délicat et plein d'esprit a également
composés des Satires et Épitres, dont l'une constitue ce
qu'on appellera plus tard " L'Art Poétique"
HORACE ONLINE:
|
|
in the original Latin:
Carmina
De
Arte Poetica
Satyrarum
libri
|
in English translations:
The
Works of Horace
The
Art of Poetry: To the Pisos
Odes |
|
2000
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